Early Porn
For as long as humans have been able to draw or write, they've crafted pornography.Danish criminologist Berl Kutchinsky traces the beginnings of of modern pornography to the 1650s, when three pornographic classics appeared: La Puttana Errante (The Wayward Prostitute), L'Ecole des Filles (Girls School), and Satya. Translated into all the major languages, these novels became the models for all later pornographic books and movies. Little has changed in porn over the past 350 years as an examination of these works shows. Themes of lesbianism, sodomy, seduction, multiple copulation, flagellation and sadism dominate, writes Kutchinsky, "as well as total amorality, a disregard for artistic merit, an absence of affection or other emotions, flimsy plots, stereotyped characterizations, monotonous repetitiousness, and a constant exaggeration of sexual interest, energy and potency."
In 1655, Samuel Pepy's got his hands on a copy of L'Ecole des Filles (The Girls' School). "Thence homeward by coach and stopped at Martins my bookseller, where I saw the French book which did think to have had for my wife to translate, called L'Escholle des Filles; but when I came to look into it, it is the most bawdy, lewd book that ever I saw, rather worse than Puttana Errante - so that I was ashamed of reading it."
A few weeks later, Pepys bought the book. He couches his encounter with it in coy Spanish and French synonyms. "We sang till almost night, and drank my good store of wine; and then they parted and I to my chamber, where I did read through L'Escholle des Filles; a lewd book, but what doth me no wrong to read for imagination's sake (but it did hazer my prick para stand all the while, and una vez to decharger); and after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame."
By the Victorian era, sexually explicit fiction had developed into a literary genre increasingly defined by its illegality. When Sir Charles Sedley, in 1663, got drunk in a public tavern, climbed upstairs, took off all his clothes, and urinated onto the crowded street below, he provoked the first recorded occasion in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that the State punished an affront to public decency.
Porn and censorship grew hand-in-hand after the Enlightenment. Before then, most Western societies worried more about sedition and blasphemy than obscenity. Not until the eighteenth century did common, as opposed to ecclesiastical, law apply to obscene libel in England.
The 18th and 19th centuries exploited the novel to produce a turn-on. The Lustful Turk fulfills all of Kutchinsky's earlier commentary. First published in 1828, the novel is based upon a series of letters written by the heroine, Emily Barlow, to her friend Sylvia Carey.
While traveling by ship to India, Emily are captured by pirates. The Dey of Algiers takes her virginity.
"I quickly felt his finger again introducing the head of that terrible engine I had before felt, and which now felt like a pillar of ivory entering me… My petitions, supplications and tears were of no use. I was on the altar, and, butcherlike, he was determined to complete the sacrifice; indeed, my cries seemed only to excite him to the finishing of my ruin, and sucking my lips and breasts with fury, he unrelentingly rooted up all obstacles my virginity offered, tearing and cutting me to pieces, until the whole of his terrible shaft was buried within me. I could bear the dreadful torment no longer, but uttering a piercing shriek sunk insensible in the arms of my cruel ravisher."
Emily quickly recovers to fall in love with her rapist. "Never shall I forget the delicious transports that followed the stiff insertion; and then, ah me!, by what thrilling degrees did he, by his luxurious movements, fiery kisses, and strange touches of his hand to the most crimson parts of my body, reduce me to a voluptuous state of sensibility. I blush to say so powerfully did his ravishing instrument stir up nature within me, that by mere instinct I returned him kiss for kiss, responsively meeting his fierce thrusts, until the fury of the pleasure and ravishment became so overpowering that, unable to support the excitement I so luxuriously felt, I fainted in his arms with pleasure."
Writes Porn Gold: "Fifty years later, all pretence at literature (and the need for women to faint) had disappeared." The Romance of Lust appeared in the 1870s.
"The Count had f---ed the Egerton while we were engaged above the divine Frankland. Our first pose was suggested by the Egerton, who had been as yet less f---ed than any. She had been also greatly taken with the glories of the Frankland's superb body, and especially struck with her extraordinary clitoris, and had taken the curious lech of wishing to have it in her bottomhole while riding St George on my big prick. We all laughed at her odd choice, but agreed at once, especially the Frankland, whose greatest lech was to f--- very fair young women with her long and capable clitoris."
Still photography began in 1827 and motion pictures in 1894. Five minutes after each invention, says producer David Friedman, a woman posed naked before the latest male toy. Actress Louise Willy disrobes in the 1896 French film Le Bain. Other French flicks before the turn of the century offered similar fare while in Germany, producer Oskar Messter revealed women taking off their clothes, exercising, dancing or bathing.
As with the development of other forms of communication such as writing, drawing, painting, printing and surfing the Internet, for example, pornographers led the way in the popular application of moving pictures. They made sex flicks known as stag films.
"Stag" as an adjective means for men only. Thus a stag film is a film for men only - meaning a film of graphic sex. Stag films frequently appeared at stag parties - parties for men only. Despite media hype about "couples porn," the genre remains for alone men only.
Almost all pre-World War II pornographic films were shot on 16mm film on single reels that ran 10-12 minutes. Single reels could be hidden more easily than multiple canisters. The forms of the stag genre were fixed by the mid 1920s and endured through the 1950s. "Stag productions generally aimed at an ineptitude that reinforced the genre's illict reputation and served as an index of its "authenticity." Cameras intruded into frames, stagehands visibly adjusted lights, and performers clearly asked for direction or smirked directly into the lens; the glitches were left in the footage, as a way of underscoring that real sex was taking place between real people." (Slade, Journal of Film and Video 45.2-3)
Despite the common language of the silent stag form and the absence of copyrights, early porn films rarely traveled outside the countries that produced them because of legal dangers.
America probably made the most stag films, followed by France, where the genre originated and flourished until Gaullist repression. Becoming so adept at making stags that the term "French film" became synonymous with porn, French pornographers developed many of the genre's basic plots.
