Zebedy Colt – Shooting the Breeze with the Eccentric Thespian of XXX: Podcast 161

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Zebedy Colt is one of least likely characters we expected to feature in a podcast interview when The Rialto Report first began.

For a start, Zebedy passed away in 2004 at the age of 74, after a wildly varied and peripatetic acting career that had started with small parts as a child actor in Hollywood in the 1930s and continued on to regional theater and summer stock across the country, including several Broadway productions. Along the way, he also had a parallel music career, recording an LP with the London Philharmonic Orchestra entitled, ‘I’ll Sing For You,’ which consisted of torch standards about men, originally intended to be sung by women but sung by Zebedy from a gay perspective.

And then, in 1974, he lost his job when the theater he was working for folded due to financial problems, so he answered an ad in a New York newspaper that had been placed by Leonard Kirtman, perhaps the most prolific producer of low budget hardcore adult films in New York.

Far from being put off by the nature of the films that Leonard was making, Zebedy did the unexpected: he entered an industry that was known for being sleazy and taboo, and made it a lot more transgressive. Over the following decade, he moved effortlessly between well-regarded mainstream theatrical productions and making his own unique brand of violent and twisted pornographic films, such as Sex Wish (1975) (where he plays a crazed serial killer terrorizing the city), The Devil Inside Her (1977) (in which a woman sells her soul to the devil to get to the man she loves), and Unwilling Lovers (1977) (in which Zebedy is a killer with the mind of a child who lives in the backwoods with his domineering mother and a penchant for playing with corpses) to name but a few.

All very weird, and all very Zebedy. So who was this man who brought such a bizarre vision to the New York sex film scene?

As part of the research for the oral history of The Freaky Gang, Leonard Kirtman’s gang of misfits who made films for his studio in the mid 1970s, we discovered a collection of audio interviews with Zebedy that give us the chance to listen to man himself instead of one of the crazy characters that he played on film. Sadly, many of these conversations have such poor sound quality that they’re unfit to be presented as a podcast, but due to their rarity, we wanted to present one here.

It’s a conversation with Barbara Nitke, who worked as a still photographer on adult films sets. Unlike other Rialto Report podcasts, this isn’t a career retrospective – instead it’s a free-ranging, casual conversation that took place in a bar in 1986. It finds Zebedy in a world-weary state of mind. He’s at a crossroads, the mainstream acting roles are drying up, his music career hadn’t taken off, and the adult film business had recently turned to video thus taking away the opportunity to make more of his strange psychodramas on 16mm.

This is Zebedy Colt. Shooting the Breeze.

This podcast is 32 minutes long.

Many thanks to Barbara Nitke for sharing the interview with us. You can find more details about her work at Barbara’s website and hear our podcast interview with her here. Copies of her book, ‘American Ecstasy’, can be purchased here.

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Zebedy Colt

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