The pool with the cinderblock walls
The pool with the cinderblock walls refers to a pool used as a setting in several of the films Harlan 'Slim' Pfeiffer filmed for Lyric International. These films included Swim Party and Spring Break, and featured Peter Glawson and other young actors. The pool was in the backyard of a house on Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles.
Lyric's films, including those that used the pool with the cinderblock walls as a setting, featured extensive nudity of boys and young men. Lyric produced only "physique" photography and never pornography.
The pool is at the house that served both as Lyric's studio and the home of its owner, Billy Byars, Jr. The house "was for a while a haven for adult homosexuals and male teenagers." [Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993, p. 337.] The house's living room, a "bachelor pad [which] boasts massive oaken beams and other touches of baronial elegance" [Viola Hegyi Swisher, "Generating "The Genesis Children", After Dark, September 1972, p. 18] also served as a setting for Lyric's photographs.
Home to the Lyric Boys
Many of the Lyric Boys, who appeared in The Genesis Children and in Lyric's photographs and shorts filmed at the pool and elsewhere, lived at the house, and were under legal custody of Byars as foster children.[Interview with Aikman, 2006, by Ballog]
The house was also home to Byars's pet snake, which was allowed free roam of the house, and a Beddington Terrier dog, which can be seen in many Lyric photo shoots and short films shot at the pool location.[Interview with Aikman, 2006, by Ballog]
One of Billy's only rules at the house was that if you wanted to swim in the pool you had to swim naked. On one occasion, the dog got loose and everyone started to run naked down the road to try to catch him. The group was almost run over by a shocked elderly couple turning the corner of the road in their large automobile.[Interview with Aikman, 2006, by Ballog]
On one occasion the LA County Department of Child Service notified Byars that they would be coming by the house the next day for an inspection/visitation. Byars and friends scurried to town to buy books, tables and a portable blackboard. By the time the Child Service officials came by the next day, Byars had set up an outdoor classroom complete with Vincent Child, black cape and all, acting as the boys teacher. Byars received rave reviews by the impressed county officials.[Interview with Aikman, 2006, by Ballog]
Varied houseguests
When Anthony Aikman, director of The Genesis Children, came to Los Angeles to edit the film, he stayed at the house on Mulholland Drive. Aikman found a strange man named Teeterman there. Teeterman slept in a coffin in the lower level of the house and had a job at the Hollywood Wax Museum where he dressed up in a costume and played the Mechanical Man while standing outside the museum to attract customers. Teeterman once showed Aikman an old 8mm film of himself, dressed in a vampire's costume, and Billy Byars trolling through a cemetery late at night. The cemetery was supposedly located out in the Midwest. [Interview with Aikman, 2006, by Ballog]
Vincent Child, the adult actor in The Genesis Children, stayed at the house for a while on completion of the film. William Johnson, Byars´s factorum, may have been a permanent resident.[Interview with Aikman, 2006, by Ballog]
The house as real estate
The house is in Los Angeles, California in the Hollywood Hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley. More specifically, it is at 8181 and 8207 Mulholland Drive just west of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The place is latitude 34°7'21.85" N (34.122736), longitude 118°22'37.35" W (-118.377042).
Billy Byars, Jr. let people believe he owned the house but he actually rented it from the owner, Benjamin Ghramn.[Los Angeles County Assessors Office]
Zillow.com tracks real estate values on a house-to-house basis. It lists the Lyric studio as having last been sold on 12/01/1988 for $600,000, and now being a duplex, as 8181 and 8207 Mulholland Drive. 8181 is described as two bedrooms, one bath, five rooms total, 767 square feet of construction and 13,070 square feet (.3 acres) of land. 8207 is four bedrooms, three baths, 2,624 square feet, on 19,600 sq ft (0.45 acres) of land. It is listed as having two units.
External links
- Aerial photograph on Microsoft TerraServer
- Bird's eye view on Windows Live Local
- Aerial photograph on Google Maps
- Real estate valuation on zillow.com
- 3D reconstruction by Sneeuwbol Software no longer functions.
