Lowell Pickett pioneered pornography in San Francisco.

He'd studied at the Chicago Art Institute, first painting then photography. Around 1965, he saw a couple of masturbation loops at the Roxie, one of four San Francisco porn theaters.

"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." (Bottom Feeders)

After taking in his share of these loops, Pickett talked to the owners of Roxie in the lobby and found they were interested in buying films. They'd pay $250 for six hundred feet of exposed film.

Lowell borrowed a camera and went to work. "We started out with the crop of young girls that flocked here in 1967, who would rather take off their clothes than work in an office. They'd work two hours and make what they'd make in eight hours in an office..." (Contemporary Erotic Cinema, p208)

"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.

"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 f--- your wife, you f--- mine' and couples would split up and go to diferent rooms.

"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)

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.

"It's a tightrope, because there's obviously a large segment of the audience that only wants to see sex. This keeps some of the films where they are and causes some of the film-makers to drop out of it. It can only harm the business. They become bored with making films and the customers complain.

"What...is missing in these pictures...is some insight into their characters, into the characters up on the screen. The common joke here is the difference between L.A. and San Francisco sex films... In L.A. films two people walk up, might say hello, and start screwing. In films made in San Francisco they kiss first and then they start screwing." (CEC p. 209)

"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..." (B.F.)

"One time, just as a joke for people that said our films weren't hot enough, I put on a close-up loop of a prick going in and out...just a five-foot loop going over and over...and after two hours I went and there were only four people left...but they were [San Francisco] Chronicle reporters. It was very funny because when I put on the loop the theater was about three-quarters filled and it was a long time before even the first people came out." (CEC p. 214)