Now available from Playboy Home Video.
Let me show you some motion features which may enlighten you far better than I can.
They've been around since the dawn of cinema.
After Mr. Edison made these 10 types of gallop, it wasn't but two days later that some enterprising
guy had his girlfriend take her clothes off.
They've had many different names.
Stag film.
Softcore features.
The nudie cutie.
One film.
Adult video.
And many different stars.
And many different styles.
They outrage some people.
But they've entertained millions.
Now, learn the story of X-rated movies told by the people who make them.
I'm pretty women so you didn't really have to work that hard.
Breast was my thing.
It bosoms.
That's what I like.
It was something for everybody.
Love them.
The sexual revolution was definitely in full swing.
What a turn off.
And defend them.
I think everybody has a right to make any movie they choose.
It is the First Amendment because it is first and primary.
Without it, you don't have a free society.
From the edges of society.
At best, in bar last.
To the mainstream.
And beyond.
How out there can you get?
I'd like to see this in 3D.
It's the story only Playboy could bring you.
The story of X.
100 years of adult film and its stars.
The images have always been there.
Images of love.
Images of sex.
In the 19th century, Edward Mybridge was trying to analyze movement in a series of photographs
that led to the discovery of movies.
And he became the first, but not the last, maker of these kinds of pictures to be criticized
for the nudity of his subject matter.
Moving images of eroticism and sexuality have always thrived in the shade of the more respectable
mainstream movie.
For many, they still live there.
Challenged, condemned, or ignored with the hope that maybe they'll go away.
They never did.
But it's a good thing, because it's taking place next to them.
...and I think they are rather interesting and pretty funny, so here I am.
I've seen a few Nudie films from the late 50's. stuff directed by Russ Meyer, and I
want to know just how fringe or... You know, I've seen some books, some books depicting
eroticism from that era, pictures, but never motion pictures.
We thought it might be a good chance to compare it with the X-rated films from our country.
I think she knows more about it than I do.
You'd be arrested for watching this? These were illegal to watch?
I did not know that. I just thought that it was just a kind of a sleazy movie house sort of thing.
Was it part of prohibition?
This is the story of shadows and a story of light.
And it starts in secret in the dark.
From the turn of the century almost to the present, 10,000 scratched and fuzzy little films were made that were eventually called stag movies.
Short films filled with forbidden images that men smiled about and women pretended to ignore.
Nobody knew who made these movies or asked any questions.
Working out of the trunks of their cars, salesmen would go from town to town and rent films and an old projector for maybe $50 a night.
Or someone would know someone who knew someone who had one.
They were running the local lodge hall in a basement room somewhere at smokers, bachelor parties, and they were very explicit.
Often meant not to be shown in public at real theaters.
There was little police interference because, well, usually the chief was in the audience.
I've always said that after Mr. Edison made these 10 types gallop, it wasn't but two days later that some enterprising guy had his girlfriend take her clothes off and that's how exploitation began.
These early dirty movies were just the latest form of photographed pornography.
They began mostly in France and Latin America where they were sold to private collectors and whorehouses.
Soon a group of American impresarios began churning them out.
A Free Ride was one of the first made in 1915.
The films are a little cruder than you'd expect but rarely feature any child pornography, maybe because the upstanding folk watching them didn't want to be reminded of their own families.
They're simply tales of adults having a good time in as many ways as possible.
Stag films had their own way of telling a story.
The couple or group would meet on whatever slim pretext the filmmakers could come up with and then they'd have sex.
To all those men watching over four or five decades, this was exactly the way it should be.
Those easy conquests were especially attractive in the Depression where everyday life was filled with rejection.
And at a time when the information highway was a dirt road, the films could be an anatomy lesson too.
It reminded me of a home amateur video.
You know, the unrehearsed sort of, you know, real people kind of sense.
I didn't think it was erotic. I thought it was amusing but mainly boring.
If only we could trick bodies for one year apiece.
It's like guys everywhere and penises everywhere and it's like now in straight porn you don't see that much dick.
I'm just trying to imagine if they were geared to be erotic. I mean, I can't imagine a lot of guys beating off while watching this movie together.
I was surprised at the variety of sexual acts. I was surprised at the amount of oral sex in films that old when it was for divorce.
A lot of the men and the women looked like they were enjoying themselves more than when you see new porno.
It seemed like there were an awful lot of women in one room naked together for them not to interact with one another.
I got these pictures from my dentist. I don't know what he got.
Boy, I'd like to see this in 3D, huh? Well, I think I'll just watch one.
I wonder where they get the girls to make these movies.
I've seen one, you've seen them all.
For decades, the stag films played on over 50 years of flickering fornication.
Tame versions were even advertised in girly magazines, but stag performers tried to stay anonymous.
A few famous ladies like Harlow and Garbo and Joan Crawford were rumored to be in them.
And when Hedy Lamar came to Hollywood, her studio tried to buy up all the prints of her early film, Ecstasy.
It wasn't until after World War II that the stags had their own star who called herself Candy Bar in a movie everyone wanted to see.
I ended up eventually from being a working girl in a restaurant as a waitress into a white slavery involvement that was bought and sold for a period of time to motel people.
And this is how it all started.
Most of those women were prostitutes who were put in that situation, who did do those movies for money.
And we don't know what happened off screen, how many of those women got raped, or what situations they were put in.
