Porno Chic

hard-core theater parties are the latest fashion for middle-class thrill seekers--and brigades of cops with padlocks

Late Last Winter, while an angry New York judge was pondering the moral depths of Deep Throat, groups of a dozen or more dithery suburban matrons in mink stoles and flowery bonnets would show up from time to time in front of Manhattan's World Theater on grubby West 49th Street. "They looked like they were on their way to a matinee of Fiddler on the Roof," says 27-year-old manager Bob Summer, eyes and ears of the World. "We'd always stop them at the box office and ask if they knew exactly what kind of movie Throat was. And they'd always say why, certainly, all their friends out in Westbury or Westchester hardly talked of anything else." Of course, the ladies were merely taking a cue from gossip columnists, socialites and such trend setters as Truman Capote and Mike Nichols. According to Sumner, one of Throat's more vehement supporters was Johnny Carson's TV side-kick, Ed McMahon: "He came with six guys and a case of Budweiser and stood out front afterward, chatting about the movie to passers-by for half an hour." Hardly what a New York Times writer had in mind when he strove to fix a label upon this curious social phenomenon and came up with "porno chic."

With or without a catchy tag--despite court orders, audible gasps from the Silent Majority and a menacingly cold wind from Capitol Hill--the sexual revolution is reaching every nook and cranny of America, and those censorial skirmishes that used to concern racy dog-eared novels are now focused on films. From Nashville to Des Moines and Milwaukee, from Portland, Oregon, to a drive-in theater in Georgia, moviegoers who might be hard pressed to identify Tuesday Weld are flocking to see Throat star Linda Lovelace, whose tour de force of fellatio drew $1,300,000 during a 39-week run at Manhattan's World and is breaking box-office records wherever it plays, for an estimated total gross of well over $5,000,000. Considering Throat's $25,000 production budget, the returns are staggering. In the whole history of dirty movies, there has never been anything quite like it.

So far, the law's agitated response to Throat has served mainly to dramatize a tremendous cultural chasm between official attitudes toward hard-core--as a peril to the nation--and the general public's genial and fairly sophisticated tolerance of it. The contradictions were underscored when Throat--after being declared not obscene by a jury in provincial Binghamton, New York--was closed and unequivocally condemned in New York City by Judge Joel J. Tyler, who also slapped a $100,000 fine on the World Theater for contaminating Fun City fleshpots with such filth. Soon afterward, a Chicago jury was unable to arrive at a judgment about the alleged obscenity of Throat and split six to six, provoking the judge to declare a mistrial. It's a pattern that's been repeated with variations in courtrooms from coast to coast: Prosecutors have found the odds heavily stacked against winning hard-core convictions in the face of public apathy or even forthright opposition. In Escondido, California, for example, a self-styled Citizens' Decency Association trying to close the Ritz Pussycat Theater took a full-page ad in a local newspaper--and found nearly half the attendees at its first public rally outspokenly pro-Pussycat.

Clearly, despite official holding actions, the descendants of our Puritan fathers have begun to close the gap between private and public morality, admitting at last that the American dream may prove expansive enough to make an inalienable right of those liberating sexual fantasies we used to conceal as smut. Gone are the days when most pornography was imported from abroad; with the porn explosion abating overseas, the U.S. has become the world's top producer and consumer of erotica. Chief centers of film production are New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where several hundred feature-length hard-core movies are made and distributed annually to something like 1500 exhibitors across the country (though the number of theaters showing 16mm and 35mm sex films is at best an educated guess, highly variable in response to the militancy of local lawenforcement bluenoses). And one California motel chain is revamping its facilities to offer sex films on closed-circuit color TV, along with mirrored walls and water beds.

Even those who haven't seen a hardcore film must know by now that the audiences include more women, more dating couples and young marrieds than ever before. But what is it they go to see? Hardcore by definition means actual rather than simulated sex, and few porn films leave room for doubt about the difference. The obligatory hard-core scenes are genital close-ups: the so-called wet shots (or "cum" shots, as they're known in the trade) that seem almost religiously bound to observe the sanctity of coitus interruptus in order to show the penis ejaculating. Equally obligatory are penetration shots that show male and female connecting at close range and from any angle an adroit cameraman can manage without fogging his lens; the oral-genital shots, more often than not of a female going down on her male partner in the manner--if not to the degree--made classic by Linda Lovelace; and what are sometimes called "tunnel" shots, those vaginal vistas that leave a viewer with the odd sensation of being either a first-year student in gynecology or a skier schussing down mons Veneris in the giant slalom. All in all, it's not a formula that promises much in the way of enduring art.

