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Contents:
Russ Meyer
Last Tango in Paris
Sylvester Stallone
Phil Gramm
Emmanuelle
Sex Crime
Harold Lime
Lassie Braun
Alex deRenzy
Spinelli

Tumuscent - From Soft to Hard

Russ Meyer was known as the King of Nudies and the Barnum of Boobs. Though a multi-millionaire who could've retired young and in comfort, Russ kept working because of the "hard-on" he got when he shot a good scene with one of his big-breasted aggressive female stars.

"I'm obsessed with female breasts... They do a lot for me. They titillate me, turn me on, excite me, rejuvenate me."

But Russ was not the type of guy who reduced women to their tits. "I've had more than my share of ass," says Meyer. "And they were all great looking broads."

Russ believes that his best film is 1970's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, written by frustrated movie maker turned film critic Roger Ebert. The story details the rise of a female rock group against the sleazy background of Hollywood. Everyone sleeps with everyone else in all sorts of kinky ways.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is an "atrocious film with all the faults of a Russ Meyer picture and little of his usual virtues." (Rotsler)

Mudhoney, 1976, gave Meyer his basic direction for later films - lots of sex and violence before virtue finally triumphs.

Up! appeared the same year, offering another example of sexploitation combined with Nazism to make a sadistic sexual satire. "This story is so complicated that for the first half-hour you may think the plot will never unravel. On top of that it has Frances Natividad acting as a Greek Chrous, and a couple of other big-breasted women commenting on what fools we mortals be... Their breasts and words will leave your tongue hanging out!

"Margo Winchester (Raven La Croix) is the big chested heroine. She's jogging along a country road when Sheriff Homer Johnson (Monte Bane), driving a Mercedes Cruiser, tries to pick her up. She refuses him but a few minutes later a guy Leonard Box (Larry Dean) corners her and she gets into his pick-up truck. Box immediately goes ape over her. But never try to rape a Russ Meyer heroine! This one is a karate expert, and though Box knocks her out and manages to rape her, she comes to and lifts him up. In the middle of a mountain stream she tosses him down so hard that she breaks his back.

"She's quickly arrested by Homer, who is more interested in getting into her pants than putting the lovely woman in jail. Besides, she's helped the world get rid of a piece of scum. Soon Margo is curling Homer's toes - and he gets her a job at Alice's restaurant, where she draws such an appreciative clientele that Alice (Janet Wood) and Paul (Robert McClaine) have to expand the place. The open a new place called Alice II and Margo becomes the feature attraction. But now Alice ain't too happy with her husband, who is messing around with Margo, too. In a counter point plot, Paul is whipping and buggering an Adolf Hitler lookalike who pays to have it done. The grand finale of all this lust takes a half hour. It will leave your eyes popping!

"A woodchopper Rafe (Bob Scott), who weighs about 250 pounds and is six feet tall, spies Margo doing her act at Alice's. He picks her off the bar and while she's struggling and screaming, tears off her clothes and rapes her across one of the tables while the male crowd cheers him on. Paul tries to save her, but Rafe clouts him silly. Homer arrives and sees his woman being molested. He plunges one of Rafe's axes into Rafe's back. Rafe pulls the ax out of his back and whops it into Horner's chest. Blood spurts out of Rafe like a geyser, but Rafe picks up both Margo and Alice and trudges off into the night with them. He's followed by Homer, who is erupting with blood but now has a chainsaw. When he catches Rafe, he damn near saws him in half.

"Alice is determined to kill Margo for seducing her husband and almost does before she admits that her real name is Eva Braun, and she was Hitler's mistress." (X-Rated Videotape Guide #1, p.148)

Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens (1980) stars Frances "Kitten" Natividad, Anne Marie, Candy Samples, June Mack, Lola Langusta, Sharon Hill and Uschi Digard. Stuart Lancaster comments on the story in Smalltown. Lavonia (Frances Natividad) is a nymphomaniac and the wife of Lamar Shedd (Ken Kerr). She gets ticked with him when he takes off on the town with Mr. Peterbilt (Pat Wright). Lamar works for a black woman who teaches him how to make love while Lavonia does Rhett (Steve Tracy) who tells her he's only 14. She also has sex with Semper Fidelis (Michael Finn) who works for Frederico's of Wisconsin who sells sexy underwear and a bust developer you can attach to a water faucet. Lamar relaxes at a strip joint where Lavonia moonlights. She does a sexy strip...

"All the women get socked on the jaw and the guys knock down doors. Asa Lavender (the dentist/psychologist) uses a chainsaw to burst through one to get at Lamar Shedd enjoying his wife Lavonia, who also is having sex with Uschi Digard. But you know who wins out at last - the ladies with the huge breasts." (Guide #1, p. 63)

Russ and one of his big-breasted stars, Kitten Natividad, enjoyed playing a game called "Come, Kitty, come." Kitten would suck off Russ until he came. Then she'd spit his sperm into her hand, and call for her cat to lap it up. It was easy to talk Kitten into a blowjob. You just had to tell her she was the 14th best woman in the world at giving head. "Fourteenth, hah?" she'd challenge before going down on you. "Let's see about that?"

Meyer's ex-wife Edy Williams Meyer's big-breasted wife number three, Edy Williams, found the lesbian scene in Valley of the Dolls such a turn-on, that a quarter-century later, she did her first such scene with veteran Sharon Mitchell. In her private life, the boyish looking Mitchell is bi-sexual. She had a famous fling with porn actress and production assistant Tigr.

In her go round with Edy, Sharon took the aggressive role, showing Meyer's ex-wife the pleasures of womanly love, even stroking Edy's vagina through her panties. Later, Edy did another softcore lesbian scene in the promo video Woman on Woman. She fondles and kisses Kimberly Carson in the shower. It's similar to what Koo Stark did in the soft-porn feature Angel. Koo has a touchy feely shower scene with Ina Storm, who later dated Princes Charles and introduced Koo to Prince Andrew. With Koo about to marry randy Andy in 1982, the news broke about Koo's lesbian scene, creating embarrassment for the royal family and signaled the end of Koo's relationship with the prince. Andrew later married and divorced Fergie.

Edy Williams is famous for flashing her big breasts at the Cannes Film Festival and the Oscar Awards. Edy eventually went hardcore under the direction of Ron Jeremy in Snatch Masters 6. She performs lesbian sex with someone half her age - Sandi Beach, 20. The scene reveals more of Williams than most people want to see - including her many liver spots.

Last Tango in Paris

Last Tango in Paris, 1973, initially rated X for dirty deeds such as Marlon Brando buttering Maria Schneider's ass before humiliating her with anal sex. Reactions to the movie and its maker Bernard Bertolucci reflect a cultural divide between leftists who dominate art and art criticism and those who aren't radical. Most critics left of center liked the film while the rest hated it.

"Last Tango is a breakthrough movie worth owning to study Director Bernard Bertolucci's film technique that plunges you into the middle of things and lets you slowly discover the characters and events as the action develops. And you will be intrigued by the dialogue, which is often gripping, gruesome and shocking." (Robert Rimmer, X-Rated Videotape Guide #1, p.100)

Bertolucci moved on to make such films as The Last Emperor and Stealing Beauty. Illicit sex remains an everpresent theme in most of his work.

Sylvester Stallone performs in a 1970 sex flick Italian Stallion - originally titled Party at Kitty and Stud's - where he penetrates several women. The softcore movie doesn't show the penetration, however, or Stallone's erection. Sylvester earned $200 for the flick and later said that he only did the movie because he was sick and broke. At other times, Sylvester has expressed defiant pride in his dip into blue movies.

Also in 1974, a future Republican senator, Phil Gramm, invested $7500 with his brother-in-law of the time to make the soft porn movie Beauty Queens. The movie was never made. Instead, Gramm's money went to make the X-rated White House Madness, later renamed The Way He Was. Gramm denies knowing about the transfer but that is doubtful according to The New Republic. (Sydney Blumenthal, 6/5/95)

"The movie that Phil Gramm hoped to profit from is more than a nasty, puerile and relentless attack on the man he voted for (Richard Nixon) and eulogized. It ridicules the office of the presidency, religion, the legal system and the military. It deliberately offends conservative sexual mores, shows marriage and parenthood to be hollow jokes and is filled with scenes of transvestitism and bestiality."

Emmanuelle

The softcore Emmanuelle series grossed about $600 million dollars. It began in 1974 with Sylvia Kristal in the title role before switching to Laura Gemser 1978's kinky Emmanuelle in America.

Sylvia is more naive than Laura and closer to the Emmanuelle of Emmanuelle Arsan's presumed autobiography. The success of the first Emmanuelle typecast both Sylvia and director Just Jaeckin and neither again attained equal success.

Audiences stood in long lines around the world to see the first versions of Emmanuelle. The story takes place in Bangkok, Thailand where Emmanuelle's husband, Jean, is a diplomat. "It's a boring life for wives, but Jean tells her "You may play tennis, golf, explore the canals and make love." Not necessarily to Jean. Unlike most husbands with such a beautiful wife, Jean believes that Emmanuelle needs to experience new depths of eroticism. She tries by masturbating with a neighboring wife's daughter. Then she falls in love with Bee who is blonde and beautiful. When Emmanuelle returns after hopelessly pursuing Bee (during which time Jean has sadistically screwed a wealthy bisexual friend of theirs), Jean suggests that She can get her revenge on Bee with another lover. The lover will teach her all there is to know about sex is Mario, a septuagenarian. With Mario's guidance, and while smoking hashish, Emmanuelle becomes the sexual prize of the winner of a vicious Thai boxing match while Mario watches. Then she is raped by two Orientals, and shares Mario with a male lover. (The X-Rated Videotape Guide #1, p. 84)

Sylvia appears again in 1975's Emmanuelle, The Joys of a Woman before relinquishing the title role. In the same year, Director Just Jaeckin made The Story of O starring Corinne Clery. It's as unerotic as Emmanuelle is hot.

