1975-79
Holliday's Hottest
Porn historian Jim Holliday ranks Anyone But My Husband, A Dirty Western, The Felines and Angela the Fireworks Woman as the four best sex films of 1975.
Anyone But My Husband opens with C.J. Laing struggling with to make dinner while her school teacher husband Bolla ballsone of his students - Susan Sloan.
Like Barbara Streisand, C.J. Laing is a nice Jewish girl who occasionally appears pretty. She deepthroats John Holmes and Tony Perez in Anyone But My Husband.
Superb French flick The Felines combines story, European eroticism and the refreshing sexual attitudes found in most European pictures. Pussy Talk stars Penelope LaMour and Beatrice Harnois and ranks as the best vagina film says Jim.
The Passions of Carol (1975): "This is probably the best film ever made that most people have never heard of. Beginning with the haunting chords of Carol Of The Bells, this X-rated version of Dickens's A Christmas Carol with a twist provides enjoyment of the highest caliber. Mary Stuart (appropriately billed as Merrie Holiday) plays Carol Scrooge, female tyrant of Biva magazine and a sexual slave driver extraordinaire." (Holliday) Directed by Warren Evans though credited as Amanda Barton.
Jim Holliday calls 1975's Honey Pie the finest loop carrier film. After an early morning romp in the sack, Arlana Blue heads to her job at Metro Magazine, where Al Goldstein is the boss - a play on his real life work at Screw. The magazine office provides the premise and various reader's letters provide the loop action. The letters, which subsequently dissolve to sex scenes, begin on a soft note and progressively get raunchier. Jennifer Wells plays an older woman who seduces a young man. Dance teacher Sharon Thorpe takes on student Serena and Terri Hall does two workmen (Ashley Moore and Rocky Millhouse) while her jealous husband is away.
Bree Anthony and Mel teach Mary Stuart the joys of pain and pleasure with the help of whips, chains, clips and dildo. Honey Pie is director Howard Ziehm's masterpiece. He also made Sexteen - "Realistic raunchy sex aimed at the raincoat crowd." (Holliday)
Jim lists 1976's Practice Make's Perfect as one of the best foreign films of all time. Eric Edwards plays a dolt learning about sex from Charles Canyon. In the process the audience learns that the stereotypes about blonde Swedes apply to the women in this picture.
The finest adult film from England appeared in 1976 -Diversions - made by husband-wife team Derek and Valerie Ford who moved on to mainstream success. Heather Deeley, who also appears in Sex Games of the Very Rich, carries this film because she's both sexy and an actress. Diversions exemplifies porn's fascination with Nazism.
Kinky Ladies of Bourbon Street is a depressing French flick that features American expatriate Dawn Cummings and three gorgeous French women. Holliday: "I prefer Sensations as the best foreign film ever, but professionally, give the nod to Kinky Ladies."
Jim says the three most overrated foreign films are Bel Ami, Sex Roulette and Professional Janine.
"Foreign films have posed both problems and delights for American viewers... I've discovered that the public either loves or hates foreign films. The plus side presents the unique, sophisticated style of eroticism and the different feel (fewer monster shots)... The minus side focuses on issue of dubbing... Raincoaters also have problems with anything that is not 90 minutes of close-up genitalia raunch." (Jim Holliday, AVN 8/86)
Pornographic features accounted for 16% of the total American movie box office in 1976, according to Dave Friedman, head of the Adult Film Association. Over 100 new explicit features appeared that year.
To keep up sales, pornographers took out full page ads in Variety touting "new" techniques like 3-D, and sending popular performers like Marilyn Chambers, Leslie Bovee, Linda Wong and C.J. Laing on promotion tours with their movies. Still, according to mobster Phil Paresi, one of the original distributors of Deep Throat, demand fell so drastically that the average production will earn no more than $300,000 in rentals, not a great return if expenses are high and profits must be divided between several investors.
This slump in profits came just as X-rated movies were getting slicker and more professional - a confusing fact to observers who don't realize that there's no connection between artistry and profit. In porn, artistry matters only to the degree it induces erections.