I mean, there was rapes on the screen.
If I had not been under duress, I certainly wouldn't have gone and willingly done it.
I had other things to do in my life that for sure didn't run out in a motel room that somebody'd take pictures of me.
I'm sitting here and listening to everybody throw out this feminist rhetoric about how tortured these women were.
But I'm sitting here watching this, none of these women looked drugged. And a lot of modern porn they do. And these women were all doing just fine, it looked like.
I know one thing, that's a tacky guy they got for me. Boy, that's an insult right there.
The most basic is here, it's slapping everybody in the face, it's there. So accept it and make it respectable.
And they can if they'll be given the opportunity. It doesn't have to be grimy all the time.
In 1948, the Supreme Court included movies in the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment.
And some innocent sex appeared as novelties on real theater screens.
I'd love to know you better. For instance, how you kiss. Does your technique leave girlies weak or does it somehow seem to miss?
I'd love to know you better.
Occasionally, in some daring scenes, couples actually got into bed together and went to sleep.
Then more suggestive films began to appear, educational short subjects or informative documentaries.
Eight children, 270 pounds. Ten children, 290 pounds.
There are thousands of people today who wear no clothes. And their reasons for not wearing apparel are as divergent and different as they are sometimes amazing.
Musical shorts with some skin sneaked in as well. Sometimes in cinematic jukeboxes called Soundies.
And pretty soon, those hitchhikers and horny dental patients were joined by showgirls, burlesque queens and serious photographic studies.
The cameraman moves the model forward to show the further you bring the model forward, the more diffuse the shadows in the background.
This is an example of calendar art for the month of June, as the beach ball would be a symbol of the opening of the swimming freezer.
By the 50s, the New York Court of Appeals proclaimed that nudity in itself without lewdness or dirtiness is not obscenity.
And other government bodies followed. Some of the shadier movie producers were able to come out of the dark a little more.
Hollywood left them alone, but the big studios made movies for big audiences and couldn't risk criticism.
When Clark Gable took Scarlett to bed and then said, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn, most of the country shuddered.
So MGM wasn't about to go out and remake The Goat or encourage the talents of Candy Bar.
The studios had invented a self-censoring production code.
And for years Hollywood banned movies that showed any kind of offbeat behavior, prostitution, drug addiction, homosexuality, sex without marriage.
Think of some of today's hits that that rule might eliminate.
Still, there was always a demand for subjects that were hidden, but that were a definite part of the human experience.
Say, I know a fella that can put you on a show right away.
In this film you will meet Jane Bradford.
What's the matter, got a headache?
She's a young and innocent cocktail waitress. Jane Bradford is about to lose that innocence.
I got the grandest headache medicine in the world.
Yes, Jane, headache medicine.
I feel better already.
Once enslaved, its victims sink ever deeper into a quack-mile of moral decay.
Haven't you any pride or decency left?
You used to be sweet and clean, Jane.
No, not Jane. I'm Lil, a gangsta's discarded mall.
Some theaters on run-down main streets stayed open with independent movies, cheap pictures that didn't have to follow the studio code,
and found ways to get some good, clean, or even slightly dirty sex in, especially if it came with a moral or two.
Unlike the illegal stags, any adult could pay to see them.
Well, you hoped your neighbor didn't drive by while you bought your ticket under the discreetly dimly lit marquee.
Of course, your neighbor might already be inside.
Thousands of those softcore features were made, and they're still being made, and have a huge following with growing numbers of young fans.
The casts are often unknown.
The stars are their innovative producers and distributors who brought us classics like the immoral Mr. T's,
the wages of sin, and the ever-popular story of reproduction.
The audience that is maybe a little bit more timid and doesn't want to go into the adult room and look like some kind of pig
will come to these bizarre conventions, you know, crawl out from under the rocks,
and basically buy the softercore, more amateur stuff, or more B-genre-oriented stuff.
This B-rated sexploitation scene has just become the new retro scene pretty much for like the mid-90s.
It's an unbelievable sleaze fest. Gorgeous big-haired girls, great cheesy dialogue, saucy Latin garage music, colorful location shots, and sizzling sex scenes.
If you'll notice my foot on the cover.
This is the cheap version of 2001. I mean, this is a story that takes place in 2069 about the spaceship erection.
It's a huge seller for us, and if this wasn't a nudie, it would be known as the worst science fiction movie that was ever made. Absolutely the worst.
I finished my homework on nuclear physics. What do I study now?
It seems more fresh and more natural than like explicit, so it's fun to watch, but it's not, you know, hard on quality.
What started all of this? Where is it all leading to?
For some of the shocking answers, see Mondo Oceanita.
It's like a whole hidden era of entertainment. It was semi-forbidden when it was new.
It never showed up on television, and most of it wasn't on video until recently. It's a whole fascinating area to check out.
There were so many adults-only movies made just in America, especially in the 50s and the 60s.
I don't think anybody could watch or own all of them. There's just thousands of them. A lot of them are horrible.
Be a meanie, own you. This is the only place I can go without him having me watched. If I could only get out of this rotten business.
You wouldn't take her. She's only a kid. She is a woman.
The most important figure in this era was Dave Friedman, the grandfatherly king of sexploitation.
The Hollywood studios, these were kind of ignored this whole trade. It was called road showing.