America's quick development of a legitimate film industry and censorship made it difficult for professionals to make stags. But this was not true of France where distributors advertised their products in the international editions of magazines like Paris Plaiser and La Vie Parisiene. During the 1920s, the French shot more stags than anyone (Slade, Journal of Film and Video 45:2-3). The two leading porners were Bernard Natan and Dominique.
By 1920, all major brothels in Europe and America stocked stag films.
Latin American stags came largely from the brothels of Tijuana and pre-Castro Havana. Bestiality appears in such films as Rin Tin Tin Mexicano, A Hunter and His Dog, Rascal Rex, and El Perro Masajista (a.k.a. Mexican Dog). Technically abysmal, these humiliating productions focus their hatred on women and the Church. Films such as Mexican Honeymoon show priests exploiting their parishioners. Anti-Catholic porn flourished in countries where the Church dominated. By contrast, American stags skirted religion.
"The American stag film is remarkably free of religious subject matter," write the authors of Dirty Movies. "The one apparent exception, The Nun's Story (1949-50), surfaced under the alternate title College Coed, a transformation which indicates either a naive or conscious confusion of religious habit and academic regalia. Protestantism has never provided the iconography hospitable to erotic transformation."
"I would rather my kid saw a stag film than The Ten Commandments," said comic Lenny Bruce, "because I don't want my kid to kill Christ when he comes back. Pleasure is a dirty word in Christian culture. Pleasure is Satan's word."
Argentina produced the classic El Sartorio (1912?), a send-up of Stravinsky's Afternoon of a Faun at the time of the Ballet Russe's South American tour and Nikinsky's wedding in Buenos Aires. Three women frolic in a river and start fondling one another. A man dressed as a devil with a tail, horns and false whiskers, emerges out of the foliage and captures one woman. She sucks him off, engages in a 69, and finally screws him. Inserts of close-up shots of his penis pushing inside her appear every few seconds. As the woman gets up from the "devil," sperm falls out of her vagina.
Am Abend came out of Germany in 1910. After watching a woman masturbate through a bedroom keyhole, a man enters the room and penetrates her vaginally, orally and anally.
Stag films specialized in "meat shots" - closeups of penetration, rather than "money shots" - men ejaculating on, rather than within, women. Cum shots became so essential to porno that it seemed flicks without them weren't pornographic.
A Free Ride, made around 1915 in America, generally ranks near the top of the earliest efforts. "With its outdoor milieu, its many and varied setups, its heavy use of titles, its concentration on the rhythms of a single incident, its obvious professionalism in technique, and its ordinary plot mechanism (a car ride), it derives from the sources of the open films of the first decade, with one essential difference - the explicitness of its depiction of sexual activity. The plot is simple: a man picks up two girls and takes them for a drive in the country. He stops the car in a wooded area, gets out, and walks behind a bush to relieve himself. The girls, curious, spy on him, become excited, and have to urinate themselves. The tables are truned. The man spies on them and, emboldened by lust, initiates unopposed sexual contact with one of the girls; her friend watches and before long demands her share of his attention.
"A Free Ride is also particularly American in its early association of the automobile and sex, a theme evident in such later films as The Pick Up (1920s and 1950s versions), A Highway Romance, Pick Ups, and A Modern Hitchhiker (all the latter from the 1930s)." (Dirty Movies, 1976)
"Best known in the 1920s was The Casting Couch," writes Jim Holliday. "The hottest of the 1930s are The Modern Magician and The Aviator, which features an inspired lead female. The best post-World War II stag was also the hottest. Known as The Nun…this classic features an unbelievable portrait of sexual intensity by the unknown female… Best French stags of the post-WWII era are The Woman in the Portrait and Family Spirit. Color came in the early 1960s, but did not get good until the end of the decade."
Most stag films revolved around five common plots. "Plot 1. Reading or handling some phallic-shaped object arouses a woman alone at home. Masturbation follows. A man arrives, is invited inside, sexual play begins; Plot 2. A farm girl gets excited watching animals copulate. She runs into a farmhand, or a traveling salesman, and sexual play begins; Plot 3. A doctor begins examining a woman and sexual play begins; Plot 4. A burglar finds a girl in bed or rapes her or vice versa; Plot 5. A sunbather or skinny dipper gets caught and seduced." (Contemporary Erotic Cinema by William Rotsler)
Most porn commentators, good liberals all, blame socio-economic structures for fixing the form of the stag film at the point achieved in its infancy in A Free Ride. But almost a century later, porn remains a limited genre. Just as adult films began with arty movies like The Devil in Miss Jones and The Opening of Misty Beethoven before dropping such pretensions in the '80s, so too stags "of the teens, twenties, and thirties," write Al Di Lauro, and Gerald Rabkin in their 1976 book Dirty Movies, "displayed narrative and stylistic concerns which almost totally disappeared after the Second World War."
From the 1920s through the 1950s, college fraternities and volunteer social groups like Elks and Shriners provided the largest market for stag films in America.
Ugly and old, most of the male performers appeared like pimps and the females' prostitutes. Performers frequently wore masks or otherwise attempted to conceal their identities by the use of bizarre disguises. Many of the men made a habit of removing everything but their black socks for their 'performances', making the masked man in stocking feet a classic symbol of the U.S. stag film. (Playboy)
Stag films patterned themselves after theatrical striptease, writes Linda Williams in her 1989 book Hardcore, while adult films resemble musicals with the characters breaking out into sex rather than song. Stags encouraged male spectators to talk to the projected female image and even to "touch" her spread legs and labia. Unlike pornos, which seek to satisfy the viewer's sex urge, stags aimed to arouse. Brothels used them to encourage potential patrons to buy the sexual favors of their women.
"One of the most admirable factors of the cinema, and one of the reasons for the hatred shown it by imbeciles, is its eroticism," declared surrealist poet Robert Desnos in 1923. "The acts of these men and women luminous in the dark are stirring to the point of sensuality.... It is in this cinematic eroticism that one seeks consolation for everything that is disappointing in artificial, everyday life."