Emmanuelle, the Queen of Sados appeared in 1982. Bob Rimmer comments in his X-Rated Videotape Guide #1: "I am writing this review just as Jerry Falwell has launched a mail order campaign to support new legislation to censor cable television, and as Sidney Niekerk, retiring president of the Adult Film Association of America and president of Cal Vista, warns members of the AFAA not to sell hardcore films to pay television. He is sure that hard-core on pay television will inevitably bring repressive legislation, which brings up the question of the difference between Hard R and an XXX rating. It's not much, as you will discover if you watch this film, which is the best I have ever seen of the Emmanuelle series. Shot in Greece and Cyprus, the film is much more professional than most adult films. The rape scene is not gratuitous." (Guide #1, p. 83)

Sex is a Crime

"Sex is a crime," writes Rotsler in his 1974 book Contemporary Erotic Cinema. "It is literally a crime in some states and it is certainly a crime in the eyes of the churches, the police, the courts, and the uptight. Any sort of sex, even including certain activities between married couples."

There are so many loony sex laws that Robert Wayne Pelton compiled a book Loony Sex Laws from which the following examples come.

In Willowdale, Oregon, it's illegal for a husband to swear during sex.

In Clinton, Oklahoma, men may not masturbate while observing a couple having sex in the back seat of a parked car in a drive-in theater.

In California, you can get 15 years for comitting oral sex though adultery only brings a maximum $1000 fine and a year in prison.

Adultery in Arkansas can bring a $20-$100 fine.

Since sex is a crime, anything concerning sex is a crime. "Almost every police scandal of the past fifty years has had its roots in the squads and divisions directly concerned with enforcing unenforceable laws - laws against gambling, prostitution, liquor, narcotics, pornography - laws intended to eliminate immoral behavior," reads the dust jacket for Robert Williams' 1973 book Vice Squad. "It is American society, which wants to indulge itself but keep its morality intact, that must bear the ultimate responsibility for police corruption."

Pornographers have always had trouble with the law. Girls feared being photographed, not because of public or social pressures but because of the law-enforcement attitude. Laboratories refused to process film and the filmmaker had to use outlaw labs, or go through some individual who would process film at night in some lab where he was employed. In the Dark Ages of filmed pornography this was always the way those grainy, scratchy print-of-a-print-of-a-print were made, hurriedly and cheaply and secretly. People never used their right names but instead got cute - U.P. Yurn, Jewel Box, Peter Long, Connie Lingus. (Rotsler)

This started changing in the 1960s. Russ Meyer and others who made simulation pics used their own names. Pornographer Lowell Picket says that he and his contemporaries like Alex deRenzy and the Mitchell brothers, found it helped them in court to put their own names on their films for it showed that they were not hiding, that they "stood behind their product," and they thought it was nothing to be ashamed of.

One reason for the heavy police busts in Los Angeles and elsewhere prior to the 1989 Freeman decision is that they were easy busts. "You get to break in on naked girls, to be around pretty girls, girls they think are easy lays. There's no danger of a shootout or even any kind of physical hassle," notes an early LA pornographer.

"It's a kind of show biz and everyone likes show biz. They keep hoping some young chick will talk them out of a bust with her bust, plus the rest of her."

This perspective is backed up in Norma Jean Almodovar's book Cop to Call Girl. The red-headed beauty - raised a fundamentalist Baptist - grew so disillusioned with the Los Angeles Police Department, particularly the Vice Squad, that she quit to become a high-priced Beverly Hills Call Girl. The L.A.P.D. got back at her, making her life miserable for years. They made up pandering charges and with the help of an inept judge, sent her to prison for three years. They also confiscated her early manuscript and did everything they could short of murder to punish her for "squealing" about their evils.

LAPD busts are politics say many pornographers. "Easy headlines," notes one producer. "It doesn't matter that it gets thrown out in court. It looks good, all those arrests, those headlines. 'Porno Ring Broken'! Bullshit! There's no ring, no conspiracy, just a bunch of folks trying to hustle a buck."

"In Los Angeles," said Lowell Picket in the early '70s, "they attempt to make the bust while the film-making is going on, charging the camera operators, the producer-directors with conspiracy to commit oral copulation, or any ridiculous charge like that. The San Francisco Police Department is more civilized."

Police frequently busted female performers for prostitution to get them to testify against pornographers.

The most important national legal ruling on pornography came in the case of Miller v. California where the Warren Burger Supreme Court said in 1971 that for materials to be legally obscene they had to arouse prurient interests, lack redeeming social value and violate community standards of decency.

"Community Standards" are the key two words in the decision. The Chief Justice and his allies on the court worried about the proliferation of adult theaters and book stores from Times Square to Main Street, U.S.A. Before Miller, a local court could find a film obscene based on "community standards," but lawyers could appeal the case to a higher court where a vague national standard determined obscenity.

The ruling bothered more than just pornographers. A few days after it came down, the police in Salt Lake CIty closed a theater showing Last Tango in Paris. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that it was now impossible to determine in advance whether a film violated obscenity law because the Supreme Court's ruling created "50 or more fragmented opinions as to what constituted obscenity."

The New York Times wrote that Miller gave "license to local censors. In the long run it will make every local community and every state the arbiter of acceptability, thereby adjusting all sex-related literary, artistic and entertainment production to the lowest common denominator of toleration. Police-court morality will have a heyday."

After Miller, pornographers who lacked the money to pay attorneys got out of the business, and organized crime got in. "Miller made it all but impossible to distribute a film across state lines," says Arlene Elster, who now runs a commercial plant nursery in Northern California. "I knew the films would never get better if you couldn't distribute them, so I gave up and got out."

Jim and Artie Mitchell originally confined Behind the Green Door to three Bay Area theaters they owned and a few carefully selected theaters across the country because they feared harassment from the FBI and the Justice Department. Getting busted for obscenity in a city like San Francisco was a hassle but it was only a misdemeanor. What producers feared was the feds.

If a California pornographer got convicted of showing an obscene film in a place like Cincinnatti - which, after Miller, was more likely to happen - and if the feds could prove the person shipped the film over state lines, the pornographer was in trouble. Defending yourself in federal court is more time-consuming and expensive and the penalties are more severe. (Bottom Feeders)

With people standing in line to see Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door, the mob recognized an opportunity. Through their organization they could distribute films under the table, taking the heat off producers, or they could copy the film and distribute it themselves.

"Green Door was popping up all over the place," remembers Bob Cecchini. "We'd find it being shown in storefront theaters in places like Phoenix. We tried to stay ahead of it. I used to get on red-eyes and hand-deliver prints all over the country."

In 1973, wanna be mafioso Robert De Salvo made a bid to dominate distribution of pornos. He nailed down Deep Throat and also tried for the rights to Behind the Green Door. He told Jim and Artie Mitchell that they could share the profits of national distribution of Green Door 50/50 or he would simply steal the prints to the movie and cut them out of the money altogether. (Bottom Feeders)

Help for the Mitchell Brothers came from an unlikely source - the F.B.I.. Agents visited the O'Farrell and told Jim that they had evidence that mobster Roberrt DeSalvo distributed bootleg copies of Green Door. If the Mitchells would testify, the government would bring charges of copyright law violation against DeSalvo. "The F.B.I. didn't get in because they wanted to protect anyone," says Bob Cecchini. "They might do that for Universal Studios, but they weren't going to do it for pornographers. It was just a way to get to organized crime."

Jim and Artie testified and the court ruled that copyright law applied to pornography. "For the first time, pornography, the toad in the erotic garden, had the same protection as the precise and...clinical descriptions of sex in John Updike's Rabbit Redux." (Bottom Feeders)

Pornographers still get jailed when they accidentally mail tapes to "porn free" cities in the Mid West and South. Virtually no distributor of explicit materials willingly sends porn to areas that have laws against it for it exposes the pornographer to long costly trials, large fines and possible prison sentences. FBI agents frequently pose as citizens of conservative areas who mail or phone in requests for erotica. If someone at a distributors slips, and sends tapes like Black f---ers 3 to a community that forbids porn, the company is in trouble.

After losing to the Mitchell Brothers and the F.B.I. in federal court in Houston, Robert DeSalvo agreed to cooperate with the feds in their fight against interstate trafficking of porn. He provided evidence in the Peraino trial arising from the distribution of Deep Throat. In January, 1976, Robert DeSalvo went missing. He's presumed murdered.

Also in 1976, major mob figure Michael "Mickey" Zaffarano bought the distribution rights to the Mitchell Brothers' Autobiography of a Flea before the film even started shooting. Zaffarano was an old time mobster who served as captain in the Carmine Galante organization in New York City. He owned adult theaters across the nation. Because Zaffarano was under F.B.I. scrutiny, the brothers got out of the deal. "Mickey brought too much heat," Artie would say later. The brothers however enjoyed their time rubbing shoulders with a real mobster, listening wide-eyed to his stories.

One day Jim Mitchell got a call from a heavy in Chicago who'd been stealing Mitchell Brothers films for years. "I think his name was Murray," O'Farrells handyman Jack Harvey recalls. "He came out to San Francisco to shoot a porn film. He had an asian story and an asian porn star lined up and then she left. So he calls Jim and says, 'I need an asian porn star.' And Jim says, 'Wait a minute. Why should we help you out? You thievin' bastard, you're stealing films from us." "The guy says 'Look, I'm in a bind right now. You send me a porn queen and I'll never steal from you again.' "That sounded fair. They sent [a porn star named] Jana over and made the movie. And I understand he never stole from us again. They made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits off the sales of films to this guy." (Bottom Feeders)

During his heyday in the 1970s, Mike Thevis owned over 400 porn bookstores and theaters, mainly in the southeastern U.S. He also owned the largest manufacturing facility of "peep-show" booths in the world. Though bothered by the occassional bust, Mike's lawyers were superb at getting him out of trouble. Thevis lived in a mansion in Atlanta. He had a wife and two sons who headed holding companies and dummy corporations for his porn operation. Mike sought more power, and he blew up the only other manufacturer of peep-show booth sin the US. He got indicted after several competitors notified the FBI that he had threatened them with violence. Thevis was tried and convicted under the RICO act of racketeering, attempted murder, terrorism, etc...

The feds seized several of his warehouses in the South and destroyed over 40,000 pounds of pornographic material. Thevis' wife divorced him and sold their mansion to professional football player Andre RIson who played wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons and the Indianapolis Colts. The mansion was burned to the ground by Rison's psychotic rap-star girlfriend Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes after she and Andre had a fight. They're still married.