It would go from town to town like an itinerant carnival and play the picture, stay with the theater owner, settle up with him every night, and get out of town before the cops came.
The police will pass an innocent weenie roast on the beach, but should they know of your actions here, that there's been a drinking party and nude bathing, an investigation will surely take place.
Julie, this is Pat Pearl. She's going to be your landlady for a while.
Landlady? What do you mean? What sort of a place is this?
I'm saving you for a very special customer. When my father learns of this, neither your father nor anyone else you respect will ever see you again.
And in a couple of months, you would die rather than have them even find you.
This is the wonderful story of life.
We showed the birth of a baby, we showed a venereal disease, we are.
Well, being a medical student, Jack, I thought you could tell me something about syphilis.
Syphilis?
Why, yes.
But in the middle of this picture was the part, the great thing of road showing.
We pause in our presentation to introduce in person the imminent sex hygiene commentator, Mr. Elliot Ford.
And Elliot Ford would come out and go into this pitch, sell these two books.
What you see there is your own specimen, proving beyond any doubt that you have syphilis.
At one time I had 40 Elliot Forbes on the road.
And with each unit we had an Elliot Forbes printed the picture and two young ladies dressed up in nurses uniforms who would go up and down the aisle selling the books.
The Supreme Court ruled that nudity per se was not obscene.
The first thing that came along were the nudist colony movies.
But what I want to know is what benefit is nudism today? Who are these nudists?
Let me show you some ocean beaches which may enlighten you far better than I can.
You couldn't show any frontals, you could show breasts and derrières.
But after a couple of years of the volleyball and everybody running into the ocean, nothing was more boring than that.
But then Russ Meyer and Ted Paramore and Herschel Lewis and I got an idea of doing something a little different.
This was the nudie cutie. We weren't in a nudist camp.
But there was always a main character in these pictures who could always see women in the nude.
Okay, hands behind your back.
But Granny, it's too hot.
It's too hot? Take off your blouses, come on.
After a few years of this, we went back from the color nudie to black and white to shoot it real grainy,
to make it look like an old 8mm stag film.
But they had some violence in it and that's why we called them the ruffy.
Look, I don't want to learn anything new. I know too much already.
Stop! Stop, Carl, stop!
Spanking was a big deal back then. The whole idea of the ruffy, the nudie, was something for everybody.
This man could live with his wife, but not his wife's habit.
But you didn't dare show their pubic regions and you didn't show any male nudity at all.
Yes, people whisper, it's unnatural.
Those particular days were so mild that in a number of localities, the newspapers would not print a picture with a belly button.
And I suspect a great many young Americans grew up thinking that belly buttons and birth probably had absolutely no connection.
Well, I didn't want to see the vulva, the inside of a woman's most personal space.
No, it wasn't necessary. The breast was my thing and that was it.
Good, hairy bush, that's okay too.
It's pretty hard to be kind of joking and you see the inside of a girl's whiz.
I'm pretty women so you didn't really have to work that hard.
Having my sort of attitude and I'll put it, my ability, I'd just shoot the girls and it was great.
What did you mean by your attitude?
I was horny all the time.
Russ Meyer began as an Army photographer, found he was pretty good at photographing sexy women.
And 20 movies or so later with Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Vixen and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, he was a legend.
I had to have girls that had giant giganzos, bosoms, that's what I like.
That was the reason that I am successful. Without tits, forget it.
All men need I think that secure warm feeling of feeding at the breast of money.
Of women without breasts? Who really wants to look at that?
Women always appeared in my films for a particular reason.
I may have selected them but I also had a feeling for them that these women were out of the ordinary.
They were special ladies and they had to be treated as a special lady.
It's true, he's a dirty old man but I love him, he has great shit.
How'd you pick these girls?
Well they just had great big knockers. Heavy metal, fast cars, fast chicks.
Six of the most bountiful women in the world, yeah, six.
Incredible brawls served up from the lusty table of Russ Meyer.
Shooting, I was always feeling that thing, it came through the lens, like the semen came right back up and then back out again, the feast on it.
In the 50s came drive-in theaters and school was out.
People didn't have to look up and down before they bought their tickets.
You remember Mundo Froido. Love is a four-letter word. Mundo bizarro, the animal and the hot fur.
It is seldom that a motion picture theater can present films of this caliber.
Do you want to know if you want to split the coffee with him or something?
If he will give it to the American Cancer Society.
Believe it or not, none of us were sleazy old men that said, hey, you want to buy some dirty pictures?
And the middle guy only wanted a cookie.
We just happened to be at the right time, at the right place.
We all got together and we rode a twisting roller coaster that went up and down and stopped at the front door of the bank.
Hey, we need some broads.
Did you really mean all those things you said to me?
You mean about my wanting to marry you? Please. I thought you could get for granted.
How wonderful. You've given me a whole new life.
That man's grabbing a guy's joint there. I saw him pass by.
Good sign here that I'm talking here, affecting these people out there.
Something else happened on Main Street.
Godard and Fellini were on the same screens as Teenage Tramp.
When they weren't showing exploitation, downtown exhibitors were running out of money.
They were running out of money.
They were running out of money.
They were running out of money.
They were running out of money.
When they weren't showing exploitation, downtown exhibitors were running even more explicit foreign films,
which were being discovered by a large urban audience in the 50s and 60s.
