Take One (Mar-Apr 1973)

At some point, no matter how much you personally like or dislike porn films, you have to stop and wonder what’s gonna happen next. oe a ee You're driving into San Francisco and there, smack over the freeway at the center of the city is Marilyn Chambers Staring down at you from a billboard advertising The Resurrection of Eve. You turn on the TV and are faced with Linda Lovelace dispensing coy double entendres to some talk show _ hack. Georgina Spelvin is down at the local shopping center signing autographs just like any other movie star, and at some point, no matter how much you personally like or dislike porn films, you just have to Stop and wonder what's gonna happen next. Until the neanderthal Supreme Court decision of a year ago, plenty of people would have been willing to venture an opinion to that. Now it’s a little more problematic, but one thing is certain. Pornographic films (or erotic cinema, as current fashion would have it) have come out of the back alleys and into the mainstream. Middle America, if not its elected and appointed representatives, is taking the films pretty much in stride. The people who make: them, and perform in them, are in many cases shedding the anonymity that once served as protection. As the films take on more of. the thematic and technical conventions of Hollywood, so do Hollywood films take on more of the aspects of porn. Respected film critics earnestly review The Devil in Miss Jones as an art film, and comparisons are made between the porn film industry and the early days of Hollywood. Somebody is making a lot of money, and somebody is losing a lot of money. Sometimes the whole scene looks like one enormous joke being played on. people who are taking things entirely too seriously. | mean, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Such a disproportionate amount of attention being heaped on one aspect of our lives? All these Westchester matrons lining up at scrungy Times Square theaters to see Ms. Lovelace do her unlikely thing? The Obsessive desire of Marilyn Chambers and Georgina Spelvin to be seen: as “serious” actresses when we know they're just fucking and sucking for big bucks because it beats work? The arguments over whether or not it’s “art” and whether or not it can “help” people? The knee-jerk reaction of the judiciary? Maybe so, but we are talking about sex, after all. That's a topic people never got tired of. And they aren't calling it Porno Chic these days for nothing, either. The media spotlight on porn films may have already even peaked, but there’s certainly no_fewer films being made, and the John Morthland is a freelance writer/editor living in San Francisco. A couple months after he finished this assignment, a friend conned him into seeing something billed as “the first Samurai porn film” ata theater in LA’s Japantown. It was a real stinkeroo, and he hasn't given much thought to the subject of pornography ever since. 6 The trapeze scene from Green Door. audience for them certainly hasn't decreased as the headlines have. So before we get into the meat and potatoes here, let's have a few words from Jon Fontana, self-taught cameraman, editor, production director, and all-around good guy for the Mitchell Brothers Film Group, which brought Marilyn Chambers into the public eye with Behind the Green. Door and The Resurrection of Eve, after making more than 200 films seldom shown outside their own O'Farrell Theater in San Francisco. Fontana was a straightA student and all-around varsity athlete in the central California town where he was raised. He was a high school teacher before getting into the porn biz, and, like the Mitchells and Ms. Chambers, he plays heavily on the All-American image. “We could see Porno Chic coming for sure,” he remarked one afternoon as we sat on the floor in the Mitchells’ offices above the theater. “Before, people’d show ‘em in their houses and stuff and you'd get nobody around the theater except the raincoat guys. But you could see the Chic thing coming just by the people coming in here. As for Truman Capote and people like that paying transitory tribute to something, who really gives a shit? You just know that next year they'll be on to something else. | mean, | know what people we're trying to do our thing for, and whether they're middle class or not doesn’t matter. We're just trying to follow our own image of what we are. The audience we have now — compared to when we opened — is more educated, bigger income... hey! our COURTESY MITCHELL BROTHERS audience is the same as anybody else’s audience, there’s just no doubt. “People want to go to a movie and they want to be entertained by that movie, and we're just giving them one more alternative — and they take it. There’s no doubt we're in the entertainment business now, we're in show business. The’change is because we are entertaining, we've improved, we’ve got longevity and tenure... we're just another institution now. “| find the term Porno Chic mildly offensive because it’s like anything else chic, you know, it’s decadent America. As far as fad, it’s all synthetic demand. The fad was created and now what matters is how to sustain it. It's gone from being a fad to being a way of life for a certain person to go to pornographic movies two or three times every year. And to please those people we've started looking for acting ability as much as sexual ability. We're trying to get into drama and see what we can do with it.” You're not going to believe this, but enterprising sex film buffs claim to have actually traced back to the original stag film. It was supposedly made in Buenos Aires in 1904, and shipped out to England and France. The first American porno film is said to be A Grass Sandwich (circa 1915), which is included in Bill Osco’s History of the Blue Movie, a 1970 hard-core documentary. The stag films were naturally crude, and their circulation was limited to smoky back rooms and men’s clubs. But they were much more common than is presumed by those people who have gotten so excited about sex.in the cinema in recent years. Until the formation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (the notorious Hays Office) in 1922, American films dealt fairly frankly with sex. Recent reports indicate, for example, that the orgy scene in Griffith's Intolerance was not simulated. The Hays Office had a chilling effect on sex in the cinema for some time, but even that wore off to an extent, enough so that Hedy Lamarr could swim in the nude in Ecstacy (1936) without Causing too big a sensation. But until 1959, the film which had sex as its sole premise was underground. Then came Russ Meyer with The Immoral Mr. Teas, a film which made no claims for itself beyond the fact that it presented naked women. In that sense, it was like the aforementioned nudies of the '20s and ’30s — except that it was aboveground and has grossed better than $1 million on production costs of about $25,000. Meyer went on to become a kingpin in the soft-core, or sexploitation industry. In