Prosecutors dismantled the Thevis empire and it's now difficult to get porn in the south. Thevis escaped from jail for a couple of days but was found by bloodhounds hiding under leaves in the woods. If you find any porn in the southeast, it probably comes from a Thevis-related company. Mike's ex-wife and his sons own a variety of sex shops. (Thevis story thanks to Brad Williams)

An early taboo that pornographers smashed was interracial sex. Blacks became symbols of raw sexual power and orientals of feminine submissiveness to male desire. Muscular black Johnny Keyes is the prime tool in Marilyn Chambers' sexual awakening in Green Door. Another black man also features prominently. "In both cases the men are silent, almost robot-like tools, used by the strage cult to sway the young blonde. Both men are decorated with savage ornament and their faces are painted....The long forbidden black stud has become the symbol of primitive sex, an uncompromising figure of sensuality, an epitome of f---ing." (Rotsler)

In The New Centurions, with George C. Scott, a paddy-wagon of black whores tell tales on their kinky customers until one black beauty complains that it seems that only black men are interested in straight f---ing. In Clay McCord's Black and White a young white woman blackmails first one, then four of her black workmen into screwing her. They have no choice and, afraid of the trouble she might cause, each of them balls her until it becomes a regular event for all four to take her at once. Then they get their "revenge" upon her by f---ing her unconscious.

In Scandinavian porno films, where blacks are rare, they are always treated as special. In one film, beautifully photographed in Denmark for the German market, a blond young man tortures and humiliates a black girl. In a 1970s feature, one character says to a black man, "I notice that the myth of your sexual prowess is the one stereotype you haven't bothered to protest."

When something is forbidden, people want it. "If there is anything I hate," says a character in a Florida-produced short, "it's someone tellng me to do something. But what I hate more is someone telling me not to do something." Exotic lands, exotic women, exotic sights draw thousands of American tourists each year. They enjoy moving from the familiar to the different. No wonder porno filmmakers exploit interracial sex. (Bill Rotsler, Contemporary Erotic Cinema)

Rotsler protests that pornos use blacks, latins and orientals as objects. Perhaps he doesn't understand that virtually all performers in porn are objects.

Holliday's Hottest

Jim Holliday ranks 1973's Wet Rainbow as a superb East Coast film that combines explicit sex with drama. Georgina Spelvin and Harry Reems play a photographer and a painter whose lives are turned upside down by a hippie artist named Rainbow, played by Valeria Marron. Their relationship is put to the test when both lust after the hippie.The first anal sex experience in the movie can serve as a teaching guide. Tension builds towards the three-way close, "and as is the case in most good films, the cryptic ending will leave audiences wondering." (Holliday)

"If you don't believe that adult film stars can be good actors and actresses, or that directors and producers can handle stories that come to grips with human problems, then buy this one," recommends Bob Rimmer. "Wet Rainbow proves that intimate stories about marital problems, interwoven with explicit sex, are the perfect subjects for adult films."

Eric Anderson directed Spelvin, Tina Russell, Judith Hamilton, Jamie Gillis and Marc Stevens in Sleepyhead. Holliday wonders if the flick was too good for its day. It's a tale of two sisters, the older one played by Georgina Spelvin and the younger by Tina Russell. "The religious overtones here sound a different tone than the Catholic guilt trips often taken by [Director] Gerard Damiano." (Holliday)

Tina Russell worries she's going to hell because she's learned to love sex. The title Sleepyhead doesn't match the story. "The plot comes apart near the end with a too-extended orgy" notes Bob Rimmer. "Tina and Tracy are sisters brought up by a Bible-reading mother and father. Tracy always carries a cross and prays to Jesus for salvation. She terrifies Bernice by telling her that her best girlfriend is a consort of the devil." Jamie Gillis and Marc Stevens appear only momentarily in roles unconnected to the main story.

San Franciscan Lowell Picket produced and directed Rendezvous With Anne which features a jazz score, a tribute to Tennessee Williams, an erotic build to the sex, few genital close-ups, and not one external cum shot. Anne Stewart gets paged in the San Francisco airport. Four Anne Stewarts, including Keri Carpenter and Lisa Troy, arrive at the information desk. The grandmother is the one being paged. The three beauties introduce themselves and discuss their various vacation adventures.

Tina Russell gives her best performance ever in 1973's Whatever Happened to Miss September? One of Tina's classic loops, Private Secretary, appears as part of Miss September's past. The standard orgy scene reunites all characters at the end and the detective discovers that porno people are nice folks, which is frequently true. Harry Reems, Jamie Gillis and Marc Stevens star in the sex comedy High Rise. "The film works on the thespian and sexual talents of one shot wonder Tamie Trevor." (Holliday)

Her husband is played by John Clemens of Devil in Miss Jones fame. "If only my husband could show me affection," Tamie tells her psychiatrist. "We don't f--- anymore." "You need a fast course in sexual stimulation," he says. "Discovering that she's looking for a new apartment in a high-rise, he suggests that she expand her horizons with some of the residents. Behind the first door she knocks on, she finds Harry Reems, a mother-fixated railroad-buff playing with his electric trains, but Tamie soon proves that she has more delights to offer than transformers and railroad engines." (Guide #1, p.288)

The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander is the best Southern Californian production of 1973 but doesn't pass the test of time. Samantha McClaren plays the Happy Hooker. Buxom Samantha also appears in Chuck Vincent's Heavy Load. Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander has little dialogue, mediocre sex, but good production and reveals early L.A. studs such as Keith Erickson in goatee in the car, Ric Lutze after the horse ride, John Holmes as Xaviera's first trick, and Rick Cassidy at the end. Franklin Anthony appears in a Mickey Mouseketeer hat in the triple-trick pooltable sex. (Holliday)

Xaviera acts both as a voiceover and fully dressed guest star. At the end of the flick, the Xaviera character gets married and thanks the preacher with fellatio.

Ivory Soap To The Rescue

As the box office for Behind the Green Door slumped, Ivory Soap unwittingly came to the rescue. A couple of years before, Marilyn posed for a new Ivory Soap Box picture. And now the box was out, with Marilyn on the cover gazing lovingly into the eyes of an adorable WASP infant.

The Mitchell Brothers juiced all the publicity they could from the incident. Marilyn Chambers appeared on talk shows all over America as the 100% pure Ivory Soap girl. Proctor & Gamble finally pulled the box with Marilyn's picture off the shelves, replacing it with an idealized drawing of a young woman that still remains its soap box cover. But Marilyn Chambers was forever etched as the girl on the Ivory Soap Box, "the perfect symbol of the mainstreaming of pornography. Marilyn was the girl next door who liked sex." (The Bottom Feeders by John C. Hubner)

As the lines waiting to get into the World Theater in New York to see Green Door showed, mainstream Americans wanted to see pornography. What had happened in San Francisco in the '60s now swept the country. "Acts that had always been considered taboo in middle-class America - exotic positions (i.e., positions other than man on top, woman on the bottom); oral sex, group sex, lesbian sex; anal sex; sex between white women and black men... - were up on the screen where anyone eighteen or older could see them." (John Hubner, Bottom Feeders)

Many viewers went home and tried out what they'd seen on the screen and found they liked it. One effect of porn going mainstream was that George McDonald was finally the star he had longed to be. But like many celebrities before him, he found fame a burden. "Women would always go, 'OOOHHH, you did that? They tended to be less inquisitive, less verbal and more physical than men. "Most guys wanted the notion that it was hard to get it up on demand verified. Some guys wanted to kick my ass. He'd watched the film with his wife and she'd gotten turned on, and now he wanted to kick my ass.

"Sometimes, I'd get accosted by the most venomous right-wingers you can imagine. They'd say, "You're a dirty-movie star! You exploit women! I learned that nothing I could say could change their minds, so I always just sat there and let them tell me I was responsible for the decline of American civilization. Sometimes I'd run across a real weirdo. He'd rag on me for a while and then he'd end up saying he hadn't meant to do that to his dog, it had just happened." (Bottom Feeders)

Marilyn Chambers' performance in Green Door became a lightning rod in the debate over pornography. Defenders of porn saw her as a "nice girl" who discovers herself through sex. Opponents of pornography saw her character as enslaved and humiliated, who leaves the sex club as a robot programmed to say yes. (John Hubner)

Jim and Artie loved the fight because it sold tickets to their film. The Mitchells hosted numerous fundraisers for progressives causes such as the environment and convicts' rights. "Jim and Artie had a definite attraction for men and women serving time behind bars. When you have been busted dozens of times for doing something you do not believe is wrong, you begin to believe that nobody can do anything wrong." (John Hubner, Bottom Feeders)

At the end of 1974, Marilyn Chambers decided she'd gone as far as she could with the Mitchell Brothers and gave her career over to her new manager Chuck Trayner. "Women have serious cramps once a month because they deserve them," says Chuck. "I raise quarter horses,and these days they've got this little thing they put on a horse's neck to prevent PMS. I don't know why they can't do that for women, why we can't get these little things you can stick on their necks to make 'em work right." (Bottom Feeders)

Chuck and Marilyn soon married. Marilyn starved for adoration and Chuck Traynor convinced her that he knew how to market her talents. Traynor says that the Mitchell Brothers were too emotionally involved with Marilyn to think straight about business. Marilyn wanted someone not only to run her career, but her life.

"I had a dominant-submissive relationship with Chuck. He was the stronger one. I relied on him for everything."

Ticked at losing Marilyn, the brothers patched together outtakes from her previous films and released as revenge Inside Marilyn Chambers. "I hated the film," says Marilyn. "I still do. It's supposed to be the story of my life, and it's not true. Jim and Artie ripped me off. They felt I'd betrayed them. I felt they betrayed me, and for many years, we didn't speak. Only when money was to be made did we start talking again."

Bob Rimmer reviews Inside Marilyn Chambers. "While you still won't know what goes on in Marilyn's mind after you have watched this, it's the most interesting of the "Inside" porno star films. Not only Marilyn, but Johnny Keyes and George McDonald discuss the making of Behind the Green Door and The Resurrection of Eve, and they give you some insight into their feelings in making porn. Marilyn enjoys acting out her rape fantasies, and Keyes tells how he had five climaxes with Marilyn during one scene, but nevertheless managed to keep thrusting inside her. George McDonald reveals that after having sex with Marilyn for several hours and not climaxing, he asked her in the shower to relieve him - which she did by hand because her vagina was too sore to continue vaginally."