There thrives today, however, a whole new breed of porn-film makers doing what they can to dissociate themselves from the stigma of smut. They are the easy riders of a new wave that began to swell in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when Bill Osco's Mona and Alex de Renzy's History of the Blue Movie broke through public resistance to the exhibition of hard-core in comfortable main-stem theaters. In several respects, the porn-film scene of 1973 is strikingly reminiscent of Hollywood during that pioneer era when making any sort of movie was considered disreputable--when actors, writers and directors cranked out primitive two-reelers under assumed names, lest their colleagues in legitimate theater or publishing circles accuse them of prostitution. It all changed, of course, with the emergence of Griffith and Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Mary Pickford--talent that bloomed overnight in a wasteland of mediocrity.

Let's stop short, however, of dubbing Linda Lovelace the Mary Pickford of porno; to claim such distinction for anyone from the ranks of hard-core would be hasty, if not downright idiotic, at this juncture. Yet the past achievements and present aspirations of many blue-movie makers are summed up by writer-director Gerard Damiano--creator not only of Deep Throat but also of a notable erotic psychodrama titled The Devil in Miss Jones (reviewed in last month's Playboy) that may well become a landmark in the evolution of sex films from wall-to-wall f & s (fuck and suck) to palpable quality. A stocky, gray-bearded man in his 40s, Damiano was a hairdresser in Queens until six years ago. "My first three years in this business, I made three hundred dollars and went through everything I had--three beauty salons and a wig store," says Damiano. "But people make sex films because they want to make films. Sex films now are to moviemakers what the Borscht circuit was to comedians--the only place you can learn outside the restrictive unions. It's the best schooling."

Damiano took the usual route from soft-to hard-core in the early Seventies by making Marriage Manual, Changes and Sex U.S.A. in the bogus documentary style then deemed acceptable, which meant that they would be relatively immune from censorship. "Six months after I Am Curious (Yellow), we came out with Marriage Manual, the first time we did real sex. But there was always a doctor telling you this could help your marriage. In Sex U.S.A., too, we gave them the old socially redeeming values. By the time of Deep Throat, though, I had decided to do what I liked. How can you convince people that what you're doing is legit if you don't believe in it yourself?"

Damiano believed in Miss Jones. "It's always a shock, even to me, seeing hardcore blown up twenty times bigger than life, so I thought of doing it soft-core, then decided hell, no, the time had come for a good pornographic art film. I hoped audiences were ready to take us seriously if we stopped making fun of our sexual problems. Why can't we just look at sex as sex, and not think we've always got to make people laugh in order to justify it? The movies have been masculine fantasies up to now, exploiting women because you played to the male audience. But the audience today includes women, and I consider Miss Jones a totally feminine film. It's the males who become meat, reduced to objects of her fantasy. And it's the penis she's in love with, not the man." Though some people might call that a typically male fantasy, Damiano doesn't expect to please everyone.

He can work up some heat in response to questions about obscenity laws and the holier-than-thou attitude of establishment film makers. "Hard-core would die a natural death in six months if they let us alone. Deep Throat had just started to peak out in New York when they busted it and made it a household word. People in the film business will do whatever makes money, but they gloss over movies filled with violence. I believe there can be as much appeal in watching two people make love as in watching one person slice another person's head off.

"The moral values of your average sex-film maker are ten times higher," Damiano adds, "than those of people making TV commercials. They are the real pimps and prostitutes. And the girl in a sex film doesn't usually have to ball the producer and director to get a role. She does her balling in the open. If we get rid of censorship, all this is going to take another form. Look at Jane Fonda in Klute; hard-core sex belonged in that picture. Belle de Jour needed hard-core to make it real. And Last Tango in Paris has tremendous significance, is important because it's a fine picture. I'm just sorry that Brando and Bertolucci copped out. In Last Tango, I would have added a few insertions and cum shots."

