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San Francisco

"In the mid-1960s, a theater like the Roxie showed two hours of loops that were strung together and set to music that was totally unrelated to what was happening on the screen," says Lowell Pickett, who, with his beautiful partner Arlene Elster, became one of San Francisco's leading pornographers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. "Can you imagine anything worse? I've often thought that if there is a hell, I'm going to be condemned to watching those films through eternity."

In these revolutionary times, the personal, including the sexual, became political.

"The sex parties were different here than they were anyplace else; that's one of the things that distinguished San Francisco," says Pickett, who hosted many such parties in his rambling Victorian on Hayes Street. The former California Highway Patrolman insisted on a few rules. Partiers had to arrive on time or be locked out. They took off their clothes upon entering the house and everybody had sex in one room.

"At other sex parties, people stood around waiting to see who was going to be the first to take off their clothes," Pickett says. "Then it was, 'I'll fuck your wife, you fuck mine' and couples would split up and go to diferent rooms." (Bottom Feeders)

Jim Mitchell found out that his peers praised him rather than condemned him for his new venture, for they believed that Jim helped free America from bourgeois restraints.

"Pornography was anti-establishment, another way of changing things," says Lowell Pickett. "We were conscious of trying to break down barriers. In the late 1960s, my partner Arlene and I went to the first meeting of the Adult Film Association in Kansas City. We took along a projector and ran some San Francisco loops and people were dumbfounded! They'd been showing movies of nudists playing volleyball." (BF)

Through porn, the Mitchell brothers got to make money and a revolution.

"The outsider-outlaw feeling was much alive in Jim and Artie," says psychiatrist Dr. Martin Blinder. "Their bent may have sprung from the same anti-authoritarian, sociopathic drive that formed Bonnie and Clyde." (BF)

Artie told his new girlfriend Meredith Bradford that porn was a public expression of women's new freedom, a way for a woman to say, "This is my body, I'm proud of it, I'll do with it as I please!"

Jim and Artie were inseperable. They seemed more like identical twins than brothers - never staying in the same room together for longer than a few minutes without going over and dropping a hand on the other's shoulder. In temperament they differed - Artie was friendly and outgoing while Jim was serious and subdued. They never tolerated criticism of the other behind his back for loyalty was their supreme value.

"They tormented each other daily," remembers an associate. "Jim loved Artie and Artie loved Jim, but there was no in between, no understanding what the other one might be going through. When they fought, they fired cannonballs."

In the end, big brother Jim won the battles, like big brothers usually do. (Bottom Feeders)

Alex deRenzy

The Mitchells sought to catch up with the leading porn filmmaker prior to Deep Throat - Alex deRenzy. In 1968, the former photographer for the Gordon News Service in San Francisco and craps dealer in Reno, was 33 years old and handsome, with long blonde hair pulled back into a pony tail and a Fu Manchu mustache.

Alex had a deeply scarred face and he walked with a limp, the result of a motorcycle race up a steep hill in San Francisco that ended when he crashed into a car that had stopped in an intersection.

Earlier on the day of his crash, deRenzy saw across the street from the Screening Room - his X-rated theater in the Tenderloin, San Francisco's version of Skid Row - a prostitute knife a man. When Alex came to in the hospital, he found himself lying next to the man the prostitute had slashed.

DeRenzy later told friends that he liked the scars on his face because before the accident he looked too pretty. Alex, a loner, lived in his hillside estate in Marin with a couple of women and several of his children from a previous marriage.

To compete with deRenzy's Screening Room and Pickett's Sutter Cinema, the Mitchell brothers opened the O'Farrell and began showing "beaver" films - endless reels of women masturbating with their fingers or pulling their labia apart to reveal huge on-screen vulvas and deep vaginal tunnels.

"If the cops hadn't bothered us," says Jim Mitchell, "we probably wouldn't have gotten into stories. The purest form of titillation is the single girl automasturbation film...and the beaver film was a truer form for getting off on some autoerotic fantasy. When it opened up and you added fucking, you had to show the man and you covered up the girl.... It disrupted the autoerotic trend of sex films. It was boring because all anyone wanted to see was the close-up penetration shots."