Sodom and Gomorrah

In 1973, the justices of the New York Supreme Court ruled that four films, including Green Door, contained so many "acts of sexual perversion, [they] would have been considered obscene by the community standards of Sodomand Gomorrah." WIth their "f--- you" attitude, Jim and Artie Mitchell decided to make a film called Sodom and Gomorrah. They spent almost a million dollars on the flop - porn's version of Heaven's Gate. The San Francisco Chronicle - the first daily newspaper to review pornographic films regularly - wrote that watching the film was "as dull as watching a pile drive on a construction site... It is an abysmally shoddy spectacle of sex and violence that is...without humor, imagination or production values, a skimpy, painfullly witless, dunderheaded retelling of the story of Lot and his daughters in Sodom." (Critic John Wasserman)

Bob Rimmer is kinder: "This sexvid has a story line (Hollywood Biblical), though it gets muddy at time because it is relived through the future. Worth owning...because it reveals the potential for retelling hundreds of Biblical stories with more explicit sexuality." (Guide #1, p.137)

Low on cash after Sodom, Jim Mitchell developed a series called Ultrakore - a return to the loops that dominated pornography when the Mitchell brothers broke in. Porn was no longer chic, fewer couples came to the O'Farrell, and the raincoaters were growing bored with features built around stupid plots. Shot on 35 mm, Ultrakore with its scorching sound tracks turned into a parody of the genre it was reinventing. For example, Hot Nazis burlesques sadomasochism, with female Nazis with fake German accents chanting "We are hot Nazis, we are hot Nazis."

When Ultrakore burned itself out, the brothers returned to features. CB Mamas capitalized on the CB radio craze. The Grafenberg Spot was "a six-day wonder made to raise money for legal expenses" according to Artie. In the sequel, The Grafenberg Girls Go Fishing, dildos protrude from anuses and vaginas "like terrible spikes and the sound track has more lowing than a dairy farm at feeding time." (Hubner)

The Mitchells inability to develop as filmmakers cost them key employees. One quit after saying "f---ing cocksucker" to a grandmother he loved and suddenly realized how coarse he'd become. Others tired of grinding out sex films. George McDonald retired because he got sick of acting in them. (Bottom Feeders)

"The Mitchell brothers had a chance to do something and they never did because they had no intellectual capacity," says their old competitior Lowell Pickett. "Their films were sophomoric because they were living out fantasies they'd formed in eighth grade. They had no aspirations to make better films because they had everything eight-graders want - buddies to go fishing and be macho with."

Paul Thomas made his porn debut in the Mitchell Brothers' 1976 production Autobiography of a Flea which also starred John Holmes, Jean Jennings and Annette Haven. "Based on a 17th century pornographic story, the infamous flea (in a voice-over) lives on a lovely young girl with occasional vacations on priests who lead her into a life of sin, biting them occasionally so that all is not pleasure. No collection of sexvids is complete without this one, which is among the few laughing explicit films ever made with a continuously connected story." (Guide #1 p.61)

By giving up on films, the Mitchells showed just as good a business sense leaving the genre as they had when entering.. By 1978 VCRs sold big and horn dick daddies no longer needed to go to theaters to see a sex film. The mainstreaming of pornography that Jim and Artie helped create was complete. After the VCR revolution, porn production shifted to the San Fernando Valley where it became a rule of thumb until the 1990s that if you invested more than $30,000 in a porno, you'd lose money.

Holliday's Hottest Films of the '70s

With virtually no advertising and few subscribers, Hustler turned four color in 1974 and sold out constantly at newsstands. Swedish soft-core genius Joe Sarno made 1974's Butterflies - one of the five best foreign sex films ever made. Eric Edwards, Harry Reems and Maria Lynn, also known in hard and soft films as Maria Forsa, star. "Many women will identify with this film as they are both attracted to and repulsed by Frank - played by Harry Reems. Frank makes love nicely to many women but is faithful to none of them.

"Denise, a German farm girl, is bored with the narrow-minded village she lives in and fless to Munich where nightclub owner Frank takes her over for a while before telling her to get out of his life.

"There is much romantic lovemaking...with hardcore closeups. "This is one of the few adult films where sexual jealousy is the motivator of the action." (Guide #1, p.154)

As one of Frank's lovers, Maria Forsa personifies the sexual symbolism of butterflies.

Sarno made several great soft flicks beginning in 1966 with Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse, followed the next year by Inga played by Marie Lilljedahl, 1973's flop Deep Throat II, and Abigail Leslie is Back in Town in 1974 starring Eric Edwards and Jennifer Jordan. High School Fantasies is a funny sexvid.

"If you were in high school in the last 20 years you'll remember poor Freddy, the bumbling ass who could never make it with girls. All his friends are happily screwing, but not Freddy - until he finally invents a concoction that sexes women better than Spanish fly is supposed to. His first conquest is his English teacher, who drinks it in Coke." (The X-Rated Videotape Guide #1, p.171)

Jim Holliday calls 1974's High School Fantasies the American Graffiti of adult films because it captures all the charm and innocence of teenage sexuality. Rene Bond plays Mary Lou, cheerleader and lust object of Zuni High. All of the highschool stereotypes are here, from the wimp to the studs to the clowns to the experienced girls and those not so sexually advanced. Even the sexually aggressive female teacher and the latent homosexual male are characterized. Larry Barnhouse is super as Freddy the Wimp who seeks to lose his virginity with Mary Lou, the girl of his fantasies. Producer Damon Christian based the film on his own experiences, but many are universal. By slight variations of the chords, the soundtrack offers parodies of over 30 rock songs. For a complete rundown of the best tunes in adult flicks, consult the trivia treasury at the end of Holliday's Only The Best.

Rick Robinson produced and directed 1974's Marriage and Other Four Letter Words. The title reveals how pornography views the institution which builds civilization. How Sweet It Is, released later, features most of the same cast as Marriage except for the lead Rainbow. Devil's Ecstasy is the best adult film to deal with Satanism, witchcraft and the occult. The other major strength of the film is the performance of gorgeous Cyndee Summers in the lead role. (Holliday)

Warren Evans's Love Bus is a prime example the term 'New York Grinder.' Compared to the lavish films Evans made in the eighties, it's just a hot sex film. (Holliday)

China Girl is the West Coast example of great films of 1974 that opted for story and eschewed raunch. The script is loaded with clever one liners that contrast Asian and American cultures. Scientist Barry Frye spills his guts at the pleasurable sex torture. (Holliday) Also in 1974, Bill Margold and Nina Fause starred in Marilyn and the Senator. L.A . Police busted the production in-progress.

Bill reviewed his own movie in the Hollywood Press. "While the film includes such subtle moments as the pouring of cement when one of the chracters is orgasming, Marilyn and the Senator is fun first and fornication second. As timely as today's headlines, the story deals with the sexual follies of a Senator [played by Bill] who has a weakness for the Detroit Lions, food, and "The Wild Bunch" (look closely at the painting on his living room wall)."

Jody Maxwell gives her best performance in Portrait. Thundercrack is the black and white cult adult film. Angel on Fire was the first major East Coast film made by a woman. Lialeh starring Jennifer Leigh is the first all black cast and production crew effort "and proves that there is no discrimination when it comes to mediocre sex films." (Holliday)

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)

Jim Holliday writes that the normally kinky Jamie Gillis is wonderfully restrained as the Bob Cratchit character and his sex scene with crippled wife Kim Pope is as tender as any ever filmed. Directed by Warren Evans though credited as Amanda Barton.

Holliday's book Only The Best, 1986, calls 1975's Honey Pie the finest loop carrier film made. "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 and tender note and progressively get hotter and raunchier, building to two sizzling climaxes."

Jennifer Wells is 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. After teasing them, she does it all sexually - including oral, anal, straight, all topped off by a double vaginal insertion and then a front and rear double penetration - before her hubby returns. Superbly scored with Country and Gospel, the scene is impossible to top and a movie on its own. (Holliday)

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)

Radley Metzger

Soft-core artist Radley Metzger, who made Therese and Isabelle, Carmen Baby, Score, The Lickerish Quartet and other films, changed his name to Henry Paris when he made his first explicit film, 1974's The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann which shattered the previous boundaries and moved adult films into the area of near Hollywood productions. Barbara Bourbon deepthroats Marc (10.5) Stevens and hooks up with Spelvin in a sizzling lesbian scene. Famous for his running gags, Radley Metzger uses two in Pamela Mann - a sex gag with David Savage and Day Jason that pokes fun at the entire myth surrounding cum shots, and, throughout the film, an idiot interviewer asking supposedly significant questions of Pamela, thus providing 'socially redeeming value.'

"I first met Barbara Bourbon , the lithe star of The Private Afternoon of Pamela Mann," wrote Bill Margold in 1975, "two years ago in a compromising position on the set of a film called The California Connection. Even before I knew her name, I was pillaging her lower delights...

"Everything Emmanuelle wasn't, is the easiest way to sum up The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann. This is sex sinematics at its best. The grinding and groaning days are no longer good enough... and Pamela Mann signals an end to the all-balling, no purpose, disposable mastur-movies that go into one orifice and out another."

The Opening of Misty Beethoven Released in 1975, The Opening of Misty Beethoven received the first annual Erotic Film Festival Award for Best Movie and is widely regarded as the best adult movie ever. Loosely based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalian, it stars Jamie Gillis and Constance Money who performed in only eight X-rated movies. Constance Money initially thought that The Opening of Misty Beethoven would be an R-rated picture.

"Misty is a good movie because it is real," says Constance. The incidents in the film were happening to me at the time, especially my relationship with Jamie. Henry Paris [the director whose real name is Radley Metzger] made me that character. He told me I couldn't act so I fit the part.

"I didn't get paid for Misty Beethoven. Nor did I sign a release. I didn't have a good attitude and I didn't like Henry Paris. "Henry makes films with blood. Not money, blood. The man is sick. Anyone who squirts somebody in the face with K-Y Jelly and cottage cheese for ten hours a day has got to be doing it for more than just film.

"Jamie beat me up sexually. Jamie and I had and still have a strange relationship. He's kinky. "My sexual learning is just as Misty Beethoven showed. I started off clumsy.