The films had style, intelligence, and artistry enough to get away with some skin,
and Brigitte Bardot became one of a series of international sex queens.
You see my back in the glass?
Yes.
You're so pretty, but fat.
A lot of the films were actually about sex and treated it with sensitivity.
Very.
Do you want me to kiss you?
No.
And you and your neighbor could now sit together and watch Heart.
Do you see him?
Yes.
You know me now.
I'm all over him.
I love you.
And my face.
Go down, Ira.
Go down, Ira.
Come up, Ira.
Come, Ira.
Come, Martino.
Kiss Martino, Ira.
Now kiss Ira, Ira.
What if I get a heart attack?
I don't know.
I'm not a big fan of Brigitte Bardot, yes, no question about it,
but she didn't influence me particularly.
She wasn't big busted enough.
Over 20 years after his most famous movie was banned in most of the world,
Oscar-winning director Bernardo Bertolucci is honored by the conservative Motion Picture Academy.
Last Tango in Paris was made during a revolution in both adult film and art cinema
and proved what a lot of people already knew.
That creativity at a high level could be found in a film about sex and physical passion.
A man and a woman meet once in an apartment, they have a great love exchange, sex, etc.
And then they go on meeting in that place without telling each other their names,
leaving their social identities outside.
And this is romantic because it's a kind of attempt to communicate without social persona.
It was just two bodies.
Another thing that distinguished Last Tango is that one of those bodies was a major Hollywood star.
It was a film about the kind of aggression that can happen during a moment of love and sex,
which is completely within the love process.
I remember that we were having breakfast, Marlon and myself,
and there was this baguette, this French bread,
and he was putting butter on that, and we looked at each other.
And I think what was really shocking in a good sense was that it was used,
something which is part of the daily life of a family, what is called the normal family,
was suddenly becoming part of sex.
Look.
In the United States, it was more or less like a porn film.
And I remember that the ticket, which was normally $3 at the time,
was $5 like you paid when you were going to see Deep Throat,
which by the way, I remember liking very much.
There was a constant give and take between American movies, foreign films,
and what was once called pornography in those days, and the borders began to become blurred.
Jane does it for kicks. Debbie does it for love. Margie does it for money.
And Barbara does it for fun. They're the naughty stewardesses, and they're flying your way now.
Come up to first class. See the new stewardesses.
One likes them older and experienced. Another prefers the younger, more virile approach,
while some girls just like men and men and men.
Girls for Rent, a story as bold as the headlines flashing across our country today,
a telling of girls available for any purpose to those who have the rental fee.
It all starts with a prison camp bust out from a hellhole where women are treated like dirt.
It was too hot to tell before, but now the lid is off.
A lot of successful filmmakers got started in what was almost considered obscenity, but not quite,
known as hard R or soft X or simply sexploitation.
Love to me is just one big orgasm.
Meet America's wildest gunswingers, doing what they do best out west, blazing stewardesses.
But after about 50 years, what we called stag movies got bigger, better, even sexier,
and finally moved into real theaters.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness the ravishment of a woman who has been abducted,
a woman whose initial fear and anxiety has mellowed into curious expectation.
Although at first her reactions may lead you to believe that she is being tortured,
quite the contrary is true, for no harm will come to those being ravished.
Soon she will be set free, unaware of anything except that she has been loved as never before.
Music
Sometime around 1969, naturally 1969, actual sex on public movie screens seemed to be sort of legal.
There was so much in the world that it was worth testing in court how far you could go,
but no one could really say for sure what the rules were. Not for sure.
We stand where the law of obscenity has always stood, in a state of total confusion.
There were rallies for sexual liberation, protests against theater closings, pro-porn marches, you know, it was the 60s.
There were pioneers too, Gerard Damiano, the Mitchell Brothers, Radley Metzger, Alex Dorenzi.
Later came inevitable change. One porn star became a federal witness. Jim Mitchell shot and killed his brother Artie.
Raids on adult theaters took their toll.
Some people gave pornography a second look and found problems that had nothing to do with morality,
but with exploitation and sexism and women's rights.
For the businessman, the money was enormous, and for the free thinker, the change was overdue.
The old stags kept up with the times, now usually found in peep shows that had more to do with masturbation than cinema.
Experimental films by Brackage and Warhol and others used sexuality openly as they always had,
but now it was understood and accepted.
The industry boomed. It even had a critic.
I started The Screw in late 68, and that's when I created the pedometer.
I would evaluate the film on the basis, not of excellence or sound, but how many hard-ons I got.
The minute hardcore came in, that was the end of the soft X of the nudie cuties and the nudist colony picture.
There were a few Supreme Court decisions that said nudity and obscenity are not synonymous.
Every fight you won in the courts, you went one step further.
Probably not many men carry a vibrator in an attache case.
It started with some documentary on pornography in Scandinavia, and it had about a minute of hardcore.
This movie, like most other Danish porno movies, is extremely crude.
Toni is more interested in having a warm, emotional relationship with the people she works with and in making a good movie.
Once you saw nudity and consummated sex, fucking and sucking, that was the opening gate.
And then in came the quality people. I think the 70s were really the golden age of pornography.
Sex is a positive. It's recreational. It can be fun.
That change in human behavior had to be documented on celluloid, and that's what happened with porn films.
It was just a mirror to reality.
When we did Behind the Green Door, the attitude in San Francisco was very loose.