Aging beatnik Lowell Pickett tried to eliminate the external cum shots but people stopped showing his films because while they were funnier and more dramatically developed, they violated pornographic convention.

As Jim Mitchell was fond of saying, "The only Art in this business is my brother."

By early 1969, San Francisco hosted two dozen theaters showing beaver films and nobody objected except Diane Feinstein, a candidate for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and leader of a band of anti-porn crusaders.

"What distinguishes San Francisco from any place else is the style with which porn is marketed, its practitioners' attitude toward it and the tolerance most square citizens display concerning the whole question," wrote the New York Times Magazine in a January 1971 article called "The Porn Capital of America."

"The flourishing underground press in San Francisco all share the idea that porn, even at its sleaziest and most bizarre, is an important and healthily revolutionary ingredient of the new culture."

One day Jim's roommate Bob Cecchini came home from work hungry. He opened the refrigerator and found it empty except for a small salami which he ate in a sandwich. Half-an-hour later, Jim burst through the door.

"I was hoping you'd be here!" Jim said. "I've got something to show you."

Jim threaded the 16mm projector and turned off the lights. The words Sacramento Salami appeared on the screen. Cecchini felt sick but forced himself to watch the loop. A woman masturbated with a small salami, plunging it in and out of her vagina.

"I just ate that salami," said Bob.

Jim turned off the projector and started laughing so hard he collapsed in a chair.

Porn became raunchier. "Some jerk in the Tenderloin showed a man-pig beastiality film. The DA and the brass in the police department were so sickened by it they decided to go after everybody," says brunette Arlene Elster.

In response, the Mitchell brothers took on radical young attorney Michael Kennedy who'd worked with William Kunstler, and fought back against increasing police raids. Working the media was a strong suit for Jim and Artie, and they packaged themselves as defenders of free speech.

Journalists became friendly with the Mitchells and took to hanging out at the O'Farrell. "Reporters weren't interested in seeing the films," says San Francisco Chronicle journalist Sandy Zane who did an early series on the porn business. "We'd go up there to drink their tequila and smoke their dope. The Mitchell brothers corrupted a generation of reporters - assuming that we could be more corrupted than we already were." (Bottom Feeders)

The stories that Zane and other reporters wrote taught the Mitchell brothers that in porn, there is no such thing as bad publicity. The more ink the brothers got, the larger the audiences at the O'Farrell became.

The fun that Jim and Artie created at the O'Farrell set the Mitchells apart from other pornographers. The brothers took chances, and created striking moments on film such as the 15-minute Requiem where a gorgeous redhead in probably her lone porn appearance mourns the death of her husband at his grave, and then returns home to masturbate to Gregorian chants.

"That film was as close as I ever came to liking a masturbation film," says Artie's girlfriend of the time, Meredith Bradford. "She was so good, so beautiful, and so striking at the cemetary it was painful to watch. And when she went home and got into bed, it turned into an erotic movie with a message. When a lover dies, sex doesn't." (BF)

"Requiem...is a significant departure in the dreary annals of American sex films," writes John Hubner. "The lizards in sharkskin suits in New York who were making beavers that featured lifeless, tattooed hookers would never have used a Gregorian choir in a film. The smooth operators in L.A. who cranked out loop after loop that were as devoid of feeling as an industrial film that follows a can of soup from the vat to the shipping crate would never have come up with a story line that involved a grieving widow...

"Jim and Artie knew they could concoct the wildest plots and craziest characters imaginable and the horn dick daddies wouldn't care, as long as a woman climbed out of her panties."

"Acting is believing, and the New Age people who acted in those films believed in what they were doing," says Lowell Picket, who now runs a convenience store in the San Francisco Bay Area. "It could only have happened in San Francisco in the 1960s. Arlene and I would go up Haight Street and say, 'We're making sex films. Beaver films. Want to be in one?' We got eighty percent of the women we wanted and no one ever got angry..." (Bottom Feeders)

Documentaries first broke through the hardcore feature barrier in 1969 in San Francisco with Censorship in Denmark. Sexual Freedom in Denmark from LA's John Lamb followed in 1970.

In New York that same year, Gerard Damiano made SEX U.S.A. starring Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, and This Film Is All About... while Donn Greer's 101 Acts of Love gives the education approach.