Because of such power, stags developed into a thriving American industry by the 1920s, though a determined attack by law enforcement and U.S. Post Office agents held the business down until the 1960s. After World War II, the greater availability of 16mm equipment enabled the stag to move from the communal smoker to the privacy of the living room.
Smart Aleck (1951?), the most popular stag ever, starred stripper Candy Barr, then a 16-year old named Juanita Slusher.
"I never thought about doing it," Candy Barr told Oui magazine in April, 1976. "But it happened and I've had a lot of flack about it. People say, 'What the hell, it's only a f--- movie.' Well, that was 1951; I do care what the hell. If I had done it by choice, then I would have had some mechanism to adjust it into my lifestyle. But I didn't do it by choice.... I wasn't lured. I was taken, done and that was it."
Distinguished only by the youthful presence of Barr, Smart Aleck, a typical motel film, begins with a traveling salesman inviting Candy into his motel room from the swimming pool. He gets her drunk before making his move. They engage in sex. The only drama occurs when Candy refuses to go down on him. "At the time I wasn't even aware that people engaged in oral sex.... It wasn't something I'd planned to make part of my life." To placate him, Candy calls in a girlfriend who performs the forbidden act.
Barr's notoriety raises the perennial question of whether such Hollywood stars as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, or Marilyn Monroe appeared in stag films? Probably not.
Dr. Joseph Slade says that before 1965, only five stags were shot with sound (one each in 1938, 1942, 1951 and two in 1949); and four in color (1948, 1952, 1956, 1959).
While stag films remained outside the mainstream of American films, exploitation films (non-explicit) played on the edge of polite society.
"The makers of adult movies, with rare exceptions, are part of a long thriving tradition of American hucksterism," write Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris in their book Grindhouse. "From carny barker to holy-rolling evangelist, to grindhouse sleazemeister, the goal has always been the same: promise something extraordinary and then get the hell out of town."
The first mainstream films overflowed with sex. Examples included "exposes" of white slavery like Traffic in Souls (1913) to epics that featured Christians lashed at the stake (Cecil B. De Mille's Sign of the Cross) and orgies (Erich von Stroheim's The Merry Widow and The Wedding March). But within a decade of prohibition of alcohol, came prohibition of sin in cinema.
Out of fear of public censure, the studios, owned and operated by secular Jews then as now, chose former Postmaster General Will Hays to create a Production Code Administration and act as an internal censor. Irish Catholics Martin Quigley and Joe Breen helped create standards tougher on sex than on violence.
In 1932, Breen wrote to powerful Jesuit Father Wilfrid Parsons about Hollywood Jews. "They are simply a rotten bunch of vile people with no respect for anything beyond the making of money. Here in Hollywood we have paganism rampant and in its most virulent form. Drunkenness and debauchery are common place. Sexual perversion is rampant. Any number of our directors and stars are perverts. These Jews seem to think of nothing but moneymaking and sexual indulgence. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. They and they alone make the decision. Nine-five percent of these folks are Jews of an eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the earth."
Meeting with studio heads, Joseph Scott, a Catholic lawyer brought by Breen and Los Angeles' Bishop Cantwell, described the Jews as "disloyal" Americans, engaged in "a conspiracy to debauch the youth of the land." Scott told the producers that America housed groups "sympathetic with the Nazi assault on Jews in Germany and were even now organizing further to attack the Jew in America."
After the Great War, German sexual mores loosened more in five years than they had in centuries. As in Russia, radical Jews, estranged from Judaism and the Jewish people as well as the majority Christian culture, led the assault on traditional values.
Satirist Kurt Tucholsky edited the Berlin weekly Die Weltbuhne. "This country which I am allegedly betraying is not my country; this state is not my state; this legal system is not my legal system. Its different banners are to me as meaningless as are its provincial ideals..." Tucholsky hated his fellow citizens, be they princes, barons, Junkers, officers, policemen, judges, officials, clergymen, academicians, teachers, capitalists, university students or peasants. The radical Jew said that the only thing in German worth loving was the countryside.
This scorn of Germany and its traditional values by the Left led to a revolution from the Right - Nazism - and the Second World War.
In 1971, radical philosopher and alienated Jew Herbert Marcuse, who influences much academic thinking on sex, said the only thing he liked about America was its scenery. Numerous pornographers such as Bruce Seven, William Margold and Reuben Sturman evince similar hatred towards America and Christianity. In return, many of America's Christian leaders place the fight against porn at the top of their agenda. Like the Weimar Republic, late 20th Century America fights its own culture war over sex as entertainment. "Like the flag, the silver screen will always be there for scoundrels to hide behind," writes Hollywood apologist Peter Keough. "In periods of social or political crisis, people don't look to arms manufacturers, the tobacco industry, or Exxon for villains, but to the Dream Factory. ...Censorship violates the First Amendment... Those who wish to impose it often have more to gain than the moral improvement of the populace."
Porn taps into our most intimate fantasies, releasing a volcano of passionate feelings. Opponents of pornography generally distrust human nature and its free expression. They want the sex urge tethered. But penises yearn to be free. Catholics, such as the National Council of Bishops, Pat Buchanan, Richard John Neuhaus, Charles Keating and Raymond Gauer lead the fight against sex as entertainment. Their opponents are usually Jewish leftists who lead organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union.
Founded on Judeo-Christian principles, Joe Breen's Production Code office previewed 98% of movies released in the United States between 1930 to 1968. A first-run house couldn't screen a movie without the P.C.A. seal, and studios wouldn't allow their films to be shown on a double bill with a film that wasn't PCA-approved. Filling this gap came independent producers who displayed all the skin and sin Hollywood couldn't show. These rip-off artists avoided obscenity laws by disguising their movies as cautionary moral tales.
Publicist turned pornographer, David F. Friedman explains, "The whole secret to the scheme was that the sucker never really saw it all, but, 'Boy didja see that preview for next week's show? We're really gonna see it then.' Of course, they never did. But hope springs eternal in the human breast."
Screeching campaigns promised "The Shocking Naked Truth Behind Today's Headlines! Nothing Like It Ever Seen Before! Revealed Here for the First Time on Any Screen!"