Damiano's emphatic views echo and reecho through conversations with bluemovie makers on both coasts. Last Tango impresses them, almost without exception, as indicative of the way in which hardcore and traditional story films are moving into contiguous orbits, and not so slowly at that. Some point out that Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather, made a sexploitation flick called Tonight for Sure in 1964. A surprising number of optimists mention militant feminist Jane Fonda as the actress they would most like to cast in a $1,000,000 sex epic. Such daydreaming might have sounded insanely unrealistic a couple of years ago, when hard-core sex was still treated by critics in all media as if it were nonexistent. Now Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, large metropolitan dailies, New York magazine's Judith Crist and many other reviewers cover the field regularly, however gingerly. Throat, of course, has had the kind of press usually reserved for a triumph in space, which perhaps it is.

One of the reasons hard-core has begun to be taken seriously is offered by San Francisco's Mitchell brothers, both in their 20s and hard-core veterans with ten features, over 300 short "beaver" films and 35 police busts behind them since they entered the business in 1969. "We're into the wide world of sex, not just into fuck films," says Jim. Owners and operators of the O'Farrell Theater, the Mitchells widened their aesthetic horizons with Behind the Green Door, based on a porno semiclassic by "Anonymous" and starring blonde, willowy Marilyn Chambers--who resembles Cybill Shepherd and is indisputably pornography's answer to Miss America. Catnip to young couples, Green Door is a trip film, a kind of sexual Space Odyssey about a girl abducted into a bizarre sex show--a sustained, strangely beautiful erotic fantasy with some of the holding power of hypnosis.

In somewhat the same bag is Wakefield Poole, a former dancer whose lyrical, penny-elegant The Boys in the Sand (budgeted at $8000) and Bijou ($22,000) made gay films acceptable to sophisticated straight audiences as well as more popular with homosexuals, and thus far show a profit of $65,000 apiece. "I was among the first to give up the traditional cum shots," says Poole. "I was criticized for that, yet one critic compared Bijou to Steppenwolf. When we first opened Boys, there were ten cities in the U.S. where you could play gay films. Now there are twice that many." (On this circuit, theaters tend to serve a dual purpose as social centers--thus, at Manhattan's leading gay show place, the doorman says, "Most of the action here is in the john....I have to use the ladies' room.") Aiming to achieve "the most beautiful erotic movie ever made," Poole is at work on a $35,000 heterosexual mini-epic titled Wakefield Poole's Bible, which will uncover the creation, Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah, and more.

Deep Sleep won the Audience Award for best picture at the second annual New York Erotic Film Festival (perhaps in no small part because of memorable sex scenes in a coffin and a hammock), but brought young Alfred Sole--a former interior decorator going into blue movies for the first time--more profit than honor in Paterson, New Jersey, his home town. Some of Sole's suburban neighbors were not amused; neither was a state senator whose home appeared briefly in the background of one shot. Though New Jersey's anti-obscenity laws were struck down as unconstitutional last year, a Passaic Country judge is bringing Sole and his two leading actors to trial under an all-but-forgotten fornication law that went on the books in 1796.

A prolific California film maker who calls himself Jack Armstrong is a law school grad who produces Catholic and Protestant religious films part time. The rest of his time since 1970 has been given to turning out 35 hard-core features, including Sex and the Comics, The Story of O and Act of Confession (the last, never shown publicly, a self-therapeutic effort concerning an unholy order of nuns and priests so preoccupied with carnal knowledge that a group of horrified Eastern exhibitors offered to buy the master print--and burn it). Among the iconoclastic Armstrong's current projects are Suckula (vampires in Southern California), Sabbat (Sexual witchcraft) and AWOL (in which a Marine makes it with his mom--another sex-film first).

The hard-core woods abound with men who have given up lucrative careers in TV and magazine advertising to make movies. Eduardo Cemano's films--The Healers, Fongaluli and Madame Zenobia--are being marketed abroad by a veteran distributor who calls them "tasteful and fairy-talish, in a surrealistic Cocteau style of eroticism, not the usual head-giving chicks with pimples on their ass." Adds Cemano: "I'm doing trip films for youth, not for the old geezers. I'm into the metaphysical aspects; I want to become the H.G. Wells of sex." Bearded, 31-year-old "Milton Vikkers," who uses a nom de film because his father is eminent on Wall Street, gave up top money as a still photographer to make such hard-core fare as The Whistle Blowers and White Slavery: New York City (both featuring Kim Pope, a pert blonde porn star facing trial in New Jersey for her performance in Sole's Deep Sleep). Vikkers says, "I deal with sex but try to avoid exploiting it. I'm a film maker, not a pornographer. I'd call people like myself the logical result of the sexual revolution and the film generation--sex and movies coinciding."