"My favorite novelist is Jerry Kozinski. I read his Painted Bird right after shooting Misty Beethoven. It probably saved my life. I was so depressed after that movie. The book lifted me out of it.

"Having done these films affects my relationships which is why I retired. A guy I'm going out with might go to a stag party where they show a tape, and other guys will say, 'Isn't that your girlfriend?' It's hard for them to deal with it because most of them are really straight.

"My mother was up one night watching cable TV with her boyfriend when she saw me.

"A couple of times in New York guys have come up to me and pulled their pants down. I was having dinner once and this guy came up and flop, he pulled his cock out right there in front of us. But people aren't usually like that." (Told to Adam magazine)

Aside from Linda Lovelace, Constance was the only performer featured in a multi-page Playboy layout until Bridgette Monet and Missy in the '80s. After retiring to the Pacific Northwest for several years, Constance returned to Porn Valley for A Taste of Money, a romanticized account of her return to X. Upon retiring from the biz, she reverted to her real name Susan Jensen and moved to Alaska to run a restaurant.

Radley Metzger gave Constance Money that porn name because she constantly asked for money.

Misty Beethoven examplifies the higher quality of 1970s pornos. They frequently used substantial scripts, trained actors and exotic sets. X-rated filmmakers experimented more in the '70s than since the industry became legal and contained. For instance, explicit violence, rape, fisting and golden showers have disappeared from sexvids. And there's little money anymore in writing porn scripts as the medium adapts a motto from FM radio - Less Talk More Sex.

"Right now the language of erotic cinema is baby talk," wrote Bill Rotsler in 1974, "but inevitably some of it will become poetry." Instead, the quality of pornos, like stags before them, tended to decline through the decades.

Henri Paris (Radley Metzger), working out of New York, directed Misty Beethoven and other classic erotica such as Barbara Broadcast, Naked Came the Stranger, and Camille 2000. Many hardcore fans, however, won't find his flicks hot enough. Barbara Broadcast is set in a restaurant where girl reporter C.J. Laing interviews an infamous New York prostitute (Annette Haven). "Henri Paris combines raunchy sex with light-hearted, witty erotic interludes filled with spunky one lingers. Classic anal with Stacy Nichols and Laing." (AFW 96D p.248)

Critic Robert Rimmer was unimpressed with this 1977 flick. "...Laing urinates in a dish and is screwed by a human dishwasher. This is a plotless flick where the female waitresses lie on the table and offer themselves as hor d'oeuvres, and the male waiters offer sperm salad dressing squirted on the lettuce. If the waitresses drop anything, they must give the headwaiter a blowjob." (Guide #1 p. 249)

Mike McGrady, who wrote Linda Lovelace's autobiography Ordeal, masterminded the 1969 sex novel Naked Came the Stranger that Radley Metzger turned into a 1975 movie by the same name. Gilly and Bill run a radio show. "We get you to work, we get you home, we even may teach you to roam," is their slogan. Billy roams with script-girl Phyllis for he has "the three-year five-month itch." Gilly, his wife, knows what's going on and seeks revenge with some of their male friends who she meets at a costume party. In her first attempt, she can't even get the guy up. In a second try a few days later, she offers another friend a chance to tie her up and whip her but discovers that he prefers to be whipped. On a Fifth Avenue bus shot in Manhattan traffic, she gives another friend the head of his life. Her greatest encounter is so hot that she becomes a silent movie star in an erotic extended satire on old silent sex flicks. But Billy still roams until Gilly seduces Phyllis so thoroughly tha Phyllis decides to leave Billy because she falls in love with Gilly. This is the best film Darby Lloyd Raines has made. (Guide #1, p.109)

Camille 2000, 1973, should carry an R rating. "A modern jet-set version of Alexandre Dumas's novel about a consumptive prostitute, mistress of the Duc de Mauriac. The sad story of Marguerite has the twists and turns of a soap opera, but it is exquisitely photographed, and the acting and dialogue are believable. If the sex scenes had been more sharply focused, instead of choreographed, Metzger would have produced the first classic porn film worth owning." (Guide #1 p. 69)

The Punishment of Anne (1975) makes Jim Holliday's top ten underrated list, "because by the time industry leader VCA got hold of the rights, it was lost in the release shuffle and many people still don't know the title. This is the film Radley Metzger made under his real name. Also known as The Image or L'Image, it is superb celebration of the old "who's the master, who's the slave" bondage theme."

Holliday's Hottest

Porn historian Jim Holliday ranks Anyone But My Husband, A Dirty Western, The Felines and Angela the Fireworks Woman as four good films of 1975. Anyone But My Husband opens with C.J. Laing struggling with to make dinner while her school teacher husband Bolla is busy balling one of his students - Susan Sloan. When Bolla gets home, he's a jerk, driving C.J. to the bathroom with her champagne bottle in a desperate masturbation scene. C.J.'s shrink advises her to have an affair herself, and so she makes plans with her friend Sylvia (Jennifer Jordan). Like Barbara Streisand, C.J. Laing is a nice Jewish girl who occassionally appears pretty.

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.

In Adult Video News' (AVN) 8/86 issue, Holliday lists the best foreign films. In Practice Make's Perfect (1976?), Eric Edwards plays a dolt learning about sex from Charles Canyon. "In the process the audience learns that those stereotypes about blonde Swedes do apply to the women in this picture. Darby Lloyd Raines is excellent as the shy school marm."

Laura's Desires (1978) is "the best example of a routine sex film turned superior on the strength of the leading lady Ingrid Theil."

The perfect film for beginners is the 1973 Danish flick Bordello. The best foreign film of the past few years is the offbeat French film The Arrangement. 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 p.4, 72.)

In 1976, Beatrice Harnois plays Felecia and Rebecca Brooke is Gabrielle, the blonde in Punishment of Anne and Confessions of a Young American Housewife. But Felicia is the only film where Rebecca performs her own sex scenes. It's one of the five best foreign films ever made, according to 1986's Only the Best.

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." Armand Weston's Expose Me, Lovely rivals the later Amanda By Night and Fiona On Fire as the best adult mystery/detective film of Porn's Golden Age 1973-83.

"This is a thoroughly plotted film that happens to contain explicit sex. Armand Weston rates among the five finest explicit filmmakers ever. It plays well in the watered down cable version an could hold your attention even if there were no sex scenes at all, probably the highest cinematic tribute an adult film can be paid. If ever a film had a mind-blowing ending, this one does. Straight from left field and totally unexpected. A groin kicking conclusion to a groin stimulating picture." (Holliday)

Cecil Howard and Robert Norman directed 1976's Fantasex, "the best of all of the adult films to incorporate James Thurber's classic Walter Mitty dreamer concept. Terri Hall is Jane and Jeff Hurst is Bernard Lipshitz. They both work as book readers for Babcok Publishing, constantly under fire from tyrannical boss Roger Caine. The milktoasts are thus reduced to escaping to the fantasy world of the fiction they are paid to evaluate." (Holliday)

Practice Makes Perfect is another good example of the European ability to poke fun at sex. Americans Eric Edwards, Charles Canyon and Darby Lloyd Raines enhance this Swedish film.

Holliday says the Spirit of Seventy-Six is the best and funniest of the adult films based on the Bicentennial. Godfrey Daniels, who made Insatiable, directs. "Hilarious old codger Ebenezar narrates the 'true' story of the sex lives of major American patriots and punctuates his commentary with some salty language. If high school history was as far as you got, you may be outraged, but post graduate students would be the first to tell you that our founding fathers had interesting views on sexuality. Most would probably have large porn tape collections if they were still alive." (Holliday)

Sweet Cakes is generally regarded as Howard Ziehm's best.

Bill Margold comments on Count The Ways: "That's the nice Ann Perry movie where Tyler is the poetry teacher in the snow."

Holliday writes: "[Director] Ann Perry's female touches are evidenced in the heavy story and the beautiful editing and photography. It is Anne's most sincere film and also her personal favorite."

Diversions also appeared in 1976. "The finest adult film, and one of the rare examples from the United Kingdom, made by husband-wife team Derek and Valerie Ford, who have achieved legitimate 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 is another example of porn's fascination with Nazism.

Abigail Clayton makes her porn debut as Dixie, "a 15 year old still discovering her own sexuality but shuttled between her older sisters. Margaret is straight but Mimi Morgan as Pamela is hooker preoccupied with her own situation. This is hard to top for the 'naive young girl learns about sex' crowd." (Holliday)

Summer Brown directed The Joy of Letting Go about a bored housewife played by former fashion model Dominique St. Pierre. Through a friend at her health club, she's introduced to the top West Coast pimp who is one girl short. Constance Money, before she became Misty Beethoven, plays a hooker. The Marlboro Man and sometime South Dakota politician Clint Hughes also appears.

Abigail Clayton gives a great performance in Naked Afternoon. Director Alan Cohlberg made better known films such as All Night Long, Tapestry of Passion, John Holmes Superstar and One Way At A Time, but none are of higher quality or more erotic than this, writes Jim Holliday.

Holliday says the best 3-D porn film is The Starlets in 3-D.

In 1976's Through the Looking Glass, Catherine Burgess plays an elegant woman preparing for a trip to Europe. "Her strange attic mirror offers portal glimpses of Jamie Gillis and a possession influence that becomes an obsession stranglehold. Terri Hall and Roger Caine are incestuous maid and gardener hired help. Laura Nicholson is her daughter. Most of the New York stars of the era appear as Catherine's world turns into a nightmarish vision of hell. Gillis is perfect as the Freudian father figure." (Holliday)

Porn in 1976

Pornographic features accounted for 16% of the total 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 minor mobster Phil Paresi, one of the original distributors of Deep Throat, demand had fallen so drastically that the average production will earn no morethan $300,000 in rentals, not a great return if expenses are high and profits must be divided between several investors. (Joseph Slade)

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. The principiple challenges to profits for producers were two. First, was the uncertainty of adaquate national distribution.