Exploitation films appeared in the 1920s. Italian immigrant Louis Sonney in 1919, as the Sheriff of Centralia, Washington, captured railroad bandit Roy Gardner and then used the reward money to make a picture The Smiling Mail Bandit - based on the story of Gardner. When his audiences tired of his warnings against the life of crime, he moved into the Dangers of sex, producing more than 400 exploitation pictures.
After her husband, matinee idol Wallace Reid, ruined his life with morphine, actress Dorothy Davenport made a film about the tortures of drug addiction. As memory of her late husband faded, Dorothy kept producing films like The Road to Ruin, which showed all sin she preached against.
The grindhouse spectacles of the '20s through '50s now seem tame. Expectations exceeded delivery. Producers surrounded the few minutes of illicit behavior - nudity, drugs, sex - with an hour of story.
Come full circle, today's "adult" movies concentrate on action rather than story. But in another sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Exploitation's grand con of promising something extraordinary and not delivering lives on in X-rated video boxcovers with their glitzy pictures of gorgeous women who rarely appear as beautiful, if they appear at all, in the final product.
Made in Czechoslovakia in 1932, Ecstasy ranks as the first sexy art film from Europe. Starring the actress who became known as Hedy Lamarr, the movie created a scandal upon release because of its brief nudity and purple symbolism evoking Hedy's orgasm - rearing stallions, howling winds, and surging flames. An ocean away from American fare, Ecstasy depicts a woman who leaves the affluence of her cold, older husband for "ecstasy." Though her estranged husband shoots himself, she's not punished for her sins.
Filmmaker Dwain Esper earned the nickname "King of the Celluloid Gypsies" for creating such exploitation movies as The Seventh Commandment. "The whole play is the most thoroughly vile and disgusting motion picture," said Hollywood's censor Joe Breen, "which the three members of this staff...have ever seen. It is thoroughly reprehensible...offensive and disgusting."
Just one of many films of the '30s about venereal disease, Commandment, which featured the Caesarian delivery of a dead baby, helped create the genre of sex hygiene.
Though cheap, nasty, brutish and short (on story), Dwain's films always delivered nudity. "Esper created dingy, prurient imagery framed within scripts of fervid moral righteousness. The result was a head-spinning, hellfire-and-brimstone huckster's stew, just like they served at a carnival geek show." (Grindhouse)
Touring the country with the 1930 classic Freaks retitled as Forbidden Love, Esper encountered a crowd in North Carolina who threatened to riot when the film didn't deliver. So Dwain handed the projectionist a ten-minute reel of frontal male and female nudity and soothed the anger.
Esper spent the last years of his long life - the 1970s - presiding over a chain of Le Sex Shoppe porn stores in Arizona.
While the golden age of burlesque lasted from the mid '20s to mid '30s, films of burlesque became popular in the 1940s, though they rarely showed as much skin as a typical MTV video today. Because of different standards of censorship around the country, films starring such performers as Jill St. Cyr and Tempest Storm appeared in as many as three versions, with only the raciest version showing a woman's bare breasts.
Jungle pictures, with the simple formula of exotic locations and black nudity, traveled the Adults Only circuit for years. Until the 1960s, state censors rarely allowed white women to disrobe.
After World War II, "great numbers of European directors used their artistic and sexual freedom to parlay the zaftig, braless Continental sexpots into fame, fortune and revolution. Auteur filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni… Francois Truffaut produced a new form of cinema. They could - and did - show nudity, adultery, sex games, rape, foreplay, but never sexual intercourse." (Rotsler)
Scandinavian skinny-dipping prepared America for Ingmar Bergman films. One Summer of Happiness, 1951, tells of a young farm girl's summer of freedom, love and budding sexuality - all ended by a motorcycle accident. Bergman's 1953 film Summer With Monika contained a nude shot of star Harriet Anderson. Fifteen years later, another round of Swedish imports changed the American film industry.
To avoid prosecution for obscenity, early American filmmakers needed to invent reasons to display the naked human body. In 1957, the first nudist colony film Garden of Eden appeared.
In Samuel Roth v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in June 1957, that for material to be declared legally obscene it had to be "utterly without redeeming social importance." Under this new definition, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the imported French film The Game of Love which had been closed in Chicago for displaying nudity, was not obscene. The court also quoted Roth in overturning subsequent obscenity cases against the homosexual magazine One and the nudist magazine Sunshine & Health.
In 1959, a federal judge, influenced by the new definition of obscenity in Roth, rescinded the ban against the novel Lady Chatterly's Lover, calling the book's author D.H. Lawrence a genius.
The men who pushed America to a more liberal view of sex were mainly non-Jewish Jews - Jews alienated from Judaism and Jewish life as well as the majority's Christian culture - including, Samuel Roth of the 1957 Supreme Court case, Grove Press Publisher Barney Rosset, the owner of Olympia Press Maurice Girodias and his father Jack Kahane, a Paris publisher and author of sexually explicit novels, comedian Lenny Bruce, filmmakers Russ Meyer, David Friedman and Radley Metzger, Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, Screw publisher Al Goldstein, Eros publisher Ralph Ginzberg, publisher Edward Mishkin, Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, defense lawyer Stanley Fleishman, Playboy Playmate and Hugh Hefner's ex-lover Barbara Klein, AKA Barbie Benton, Hefner's personal secretary Bobbie Arnstein, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, psychologist Albert Ellis, authors Philip Roth, William Styron and Norman Mailer and Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. They carried on a 100-year history of radical Jews challenging the reigning order. In the 19th century, for instance, most of the madams of major brothels in the Western United States were non-Jewish Jews as were many of the traffickers and prostitutes in the white slave trade. Though only two percent of the American population, Jews dominate porn. Most of the leading male performers through the 1980s came from Jewish parents. Leading "Jewish" pornographers include "Wesley Emerson", Paul Fishbein, Lenny Friedlander, "Paul Norman" Apstein, Bobby Hollander, Rubin Gottesman, Fred Hirsch and his children Steve and Marjorie, Steve Orenstein, Theodore Rothstein and Reuben Sturman.
