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"One day," says Hodas, "I was talking to this repair guy over on Tenth Avenue near 42nd, and the guy says, 'I bet you could do something with these old film machines.' They were like nickelodeons. So you could say, the modern peep show was born by accident." (Tales of Times Square, p. 74)

Hodas bought 13 of the machines and installed them in bookstores whose hardest material was nudie pictures. Martin's machines played loops of naked dancing girls. Customers flocked in and demanded more explicit fare, driving a porno takeover of Times Square. Smut peddlers like Hodas bought up leases, paying up to $5000 for 600 square feet.

Most of the early hardcore loops came from the West Coast though Hodas eventually shot his own grainy product such as Flesh Party and Elevator Orgy. In 1970, the Mine-Cine, in the Wurlitzer Building on 42nd Street, charged spectators for studio tours of sex loops filmed in progress. (Tales)

The mob muscled into the business in 1968. By March, Hodas competed with John "Sonny" Franceze, a family boss who oversaw numerous peeps. Between 1968-71, Hodas paid $150,000 in mob protection. The returns were far larger, enabling him to set up operations in other cities.

The first series of loops used the brand names Kiss, Pretty Girl, and Color Climax. Stars of Sex used Tina Russell and the Collection series starred Candy Samples.

"Any public traces of highly illegal kiddie porn disappeared for good by the mid-1970s from Times Square. But the kook loops remained in the rear ends of several scumatoriums. A dive called Exotic Circus, at 140 West 42nd, contained familiar Swedish Erotica loops up front, but those with the courage to walk tot he back found loops of menstruation-vampires, bowel movements unloading, girls f---ing horses, Great Danes getting their peckers sucked. The slicker Peepland, former locale of Hubert's Museum, opened in Janurary 1978, its downstairs sanctum harboring a hundred blue assembly-line booths. Here were strange and unnatural acts from German distributors, a Disneyland in hell, as quoted from show cards: "Two wild girls shove live eels up snatch and asshole!"; "Fish-f---ing!"; "Farmboy f---s cow"; "Man f---s a hen"; "Woman sticks arm up cow's ass!"; "Man licks 400-lb. pig's asshole!"; "Girl takes on dog, horse, and pig simultaneously."" (Tales of Times Square, p. 78)

The first pornographic feature films came from New York and San Francisco. The Big Apple accounted for about 1/4 of this product through the early '80s when the market shifted to California.

Many of the most famous pornos came from New York - Deep Throat, Devil in Miss Jones and Misty Beethoven. In 1973, the justices of the New York Supreme Court ruled that four films, including Throat, contained so many "acts of sexual perversion, [they] would have been considered obscene by the community standards of Sodom and Gomorrah."

With its serious, depressing tone, Miss Jones symbolized New York porn which had more in common with decadent European productions than those of the West Coast. In turn, American porn features of the Golden Age frequently displayed more in common with European product of today and yesterday than it does with 1990s American porn.

LA concentrates on light productions of fun sex while New York produced darker, more thoughtful films like DMJ. San Francisco experimented with "artistic porn."

Cecil Howard's first explicit film was the 1972 documentary Personals featuring Tina Russell and her husband Jason.

Cecil's real name is Howard Winters. He's consistently produced the most thoughtful work that contains explicit sex. Howard's brooding voyages into the human sexual psyche, - penned by Anne Randall since 1980 - are consistently insightful as well as arousing. Cecil captured memorable performances from persons not noted for their acting talents, such as Joanna Storm in Firestorm. (AVN 2/94)

Peach Fuzz, 1977, is now known on video as Georgia Peach. This early Cecil Howard film is about two friends who meet for the first time in 12 years and recall the old days.

In 1986, Jim Holliday wrote that Cecil Howard's Dangerous Stuff, 1985, was the best sex video he'd seen.

Sheldon Ranz believes that Cecil's Firestorm, a sensitive portrayal of a blind girl (Joanna Storm), is the best porno of the 1980s. "Howard's humanism shines through his work," says Sheldon. "He is a credit to our people [Jews]."

Roberta Findlay made Snuff as well as 1974's Slip Up, starring Jamie Gillis as Herman Killacunt who invents an electrotesticular cock erector at the Tighttwat Institute for Sexual Research.

The director who bills himself as Lawrence T. Cole is really Bob Wolf - the man who made the Linda Lovelace epics, "The Piss Movie" and Dogarama. One day he'll step forward and completely discredit Linda Boreman Lovelace Marchiano, says 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)

When Lasse Braun came to America in the early '80s, he set up shop in New York, notes Jim Holliday, "where porno styles seem more akin to those in Europe than the Los Angeles variety." (AVN)

10/3/99

Nick at Nite

Luke F-rd Wire Services, Ltd.: X-centric auteur Nick Zedd rekindled Slime Square’s lurid luminescence last Saturday night---projecting images of turgid genitalia and puckered perinea onto 42nd Street.