Alex deRenzy gathered classic stags into A History of the Blue Movie followed by Bill Osco's inferior Hollywood Blue. The first advertised porn feature in the major New York newspapers was Mike Henderson's Electro Sex '75 released on Labor Day weekend 1970. Freddy Hanson made Animal Lover in Denmark featuring farm girl Bodille doing a dog, pig and horse. Matt Cimber, the husband of Jayne Mansfield, made the first 35 mm porn film to get national distribution Man and Wife.

Bill Osco is part of the Osco drug chain family that developed Sav Ons. He produced, wrote and directed the first classic porn feature - 1970's Mona The Virgin Nymph which starred Fife Watson, Judy Angel, Susan Stewart, Orrin North and Calvin Victor. Bill got help from two experienced loop makers on the West Coast - Mike Light and Howard Ziehm.

In December 1970, Arlene Elster and Lowell Picket hosted the First International Erotic Film Festival. Don Simpson, who become famous as half of the production team Bruckheimer and Simpson before killing himself in 1995, handled publicity. Arthur Knight, the Saturday Review film critic, was one of the judges.

The winning entry was a three minute film of a woman peeling an orange.

Adult theaters sprang up all over America and their owners sought San Francisco porn.

"We'd shoot two versions, a hard-core for here and a soft-core for elsewhere," remembers Lowell Pickett. "The places we shipped hard-core versions always surprised me - San Diego, Indianapolis, and small towns all over the country where, I presume, the authorities were being paid off." (Bottom Feeders)

Public concern over pornography led to a Presidential commission which included the Nixon apointee Charles Keating, the founder of Citizens for Decent Literature. In his home town of Cincinnatti, Keating was known as "Mr. Clean."

In 1992, after his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan debacle, Keating became known as "Mr. Swindle."

After spending $2 million dollars and two years in research, the 1970 Report of the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found little evidence that porn caused harm. The Commission recommended that the United States follow Denmark's lead in abolishing censorship of sexually explicit materials.

Furious with the majority report, Keating, along with Father Morton Hill and several other commissioners, alerted the White House to the moral damage the report could cause the country.

Richard Nixon, who was known to appear on the beach at San Clemente in a business suit with all three buttons buttoned, issued a statement "totally rejecting" the majority's recommendations. A Democratic President (Lyndon Johnson) had appointed the commission; the Democrats were as soft on smut as they were on Communism. A Republican President would never relax the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life. (BF)

Until 1957, U.S. law governing obscenity patterned itself after the Hicklin decision in England in 1868 which said that a book could be banned if as much as one paragraph on one page was deemed to be lewd.

But in a majority decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, written by Justice William J. Brennan in 1957, obscenity became defined as material "utterly without redeeming social importance."

The Mitchell brothers' 1971 conviction (later overturned) for showing obscene films which had no plots, led to an important evolution in porno. To give their explicit films "redeeming social importance", the Mitchells and other pornographers in 1971 began adding stories to their films.

The brothers pioneered both the featurette and the pornographic feature film in San Francisco, pumping out 336 of them before doing Behind the Green Door. The films were easier to defend in court and the audience had come to expect films with a story and characters.

Features also drew larger and more varied audiences than the single lonely men who dominated the viewers of loops.

The other adult theaters in San Francisco followed the Mitchells lead. Lowell Pickett's features aimed to be both erotic and artistic.

As for pioneer Alex deRenzy - he'd fallen into a funk. In trouble with the IRS, he made endless attempts at recapturing the success of Censorship in Denmark, pouring out psuedo-documentaries with couples romping around at staged orgies.

As far as production values, the Mitchells never got it right, but their product was still way ahead of the porn of the previous seventy years.

George McDonald

Orphan George McDonald graduated high school in Fresno in 1967.

In his senior year at Herbert Hoover High, George served as student body president, received the class of 1967's vote for "Most Likely to Succeed" and took the North Fresno Exchange Club's "Boy of the Year" award. He dreamed of becoming governor of California.