The hippie era was still in existence.
And the sexual revolution was definitely in full swing.
But it was not chic yet to be in an X-rated film.
Hopefully we change that.
I don't think I know how to kiss.
You don't?
After you put your tongue out, what do you do?
You'll learn.
Teach me.
No.
Please.
Some other time.
No, otherwise he's going to think I'm a child. Come on.
No, no, no.
Like that?
Yes.
Among all the invented films, three became the classics of the time and created three new stars.
One of those stars came from an ivory snowbox.
If you touch me, I can get off. We'll get off together.
Another had been considered old and unattractive.
Put your cock in me. I can't do it by myself.
And the third renowned for a particular sexual talent.
The classic film I reviewed and I helped make it a success was Jerry D'Amiano's Deep Throat.
It was something everyone took for the blowjob and he was made sort of as a comedic vehicle.
And Linda Lovelace was a great cocksucker.
Try it. You'll like it.
Find it by smoke while you're eating.
We knew while we were making the film that it was the first of its kind.
We hardly knew the impact it would have on society.
It became the thing to see before the ugly head of anti-sex feminism sort of knocked us back a bit.
And The Green Door is another classic. The Mitchell brothers made excellent films.
Of course they weren't pornographers. They were really hippies.
I met the Mitchell brothers and they proposed this new film to me.
And it was good money, a good percentage in the movie.
It was really a challenge because it was something that there weren't a lot of lines in it.
It was all acting with my emotions, my body, my eyes.
And I hope that came across.
What a long way from Ivory Snoke.
Well, I don't know.
The new films were innovative, entertaining, sometimes even insightful in their treatment of sensuality and desire.
And became tremendously popular.
The stars were at the Cannes Film Festival, the best parties and often the local theater.
Going to see them was an adventure. It was fun. Everybody did it.
Well, you didn't brag about seeing two men.
My Mr. Belvin, how big you are.
Please, please, Mr. Belvin.
Okay, okay.
So, Gina's Belvin is describing what you wanted.
What a turn on.
Fuck me, please. Oh, please get me off. Please get me off.
Fuck me harder. Fuck me faster. Harder.
Please touch me. Please.
Damiano and Devil and Miss Jones created in a celluloid fashion a world we wanted to experience.
The women who did the films were really committed.
It was almost a political extension of the 60s. They cared.
Linda, what is your opinion of the current argument over pornography?
Well, to be honest with you, what they're going through now is censorship and all.
I don't believe in any kind of censorship whatsoever.
Linda Lovelace was a very curious experience.
At the time we were making the movie, she was very sweet, almost naive.
Have you ever taken a penis all the way down to the bottom of your throat?
No. I tried, but I choked.
My society and government has accepted pornography knowing its smiles.
Now I'm telling you about its bruises.
Deep Throat made $600 million and I received the physical pain and the brand Linda Lovelace.
What are you going to do now with your life? Will you make more pictures like Deep Throat?
Yeah. It's been 12 years for me and there are still times when I'm with my children that I'll just cry when I think of something that I went through.
I'm proud of what I do. I feel like I'm a woman. I can respond like a woman. I can do things that women should be able to do.
And what is your response to those who say that a movie like Deep Throat ought to be permitted to be shown under the constitutional protection of the First Amendment?
What about my First Amendment? What about the First Amendment for me? What about my rights as a human being?
Pornography teaches you that it's about women!
Pornography teaches you that it's about women!
And we're doing it tonight, gang!
Come here, I'll show you some violence. How about a guy with the biggest titties in the city? Oh, no, no. No silicone here. At best in burlesque.
Pornography is violence against women.
Yes, sir, you made a wise decision, my man.
Our view of pornography is that it teaches inequality physiologically. It's not just something that happens in the brain.
It's that men learn that women are worthless in their bodies.
The girls in there are not forced to do what they do. They're not handcuffed, taken in there.
Why criticize or hurt other women by saying this?
Do you think I'm hurting other women?
You are. It is.
How? Because you're downing them. You're downing them for what they believe in.
Instead of saying, how can we think about it, they say, why do we care?
All right? Why we care is because some people are being hurt here.
That is the place where feminism got totally off track.
Right from the start, I'm afraid, that contemporary feminism got in the grip of this puritanical anti-porn wing, which has great trouble with visual images.
Such films wouldn't be made if there were no market for it. I think that film only reflects what the world, what the society is about.
I think it's the old truth that art reflects as a mirror of the world.
Men just want to come, and women want a story. I think sex has much to do about nothing.
Let me drop my load and then watch the special on cable TV.
Sex is probably the single thing that men are most interested in.
Oh, with this, I think that you'll agree. It's a sniggering kind of sex. It's a lascivious kind of sex. It certainly isn't a healthy approach to sex, Hugh.
We suggest that it is.
I would not only suggest that, I would say rather strongly, we consider it a pretty healthy end.
Guys like it, not because it's anti-woman, but because it makes them feel good.
I don't smoke, I don't take drugs, I like porn. You look at you, you're grinning. I'm happy. You look at porn, you're happy. You see guys sitting in a bed of porn over there.
I did a lot of things that I found very detrimental to women, and that's why I got out of it two years ago. I didn't like degrading women anymore.
Did you find it degrading to you, or just to the women?
