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by Felicia Feaster
"This is my happening and it freaks me out!" Thus spoke swinging record producer/transvestite Ronnie "Z-Man" Barzell in the midst of a psychedelic party in Russ Meyer's cult classic Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
He might as well have been describing the Swinging Sixties, a decade which saw America's movie industry revealing more skin and sleaze than a midnight tour of Sunset Strip. Thanks to a new sexual license, for the first time in the history of film, sex seemed more than titillation or cautionary tale -- it actually looked like fun.
What a difference a decade makes. Film -- along with comic books and juvenile delinquency -- had been endlessly debated as a potential social corrosive in the censorial Fifties. But by the early Sixties film was considered protected under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. By the late Sixties the movie industry was taking advantage of this new freedom with films like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Myra Breckinridge, Midnight Cowboy and the oddball 1969 British release Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (which starred Playmate Connie Kreski). All were rated X under the newly formed rating system that had essentially wiped out the old Production Code.
In the Sixties Playmates who surfed their Centerfolds into silver screen celebrity were no longer limited to the ranks of vamp and virgin. While Fifties Playmates like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield often seemed to personify sex, Playmates of the next decade shared a casual, equal sexual rapport with their male leads, the power dynamic often shifting from men in control to women in the driver's seat.
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All featured Playmates are in The Playmate Book.
When the cameras stopped rolling, the real show started. Read all about it in The Mansion Book.
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