Hitting bad luck after graduation, he eventually became a clerk at a dirty bookstore in the Tenderloin. One night friends paid for him to see a sex film which starred a stunning actress with short blonde hair. When she took her clothes off, she was even more beautiful than George imagined - large breasts, a flat stomach, trimmed blonde pubic hair and long legs.

The woman gives a man a blowjob but by the time she's finished, he's still soft. The audience groans. Shifting to the man's face, the camera reveals he's terrified.

George decided that he could perform sex on film and he pestered Jim and Artie Mitchell until they give him a chance. His costar was Lelania - the beautiful blonde in the flick that inspired him to give porn a chance. Though George had been laid many times, this was his first blow job.

Jim then told George to perform cunnilingus - another first. He'd always wondered what it'd be like, and now he got to find out on camera.

Moments later, he bolted up, gasping for breath. George had so immersed himself in his work that he forgot to breathe.

The couple moved into the missionary position and after several changes of camera angle, George received permission to come. He stroked hard, burying his face in Lelania's hair before pulling out and achieving another first - watching his own orgasm.

Jim showed George where to clean up and told him they were going to Ocean Beach to shoot the socially redeeming part of the film.

While washing himself, George reflected that porn is the opposite of life. In life, you meet a girl, date and perhaps go to bed. In porn, you go to bed and then you have the date.

In all his features George played a sensitive young man who wanted to get to know a woman before having sex - a radical departure from the typical male characters in porn whose lines were usually confined to "Suck harder, baby."

George McDonald became San Francisco's first porn star, liked by almost everybody except the Mitchell brothers and their film crew who despised those on the wrong side of the camera.

Sutter Cinema

Penny Lane entered porn as a film editor in early 1970 when it "wasn't exactly a field, but more like a basement full of dogshit where I cut two featurettes every ten days." (Puritan #8)

Directors earned $150 for a 30-minute, 16mm color film shot in one day, and $400 for an hour-long 16mm sync film shot in two days.

Penny lived in San Francisco and received welfare. She says the formula for the hour feature went roughly like this: 7-10 minutes of plot followed by 10-12 minutes of oral sex, interspersed with hands and facial close-ups, and 30-35 minutes of penetration intercut with position changes and followed by 2-5 minutes of wrap-up.

"These films weren't released, they escaped!"

Leo Productions worked fast for it changed the program at Lowell Pickett's and Arlene Elster's Sutter Cinema every second Thursday. Including lab time, an hour-and-a-half of new material had to be produced every fourteen days. The Sutter Cinema opened at 6:30 AM every day and closed at 2 AM.

To make more money, Penny began to write and direct her own pornos under the nom de porn of Aqua Vulva. Some of the actors were junkies who didn't show, so the time came when Aqua had to jump in to perform - "to save the picture and pay the rent." (Puritan #8, p.38)

Penny found herself shuttling between bed and camera. At last, she'd "climbed out of the dogshit but was getting deeper into the bullshit that the business demanded."

The early producers often owned theaters, thus by-passing distributors. They were usually bankrupt small businessmen who came from every background except film. Several producers Penny worked for came from vaudeville and they were the more demanding ringleaders in this sexual sideshow.

"I watched one prodding his actors with sticks while screaming at them, "Fuck yer guts out!" or "Make that cum shot!""

The actors usually got $50 a shoot plus a $20 bonus for each cum shot. Workdays frequently lasted thirty hours with catnapping between camera set-ups.

Most of the theaters that sprang up after the cessation of censorship were built to show pornos. They seated about a hundred and catered to the briefcase crowd as well as the raincoat brigade.

"They were full of red-and-gold hooker wallpaper and jackoff vibes. The seats smelled like sex and cum jellies lingered on the upholstery. And on the screen, always the same ole sexual surgery: Giant chicken gizzards, hairy asses whumping, balls flapping, fingers sinking, breasts bobbling, mouths hard at work." (Puritan #8)

Penny's final film for Sutter Cinema/Leo Productions was a sub-genre, today forbidden to be exhibited in X-rated theaters today - an S&M horror fantasy. Because none of the women she interviewed would play the lead in her film The Throngs of Experience, Penny took the role. She cast one of her ex-lovers opposite me because of his affinity for domination. But no one expected him to get so carried away with the part.