No, not to me. Are you kidding? It's a man's world. I was very macho. I was standing there like a man, you know, being very proud.
I mean, everything was focused around the tip of my dick.
So I can get a fucking, you know, stinking, filthy whore.
We got pornography and what we needed was eroticism.
Eroticism is like for it instead of against it, and pornography is against it instead of for it.
And instead of ending a situation of long repression, maybe it is now creating a whole new set of negative values towards sex.
We don't need that.
Always broad, huh, Jamie?
And when are you going to learn that females have but one function in life? To give one pleasure.
The powerless have to fight the powerful. The powerless don't have the same kind of speech that the powerful have.
The powerless have to make the fight. The powerless have to win. The powerless have to become credible, and we will.
If you want romance, you're gone with the wind.
The popularity of sexually explicit movies opened up the freer portrayal of sexuality for everyday audiences.
Stars like Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, Angie Dickinson, Al Pacino, John Voight and others appeared in erotically charged films made by new filmmakers who knew what was happening on the darker side of the street.
New movies created new breakthroughs, new stars, more freedom in image and language.
That's it.
I'm fighting my very worst...
By the end of the 70s, talented filmmakers were taking sexual images and language to
extremes, far beyond any ordinary pornographer's imagination.
That's good.
I can make love for about three minutes.
I do about three minutes of sales fucking, then I need eight hours sleep.
Please, get hard, please.
Oh, welcome!
The
adult theater and its so-called dirty movies are gone. They've given way to adult video
and dirty tapes. But those theaters and the people that worked there and those movies
were part of a war. The city of Chicago started banning films in 1907. Each victory in the
battle against censorship brought another form of opposition from government, from self-appointed
watchdogs. The struggle against censorship may not be over, but it led to films and videos
we see today, no longer automatically obscene. And in the work of Zalman King and others,
often meant for couples to watch together. The struggle brought unlikely champions like
John Wayne, who fought a California proposition that threatened artistic freedom, and legitimate
heroes like censorship lawyer Stanley Fleischman and an army of producers and exhibitors. Okay,
not all of them people you might want to hang out with, but most of them courageous enough
to fight to defend their livelihood and even fight for what they believed in. Deep Throat
played in Los Angeles longer than any other movie has ever played. What happened was we
tried a case here in Los Angeles and the jury concluded that the, was not obscene. And on
the other hand, it was not obscene. I don't have to tell you that I'm against obscenity,
but you can't clean the slate with a badly written bill. I say no to Proposition 18.
People like Russ and I never took a bus sitting down. The court redefined obscenity last June
as being that which is offensive to community standards. Since then, there have been raids,
arrests and book burnings all across the country, as well as the shutting down of adult movie
houses. There is pornography, which is legally protected. It does not violate community standards.
The Supreme Court has laid out the law, but where the pornography violates the law, we
are going to enforce that law. They use general terms like does it appeal to prurient interests?
Does it go beyond the customary limits of candor? Does it have social value? All of
those things are vague and elastic. And in one case, Justice Potter Stewart said, look,
I don't know about these definitions, but I know it when I see it. Of course, we all
know it differently.
You have problems with the police, sheriffs. You have people like Keating, that bastard.
You know Keating, Charles Keating? Now they let him out again.
We would become a society of Pagan, animalistic and given over to all of the baser vices.
It takes one second of your time to beat your horn and say you're against porn.
The telephone would ring at two o'clock in the morning and wake up my wife and my kids
and somebody would be saying, you know, we're going to burn your house down.
Why have a boycott if you can switch the channel?
We perceive it to be a problem.
Do two people have a right in the privacy of their own home to batter each other to
pieces?
We all have a normal, healthy interest in fucking and sucking and it's not this terrible
thing.
In terms of sexuality, if people are willing partners, I suppose, most anything goes. Nine
and a half weeks is sort of a part of people's language now.
The door was just about closing towards these kind of relationship films, films that took
the audience into this, into the realm of romance in a way they hadn't seen it before.
I try to have all of the romance and all of the sexuality be motivated. People in the
audience are saying, well, that's not so bad, but it begins to escalate and escalate and
I think all along the way it's like floors in an elevator. You say, well, I want to get
off on this floor.
There is absolutely no evidence if you read box office figures that America is clamoring
for more graphic sexuality in films.
It's very possible for filmmakers to treat sexuality, which is obviously one of the great
human subjects, to treat it responsibly and artistically and creatively. But that doesn't
mean that every film that includes nudity and graphic sexuality is using it appropriately.
I think every movie art exists. I think everybody has a right to make any movie they choose,
write any book they want to write. But the price of freedom is that some of what they
create might be kept away from children, not adults. That's the key. If you are a legal
adult under this country and its blessed 45 words, which comprise the First Amendment,
is there for any adult to have the right to see anything he or she chooses to see.
It is the First Amendment because it is first and primary. Without it, you don't have a
peace of society.
It tends to be too easy, a lot easier than in real life, making a lot of us feel very
frustrated much of the time.
Ralph, you want to know what happened? He kissed me and I kissed him back. And then we did
it. We did it right there in the car. He fucked me right there in the car. I was drunk. It
didn't mean anything to me. I wish it hadn't happened, but it did.
As far as I'm concerned personally, putting aside child pornography, as I say, which is
not in the area of obscenity, there's no reason why adults can't consider any sexual material
just as they consider any outrageous political material or anything else.
