Casting director Joel Thurm allegedly had sexual encounters with Hollywood icons Rock Hudson and Robert Reed.
In his recently released memoir, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,” Thurm explains that he had attended an industry party in the ’70s where most of the attendees were gay.
They had gathered to watch one of the first full-length, big-budget, gay-porn flicks called “Boys in the Sand.” In attendance was Hudson, one of his childhood crushes.
The Brooklyn native claims that the “Giant” star caught his eye and beckoned him to follow him into a bedroom.
However, once they were alone, Thurm tells Page Six that he “couldn’t get it up” for Hudson.
“I was embarrassed and mortified … getting it up was a specialty of mine,” Thurm, now 80, explains with a laugh. “I couldn’t do it because he was Rock Hudson! It so intimidated me. Someone said, ‘Well, why didn’t you just b–w him?’ I said, ‘Because I was too …’ I couldn’t do anything.”
Thurm claims that the “Pillow Talk” star — who died of AIDS in 1985 — was unperturbed by the failed sexual encounter as “it had happened to him before.”
Despite that small blip with Hudson, the casting honcho claims to have had a more successful rendezvous with Robert Reed, who was best known for playing Mike Brady on “The Brady Bunch.”
At the time, Thurm had cast and was producing the 1976 TV movie “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” starring a young John Travolta.
He claims that Reed was irked at having to play second fiddle to Travolta and particularly incensed by having to have his hair kinked and then unkinked twice — a laborious process — in one day.
In an effort to smooth things over, Thurm allegedly went to Reed’s dressing room.
“It was known (that he was gay,)” Thurm says. “But I didn’t go in there with the intention of that. I went in there with the intention of just, ‘Hey, thank you for putting up with what we have to do …
“And then, I don’t know, I just started rubbing his back. I thought, ‘Well that’s what you do in a situation like that.’ I had no intention of anything more than that. But he seemed to respond.”
Thurm notes with a laugh that after the assignation Reed “went back to being the same pr–k he was before.”
Reed also died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 59.
Thurm’s skills are famously displayed in his cast decisions for “Grease,” “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Airplane.” He also worked on dozens of TV shows, including “The Golden Girls,” “Taxi,” “The Love Boat,” “Family Ties” and “Miami Vice.”