"While I was shackled, hanging helplessly upside down on a wooden cross, peeping through slits in the leather masks over my head and trying to call the shots, this guy went wild. He was ecstatically wielding the whips while my fumbling, one-eyed junkie cameraman was screaming "Cut!" This SOB cut me to ribbons.

"Finally I was taken down, untied and brought to the Haight-Ashbury clinic. I narrowly escaped becoming the first snuff film star. That's when I decided to quit the business and go on to graduate school, get my Ph.D. in film and eventually become a university professor.

"One thing is for certain: The future masters of the medium will be those courageous souls who abandon the "peter meter" [which Hustler still uses to review sexvids] formula of erotic film-making in favor of a more viable aesthetic." (Puritan #8)

Penny couldn't have been more wrong.

The 1971 SF porno School Girl "is one of those lost in history epics that packs a slice of erotic realism far superior to the technologically brilliant, but emotionally limited features currently being produced....The San Francisco sexual enthusiasts are charged with honest moans and erotic energy missing in most of the thousands of films and almost all the videos made since 1971." (Holliday in 1986)

Former Alex deRenzy cameraman Paul Gerber directed this story of a young sociology student, Debra, investigating the sexual underground by answering a series of sex ads in the Berkeley Barb.

Also in 1971, Anthony Spinelli made his first 35 mm porn feature Touch Me. His first 16 mm flick was Diary of a Nymph.

San Francisco has always been more sexually liberal than Los Angeles. The City by the Bay enjoyed topless bars while the City of Angels worried about bikinis. San Franciscans saw beaver loops when Los Angelenos saw only bare breasts. And while San Francisco police made the occassional bust, they lacked the vindictiveness of L.A. cops.

"When Los Angeles, both in production and exhibition, finally got around to hardcore, the San Francisco filmmakers were making [porno] art films.

"Technically, the films made in San Francisco are as amateurish as hell. The cinematography ranges from fair through atrocious. The editing is often non-existent.

"But there is zest to San Francisco films. The films are wilder, more experimental, more daring..." (Contemporary Erotic Cinema, p. 64-67)

The schlock came from Los Angeles though the city had two big assets - lots of filmmakers and the world's largest collection of beautiful women.

"The Tinsel Town porno companies make "product". They turn out technically superior films. The average San Francisco film has more life." (Rotsler)

And which is better? Whatever turns you on. "The best way to judge pornography is by its effect on you. Were you aroused? One of the hottest scenes I have ever seen was in The Circus of Doctor Lao when Pan danced around Barbara Eden. She never did anything but open the top couple of buttons on a very high-necked dress, but she was such a good actress that every man I know was strongly affected. And I've seen the hardest of the hardcore and fallen asleep. I saw that film where the Danish girl has sexual relations with a large hog and it turned my stomach. And I've seen hard-core that excited me, but I've seen "simulation" films that evoke quicker and stronger and deeper sexual response. The biggest offense is boredom." (Rotsler)

Los Angeles pornographer Clay McCord enjoyed placing his wildest fantasies on film. "You want to see girls getting whipped or lots of fellatio or black-magic rites with naked girls? Easy. You want to see big orgies, weird couplings in odd places, beautiful nudes getting it in any position including the impossible - just write it into your script and get the budget for it." (Contemporary Erotic Cinema)

Merrill Dakota, another L.A. pro, said, "We did a film called Black and White that had four black guys balling this one white chick at the same time! The first girl we hired walked off the set when we got to the hardcore, but we rushed in a substitute who loved it! She got the lead stud to leave his wife, who was white and pregnant, and live with her."

Merrill's brother Philip Dakota: "In I Am Curious But Not Yellow we shot Cindy Hopkins, who is the lead in Flesh Gordon, at three different stages of her sex life: as a young and innocent girl who undergoes her first lesbian act, as the swinger who makes the advances to a highly embarrassed youth when she accidentally walks into the men's room, and as the girl who knows what she wants to try and who knocks out a black man with a karate chop at a public newsstand, carrying him off over her shoulder to ball him, just because she'd never balled a black man. We were shooting from across the street and the expressions on the bystanders was something to see!" (Contemporary Erotic Cinema)

Pornographers shot hardcore scenes on the streets of San Francisco, something rarely done in Los Angeles.