"Porn distribution networks are sketchy, potentially subject to federal legal intervention, as in Memphis, threatened by new zoning ordinances in major cities, dominated in most regions by the Mafia - probably in some ratio to the distruption of circulation that was a consequence of the 1973 Supreme Court decision giving regulatory powers over pornography to local communities, a decision said to have accelerated underworld involvement with feature films - and undercut by extensive pirating of 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. Holding the lines open against legal contest and conservative outcry is a continuing worry..." (Jospeh Slade)

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 protested the influx of U.S. features on the streets of Munich. It's been legal to distribute porn features in the Federal Republic of Germany since 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. But in France, once Gaullist censorship was overthrown, 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 from respectable sources 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 novelization of the script. Next, Middleton sold rights to his film to exhibitors in Europe and Asia.

At times, the 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 not only is the US the biggest producer of porno films, it is also the biggest consumer.

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. No American porn flick has yet managed a big studio look."

This doesn't stop pornographers from trying. Middleton stresses the literary origins - a Russian short story - of Through the Looking Glass. He says he's "trying to upgrade the genre...and get into a sophisticated plot." He prefers to call the results a "psychological thriller, supernatural sex, not reallly a porno."

Bob Rimmer reviews the attempt: "This is 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 #1, p. 213)

Borrowing from literature became popular in porn's Golden Age. Examples include Armand 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'sFarewell 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 has 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. Because the raincoat brigade - the economic underpinning of hte 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)

Still today a large number of pornos are 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, the camera's presence is always blatant whether its focus is ethereal and gauzy or grainy and harsh. The instrusion always shocks. Over seven decades, the stag film has evolved formulas and cliches to cushion the impact, and they have been transmuted into patterns within the feature film as well. Frequently lamented by the critic as boring, the cushioning devices are crucial: popular belief to the contrary, sex has not lost its mystery or its power, and without the cut-out characters and the erotic templates, film pornography would probably be intolerable to those who enjoy it most. Protective on the one hand, restrictive on the other, but ontologically necessary in either case, the conventions help to explain why it is so difficult for a pornographer aesthetically to improve his product." (Joseph W. Slade)

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 frequently crucial the 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 climaxes weaken dramatic ones. Thus, a formula suited for a stag film may not work in a feature which seeks to delay gratification.

The Golden Age

The dominant filmmakers at the beginning of the Golden Age - which extended from 1973-86 by a broad count, '75-'81 by a narrow count - were Gerard Damiano, the Mitchell Brothers, Harold Lime, Lassie Braun, Alex deRenzy, Anthony Spinelli and Richard Mahler. The leading performers included Eric Edwards, Jamie Gillis, Paul Thomas, Annette Haven and Vanessa Del Rio.

Harold Lime is Ted Paramore

Harold Lime made 1968's The Ribald Tales Of Robin Hood and then he moved into hardcore with 1977's Desires Within Young Girls, followed by The Ecstasy Girls, Amanda by Night, Centerspread Girls, Society Affairs, and Ecstasy By Night. The Godfather of porn, Reuben Sturman, funded these sex films and when the video era started, he offered Harold money to start a porn video company. Harold, to his regret, turned down the offer and he's never played a major role in the biz since.

Holliday notes that the highest tribute was paid to Desires Within Young Girls when the investor behind the Candy films told Bob Chinn he wanted to make a film just like Desires. Starring Georgina Spelvin, Annette Haven, John Seeman, Bonnie Holiday, Abigail Clayton, Paul Thomas and Sabrina, Desires offers provocative material. Georgina Spelvin is Madeline Stone, a woman whose husband dies during the opening sex. She decides to get her daughters Penny and Cissy, played by Clair Dia and Annette Haven, out of school and into marriage with rich men. Lime uses big casts and humor suited for adult films, but the best thing about Lime's movies, according to Holliday, is that when they are over, they leave you thinking about the human condition - something rare in porn.

Joan Devlon, who also stars in Lacey Bodine, is superb. Holliday says she remains one of the lost San Francisco legends worth discovering. Joan is also known as Giovanina. Desires Within Young Girls was busted in North Carolina solely because of its title.

Untamed, 1978, is a largely unknown erotic triumph which is a cross between a loop-carrier and feature film. The Ecstasy Girls is the masterpiece collaboration of Harold Lime, David Stone and Robert McCallum. Georgina Spelvin, Jamie Gillis, Serena, Lesllie Bovee, Laurien Dominique, Desiree Cousteau, Nancy Suiter, John Leslie and Paul Thomas star. This is director McCallum's best comedy.

Coed Fever, 1980, explores fraternities and sororities in a way that Animal House never dared. Robert McCallum directs Annette Haven, Samantha Fox, Serena, Lisa DeLeeuw, Vanessa Del Rio, Jamie Gillis, John Leslie and Ron Jeremy. Amanda by Night is one of the all time best combinations of sex and story. McCallum cross cuts between nice and nasty sex to point out the difference. The film feels like a TV detective episode with some explicit sex thrown in. The good guys are distinguished from the bad guys from the beginning. Ron Jeremy is a corrupt cop, Jamie Gillis a nasty pimp, Samantha Fox a strung out hooker and Veronica Hart is a high-class hooker. Veteran performer Robert Bolla gives his best performance as a cynical but sympathetic cop. (Holliday)

Indecent Exposure, 1981, ranks below Ecstasy Girls and Amanda By Night, but it's still a good adult film, on par with the slapstick Coed Fever. Society Affairs, 1982, marks the return of Harry Reems after a seven year absence from X-rated films. He plays the double role of a petty crook and a dim-witted heir in need of sex. The typical glossy production values of Lime and McCallum are mixed with comedy and solid sex. Harry gives a revealing speech about crooks and whores and then there's the split screen confrontation between his two characters. (Holliday)

Harold Lime produced and Robert McCallum directed 1986's The Ecstasy Girls II. Holliday says the sequel to one of the all time monster hits will disappoint those who expect the original, but will impress those who never saw the original and should surprise fans who think sequels are lame imitations designed to capitalize on a blockbuster. E.G. II offers the best story continuity and the most integrity of any adult sequel [up to 1986].

"I had great times and I thought they'd last forever," says Harold Lime. "Intellectually I knew better, but emotionally I didn't."

Harold made the 1980s Jane Bond series on video, and in 1989 Harold began producing bondage flicks for House of Milan. "We think you'll be good at it," they said. I thought, "Oh no. And so I had to talk to people who knew about it so that I'd know what to do. And it was easy. I made sure I had someone on the set who knew what was going on. I didn't know about tying knots.

"I'm now shooting one a week. I'm on a hot streak. But I'd rather not be associated with bondage. Some people don't understand it. Please don't write about it in your book."

The King of Euroloops

Before porn was legitimate in the U.S., American fans in the '60s turned to Europe, particularly Scandinavia for the best quality stag films ever made. The king of Euroloops at the time was Lasse Braun, the pseudonym of an Italian named Albert Ferro. He produced series of films with diverse themes: a "tropical" series, "apparently shot in the Caribbean featuring black performers, a "prostitution" series about professional sex, an historical series devoted to the sexual adventures of Casanova, another series devoted to the sex life of the Vikings; and three top-secret episodes from the adventures of Sex-Agent X-69. He focuses on anal sex in Deep Arse."(Dirty Movies p. 89)

Operating out of his home in the Netherlands, Braun ranged all over the world, the continent and Scandinavia, "searching for locations and new talent. On one of his trips to Sweden, he met Brigitte Maier, the young American porn starlet. A few months later, she moved in with Braun and his wife as a permanent houseguest." (AFW 7/87 p.64)

Lasse began his role in the sexual revolution on September 20, 1961 when he learned through the newspaper that a young man, with the same surname as one of his Milanese girlfriends, had been arrested in Genoa by the Italian police for carrying three suitcases of pornography bought in Monte Carlo. Lasse calls his girlfriend, who, in tears, says that the man arrested is her older brother Dino. Lasse gets from the girl the name of her brother's attorney and visits him. As the lawyer had no experience with this kind of felony, Lasse suggested a line of defense that he'd researched six years previously in his doctorate in Law thesis at Milan State University - that representation of licit sex couldn't be considered illicit. Dino gets out of jail, and Lasse, filled with fervor for free expression, chases up his sources of porn to a tobacco shop in Brussels, Belgium.

Lasse spoke five major European languages, and as the son of a diplomat, he was a member of the Diplomatic Corps in Austria. Rich, he drove a Mercedes with DC license plates and could pass through customs with impugnity. Alberto Ferro aka Lasse Braun traveled around the world from 1962 to 1967 shooting high quality loops and distributing explicit books and magazines. He believed that making quality erotica would allow for the eventual legalization of the product. Ferro played a major role in inspiring a young Danish MP of the Social-Democratic Party to sponsor legislation that decriminalized sexually explicit books. The Danish Parliament delayed legalization of pictures.

Lasse founded Beta Film in Stockholm and began producing hardcore ten minute loops shot in color on Super 8mm. He starred in his first loop, Golden Butterfly, with his girlfriend from Monte Carlo. She dressed up as a Japanese Madame Butterfly and Lasse played a naval officer. But instead of singing, the couple had sex. Lasse shot more loops by picking up girls in the discos of the Swedish capital city. His early titles included Blow 'Up 70, Chains of Eroticism, Sex on the Motorway, Susie la Blonde and Dream of a Nymphomaniac. In 1971, a major American distributor (Reuben Sturman) visited Lasse in Copenhagen and they produced peep-show machines - Super 8mm projectors closed in solid boxes - and distributed them to virtually every state in the Union.

In 1973, Alberto Ferro shot his first feature - French Blue, showcasing his protagee Brigitte Maier. Alberto showed the film at the 1974 at the Cannes Film Festival. During '74-'75, Lasse made his masterpiece - Sensations with money from his American friend. The next year Albero Ferro made Body Love with a score composed by German musician Klaus Schulze. Brigitte Maier starred in Braun's Sensations which appeared in 1975. It's the best non-American adult film ever according to Bill Margold and Jim Holliday.

"Lasse Braun is in the deRenzy mold, an eccentric genius who shoots masterful sex films when he's in top form. Sensations demonstrates that there is nothing better than a great foreign film. I would rate this French film as the hottest foreign entry ever made, and even on a professional level, Sensations belongs in the all-time top five...so sumptuous that sex is an art.

"Braun's penchants give his pictures a singular tilt toward the kinky side of town. His characters are as interested in the psychological aspects and the interpersonal dynamics of sex as the mechanics and sensations of it. The individual's need to control is in conflict with his wish to let go, and out of this struggle comes much of the tension and drama in a Braun movie.