Born in 1924, the godfather of porn, Reuben Sturman, grew up in Cleveland's East Side, the ambitious eldest son of immigrant Russian Jews who ran a grocery. The future leader of "Kosher Nostra" served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, then attended Western Reserve University before marrying and starting his own business. Using his home as a garage, Reuben drove through Cleveland, visiting candy stores and selling comic books from the trunk of his old Dodge. His business grew by the late '50s into a wholesale magazine company with warehouses in eight cities.
At the suggestion of an employee, the company began to sell sex magazines. Once Sturman realized they produced 20 times the revenue of comic books, he wanted to stock every such publication printed. He eventually produced his own nudie periodicals and opened retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the top of adult magazine distributors.
By the mid '70s, Rueben owned over 200 adult bookstores supplied by regional distribution companies with regal names such as Royal News in Detroit, Noble News in Baltimore and the flagship Sovereign News in Cleveland. Though not as well known as Playboy's Hugh Hefner, Hustler's Larry Flynt and Penthouse's Bob Guccione, Sturman dominated porn more than Bill Gates dominates computers. One competitor complained that the Jewish wiseguy did not simply control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the industry.
To guard his privacy, Reuben used at least 20 different aliases, avoided the news media and frequently hid his face behind a mask during court appearances. "To his defenders in the sex industry, Sturman was a marketing genius and a champion of free speech, an entrepreneur whose toughness, intelligence, and boundless self-confidence were responsible for his successes. But to anti-porn activists and Justice Department officials, Sturman was the head of a vast criminal organization whose companies enjoyed an unfair competitive advantage: protection and support from the highest levels of the Cosa Nostra." (Eric Schlosser in the US News & World Report 2/10/97)
Cosa Nostra AKA the Mafia arrived in the U.S. with the great wave of Italian immigrants who came to the New World in the late 19th and early 20th century. A direct descendent of the Sicilian organization though transformed by American mores and modern corporate methods, the American Mafia, according to numerous experts such as journalist Jerry Capeci, is the most dangerous criminal organization in the world.
The Peraino family emerged out of the bloody Brooklyn gang bang of 1931 known as the Castellammarese War. Taking its name from one of the factions - immigrants from the town of Castellamare del Golfo in Sicily - the Mafia's first great power struggle in America brought to power such legendary mobsters as Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese. Among those who died was Giuseppe Peraino, a member of the Profaci crime family, which became part of the Colombo family.
Giuseppe left a wife Grazia and two sons, Anthony, 16, and Joseph, 5, who later produced and distributed the most profitable film of all time - Deep Throat. In the same year as his father died, Anthony was charged with committing homicide by auto. As with his next six arrests, Anthony escaped conviction. Law enforcement considered him and his brother Joseph "made" members of the Colombo crime family.
American porn mainly comes from two groups - Italians and Jews. Generally speaking, Italian-American crime overlords "protect" Jewish businessmen in exchange for a healthy share of the profits. "For the most part," writes Gerald Krefetz in his book Jews and Money, "Jewish crime has followed the tradition of the Jewish people: it is verbal, intellectual, quasilegal and non-violent." According to Krefetz, Meyer Lansky presided over a 1934 ecumenical criminal congress that transformed crime from a cottage industry of small warring groups to an elaborate corporation with subsidiaries and affiliates in pornography, prostitution, gambling, drugs, labor unions and political corruption. "Al Capone was a product of the era of guts," writes Gerald, "while Lansky was a forerunner of the era of brains."
In 1959, three films ended the nudist colony device - Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr. Teas, David Friedman's Adventures of Lucky Pierre and Ted Paramor's Not Tonight, Henry - brought breasts and story to the big screen. Meyer's film was the first, most popular, most raunchy and most profitable but Not Tonight, Henry was the most erotic film of 1955-60 says porn historian Jim Holliday.
Ted Paramore, the son of a major Hollywood screenwriter, began producing erotic loops in 1954. "You were only allowed to shoot girls in bikinis, and then in pasties, then nudes. But you couldn't show pubic hair. These loops were just little stories. No sex."
Ted's first major film Not Tonight, Henry starred comedian Hank Henry and narrator Paul Friese. Frustrated by his wife, Henry dreams about sex with glamorous figures of history such as Cleopatra, Delilah, Pocahontas and Lucrezia Borgia. Along with Mr Teas, Henry illustrates the primary reason for pornography - the human need to fantasize when the real thing isn't either available or satisfying. Generally speaking, at such moments men turn to sexually explicit pictures while women turn to Romance novels.
Ted's first marriage ended quickly in divorce in 1953. Then he married the love of his life - Playboy Playmate Betty Blue in 1957. It lasted until 1963. After living most of the next three decades together, they remarried in 1991. In between Paramore enjoyed about 200 other beauties including Penthouse Pets and porn stars like Veronica Hart.
Film director Russ Meyer dominated three decades of soft porn - no penetration or cum shots - specializing in beautifully photographed sex, violence and big breasts. The Hugh Hefner of adult movies made pictures that grossed $100 million dollars, four of them ranking among the 1000 top-grossing films of all time - Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Vixen, Cherry, Harry & Racquel and The Supervixens.
The Immoral Mr. Teas appeared in 1959, the first "nudie-cutie" and the most notorious erotic film released in the United States until Grove Press put I Am Curious Yellow on the market in 1968. (Sinema) Mr. Teas set the standard for a new genre of narrative films that featured female nudity and poked fun at the clumsy participants in the game of love.
"There was a vacuum," says Meyer. "The public was waiting for something new... Once Mr. Teas caught on, it was booked all over the country."