"We're less afraid to try things up here," says a San Franciscan. "In Hollywood they have the Big Studio thing that mucks everything up. Everyone down there wants to make the big hit, the big film...but never does."

"We started sooner," says Brad Wilson of San Francisco. "We got the lead, and we held it."

Cinemotographer Tony Haze worked both cities. "San Francisco movies have a cinema verite quality. They go places, they get out of four walls, they do things, they get the hell out of the bedroom. In L.A. moving the screwing from the bedroom to the shower is considered going on location."

A female performer who worked both places said, "Up there [San Francisco] they don't known what they're doing but it's fun. In L.A. it's more professional. They don't screw around. They work faster. They seem to know what they're doing more. The cops have them uptight here. They sneak you into the location in case they're followed...

"Up there they use lots of amateurs. Down here a lot of the girls and even a few of the boys talk about getting into the movies. I never heard anything like that in 'Frisco. They're just in it for the bread up there, and most of them don't see anything wrong with balling for the cameras." (CEC)

San Franciscans seem more interested in making statements, Los Angelenos in making profits. Politics in the northern city are more radical. The counties beside the two cities, Marin County in the north and Orange County in the south, rank among the wealthiest counties in the United States but their politics contrast - Marin is liberal, Orange conservative.

Part of the difference between the two approaches may come from the geography - Southern California is flat, sunny and suburban while the San Francisco Bay Area is colder, hillier and more varied.

California porn differs from New York and European product which are grittier, more thoughtful, decadent and depressing.

A careful observer can usually tell where a porno was made. California porn features more attractive women and locales and a "sex is fun" approach. Films from the West Coast displayed a "loopy acid-fueled faith in the healing powers of sexual liberation." (Grindhouse)

After the California Supreme Court's Freeman decision in 1989, Los Angeles won the production battle and the San Fernando Valley now makes most of the world's porno. In the 1990s, the San Francisco - Los Angeles divide between professionalism and enthusiasm transformed itself into a mainly L.A. amateur vs. feature competition. The zest of amateur and pro-am videos allows them to compete with bigger budget productions.

"These strip-malled, sun-baked, single-storied San Fernando Valley communities are where Southern Californian dreams go to die," writes journalist Karl Taro Greenfield in A. Magazine, 9/30/95. "The per capita income in the Valley is lower than on the upscale West Side of Los Angeles, as is the likelihood that a resident holds a college degree; the chance a child will grow up in a two-parent household; and...the price of real estate. About the only things higher in the Valley than on the West Side are the temperature and the death rate.

"But that's the cynic's take. Rewind, to the blissed-out mental state of a not-yet-jaded, cliche-believing, dream-dreaming pretty young thing. Lured by the same mirages, enticed by teh same sun-burnt offerings, tempted by visions of palm fronds and the Palme d'Or, the girls still come to Los Angeles by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, to become models or movie stars.

"The formula is as concise and brutal as the Pythagorean Theorem; broken hopes minus options adds up to a career in...'adult' video. White girls. Black girls. Asian girls. Girls of every background who dreamed the California fantasy, came here to find it, and failed. Where dreams die, porn thrives."

Born 4/22/52, Marilyn Briggs fled her loveless home in 1969 to model in New York. She did topless stills, Pepsi and Clairol commercials and a small role in The Owl and the Pussycat where she appeared in bed half-naked. When Barbara Streisand didn't want to tour to promote the film, the job fell to Marilyn. She later moved to Los Angeles where an important producer had a deal for her - He'd provide her with an apartment, a car, acting lessons, spending money, roles in major films and career guidance in exchange for Marilyn being his mistress. But she didn't want to be tied down to an old man with a big paunch and rejected his offer.

On his way out the door, the shocked producer told Marilyn that she'd never make it in the biz. He was right. Marilyn never succeeded in mainstream entertainment.

Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel "auditioned" her in 1974, asking many questions about her sex life, but the interview ended when Marilyn refused to blow them.