Pornographers faced, and still face, two main challenges to profits. First, is the uncertainty of adequate national distribution. Such distribution networks are sketchy, subject to federal legal intervention, as in Memphis, and threatened by new zoning ordinances in major cities. The Mafia has dominated porn distribution in some proportion to the disruption of circulation that followed the 1973 Supreme Court decision giving regulatory powers over pornography to communities. Those filmmakers such as the Mitchell Brothers, who at times avoided working with the Mafia, suffered heavy losses when the Mob pirated their prints.
Bill Osco, whose Mona (1970) was the first hard-core feature to be promoted nationally, circumvented some of those problems by forming his own distribution company, General National and the Mitchell Brothers followed suit, though less successfully, with Cinema Seven.
As one of Variety's top-grossing films of 1976, Alice in Wonderland exemplifies the second challenge to the hardcore industry, the proliferation of quasi-respectable softcore sex films.
While Scandinavians ruled the 8mm loop world, Americans dominated features. In 1975, Germans took to the streets of Munich to protest the influx of American porno. It became legal to distribute sexually explicit movies in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1974 but initially, only in private clubs. That restriction and Germans' love for erotica about the sexual awakening of children, delayed for a decade a domestic porn industry.
Once Gaullist censorship was overthrown in France, porno features poured forth, sending overseas such films as Exhibition, Pussy Talk and Candy's Candy. In 1975, sex films accounted for a quarter of all French movie production (Oui 4/76).
Worried about its country's image, the French Ministry of Culture in 1977 banned export of French pornos.
Veteran American producer-director Jonas Middleton made 1973's Illusions of a Lady. Then he raised $200,000 and assembled a cast of 50 for the arty Through the Looking Glass which he publicized in Playboy and Penthouse before release with ads that read, "A film that is aimed at the same sophisticated couples market that was attracted to last year's Emmanuelle."
After 16 weeks on Variety's Top-grossing chart, it brought in $600,000. By contrast, The Lollipop Girls in Hard Candy, crude footage released in 3-D, racked up $1,000,000 in 18 weeks.
Middleton shot Through the Looking Glass in one hardcore and two softcore versions so that he could distribute to three different types of audiences. And Dell published a novel based on the script. Next, Middleton sold rights to his film to exhibitors in Europe and Asia.
In at least one sense, the American pornographer has a friend in the U.S. Government. With varying effectiveness, American Customs routinely seize hardcore imports - the best known example being Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses which was on its way to the New York Film Festival in 1976. But unlike France, the U.S. does not restrict films shipping abroad. This policy helps America's balance of payments by millions of dollars a year for the US is the biggest producer and exporter of pornography.
Academic Joseph Slade writes in 1978: "...Whatever the talents lavished on porn, so far their shades of blue do not add up to a coherent spectrum. Craft and crudity war: if a director achieves silky, poetic cinema tones or choreographs bodies balletically, he will blow the continuity or fail in something else. Below the top level, all porn features are dogs, and there is little point in picking best of breed. Even the slickest share faults, scenes held too long, excessive close-ups of genitals, jerky editing, under-lighting, out-of-sync sound tracks."
While mainstream films shot up to ten feet of film for everyone one foot used, pornographers shot on a two-to-one ratio. Says Slade, "no American porn flick has yet managed a big studio look."
This doesn't stop pornographers from trying. Middleton stressed the literary origins - a Russian short story - of Through the Looking Glass.
"I'm trying to upgrade the genre," said the pornographer "and get into a sophisticated plot." Middleton preferred to call the results a "psychological thriller, supernatural sex, not really a porno."
That many pornographers such as Middleton don't want to call a porno a porno reflects the abysmal reputation of porno.
Bob Rimmer called Through the Looking Glass "a sexvid classic that mixes a Daphne du Maurier or Stephen King kind of story into a terrific gothic drama... Middleton knows how to build effect on top of effect and make you believe his heroine, Catherine Burgess, is possessed by the devil.