"Europeans seem to have a culturally derived attitude toward screen sex that gives their pictures a distinctive quality different from those made in America. When Braun came to this country [during the video age], he established his enterprise in New York, where porno styles seem more akin to those in Europe than the Los Angeles variety." (Jim Holliday)

Bill Margold writes: "Sensations goes where Emmanuelle could only dream about. Sensations is loaded with beautiful people the least of which is Brigitte Maier, whose acting ability could fit in the space between her two front teeth with room left over for a Boy Scout troop. But Brigitte merely has to react to the splayed sights and sucking sounds of those around her until she becomes the main dish in a sexual feast."

In June, 1977, Alberto Ferro retired from full-time production of porn though he's come back every year or two to make a sexvid. In 1995, Braun shot Master Sex in Budapest. It was distributed in America by Raw Silk.

Adam Film World: "Back home, Lasse Braun has a reputation as long as both your arms. He began making movies when you could spend $300,000 on a feature and still earn a profit. The adjustment to American video must have been difficult for him, as the typical feature now costs less than 10% of that figure and must be completed in two days at the most, preferably one. Braun's videos retain some of the mystery, manipulation intrigue and novelty of his films. (AFW 7/87 p.64)

Lasse Braun directed American Desire starring Veronica Hart and Robert Bolla as a young couple whose sexual excitement is dimming. They've been living together so long that Bolla is no longer spontaneous in bed. Looking at his penis under the covers, Hart says, "He doesn't seem to be in the mood."

Bolla keeps watching TV.

"Poor thing. I think he's broken... Seems to be a case of sexual fadeout... I feel like an old married woman... It's gone. We don't have it anymore."

The film seeks to reveal American hangups and declining values but ends up vague.

Young Nympho reveals a couple who wish to extend their sexual experiences. "Braun sets his scenes so well that we are excited even before the action starts.

"Temptations of the Flesh further explores the consequences of acting out one's fantasies.

"One of the pluses of a Braun movie or video is his sense of color. He has an unerring knack with combinations of color to enhance the images and make the ladies look good. He favors 'interesting' performers, those who look as though there might be something going on inside. Siobhan Hunter has been making frequent appearances in his videos, leading to speculation whether she might be to Braun what Brigitte Maier was in the mid-70s." (AFW 7/87)

Fantasy Nights appeared in 1990. "Victoria Paris plays a woman who has married her high school lover (Jon Dough) who is also her only sex partner ever. She feels sensually and emotionally slighted because of it. The couple offers housing and support to her younger sister (Samantha Strong), who is working her way through school. Paris' dreams are infected with equal parts jealousy and release of her free-wheeling sister's more open attitude toward eros. European erotic auteur Lasse Braun returns to the adult screen after a self-imposed three year hiatus, bringing with him some of the brilliance missing in the current crop of carnal releases. He's teamed up here with director Henri Pachard and gifted lensman Alex deRenzy for a wonderful erotic outing based on a woman's disillusionment when her real life fails to live up to her sexual fantasies and dreams. Plenty of varied and different sex... An intelligent, sophisticated an sexually timely taste of erotica." (1997 AFW Guide p.256)

Alberto lives between Rome, Amsterdam and Los Angeles. In 1990, he began a series of sex tests on women between 18 and 68 years of age. With the help of two handsome assistants - an American and an Italian - he focused on the G-Spot and the female orgasm. He believes that all women have a G-Spot and that every woman can reach orgasmic ejaculation if their G-Spot is properly stimulated. Lasse's written a 400 page book in Italian - The Impetus of Venus - that is being translated to English. It's in the form of a dialogue between Lasse and his new protegee - a 23 year old UCLA student who is an American - Italian woman.

Alex deRenzy

Porn's all-time leading director is San Franciscan Alex deRenzy who started shooting X-rated entertainment in the 1960s, including the first major porno 1969's Censorship in Denmark. He's still going strong. "Pioneer deRenzy is that rare porn director who brings class, sensitivity and personal style to every project he undertakes." Adam Film World (AFW), in this 7/87 quote, does exaggerate, however, as the porn media frequently does. Alex's anal projects for Rosebud, for instance, lack "sensitivity" to put it mildly.

Alex evidently agrees as he churns out these loops under the name Rex Borsky. But in his features, deRenzy creates well-shot well-cut movies dealing with the subtle psychological dynamics of eroticism. Alex produced, directed and wrote 1974's Fantasy Girls starring Sharon Thorpe, Jamie Gillis, Lessie Lynn, Joey Silvera (first feature appearance), Bonnie Holiday and Stella Scot. She's the long haired brunette with Gillis and later on in an out-call hotel scene. As of 1986, this was the only deRenzy film to use a dolly shot, says Jim Holliday. The story centers on a massage parlor and the adventures of the female employees and their customers.

Jim Holliday uses deRenzy's 1975 film The Pleasure Masters as the classic test for determining whether or not you like porn. "This is 'General American Porn' just as your newscasters speak General American Speech. You are either a porn fan or a yoyo that watches but can't appreciate quality sex when you watch it." This elaborate loop features a domestic bedroom threeway between Joey Silvera, Kikko and Crystal Lil with a "subtle lesson on the dangers of stereotyping... After the fog lifts on the orgy, The Twilight Zone twist occurs." (Holliday)

By the mid '70s, 40% of porn came out of New York, about 30% out of Los Angeles and about 20% out of deRenzy's home town of San Francisco. When police harassment shut down LA production, most major West Coast pornos shot in the city by the bay until the Freeman decision of 1989. New York production of X-rated features effectively finished when Ron Sullivan came west in 1986. A careful observer can tell if a porno was made on the West or East Coast. East Coast films generally tell grittier stories with a more pessimistic and thoughtful theme while West Coast flicks usually feature better looking women and scenery and a "sex is fun" theme.

Alex deRenzy "has coaxed highly charged career best performances out of lust-bunnies such as Desiree Cousteau, Amber Lynn, Linda Wong and Jacqueline Lorians, to name a few."

DeRenzy is a complex artist, and his movies have complex plots, characters and structures. In Pretty Peaches, he cast bodacious Desiree Cousteau as an amnesia victim trying to rediscover her identity. On the one hand, it's a clever parody of mindless sexuality. On the other, it is a comic view of the reconstruction of an identity through erotic therapy. Desiree plays the forgetful Peaches, and the film follows her from one sexual misadventure to another.

"Pleasure Masters, 1976, spotlights deRenzy's fascination with the past. A lavish costume piece set 100 years ago in a plush bordello, the picture presents an evening of uninhibited revels, including one of deRenzy's trademark group numbers." (AFW 7/87 p. 59-61)

Parochial Passion Princess, a loop, is a deRenzy masterpeice starring a plaid-skirted schoolgirl played by a San Francisco hippie with hair under her arms. The short frequently played on the same bill as deRenzy features. It's available on tape in The Best of Alex DeRenzy. Jim Holliday includes Femmes de Sade among his 1986 list of the ten most underrated adult movies: "Anti-porn idiots who speak from the heart rather than the head claim porn has become more violent, more explicit and more demeaning to women. Yet any fool can see that adult films and videos have been heavily self-censored by the adult film industry to conform with society's guidelines. Case in point - this classic from Alex deRenzy. Censorship shears have been used to 'tone down' something I don't think needs to be toned down."

Alex directed 1977's Baby Face.

Baby Face II: "Ten years after he made the classic Baby Face, deRenzy is back with another big winner. The first one included a long scene with Kristine Heller that may be the best gang bang ever put on put on film. And in the new one, we have a strong contender for the best orgy on screen. The scene takes you by surprise; after several episodes marked by naturalness, humor and good sex, Baby Face II suddenly explodes in a wondrous display of rich eroticism, furious energy and consummate filmmaking skill. The second half of the picture unreels non-stop peak-power images of sex at the outer limits of passion, all the more overpowering by contrast with the first half." (AFW 7/87)

"What starts out as a simple bachelor party turns into a blazing inferno of f---ing and sucking in what may be the greatest loop carrier of all time." (AFW 96D p.247)

Alex deRenzy's powerful handling of comedy shows in the Pretty Peaches series. Desiree Cousteau won a Best Actress Award in the original 1979 flick "playing a female Candide...everyone's victim. But she is so happy-go-lucky that her misfortunes never affect her. After her jeep collides with a tree, she's flipped onto the ground. Unconscious, she's revived by a penis. After that her memory is suddenly lost and to recover it she gets the most detailed enema you've ever seen. Desiree is so naive that most men will want to play Big Daddy with her. Juliet Anderson, who was born [40 years earlier] in Helsinki, Finland, makes her screen debut as the maid of Pretty Peaches's father." (Guide #1, p. 121-122)

Sharon Kane also makes her first feature appearance in Pretty Peaches, the movie deRenzy regards as his best all-round film. Spinelli Family The Spinelli family is the first family of porn, the medium's most successful and influential family. A warm, passionate Italian bunch, they've managed to stay together in an environment that frequently destroys relationships. Anthony's marriage to Roz is one of the longest lasting and best marriages in the X-rated film industry. Anthony made pornos through the 1994. His sons Mitch and Michael began working behind the scenes in the 1970s. Anthony's brother was a well-known character actor in Hollywood before dying in 1995.

"Good directors are like good fathers, they find the right balance between giving their children (cast and crew) guidance, and giving them room to find their own way. The best father is reassuring, warm, humorous, firm without being too authoritarian. [Anthony] Spinelli is all these things. He and Henri Pachard both have grown sons who have become invaluable to them in the production of their pictures.