Why treat sex as being outside of a First Amendment which is supposed to protect all
speech in a free society?
Leaving Las Vegas was one more example of how sexual openness and freedom could lead
to high achievement and quality in the mainstream movie.
In a huge trade show in the real Las Vegas, we can see how all this sexual imagery, and
you can call it porn if you insist, created a major industry.
Have a good time. Very good time.
I tell you, I like working for a mall. A lot of people think that porn is flea or whatever,
but it's not. We all get along, most of us, and we all just have a good time.
Legends of Erotica is now going to be a place where the industry has its own hall of fame.
Eventually people will be able to go there, much like Cooperstown or Canton, and worship
at the altars of their idols.
The legends of Erotica.
Okay, we'll start with Vanessa Del Rio.
She had the biggest split in her business.
She became famous and became famous in movies as Anne Hague.
She began her feature film career in 1977 with Alex Durenzi's Pretty Peaches.
Other noteworthy films include Talk Very to Me.
3D, three dimensional, in and out, in and out.
It's shooting on me.
A good movie could cost to make up to 10,000 and could gross about 250,000.
Guys like to watch these movies because they really don't do it at home.
Because if they did this to their wives, they'd get smacked in the mouth.
The box is the key to renting or buying any tape.
We know what we're doing.
There's no fuss, there's no mess, it's fun and that's it.
Younger men are always interested in more mature women.
I think it's that thing that maybe somebody knows something that they don't.
I hope they're not thinking about their mother, then I'd get busted on another problem.
This is a very good movie about two baseball players that are natural.
But they're hung a lot better than Robin Redford, so they got the part.
Robin Redford.
Most of the customers tell us that at least 20% of their consumers are women.
Our market is definitely the more masculine, body builder, hairy type.
Our newer videos do all feature safe sex.
They're wearing condoms and there's not a lot of, you know, no exchange of bodily clothes or anything like that.
Most of our newer product is solo masturbation videos.
They have the toppers videos and they have big boobs.
So now they're going for the young, natural boobs look.
This is Chacey Lane, vivid girl, par excellence.
And I would say that the reason that Chacey is a vivid girl is because she's absolutely stunning.
And take a look at those eyes.
This is Jeannine.
She just recently appeared with Howard Stern.
You're in this industry. One of the things that draws you to it is your love of sex.
We're the nice people and it's not work, it's fun.
We don't feel comfortable mixing any kind of hardcore intercourse with bondage or cat fighting or anything that the Supreme Court might think is pervading.
Foot worship is one of our most popular fetishes because a lot of guys really find beautiful female feet very sexy, very attractive.
It's red, it's blue, it's very pretty.
This is a nice bottom here we can look at and this is about girls having fun together.
Hi.
We like to have people doing real things with each other.
People who just sent us a tape that they and their boyfriend or something like that had done at home.
Now this girl right here was wrapped in saran wrap.
This has to do with child rearing practices sometime back before Dr. Spock when we gave animals to be regular and people found them feeling enjoyable.
It took about four boxes to wrap this person up.
I know it turns men on. If it didn't we wouldn't sell them.
This of course is the inimitable Christy Canyon.
Christy's a legend in her own time.
I'm old.
Family is back.
You guys want to see some skin?
Imagine a world where you can take all of this and bring it home.
For the past 20 or so years we've been in that world and no one has taken more advantage of it than the adult video business.
Besides those racks of money, we've been in the business of making videos.
Besides those racks of movies and those oversized boxes, you know where they are.
There are now sexually explicit cable channels and community access shows.
Sex videos are advertised in conservative newspapers.
You can access cyber sex on your computer.
The negative side of adult films and video, the talk of suicides, drugs, the taint real or imagined of organized crime,
the occasional teenager like Tracy Lourdes has been pounced on by the media.
Strong new laws protect the regular industry from child pornography.
Trade organizations try to look out for performers and producers,
but there's still some reluctance to show safe sex.
And there's a constant demand to show more and do more on camera.
And plenty of candidates eager to do it.
You do orgies?
Yeah.
Gang bangs.
I'm willing to pay 600 per scene for a girl-girl.
Okay.
This new world is just as image-conscious, promotional-minded and Hollywood as Hollywood.
Many of the women stars have supermodel looks and incredible sexual talent.
And in live appearances, they can make a million dollars a year.
And the sex itself is enlightening, to say the least.
I refer to the X-rated industry as a playpen of the damned,
an overage version of juvenile hall where recess is 24 hours a day and the bell of responsibility never goes off.
I do boy-girl-girl and I can do blowjob from another girl and she has single-girl masturbation.
The primary reason this business was designed was for masturbation.
It's a cathartic.
It's to get society up and off instead of out in the street with a hatchet in its hand.
I believe that it's also designed as a form of vicarious revenge,
for lack of a better term, against the cheerleaders we may not have had when we were in high school.
And the ultimate shot in the X-rated industry, of course, is the cum shot in the face.
If you're a male, there's no way you're going to be able to cheat.
You've got to get the heart on.
You've got to get the pop shot.
And you really don't want to be sitting there playing with your dick with a whole room full of indifferent people
who would sooner cut your dick off and replace it with a chorizo sausage because you're just not functioning.
And they don't want to hear, you know, I'm not feeling too frisky.
No, tough. Get it up.