About 150 imitators of Mr. Teas appeared in the three years following its release. "...The Nudie Cuties of the early Sixties offered a broad burlesque of sex - purveying asexual nudity and depicting the male as a bumbling buffoon rather than a lover.... The voyeuristic nature of these early nudies is the most striking thing about them. The hero does not crave sex; he just wants to look - and the devices of the filmmakers...remove all suggestion of sexuality from the leading male character." (Playboy)
With 1964's Lorna, Russ moved past nudie-cuties into realistic drama. Sex now drove behavior. Not love, but lust. "Lorna was the first dramatic naked-lady movie," says Rotsler. "The films with nudity before then were more vaudeville than drama… Meyer's scripts operated as excuses to create as many opportunities as possible to show female nudity. He wasn't a story-teller… Lorna established the formula that made Meyer rich and famous, the formula of people filmed at top hate, top lust, top heavy. There are few if any subtleties in a Russ Meyer film, any Russ Meyer film. His canvas is vivid, but it is all red or all purple."
Meyer peaked with 1968's Vixen, the best known and highest grossing of his films. Produced for $72,000, it grossed over ten million dollars.
In the third of a century since the beginning of sex films, no one has bettered the sex films of the first great director of the genre, Radley Metzger. His 1975 feature The Opening of Misty Beethoven is widely considered the greatest porno.
Radley debuted in 1961 with the softcore Dark Odyssey. The second time Metzger filmed, he made a five-minute insert for a French film he'd bought and renamed as The Twilight Girls. "Some nudity, two girls kissing - I thought the projectionist was going to call the FBI when he ran it the first time." One of the girls in the insert became famous a decade later for her starring role in The Devil in Miss Jones - Georgina Spelvin.
A professional filmmaker, Metzger directed feature films whose sex and nudity arose out of the plot, unlike Meyer whose plot staggered out of the nudity and sex.
A former editor of the conservative Birmingham News, David Friedman's father owned - along with Dave's uncle - an amusement park and a chain of movie houses. In 1956, David formed a company to make sexploitation films. He toured the country with a movie that dared to show the birth of a baby - Mom and Dad, which he estimates grossed $40-million. Figured in today's dollars, Mom and Dad may be the most profitable film ever.
"When I got into the exploitation distribution business in the late '50s, there were four of us in the country - Bill Mishkin and Joe Brenner in New York, myself in Chicago, and Dan Sonney in LA - and the total output in the whole United States was about eight to ten pictures a year, so that the sixty theaters that had to play this stuff every year played each one ten to twelve weeks, gave you a fair percentage, and you made a fortune with it.
"I bought a drive-in in Joliet and I had one of the first Nudie houses in Chicago back when Chicago had a tough police censorship board. And it was more profitable than that it is today when you don't have to submit anything and they're playing hardcore in Chicago." (Grindhouse)
Along with Dan Sonney, the son of Louis Sonney who started the exploitation genre in the 1920s, Friedman bought a rundown theater in Los Angeles on Fifth and Hill that became the flagship of the Pussycat Theaters. The men eventually sold out to Vince Miranda. "On the opening day of a new film you could almost call roll," Friedman remembers. "The same guys were there, week after week. They'd stand out front reading the one-sheets so long you'd think they were studying the Gutenberg Bible."
The Adults Only market exploded in the 1960s. "In 1960 there were maybe 20 theaters around the country that showed adult pictures exclusively. By 1970 there were 750. The Pussycat chain built 25 theaters, from the ground up, to show X-rated movies. There were 47 Pussycat theaters in California alone.
"I've exploited the basest human emotions," says Friedman. "But the one I exploited most was loneliness. That's who was paying my way, a lot of very lonely men." (Ibid.)
Realizing that the nudie-cutie was running out of steam, David Friedman became one of the first producers to add violence to sex films. Blood Feast appeared in 1963, inspiring hundreds of imitators. "Unlike the Friedman and Meyer films, which dealt in violence but had some artistic merit, the Roughies and Kinkies of the middle '60s generally represent the nadir of the sex-exploitation film, ugly in spirit and appealing to the worst instincts of humankind. The death rattle of the woman with the severed leg replaces the unfettered cry of ecstasy, and blood rather than semen becomes the symbolic fluid of erotic expression. Paradoxically, these grotesque films, featuring neither complete nudity nor loving sexual contact, were largely exempt from the wrath of the censors, possibly because the United States has traditionally been a country that censors sex but tolerates violence." (Sinema p.25)
Producer Bob Cresse never cast an actress he didn't want to whip. His most notorious film, Love Camp 7 of 1968, declared "Everything you are about to see actually happened." The movie shows a Nazi concentration camp where Jewish women become sex slaves for the Reich. Inspired by Love Camp 7, David Friedman produced 1974's Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, shot on the sets of Hogan's Heroes - a popular TV sitcom about hijinks in a Nazi prisoner of war camp. "Sergeant Schultz never saw anything like this," notes Grindhouse. "Castration within the first minute; a drunken gang rape; a victim impaled on an ominous electro-charged dildo; maggots inserted into the open wound on a prisoner's arm; nipple clamps; gouged-out eyeballs; the slow hanging death of a nude woman standing on a block of ice; another boiled alive in hot oil, and Ilsa urinating on a depraved Nazi general."
The opening of Ilsa says that the producers felt obligated to show the historical truth, and that the film was "Dedicated to the hope that these atrocities never happen again." But the atrocities do occur again in such films as Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks and Ilsa, the Wicked Warden. The Ilsa films based themselves on the true story of Ilse Koch, "The Bitch of Belsen," who was executed by the International War Crimes Tribunal for "crimes against humanity."
The husband and wife team of Michael and Roberta Findlay created numerous crimes against humanity. Under the name Anna Riva, Roberta began performing in sex films before moving behind the camera with her husband. Satan's Bed, 1965, features the rape of a mute Yoko Ono. Next came their "Flesh" trilogy - Touch of Her Flesh, Curse of Her Flesh and Kiss of Her Flesh which displayed various methods of murdering nude women such as a poisoned cat's claw dragged across a naked midriff, electrically charged earrings, razor-studded dildos...
Michael Findlay came to a grizzly end. Headed for Europe in 1974 to seek investors for his invention of a portable 3-D camera, he was decapitated by the propeller of a helicopter that crashed into the roof of the Pan Am building in Manhattan.