"Middleton gives you a 15-minute cinematographic tour of madness that must have been inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's paintings. It will scare the hell out of you - or make you want to throw up - and Jamie Gillis as Catherine's daddy is at his worst. A demon, laughing insanely, tells Catherine: "There are no mornings here, no nights. You'll never grow old, Catherine." But after a few minutes of floundering in his sea of despair, Catherine looks haggard, and so will you if you watch it to the end." (X-Rated Videotape Guide , p. 213)
Porn's Golden Age borrowed extensively from literature. Examples include Sam Weston's Expose Me, Lovely (1976), Radley Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1975), and
Barton's The Passions of Carol (1974) which are based on Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, Shaw's Pygmalion, and Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
A former mannequin for Vogue, Catherine Burgess appeared in Expose Me, Lovely as Cary Lacey and as Catharine Earnshaw in Bob Gill's The Double Exposure of Holly (1976). Burgess joined fellow models Kristine De Bell (Alice in Wonderland), formerly of the Eileen Ford Agency, and Dominique St. Pierre (The Joy of Letting Go), from the stables of Halston and Courreges, "in this final refuge of narcissism." (Slade)
Because the raincoat brigade - the economic underpinning of the industry - tires quickly without new performers, the careers of female performers are short. "As nubility gives way to coarseness, which happens abruptly, as if a Dorian Gray syndrome were operative, the women drop out, drift into related work, such as writing columns for Cheri or Screw, or wind up in production. Producing, casting and directing now occupy Darby Lloyd Rains, Sandi Foxx, and Tina Russell. Ex-performers are valuable because they know their way around sets, have studied the best camera angles (perhaps the most important aspect of the feature), and can give pointers to novice crews. This personnel feeback is remniscent of the early days of the cinema, when actors like William S. Hart became directors churning out formula westerns. Like any formula genre, the porn feature is highly self-reflexive, so that it forever turns back upon itself to make obeisance to the tradition from which it derives... the stag films, the silent, flickering black and white image unreeling in thousands of American Legion and fraternity halls of the past." (Joseph W. Slade, Movies as Artifacts)
Dozens of pornos appear each year about the making of pornos, allowing for quick and credible nudity and sex. Such a scheme "also adds the frisson of voyeurism as the "real" camera follows photographers filming the action. Central to any hardcore film is the presence, pictured or implied, of a camera intruding on intimate behavior." (Slade)
In China Girl, asian villains video-monitor the sex of prominent scientists while in The Double Exposure of Holly - note the title - videotapes of her affairs ruin a haughty wife. In Blonde Velvet, a spy ring blackmails diplomats through the use of concealed cameras.
Given the porn movie's reason for being, the depiction of actual sex through the violation of public and private taboo, says Slade, the camera's presence is always blatant whether its focus is ethereal and gauzy or grainy and harsh. The instrusion always shocks.
Getting to know porn performers ruins enjoyment of porn for many for it becomes difficult to view the performers as objects rather than human beings. And objectification, particularly for men, is crucial for sexual arousal.
The porn director cannot escape using formulas says Slade. The trick is to use them well.
One formidable obstacle to quality porn is the fleeting nature of eroticism, which is why directors like Gregory Dark compose their movies in self-contained approximately ten minute segments. After you've gotten off, there's little reason to keep watching a porno.
"I doubt that many people watch these things through," says Dark.
Successive orgasmic climaxes weaken dramatic ones. Thus, a formula suited for a stag film may not work in a feature which seeks to delay gratification.
The year 1978 produced more good X-rated movies than any other year says Holliday. Examples include Anna Obsessed, Candy Stripers, Debbie Does Dallas, The Health Spa, Skin Flicks, China Cat, The Joy of Fooling Around and Slave to Pleasure.
Holliday rates Anna Obsessed as superlative. First made as Obsessed, the film couldn't find a distributor because it was too disturbing. The film deals with the troubled marriage of John Leslie and Constance Money. She can't orgasm and wants to know why.
Holliday says that if he had only one film to sum up the pleasures of sex entertainment he'd choose Bob Chinn's Candy Stripers.
Holliday gives his "Hottest Single Sexual performance in an Adult Film" award to Jesie St. James for her work in Anthony Spinelli's Easy.
Skin Flicks is one of Director Gerard Damiano's best ever. He plays a financial backer of a porno ten days behind schedule. Tony Hudson plays the adult filmmaker forced to listen to Damiano's rants. Jamie Gillis plays the rapist who lusts after Sharon Mitchell.