It is, in the baseball analogy, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, full count, and you can't foul off a ball.
This is because of me because this is because my dick didn't get hard.
All of our body parts don't always cooperate.
Come on, boy. Come on.
We'll just say right then, hey, go home. It's okay. Thanks for trying.
When one dick doesn't work, you'd stick another dick in at a tight enough close-up that supposedly isn't noticed not to match.
I think stunt dick is really humiliating to the performer who's stunt dicked for.
You people out there who are men think, God, I'd love to make a fuck-film.
You A, would not get it up.
B, you wouldn't cum.
C, you'd find it difficult work.
It takes a professional to do what these guys do.
How much sex are you going to be able to enjoy with a cameraman a couple of feet away from you, a light even closer, burning your genitals,
and partner that you're with for the most part having worked with you so many times that you'd be better off shaking hands and screwing?
I mean, everybody knows Sylvester Stallone started in our industry.
It didn't work, and I kind of heard that maybe his lack of success in our industry was the reason for his success in the legitimate industry.
I happen to do it for the very, very rightest of reasons to go with my own flow, and that's immortality.
They taught us everything about you in law school.
Well, there's one thing they didn't teach.
What's that?
That I have a big dick.
Women are given the lion's share of the fame and notoriety in our industry, and the guys are really the ones that are doing a lot of the hard work.
Let's face it, I've been doing this for ten years.
I've had sex everywhere there is to have sex.
I think it would be fabulous to do it in a bed without 40 people standing around with the man I love in missionary position.
Never once does he pull out and come all over my face, and never once do I say, oh baby, I'm coming.
Oh, wow.
Can you work?
Well, you know, all girls can act a little.
How do you feel?
I love everyone.
Your public is out there watching you and a lot of them are stroking at me, looking at you.
I don't want any more of that.
I don't want any more of that.
I don't want any more of that.
I don't want any more of that.
I don't want any more of that.
I don't want any more of that.
I don't want any more of that.
We've had a number of suicides in this business, most of them not really related in the long run to the adult community,
but four or five suicides in this business over 25 years is four or five too many.
I'm number one.
How out there can you get, how dirty can you make your sex?
I mean, and I've seen girls just push the limits, you know, having two in their ass, one in their pussy,
and jerking off two guys at the same time.
It's hard to say, no, I won't do that, because it may be very important to the script to do something maybe a little bizarre or a little kinky.
And then there are times when I would probably say, no, if it didn't seem so important or didn't seem to fit in,
if there was no reason for it being there, I probably wouldn't do it.
If I could have a valid reason for a real kinky thing to be in, I would probably do it.
And I'm starting to think, what the hell, in five years, what are they going to do next?
We sell a couple films.
We want to sell something that the man and wife can watch together.
We don't sell four hours with nothing but compilation, there's no storyline, it's sex, sex, sex.
And we sell something with a plot, with a storyline, with some production value, so both people can watch and enjoy the video.
They have seven, eight, nine, ten sex scenes.
They know they're going to get their, I like to say more, fuck for your buck.
They know that they get it.
Michael Nint, director, he has a vision that we feel is far and above anybody else's image today, and it shows himself.
It's popular because I think that a lot of people want to feel guilty.
A lot of people still think that sex is dirty.
Latex was number one, nine weeks in a row.
Death asked yourself, would Casablanca have been one bit more romantic, one bit more dramatic, if it had included a nude sex scene between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman?
This is what people are looking for.
They're looking for something different.
They're looking for something different than the old, well, boy meets girl, they go and screw.
What the fuck?
All we can do is breathe and hug.
Breathe and hug.
Live, uncensored, it's time for television's first interactive erotic call-in program.
Okay, you know that those aren't real.
I don't care.
Wow.
Hi.
Can I please watch the channel?
Sure, you can. I'm turning it off.
Turning it off.
I'd like to see this in 3D, huh?
Flappers flinging off their clothes, strippers shaking their breasts, beach bunnies wiggling their hips, legs spreading, zippers unzipping, sinners sinning, sometimes more anatomical details than you might be interested in.
Sometimes some sensuous and genuine lovemaking.
There's a long, fascinating, often surprising history in the shadowy story of X.
We're pioneers in the neoplastic arts.
See, there's no rejection, it's just love.
Let it come out, let it come out.
Oh, yes.
They say that if you like it, it's erotic.
If you don't, it's pornographic.
If you get busted for it, it's obscene.
The same images, the same movie, and maybe most of the films themselves don't have much apparent social value, but would you rather see gratuitous acts of violence or gratuitous acts of love?
Well, I'm 76 years old, so this.
The juices are not quite the same.
But every once in a while when I hear there's really a good movie, I'll call up a client and say, hey, I'd like to see that one.
Scenery, and then just bring my leg over.
How do we have sex?
Her and I, an ass lawyer.
Oh, oh, oh, is there any other way?
It's just as nasty.
I can't stand these squishy, blue eye-time because they bend.
I like the vibrators.
Don't you remember the lecture I gave you on dildo shopping?
D.H. Lawrence, who wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, the book, not the video, once said, to the Puritan, all things are impure.
Despite a lot of opposition, we've come a long way.
From secret screenings in the basement to our very own section of the video store, from dark shadows to bright lights.
What's next?
Bye.
Excuse me.
I just want to check this out.
What?
Need to be in it?
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.