Long hooked on the sexually sadistic side of cinema, pornographer Bill Margold says "there is nothing more arousing than sexual terror. A helpless woman being strangled, stabbed, axed, suffocated or drowned is the most exciting thing I can watch. It unlocks my fantasies.
"Nineteen seventy-one must be remembered for a slickly sick slice of sexual sinematics called The Psycho Lover... This show had it all. A nut goes about strangling and stabbing women and the police are baffled. Each of the murders is done with care for the viewer's arousal. He uses the strangulation method combined with sexual taunting and terrorism. A stylish dual electrocution/execution at the end of the film (with much writhing about) was particularly stimulating."
Margold makes explicit the dark desires of many men for achieving the ultimate revenge against women - murder. In a less dramatic fashion, standard porn reveals male desire for revenge through its habitual depiction of facial cum shots. Just as there are few jokes without a victim, so too there is little porn without a victim.
The nasty films of the 1960s and 70s made by Friedman and company show that without some form of restraint, either industry-imposed or government-imposed, pornographers gleefully churn out product that drips with blood as well as semen.
The year 1966 was a particularly bad year for literature - the two runaway best sellers were Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann and The Adventurers by Harold Robbins. And in June, 1966, a journalist thought up the literary hoax Naked Came The Stranger.
"The act of conception," recalls Mike McGrady, "took place, fittingly, in a gin mill. Fittingly - because the gin mills that year were filled with writers anesthetizing themselves against the harsh new realities of their profession. To be a serious writer in the 1966 was also to be, by inclination if not by definition, a serious drinker."
In the Spring, New York Times literary critic Lew Nichols looked at the best seller list and winced: "Seldom has there been so wretched a collection of titles as appears today."
On a Tuesday night in June, Newsday reporter McGrady sat drinking at a gin mill known unofficially by its largely journalistic clientele as "the bureau." Mike felt depressed as he recalled his recent interview with Harold Robbins and his attempt to read Valley of the Dolls.
"I keep thinking of Peter Zenger," Mike told his fellow drinkers.
"Who?"
"Peter Zenger. I keep thinking of him standing trial to defend the freedom of the press. For books like those - is that why he stood trial?"
As Mike found solace in alcohol and male companionship, he had an epiphany. The Newsday columnist turned to a couple of fellow reporters.
"Why don't we all do one? A novel. Everyone could do one chapter and each would write about one specific perversion..."
Twenty five Newsday employees, mainly journalists, each wrote sections of a sex-drenched novel. Mike cast as author a demure suburban housewife who resembled Jacqueline Susan - Penelope Ashe.
Naked Came The Stranger describes in pornographic detail the adventures of a suburban housewife who seeks sexual satisfaction through sex with loads of men.
Seeking a publisher, Mike visited the office of Lyle Stuart who specialized in trash.
Poster-sized photographs of the communist revolutionary Che Guevara grabbed Mike's attention as he entered the office as did two large cardboard cartons filled with books and carefully labeled: "Sex Soft" and "Sex Hard."
"It's not just that Lyle Stuart and Che Guevara were friends," remembers Mike, "which they were. But Lyle Stuart is to the publishing world what Che Guevara was to the world of international diplomacy."
Well into their first meeting, Mike told Lyle about his prank - a bunch of journalists getting together to write a truly bad book.
"I'll publish it," Stuart said.
"It should be ready in a year or so," Mike said. "You can read it then."
"I mean I'll publish it sight unseen," he said.
"You mean without reading it?"
"Of course."
That was Lyle Stuart's way. He generally refused to read books that he published.
"That may seem strange to someone who is new to book publishing," says Mike. "But the remarkable thing is that so many publishers do read what they publish."
In 1969, Naked Came The Stranger exploded like an orgasm to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, helped along at first by Screw Magazine and later by exposure of the hoax in such publications as Time, Newsweek, New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.
In 1970, Mike published a book about the experience entitled Stranger Than Naked or How To Write Dirty Books For Fun & Profit.
Ten years later, Mike McGrady and Lyle Stuart combined on another hoax that largely remains undiscovered. This book profiled a leading star of the fledgling porno industry. Though the truth has long been available for those who wanted to investigate - the media, which seized on Naked Came The Stranger were, for political reasons, reticent to investigate Linda Lovelace's "ordeal".
After attending Sony's exhibition of its new consumer video cassette machine in 1969, Columbia movie executive Peter Guber published a 15,000 word prediction of future shock. "The... impending revolution will have an enormous impact on the motion picture industry, as well as every other American institution: music, theater, publishing, politics, sex, journalism, religion and big business. Financial empires will rise and fall; the 'home entertainment center' will become the backbone of the national economy."
Guber believed that the new technology would create a great new pornographic market. "One can make their own home movies, tapes and films as well as find distribution for them. Thus home nudies with neighborhood actors and actresses are a certainty." (The New BallGame)
The first legitimate film to show pubic hair, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, appeared in 1966, followed a year later by the laborious I Am Curious Yellow which overflowed with full frontal nudity. Underground, stags became known as loops and producers shot increasingly in color. Body painting flicks proliferated as an excuse for showing skin. "Then came the beaver shorts, the split beaver shorts and features that dealt with S&M, spankings, whippings and the like. By the late sixties, color feature films showed full body simulation. This was only a step away from IT." (Jim Holliday)
Sexually explicit material remained outside popular culture until the 1960s when notions of sin, shame and guilt diminished. Literature, plays and movies became raunchier and sex shops, adult movie houses and strip joints proliferated. After dropping its Production Code in favor of a ratings system in 1968, Hollywood unleashed such experimental fare as Easy Rider, Bonnie and Clyde and Midnight Cowboy.
Pornographers regularly rip off their plots from mainstream films. "Imitation breeds contempt," Bill Margold told the authors of the 1988 book Porn Gold. "One day, Viper sat down and wrote an X-rated version of Gremlins called Don't Get Them Wet! It's the same gremlin motif but the way to get them wet is to do certain things. You don't feed them meat after midnight. If these gremlins suck dick, they've going to multiply. Which they do.
