Golden Age Director/Performer Carter Stevens Dies

POCONO SUMMIT, Pa.—Pioneering adult movie performer/director Carter Stevens died Wednesday afternoon at a hospital in his Pennsylvania hometown after suddenly collapsing sometime earlier, his son Braden Frost reported via Stevens' Facebook page. He was 76. Stevens' cause of death was unknown as of press time, however fellow Golden Age performer Jeanne Silver announced intentions on her own Facebook page shortly after the news broke to set up a GoFundMe campaign to assist Frost and Stevens' surviving daughter in covering funeral and other expenses. Stevens made his first adult film, The Collegiates, in 1972 with money he raised on his own, and he cast a young Harry Reems fresh off completing his role in Deep Throat. In a 2008 interview, Stevens recalled to AVN, "The Collegiates did what I wanted and I started getting work here and there in the production end of the business. A year or two later, I ran into a producer in an office at Dino DeLaurentis where I was working on pre-production for Mandingo. He had heard that I had done a porno and asked if I could do it again for him. I said sure, and Lickity Split was born. Screw loved the film and it hit Variety's top fifty grossing films one week and all of a sudden, 'Carter Stevens' was a hot new porno director."  The AVN Hall of Famer would go on to direct and/or appear in classics including Rollerbabies, Blonde Velvet, Pleasure Palace, Inside Jennifer Welles, Candi Girl, Tinseltown and many others. He also married performer Baby Doe, whom he directed in the 1984 Video-X-Pix release White Hot. AVN will report further details of this breaking story as they become available. (Photo of Carter Stevens taken from his Facebook page.)