Finding no work in L.A. in 1971, Marilyn moved to San Francisco but still could not find acting jobs that paid. The slim blonde danced nude for a few weeks but quit because it depressed her. While working as a waitress in a health restaurant, Marilyn read an ad placed by the Mitchell Brothers about a major film they were casting. She charged down to O'Farrells and read the audition notice which asked if the actor wanted a balling or non-balling part. Marilyn at first thought the notice meant bowling but in a few minutes Marilyn realized that the film was X-rated. She turned to leave.

It'd been a depressing day for Jim and Artie Mitchell for all the girls who'd answered their ad appeared burned out. Then they saw the fresh looking Marilyn leave the building. They chased after her and by late that afternoon, they'd signed her to do their movie.

When Marilyn told her beatnik husband that evening about what she'd done, he became angry. But Marilyn stood by her decision. After venting his feelings, Paul kept quiet for he believed in individual freedom. But he must've suspected their relationship was changing, and within a couple of years they divorced.

The Mitchells gave Marilyn a new last name to go with her starring role - Chambers.

Marilyn was the youngest of three children. She'd spent her life unsuccessfully competing for her parents attention. Learning that she couldn't please them, Marilyn decided to defy them. By appearing in Behind the Green Door, she got to defy and impress her family in a way they'd never forget. (John Hubner)

So that her reaction to being raped would be genuine, Marilyn never read the script of Behind the Green Door which is based on an anonymous story that men had been passing around since World War II. A woman named Gloria is kidnapped from a hotel and taken to a secret sex club.

"That's why I think the film hit," says Marilyn. "I lost my inhibitions onscreen at the same time Americans everywhere were losing theirs."

Filming Behind The Green Door

Marilyn, 19 years of age, smoked a joint of marijuana to calm herself before the filming began. Six women dressed in black robes like the witches in MacBeth lead Marilyn on stage, undress her and play with her body. Then out comes the ex-boxer Johnny Keyes painted up like a savage. He performs endless cunnilingus on Marilyn who is in anguish and looking around like she hopes that everything will soon be over. It won't.

Johnny eases up Marilyn's body and inserts his penis into her vagina. He strokes long and hard, in and out, as Marilyn winces with pain. As she thrashes about, Johnny follows her eyes, insisting that she recognize him. Finally Marilyn surrenders, wraps an arm around Johnny and kisses him. Johnny rides on until he and Marilyn appear to simultaneously orgasm.

Next, five men in white tights with the crotches cut out, mount the stage. Three men get on trapezes and another lies down on the floor.The weird sisters bring Marilyn back out and guide her on to the penis of the man lying down. The three men on trapezes lower themselves to Marilyn, and she takes the middle man's cock into her mouth. Marilyn shudders, then begins masturbating the other two men on the trapezes. The fifth man tries to suck on Marilyn's breasts while the sisters fondle her.

Marilyn masturbates the men harder as the audience starts screwing each other. The men on stage come all over Marilyn.

The end result is a complex ten-minute scene with advanced special effects. "The image of one of the men ejaculating into the heroine's mouth is shot in extreme slow motion, and it is repeated and reworked by dissolves, overprinting and reverse printing. The color is solarized,and the image becomes brilliant, abstract, changeable. Chambers' elegant characterization of a victimized woman is achieved without a single line of dialogue as she moves with conviction from terrorized, passive virginity to willing sexual maturity." (Sinema p.162)

Former All-pro defensive end with the Oakland Raiders, Ben Davidson plays the bouncer at the club and the Mitchell brothers have cameo roles as Marilyn's kidnappers.

Eventually, George McDonald rushes on stage to rescue Marilyn and they run away to his van to make love.

"The movie was made under conditions so hot," says Artie Mitchell, "we just wanted to throw down the camera at the end of each of day of filming and fuck and suck our way to oblivion."

Jim Holliday: "Behind the Green Door is based upon an underground erotic classic whose vague origins are debated by erotic historians. There can be no debate however on the overwhelming attraction to males of its plot - kidnapping a beautiful woman and forcing her to do everything you want. Green Door could not be made today. The flick is most significant for introducing Marilyn Chambers, who showed in this West Coast classic that there's a big place in porn for the wholesome American girl next door."

Many of the persons in the film are unattractive but all are enthusiastic and the musical score ranks among the smoothest you'll ever find in an adult film. Green Door's kinky sex retains appeal even though its production values are poor.

