Take One (Mar-Apr 1973)

“People want to go to a movie and they want to be entertained... we’re just giving them one more alternative.” 1964, he did Lorna, which added a touch of drama. In 1968 there was Vixen, which was so _ successful that 20th Century-Fox fronted him the money for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls barely a decade after he had _ initiated sexploitation. Nor was he the only one to strike it rich during that era. The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill was made in 1965 for $25,000 by a group of anonymous producers who considered it so hot they were glad to unload it for. $75,000. Dave Friedman’s Entertainment Ventures Inc., the “suckers” who picked it up, have since grossed half a miHion dollars on it. EVI, which for a time specialized in films that mixed blood with sexploitation, is one of the soft-core biggies to this day, its chief rival being Box Office International, which did extremely well with The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, a quick-cutting sex comedy structured like Laugh-/n that in 1969 won a Cannes Film Festival award for most erotic film. The sexploitations were cheap and they made good money. The President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography estimated that by the late '60s there were perhaps 100 firms making soft-core sex films. Budgets ran anywhere from $3000 to $100,000, the average being $20,000 to $40,000. Profits ranged from 100% to 400%, the average return being about $75,000. The circuit for them consisted of 500-600 theaters. They provided a way into the industry Stacy Walker, + Art and Jim Mitchell. for aspiring filmmakers. Laszlo Kovacs was cinematographer on. The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill, and Francis Ford Coppola similarly got his start in nudies (a fact he is not inclined to discuss these days). But they were hardly enough to satisfy an audience that was itself experiencing the so-called sexual revolution of the 60s. They started out showing nothing but bare boobs (no genitalia, no sex), and at their peak they had none but simulated sexual activity. With action and story line so limited, they come off today as camp more than anything else, thanks in large part to their extensive use of dildoes, elaborate costumes, swearing, and heavy overtones of sadism and masochism. Russ Meyer is seen as some kind of king of camp, as is his busty ex-wife Edie Williams and other soft-core stars like Lorna Maitland, Uschi Digart, Maria Arnold, and John Tull. The films play drive-ins and the nabes today, and are usually rated R. Because when you get right down to it, these films never have gotten right down to it. Running parallel to them, though, was another kind of sex flick that also didn’t get right down to it, but surely provided the inspiration for those that later did. These were the sex “documentaries,” usually shot at a nudist colony or Esalentype encounter. They showed a little more of the human body and were able to justify their slightly more bold approach by virtue of the fact that they were documentaries and thus had the “redeeming social value” that the courts Sb JOHN BURKS required. Marilyn Chambers’ first film, Together, was.of.this type. Purchased from independent producers by Hallmark for distribution to its 200 or so Esquire Theaters in 1969, Together wound up grossing about $6 million. Marilyn, who was 17 at the time, got $250 for her part; she was shown (in slow motion) jumping off a diving board nekkid. The stage was actually set for genuine hard-core in America when pornography laws in Denmark were liberalized and the Danes ‘held their big sex fair of 1970. Sherpix, another of the majors in the sexploitation field. and the company that distributed Andy Warhol films in 1965 when nobody else would touch him, decided to make a documentary of the sex fair, and sent San Francisco’s Alex de Renzy off to Copenhagen to film it. Since live sex was a part of the fair exhibition, it was included in the documentary, and Americans could now watch non-simulated sex on the silver screen. Pornography in Denmark was the breakthrough, and it was soon followed by Graffiti Productions’ History of the Blue Movie, which strung together old stag films and called itself a documentary, and Hollywood Blue, which did the same but carried it further by strongly suggesting that the footage included famous stars who’d done stag films for quick money when they first came to Hollywood. So in 1970, in a few cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, hard-core was in. The documentary approach was quickly deserted. The 13