Tina Russell

Tina Russell (born Linda Marie Mintzer, September 23, 1948, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania) was an adult film performer who, for a short time in the early 1970s, was "the biggest name in adult films," in the words of The Rialto Report. Her 1973 memoir, Porno Star, was the first account of the New York adult film industry.¹²

Career

She met John Sanderson, a local photographer, while at college in Williamsport, and moved with him to New York City in the late 1960s, where she enrolled at New York University. The couple began nude modeling to raise bail for a friend arrested for marijuana possession; after leaving college she modeled for sexually oriented photographs and performed in loops and live sex shows around Times Square. After a period in Peru they returned to New York as Tina and Jason Russell, and in films she often appeared with her husband.¹² She spoke of wanting to make what she called "pretty fuck films," with budgets large enough for directors to make artistic statements; after the success of Deep Throat and Linda Lovelace she was, in the Rialto Report's account, "slowly forgotten."² In February 1973 she appeared in The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, shot in Philadelphia by R.C. Horsch.³⁴

Suffolk County Case

A filmmaker interviewed by The Rialto Report under the name "Jack Bravman" said that after the 1973 film All in the Sex Family, shot partly at the Patchogue Drive-In in Suffolk County, New York, with Jamie Gillis and Tina and Jason Russell and photographed by Roberta Findlay, police traced the production through the license plates of cars in the film and arrested the actors, crew, the distributor Hal Rosen and the owners of the locations at dawn, taking them to be arraigned at the Suffolk County courthouse. By his account the case "dragged on for years" and ended for him with a misdemeanor and a 500 dollar fine; he did not give Russell's outcome.⁵