"We've just finished a movie called Let's Talk Dirty which is nothing more than a rip-off from the mainstream Some Kind of Wonderful which is about a guy who thinks he's really in love with this beautiful girl and winds up falling in love with a tomboy.
"You have to give the audience something to identify with. They are desperately in need of a hook to hang their dreams on. The problem is that we're putting so much stuff out that it all looks the same and they may not go back. We're drowning in our own sexual quicksand because there's a lack of imagination."
Bert Lenberg edits various hardcore magazines in Sweden. He told Hebditch and Anning: "Porn is mechanical. There is a formula. The first photo has to show them with their clothes on. Then there's some sucking: cocksucking is big everywhere. She holds your life in her hands, she's in charge and could always bite you. Then you have f---ing in at least three different positions - missionary, from behind and with the girl on top. The last pic is always of the man coming on the girl. The photographers know this, so you can always be sure the right shots are included in what they submit.
"Sometimes only the color of the girl's hair seems to change. You can't abandon the formula, it's frustrating. The buyers know what they want.
"We monitor customer needs, talk to people. Our readers phone a lot and we always take the calls. I even talk to friends in the pub. If a computer engineer tells me he liked the blonde, then I'm sure ten other computer engineers also liked her.
"The setting becomes more important when you are working with less attractive models. What do readers feel towards the girl? They imagine they are f---ing her."
Most sex magazines include a storyline with the photos. "Some guys jerk off to the text, some to the pictures, some to both," said Lenberg. "A couple of years ago we tried publishing without the text, but readers complained and we had to bring it back. Of course, it's pure fiction. We always quarrel in the office about who has to write it. The guy who gets the job is the one who doesn't protest enough. One thing is certain - you don't write porno on a Monday morning."
Englishman Rupert James edits a series of porn magazines published in Denmark. "One can see a progression from the early days where films were shot in black and white from one angle which gave the voyeur concept. If you can't move the camera, the person watching is in the same position. It's like looking through a keyhole.
"But photographers have gradually become aware of people's desire for higher quality, for variation, different camera angles, facial close-ups… The style of mags has stayed the same, but the quality has improved."
"America is obsessed with the blowjob," Bill Margold told Porn Gold. "We are not an enlightened nation and therefore Americans can go home to get laid, but they can't go home to get blown. So we do it for them.
"The cum shot in the face is the stock-in-trade of orgasm. It's the ejaculation into a woman's waiting face that gets the audience off more than anything else. They sit there avidly and watch.
"And they want the requisite number of orgasms per movie - usually six. That makes them happy. I have been in audiences where you can hear them counting…
"It is formula video and must have those five or six heterosexual scenes, one or two a threeway. It should have your lesbian scene. The ideal way to watch my movies is over a week. If you get off seven times, I've given you the perfect form of entertainment."
Sex movies first played in small, converted storefronts known as nickelodeons. By 1910, there were 10,000 in the U.S., for all you needed to go into business was a projector, screen and a few chairs.
Porn theaters opened up in storefronts in the late '60s. By 1970, there were as many as 700, says exploitation film historian Eric Schaefer.
In 1969, Sam Chernoff of Astro-Jemco Film Co. in Dallas, brought together in Kansas City a group of 110 producers, distributors, and exhibitors of sex films to form what became the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA). Sam was elected the first president. In 1971, David Friedman became the third president of AFAA. He was re-elected four times before becoming Chairman of the Board. The AFAA primarily sought to protect the sex film industry from prosecution for obscenity.
Los Angeles attorney Stanley Fleishman prepared a legal kit for the defense of the adult film industry.
Because of the money these exploitation producers were taking from the mainstream industry, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Jack Valenti tried to dissuade theater owners from showing unauthorized films. Valenti said they'd "clog the outlets for quality films" so that eventually "no responsible producer will find a theater to exhibit his product… X was made for people like Friedman and those guys."
In turn, the exploitation producers feared competition from the makers and exhibitors of fully explicit loops shot in 16mm. These "heat artists" were "giving the exploitation industry a bad name" because their films "went too far."
Storefronts pulled in about $4000 a week writes Eric Schaefer in the Something Weird Video's Blue Book, copyright 1997. The largest expense for the storefront theater was the films, which they usually bought outright and later resold.
The audience was typically middle-aged white guys who "stumbled into a temple of sex," wrote Dr. Joseph Slade in 1971. "Eroticism is a palpable force in the air, inhaled by a reverent congregation."
With the release of Deep Throat in 1972, porn became chic and explicit films began playing in regular theaters. "Just as the nickelodeons were pushed off the scene in the teens by feature films shown in more opulent theaters, storefronts were gradually squeezed out of the marketplace by better theaters playing higher quality product. A few hung on in L.A. and other spots, some switching to gay films, but most storefronts had disappeared by the mid-1970s." (Blue Book)
Steven Ziplow wrote the 1977 book The Film Maker's Guide to Pornography. He writes: "I recently took a stroll around the area of 42nd street and 8th avenue in New York City, stopping to view a few peep shows whenever the urge hit me. It appears to me that the demand in this area seems to border on the bizarre and unnatural. At least 50% of the peep shows boasted of explicit sexual acts between women and animals. Older stag films are also put to good use. It is not unusual to see a sign advertising a stag film made by some great star in her leaner years. In one week alone I saw promotions for loops supposedly starring such names as Barbara Streisand and a collector's item, an early Jayne Mansfield.
"Another large percentage of the pictures have to do with urination or, as we call them in the trade, "golden showers." Outside or beside each booth is usually displayed a hastily written description of each show. "New from Sweden - One young 13-year old girl f---ing sucking her way through four men of different colors" or "Just in - young starlet taks on two 15-inchers and a Great Dane." If you have only one quarter and don't know which show to take a peek at, I advise you to look on the floor. The booth with the messiest floor is usually the hottest show."