Thursday 2: The Golden Age of American Sexploitation

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The films themselves ranged from cheap 10-15 minute “smokers” to 60-70 minute “nudies.” None were narratively complex nor offered the viewer anything more than a shabby set-up before the repetitive carnality unspooled on the screen. The first hints of change came from former military photographer Russ Meyer and his 1959 debut feature The Immoral Mr. Tease in which Meyer’s keen sense of vaudevillian comedy and exquisite cinematography won him acclaim as the first “artist” to make sex films.

This ushered in a wave of softcore features with more complex plots, good acting, and much more explicit sex. The films became the B-pictures of the B-pictures and all through the early to mid-60s, they played to packed houses in slightly more “upscale” venues. Everything changed when, in 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on obscenity, stating that no film which included “literary, scientific, or artistic value” could be declared obscene. With this decision, a wave of even more explicit pictures was unleashed, breaking every taboo with one major exception: hardcore sex.

In 1969, this last frontier was crossed when President Johnson’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography declared that there was no harm to be caused by viewing explicit sex. Suddenly countless filmmakers began pushing the boundaries of what was shown in their work, though many of these early productions remained in keeping with the extremely simple narrative set-ups which had been prevalent in earlier decades.

However, as more people accepted explicit sex in films, filmmakers themselves became more open to artistic experimentation and creating complex narratives around carnal scenes. The rise of “porno-chic,” a term coined by critic Vincent Canby, saw American hardcore films emulating European art-film aesthetics, as seen in works such as Jon Fontana’s Resurrection Of Eve and Orson Welles protégé and cinematographer Gary Graver’s nihilistic 3 A.M.; adapting works of literature, as seen in Sharon McKnight’s Autobiography Of A Flea and Bud Townsend’s explicit musical adaptation of Alice In Wonderland; and subverting popular genre film aesthetics, as seen in distinctly bizarre features such as Jonas Middleton’s surrealist horror Through The Looking Glass and Gerard Damiano’s pseudo-autobiographical X-rated marionette musical, Let My Puppets Come.

Just as many independent films of the era emerged from areas of the country not known for being centers of filmmaking, regional hardcore productions became more and more commonplace, such as Karl Krogstad’s experimental feature The Last Bath and a now lost Chicago-shot work, The Last Affair, the production of which is chronicled in Robert Flaxman’s fascinating documentary, A Labor Of Love.

Despite moderate social acceptance of hardcore sex in feature films, there was still a great deal of criticism, especially from conservative religious and feminist groups, which viewed many of the films being made as misogynistic. Bonnie Sherr Klein’s documentary Not A Love Story remains the most prominent cinematic example of the era’s anti-porn feminist rhetoric. This criticism, however, was met with the production of numerous female-centric and pseudo-feminist productions, such as Roommates, a 1981 film by New York-based gay filmmaker Chuck Vincent.

With the emergence of video as a popular means of movie-watching, many producers were no longer willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on 35mm feature production and consequently, by 1985, most filmmakers had either abandoned sexually explicit projects altogether or succumbed to video, leaving behind just over a decade’s worth of uniquely American, and all but forgotten, cinema. Joe Rubin