"Character interests Spinelli so much, that all of his movies are about people, not merely types." "(AFW 7/87 p.52)

Spinelli began in the early '70s, directing under the name Wes Brown for flicks such as 1971's Touch Me, starring Renee Bond and Ric Lutz, and 1974's The Seduction of Lynn Carter. Touch Me "is better than many of his [Spinelli's] later films. If you have ever been to an encounter group weekend, which were so popular in the mid 1970s, then you will immediately recognize the dialogue and the participants. This one includes a marathon group which includes a husband and wife, three single women, and three single guys, all with different hang-ups - mostly sexual. They are frigid, too aggressive with their friends, or too involved in religiously induced sexual fear. Dr Lloyd Davis determines to teach them all how to enjoy pleasure through sensory awareness. And as usual in groups of this kind, someone who is further out than the rest gets things started: "Doctor, how can I feel anything with all these clothes on?" Soon half the group is naked..." (Guide #1 p.146-147)

Renee Bond and Ric Lutz star in 1971's Touch Me - a dated encounter group film. It's the first Spinelli 35 mm feature. Diary of a Nymph was his first 16 mm. Few theater exhibitors dared show 1972's An Act of Confession. This Anthony Spinelli directed flick will never show up on videotape says Jim though he "would defend this film to my last breath as a pro-religious statement." The film is "the historically accurate story of a nun preparing for her final vows while still troubled by erotic dreams. The graphic dreams are shown in living color, and cum-shots on the communion plate are enough to drive the super-religious right to the rifle racks. The sex between priests and nuns and nuns is all fantasy, part of the heroine's troubled conscience, but detractors would be sure to overlook that point... The ultimate problem concerns a certain white-robed, bearded fellow walking out of the water to smile down upon the nun as he receives a blowjob. I contend that it is pro-religious because after this final fantasy she is convinced that she can serve the church as a bride of Christ and the whole thing is only a dream that reinforces her faith. Cyndee Summers, Keith Erickson and Franklin Anthony star, but you will never get a chance to see them - or the unknown lead whose name even Spinelli can't remember." (Holliday)

Only a secular person such as Holliday could call such an offering pro-religion. Religious people hate such productions. The movie is available on videotape from Alpha Blue Archives.

"The confession with the priest turns into group sex," says Pat Riley. "The taking of communion becomes a Blow Job for the altar boy and the priest - cum collected on the tray - and there's a scene with her tied to a cross while she's shared by two friars... Christ appears and walks on water while getting a BJ..."

The Seduction of Lynn Carter focuses on one woman - Lynn Carter, played by Andrea True. "Lynn has been married 15 years and has a 13-year-old boy. In bed with her husband, who is about to leave on a two-week business trip, they make love and he asks her if she's ever been curious as to what it might be like to be with another man. She tells him she's never been interested but wonders what his reaction would be if it did happen. He tells her he would understand and not be violent. The next day, after he's gone, she meets Jamie Gillis." (Guide #1, p.130)

"This is either a male chauvinist pig film," writes Holliday, "because when the sex between the two gets kinkier and raunchier, she keeps coming back for more and loves every minute of it, or it is all too true."

Porn veteran Andrea True gives her best adult performance in Seduction. A few years later, she sang the disco hit More, More, More. As usual, Jamie Gillis plays the charming but demented sex expert who takes Lyn to the heights of ecstasy and depths of humiliation. Once the affair begins, the sex is non-stop and more raunchy than affectionate. Jamie quickly gets Andrea stoned on weed, another example of the frequent connection in the lifestyle of pleasure between sex and drugs, which along with alcohol, dull the conscience and allow one to act naturally - the ever-present theme of pornography. This encouraged release of the brute beneath our civilized exterior is the main basis for religious and traditional opposition to porn. Imitation of God through the pursuit of virtue was the West's much violated ideal before the secular Enlightenment. Since then, particularly since the '60s, imitation of animals has become the ideal for many secularists, particularly artists.

Night Caller, 1975, is one of three Anthony Spinelli films (along with Sex World and An Act of Confession) among Jim Holliday's list of the top ten underrated pornos of all time."...A film with a real edge, a more exploratory probing of a pervert's mind than similar Hollywood pap. Anthony Spinelli made it under his Wes Brown pseudonym. David Book, the Mediterranean porn star with the charming accent, plays the proverbial loser who gets his kicks making obscene phone calls, once in a while following up in person, as with his terrorizing of redhead Monique Starr." The voice of the cop at the end is the same voice that narrated many of the Essex trailers of the era - Anthony Spinelli. (Holliday)

The credited director of 1976's Cry For Cindy is Wendy Lions but Jim Holliday believes the film is truly directed by Spinelli. It's Amber Hunt's feature debut, of which she only made a dozen. The November 1975 Hustler Honey sexually explodes on screen and Spinelli gets her best acting ever. At one point, Spinelli shows three sex scenes at the same time, revealing passion, comedy and heat. John Leslie had to annoy Spinelli to get his role and Cry begins a ten year relationship between porn's leading man and the Italian-American filmmaker.

"Sex World had a large cast, but every character had depth and detail. The story had comic episodes, dramatic moments and so much of interest that it has become a classic that will live for ages." (AFW)

Screw voted Sex World the best sex film of 1978 and the flick also won for Best Music Score at the 1979 Erotic Film Awards. The third best-selling sex flick of all time relates a weekend at a sexual health resort that caters to male and female fantasies. The cast fills with attractive performers such as Lesllie Bovee, Annette Haven, Sharon Thorpe, Kay Parker, Desiree West, John Leslie, Abigail Clayton, Cris Cassidy, Joey Silvera and Johnny Keyes. He's the original black stud and he transforms in the flick's show-stopping scene the reluctant duckling Thorpe into a sexual swan. (Holliday)

Nominated for the Best Film at the Fourth Annual Erotic Film Festival, Easy appeared in 1978. "A woman's search for satisfaction meets with stumbling blocks at every turn. This marks the beginning of Jesie St. James all-too-short career in adult. She can best be described as ferocious - devouring her male partners. She and Georgina Spelvin contribute a class lesbian encounter. " (AFW 96D. p.255)

Kate Harrison (St. James), a schoolteacher, has lost her husband to another female teacher at Clifton High. "She's "easy" - not always because she wants to be, but because she can't resist her own sexual compulsions. From a student who forces her to have oral sex, to his friend who rapes her (but in the process she acquiesces), to a blind piano tuner who tells her that he's the best stud in town, to a fat man who accosts her in a bar (played by Anthony Spinelli) with whom she refuses to go to bed, to an author Victor (Jack Wright) who seduces her but already has a girlfriend (Spelvin), to her final love Matt who she adores, but who forlornly tells her that he's married, poor Kate wants to be wanted - not just of her body - but she can't find the right man. Jesie St. James has an expressive face that Spinelli concentrates on. Whether she is climaxing or not, both the contractions on her face and her joy make you believe she is." (Bob Rimmer, Guide #1, p.82)

Jim Holliday says Jesie St. James in Easy gives the hottest performance ever by an actor in one sex film.

Spinelli also directed Talk Dirty to Me, its sequel Nothing to Hide, as well as Talk Dirty to Me One More Time I-II. Anthony directed, for Marga Aulbach's debut as a producer, the film so often cited as an industry high-water mark, The Dancers, 1982. Georgina Spelvin, Vanessa Del Rio, Kay Parker and Mai Lin are the leading ladies and John Leslie, Richard Pacheco, Randy West and Joey Silvera are the leading men.

At the sixth annual Erotic Film Festival, Anthony's son Michael Ellis won the Best Screenplay award (he also wrote Nothing To Hide) and Georgina Spelvin won Best Actress. The Dancers "wasn't nominated for Best Picture because the emphasis is on male stars and male strippers. But the film is entirely heterosexual, well-acted and funny." (Guide #1, p. 76)

Robert Rimmer writes that The Dancers "is worth buying to get at-home female reaction to the whole concept of male strippers and to find whether women enjoy watching men being seductive and using their bodies as a sex tease, as well as to see which of the strippers they prefer. Each of them does it differently and in character with the parts they are playing. Randy West, with a superb body, is egotistical, Richard Pacheco is the boy-next-door female fantasy as he scatters rosebuds from his jockstrap, and Joey Silvera is a bad-ass wearing only chaps and brandishing a whip when he appears. In all cases the females clammer up to the stage to stick money in their favorite jockstraps, get a quick feel, and get kissed by the stripper. A few even try to go down on the strippers." (Guide #1 p. 76)

Dixie Ray, Hollywood Star appeared in 1983, starring John Leslie, Cameron Mitchell, Juliet Anderson, Lisa de Leeuw, Veronica Hart, Kelly Nichols and Samantha Fox. "This is the best cops-and-bad-guys adult film that I have seen so far," writes Bob Rimmer in 1986 (Guide #1, p.351).

"Why it wasn't nominated for the 1984 Erotic Film Awards beats me. Nick Popodupolis (John Leslie) not only is the only "screwing male" in the film - but he ultimately beds all the luscious ladies mentioned above.

"Dixie Ray (Lisa de Leeuw) was, back in the '30s, a top Hollywood star. Now, in February 1943, she is a has-been, and she hired Nick to recover pictures of her that were presumably taken by her husband... with her skirt flying in the air and revealing her pussy." Anthony Spinelli launched amateur porn with 1984's Reel People. Spinelli introduces the film and uses Juliet Anderson, Gail Sterling, Priscilla Shields, John Leslie, Richard Pacheco and Paul Thomas "as foils to allow real people to talk about their sexual selves, their fantasies - and to realize them on camera.

"Unlike most adult films, Reel People lets the viewers become voyeurs to feelings and actions that inmany cases parallel their own. Spinelli talks in a voice-over with them, and they respond intheir own voice-overs, as they are making love." (Bob Rimmer)

But neither Anthony or his sons followed up their invention. A doxen years later, Mitch Spinelli admits, "I totally missed the boat." Adam Film World: "The shift to video, with its hasty shooting schedules and low budgets, was awkward at first for this careful director [Anthony Spinelli], but more and more he has been acquiring the light, improvisatory touch needed for 'quick-and-dirty' shootings." (AFW 7/87)

Anthony Spinelli released videos with a different feel from his large screen efforts. "In the Elle Rio vehicle, And I Do Windows... Too! he attempts absurdist comedy in the vein of Lonesco, while presenting the Brazilian dynamo to John Leslie and Joey Silvera. The laughs fail to dissipate the tension generated by Rio, whose sexual appetite may not have seen their equal since Messalina took on half the studs in Rome." (AFW 7/87)

In The Last Condom, "two different styles of condoms -old and new - share a bathroom closet. They begin to compare and contrast attitudes about sex through the flashbacks of past users... The Shanna McCullough/Dennis Sobin hooker vignette is a classic." (AVN 97)