He encountered marijuana and even tried his hand at smuggling drugs, hitchhiked across North America and enjoyed the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
He lost his co-ownership of The Cabale and moved to Los Angeles in 1967, where he briefly worked as a carpenter and started a rock band.
He met a business-savvy young man named Bill Osco, who became the manager of Ziehm's short-lived band.
Osco wanted to get involved with the movie business, so he and Ziehm founded Graffiti Productions and started making porn loops.
The production was plagued by numerous problems, including a police raid where all the negatives were confiscated, and the budget quickly ballooned from $25,000 to a reported $700,000.
Osco would later go on and produce Alice in Wonderland, a sex musical version of the Lewis Carroll tale.
He struck up a partnership with producer Peter Locke and made six more adult feature films from 1976 to 1981: Sexteen, Honey Pie, Sweet Cakes, Hot Cookies, Star Virgin and Naughty Network.
After making his last adult feature film Naughty Network in 1981, Ziehm began to focus on other endeavors, including a series of vocabulary training audio cassettes called Wordbank and Wordbuilders.
In September 2017, director Christian Genzel began production on the documentary Finding Planet Porno, which details Ziehm's life and career.