Behind The Green Door Premieres

"Searchlights and ushers in tuxedos greet the sleazerati as they arrive at the O'Farrell Theatre here in San Francisco on opening night of Behind the Green Door, the Mitchell Brothers' latest and biggest filim," says a TV reporter standing under the O'Farrell marquee.

"Marilyn Chambers, the star of the film, arrived just moments ago in a stretch limo, and it's no stretch of the imagination to say she left the crowd wanting to see more, which they undoutedly will."

On opening night at O'Farrell, George McDonald felt too nervous to go inside the theater to watch. He stayed outside and awaited reactions. As the movie ended, guests came out thrilled but confused. On the biggest night of George's life, the projection man confused reels two and three.

"Only in porn could that happen and the audience still enjoy what they saw," reflected McDonald.

Even shown in sequence, Green Door makes little sense. A crucial 15 minutes of film burned up in the developing lab. The 16mm film is grainy, blurred at times, and the sound, as usual in a Mitchell Brothers production, inept.

But despite the technical problems, Behind the Green Door, shot for a total investment of $60,000, earned about $50-million, making it the second highest grossing porn movie ever.

When Marilyn's parents found out about it, they refused for years to talk to her.

Greatest Hits of the Early '70s

The first great cult adult statement - Curt McDowell's Lunch - appeared in 1972. Holliday says that the San Francisco ladies in Lunch create more heat than an army of ice princesses. A favorite in the Bay Area, McDowell is best known for the epic he released in 1974, Thundercrack, which also features Mark Ellinger.

Lunch is less of a sex film than a complete film experience that happens to contain sex.

A Touch of Sex features West Coast legends like Rene Bond, Cyndee Summers, Sandy Dempsey, Sandi Carey, Ric Lutze, Rick Cassidy and Winston Fonte, an early black stud who later performs in Pink Champagne. Harry Wilcox has no explicit scenes in Sex. He's better known as Michael Pataki, a co-star in mainstream films like Rocky IV and a director of films such as Last Foxtrot in Burbank.

A Touch of Sex is an 'innocence versus decadence' comedy. Harry Wilcox is the bumbling innocent in wild Hollywood, wanting to be a musician and hopeless in love with Mary Jane. Sexual opportunities beckon at every corner but Harry 'Just says no.'

Holliday calls Teenage Fantasies 1972's West Coast Deep Throat for it took the Coast by storm along with Behind the Green Door. The film uses a psychologist to explain the mysteries of sex to the audience. The cute blonde is the ex-Mormon Suzanne Fields who's the female lead in Flesh Gordon. Rene Bond shows off her oral skills by narrating the flick and giving blow jobs. She goes further in Teenage Sex Kittens where she pairs up with Gilda Grant as free spirits in Palm Springs. Sex As You Like It features early legends Candy Samples, John Holmes and both Sandys - Dempsey and Carey.

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 plot comes apart near the end with a too-extended orgy" notes 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." (X-Rated Videotape Guide)

Jamie Gillis and Marc Stevens appear briefly 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.

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 picture on the Ivory Soap box. 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 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." (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 was sweeping 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.

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 finally became the star he always 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 verified, that it was hard to get it up on demand. 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 venomous right-wingers. 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." (BF)

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.

Jim and Artie loved the fight because it sold tickets to their film.

The Mitchells hosted numerous fundraisers for progressive causes such as the environment and convicts' rights. Jim and Artie felt attracted to men and women serving time. "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." (Hubner)

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."

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: "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 Sodom and Gomorrah."

WIth their "fuck 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."

Eric Edwards remembers the glory days of San Francisco porn. "I did a lot of movies for Robert McCallum. He was another favorite of mine, mainly because back in those days he'd have productions in San Francisco and it was such a joy to hop on a flight all paid for, have a drink, come down, have a limo waiting for you, and deliver you to your hotel suite, and get handed your script. Everything was so finely organized in those days.

"Being an actor, I didn't know anything about the production end, but I knew we were trying to do something of quality. It was like regular movie making. Bring the talent in, put them in a hotel, take care of them, give them a food budget, bring them on to an organized set... Those were the good old days."