China Cat is Holliday's favorite of the Johnny Wadd series even though 1979's Blonde Fire starring Seka has a bigger budget and is more elaborate. China Cat completes a four film, four year Johnny Wadd cycle. Desiree Cousteau, Chris Cassidy, Laurien Dominique and Candida Royalle "provide the in-person sexual toppings from John Holmes' pizza delivery business."
Jack Mathew (Eruption and Pro Ball Cheerleaders) directed the sophisticated French romp The Joy of Fooling Around. Jack made videos under the name Jack Genero.
Four beautiful Florida college girls star in Lure of the Triangle which features the best underwater sex ever shot says Holliday.
Slave of Pleasure represents the high-water mark of New York grinders. Director Warren Evans moved on to elaborate productions like Bon Appetit, Fascination and Blonde Ambition. (Only The Best)
In 1977, Evans made a grinder called Fire in Francesca that was a porn version of Laura. A year later he teamed with Ken Schwartz for Fiona on Fire, a big budget Laura.
Holliday says Telefantasy is the best of all sex films with a media focus. All About Gloria Leonard is the second insider film by Evart Productions. Seka, Annie, Angel and Oral Annie follow.
A man who has seen thousands of porno films told Jim Holliday that Legend of Lady Blue is the only one that made him cry.
The best and most accurate of the several films about the life of Viennese madam Josephine Mutzenbacher is Sensational Janine. There's also Josephine, which has 22 cum shots and Professional Janine - a 1984 slick sex comedy.
Debbie Does Dallas
Debbie Does Dallas appeared in 1978 and became one of the five best selling pornos of all time, providing relief from the diet of violent X-rated material that marked the '70s.
Bambi Woods and Misty Winter star in this well-photographed flick about a group of girls trying to get money so they can go to Dallas to tryout to be Cowboy Cheerleaders. The fresh looking young women appear naked in the shower in a famous scene that is copied by R-rated Porkys four years later.
Debbie Does Dallas exemplifies happy California porn and is one of the five films profiled in the 1986 Attorney General's Report on Pornography.
Debbie has been chosen to go to Dallas and become "cowgirl," but she has to raise the money herself since her parents are opposed to going. Debbie has only two weeks, but her cheerleader friends offer to help raise enough money so they all can go.
As the girls start looking for jobs, they gather in the locker room to discuss their progress and their problems. When the last girl leaves, four males and two females enter. They engage in intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio; the males ejaculate on the females' buttocks and faces; the females lick the semen.
Debbie gets a job in Greenfield's store, and on the third day he suggests that "There are other jobs girls can do." He says he'll pay her ten dollars if she shows him her breasts, and another ten if he can touch them. He starts to suck her breasts, but Debbie stops him. He says he'll pay ten dollars for "a little suck on each one." Debbie negotiates for twenty and lets him do it.
Debbie tells her friends that she's found a way to make money. After telling them what she just experienced with Greenfield, they decide to ask each other about techniques that are special enough that they can keep their virginity and still make money.
While one girl is working, the telephone rings. She talks to a man named Tom and plays with her breast. When she hangs up, she penetrates her vagina with a candle, but is discovered by the boss's wife, Mrs. Hardwick. Mr. Hardwick comes in and strips; Mrs. Hardwick puts her fingers in the girl's wet vagina while her husband masturbates. Mrs. Hardwick exposes her breast, and Mr. Hardwick has intercourse with the girl while Mrs. Hardwick masturbates. Mrs. Hardwick tongues the girl's breasts; when her husband ejaculates, Mrs. Hardwick licks his penis.
Meanwhile, two other girls accept Mr. Bradley's offer to pay them twenty-five dollars to let him kiss them. He licks their breasts, performs cunnilingus, and both girls perform fellatio. Mr. Bradley has anal intercourse with one of them, then one girl masturbates him until he ejaculates on the other's backside. She rubs her face in his semen.
Another girl accepts money from a Mr. Biddle who wants to spank her on her bare bottom. Still another girl lets two men fondle her at the same time, then one has intercourse with her while she performs fellatio on the other.