Featured as part of a collective art event aptly entitled “Make 42nd Steet Dirty Again,” pinkly glistening vaginal vistas belonging to cinematic smutsters that included Annie Sprinkle and Kembra Pfahler illuminated a picture window fronting Gotham’s newly sanitized boulevard as rubber-necking pedestrians and tour-bus passengers gaped incredulously.

“I was projecting footage from the TeleTubbies intercut with images of nuns blowing a Doberman,” exhulted the filmmaker. Also showcased for 42nd Street’s carriage trade was Zedd’s notorious “Whorgasm,” in which his own veiny meatplough massaged the nimble gums and tonsils of underground cine siren Susan Manson.

It was at approximately this point that Zedd was approached by event organizer Amy Shapiro, widely known amongst underground cineastes for her portrayal of a toilet-seat-bludgeoning victim in the Joe Christ video “Acid Is Groovy Kill The Pigs.”

“She was wearing Mickey Mouse ears to protest Disney,” recalled Zedd. “She said, 'Please turn that projector the other way because we might get arrested.’

"Don’t you want to cause provocation?" I asked her.

"You just can’t do that," replied Shapiro, and huffed off."

There followed a rare moment of interpersonal compliance from Zedd---stationed atop a peep-show booth with his video and 16 mm projectors--- as he turned his flickering spectacle upon a colossal set of plywood breasts with areoles the size of dinner plates that hung from the ceiling of the raw, condom-festooned commerical interior at 111 West 42nd.

“I showed luscious subterranean diva Brenda Bergman performing fellatio on a gun,” itemized Zedd. “[Underground personality] Scott Free spurted gout upon gout of cum on the face of Darryl Goldsmith, a nice Jewish girl from Tennessee.

“I also had [70s cartoon character] H.R. Puffn’ Stuff mixed with images of babies undergoing neurosurgery, plus [occasional l-keford.com contributor] Gene Suicide with his pecker on a downward spiral.”

Concluded Zedd: “Despite my best efforts, the cops never showed.” Only in New York: city with a heart!

Chaim Amalek writes: I attended that "bring Porn back to 42nd street" show last week. It was, like ALL semi-public sex oriented shows in NY these days, pretty lame. Some of the artists present had just arrived in NY a few years ago, and had absolutely no knowledge of what 42nd street was like in the late 80's - early 90's, when crime was at its peak.

And to be blunt about it, the street was a DANGEROUS place to be then, day or night. Roving gangs of violent urban youths (i.e., black teenage males) would occasionally descend upon the area in search of prey (usually white people). The many drug dealers there attracted numerous street hookers and junkies (often the one and the same), which lead to lots of one-on-one street crime as well. The 42nd street subway stop was the most violent in the city (this was at a time that the city as a whole recorded around 2,200 killings a year.)

Yes, I miss never having seen the likes of an Annie Sprinkle in her prime, and Manhattan has become MUCH less diverse economically in recent years, which is regretable, as this is a much less interesting place as a result. But lets not be overly selective in our memories. The 42nd Street of yore was a forbidding place in which to indulge one's taste for forbidden fruit. (Now, the Japanese on the other hand, know how to do this sort of thing right. Tokyo has adult entertainment districts that are every bit as raunchy as Times Square was, but without the violent crime. I guess the Yakuza really know how to run such things.)

10/31/99

Cicero writes on RAME: It may simply be reflective of the production eras in question, but I cannot help but note that the porn that was made in New York City twenty (?) years ago was a whole lot more intelligent and dirty (in the positive sense!) than the effluent that has come to us from California in recent years. I saw a few such movies in recent months, in which none of the women appeared to have implants, tatoos, piercings, or even hair color that comes from a bottle. Just women who look like the sort of women most men lust after in real life, doing really erotic things of the sort that most men daydream about. (And this does NOT include spitting, animals, screaming like a lunatic, or gang-bangs with hundreds of losers.)

Is any straight porn made in New York these days, and do any porners live in the Big Apple? Given the low entry barriers to the production of pornography, why is it that Southern California so totally dominates the field, far more than SCal dominates in the world of non-porn movies - why no NY porn, with conventionally attractive women? And is there some sort of secret guild in LA that requires the producers of porn to see to it that their product is utterly lacking in eroticism?

Jim Gunn replies: I used to live and work near New York City for years. A combination of bad weather for much of the year; a lack of reliable talent and locations; and the difficulty of traveling in and around the N.Y.C. Metro area all conspire to make New York a very poor place to try and shoot porn. Not to mention that the overwhelming presence of porn in the San Fernando Valley is, by this late date, a self-reinforcing phenomenon- not unlike the computer industry Silicon Valley in CA or the historical popularization of VHS as opposed to Beta format- the law of increasig returns (modern economic theory) causes the concentration of an industry in a given region to increase due to the relative value of being geographically nearby customers, competitors and especially support services.

Nevertheless, I did produce quite a few movies in the N.Y.C. region over the years. "Strap-On Sally 9 & 10 and 11 &12" were all done in and around a big mansion in The Hamptons, LI in New York for example.