Mr. Greenfield wants more from Debbie, but she tells him that she's saving herself. Greenfield says he doesn't want anyone else - he wants Debbie - and that he's ready to pay all the expenses for her and her friends to go to Dallas if she agrees.
Debbie dresses as a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader; Greenfield (played by R. Bolla) dresses like a football player, because he always wanted to be captain of the team. He licks her breasts; she licks his penis, he rubs her clitoris and performs cunnilingus, she performs fellatio, they have intercourse, first with her on top then him; she masturbates him, he ejaculates. As the film ends, she turns her head away, and the word "next" appears on the screen.
Many porn fans identify with R. Bolla's character - the dorky shopkeeper that dreams of being a football player and nailing the top cheerleader - and thus revel when he finally scores.
High school is an erotic setting for any male because it reminds him of the time when his body flowed with the highest amount of testosterone and because "most males have some bitter memories of the time," notes Peter van Aarle. "Girls grow up faster than guys and prefer to date older fellas than their own immature age group. Even if he gets dates at 15 years of age, a guy will usually have at least one girl in his class he idolizes but can't have." (RAME)
While Bambi Woods has only one sex scene in Debbie Does Dallas, in 1983's Part II, she appears from beginning to end. AVN says the sequel is even better than the original.
Debbie Does Dallas II picks up with Debbie not making the cheerleading squad, so she travels to see her aunt Sadie who owns a whorehouse. On the way, Sheriff Little John
(Ron Hudd) arrests her, sure that she's a hustler and drug dealer. "He sticks her in the pokey and searches her (you know where) for drugs. Bambi eventually works her way into his good graces and he delivers her to Aunt Sadie." (Bob Rimmer) Several of the house ladies take Bambi to bed and seek to convince her that sex with women is just as fun as sex with men.
The movie was initially titled The Best Little Whore in Texas but that was withdrawn for fear of legal problems.
Baby Love and 1979 Porno
Baby Love, 1979, signaled the end of explicit cinema out of San Francisco and features the only film footage of a lesbian scene between Sharon Kane and Chris Cassidy.
Satin Suite is a sex version of Executive Suite with Sandra (Heather Young) narrating the rise of Rothwell Industries and 18 Magazine which were supposedly built on sex.
Star Virgin is another Howard Ziehm loop carrier. "Kari Klark plays the last earthperson, floating in a distant galaxy, who has a robot explaining what sex and love were like on her defunct planet." (Holliday)
In 1979's Summer School, Director Godfrey Daniels makes a sweet sex film, second only to Little Girls Blue as schoolgirl porn. Daniels has made tender films, erotic films and a couple of wall-to-wall bangers. (Only The Best)
Knowing how to appeal raincoaters, Leon Gucci - real name Leonid Kirtman - made nearly a million low rent grinders. Female Athletes is his biggest name cast and his best overall film. His theme of women's liberation is an unusual one for the male oriented genre. (Holliday)
Lenny was such a feminist that he usually pushed his actresses into f---ing and sucking him to get parts.
Samantha Fox and Vanessa Del Rio star in 1979's Tigresses which says that "women are kin to tigers in jungles and as predatory beasts, they can get what they want sexually. If anti-pornography forces even begin to comprehend that this entire industry is run by 'the power of the pussy,' they would leave it alone," says Holliday.
The makers of the first hardcore films appeared obsessed with claiming legitimacy. Their posters emulated and sometimes surpassed traditional Hollywood advertising. The producers of Sweet Savage enlisted the services of name actor Aldo Ray to lend credibility to their western porno. But this trend of theatrical "porno chic" didn't last long, thanks to the greed of those who owned adult movie theaters and the invention of the VCR. In the 1980s, sex films moved from the grindhouse to the bedroom. (Grindhouse p.80)
Today's sex flicks play on the small screen, and feature a sharper picture,
hotter sex and better looking performers. For better and worse, pornographers
at the end of the 20th Century harbor fewer illusions about "making movies".
With the demise of the X-rated feature in the 1980s, porno flicks became
a series of approximately ten minute sex scenes for which the only reason
to watch is to masturbate.