Earnest, ambitious film makers such as these, of course, are still outnumbered by bleary pornographers grinding out f & s schlock for a fast buck (which isn't to imply that the ratio of serious artists to commercial hacks is measurably higher in Beverly Hills). The trend, however, seems to be toward not only the kind of erotic mysticism of Cemano but also spoof comedy of the type immortalized by the broad, raunchy and sophomoric It Happened in Hollywood, produced under the auspices of Screw magazine, which generously awarded it 101 percent on the "peter meter," though Screw editor Al Goldstein candidly calls Hollywood "high-class garbage." Even in such unserious efforts, it's evident that those involved are attempting to appeal to more than purely prurient interests by developing deeper characterization, stronger stories with a social or psychological slant and the superior production values that are a concomitant of higher budgets--away from the lowly "one-day wonders" that usually cost a few thousand dollars to produce and seldom attempted more than a conventional clocking of the old in and out between doctor and patient, housewife and plumber, businessman and baby sitter.

The profit margin in porno often comes out pitifully small. If he finds a distribution deal instead of selling his work outright, a moviemaker collects perhaps 60 percent of film rentals, less the cost of prints and advertising. Which can mean that an out-of-town exhibitor rents one picture for $500 a week, rips off extra prints for his five other theaters and later trades the copies with friends in a distant city, who send him prints they've ripped off someone else. Always vulnerable to the law, few victims are in a position to cry thief.

In fact, the fear of legal action--heightened by the unknown effect of imminent decisions on obscenity from the U.S. Supreme Court--explains the increasing tendency of hard-core-film makers to go soft. A striking example is the return of Linda Lovelace in a movie currently titled Deep Throat II, with a new director and said to have been shot hard-core but repruned for an R rating under the Motion Picture Code (though a Throat without hard-core sounds rather like a Lassie movie without the dog.) It's a prospect that moves Linda herself to a pretty pout of disapproval. Dining at a beach-front restaurant in Malibu with her boyfriend and manager, Chuck Traynor, Linda voiced very definite opinions with the shy diffidence of a schoolgirl. "Throat II will be a backward step if they take out the hard-core. I don't want to back away, and I'm not looking for a big Hollywood career. I'm a porno star. I just want to be Linda Lovelace."

Being just that seems sufficiently chic and socially acceptable to make Linda an Esquire cover girl as well as the subject of an interview in modish Women's Wear Daily and an occasional guest on the talk-show circuit. Recently, her arrival in a Rolls limo created a minor sensation at the Last Tango premiere in Hollywood, where press photographers mobbed her. ("Carroll O'Connor," Chuck interjected, "was the only big name who had balls enough to shake hands and offer congratulations.") Last Tango itself was lost on Linda. "Just disgusting," she says, "and the sex scenes weren't a bit believable. Hollywood should stick to comedies and Westerns and stay away from sexy romantic stories."

The first authentic superstar to emerge from sex films--once considered a dead end for actors--Linda can now demand a (text continued on page 153)Porno Chic(continued from page 138) healthy cut of profits, plus a salary well in excess of the $100--$150 a day that amounts to good pay for all but the lucky few performers in hard-core. The lucky ones are becoming more visible and less embarrassed than ever before about their status in showbiz' sexual ghetto, where performers acquire new names and shed them as casually as underthings for anorgy. Several, Linda included, have recently written books about their careers in porno; hers, aptly, is titled Inside Linda Lovelace.

"Most aren't actors by any stretch of the imagination," says Damiano, though he himself did a lot to improve the image of sex stars when he gave the lead in Miss Jones to 37-year-old Georgina Spelvin, whose anonym masks her identity as a onetime musical-comedy trouper with solid credits both on and off Broadway. "I'd like to do Hedda Gabler hard-core," she says, only half joking.

There's no denying that part of the kick in watching these performers perform is to speculate about their behavior offcamera. Georgina keeps house with actress Claire Lumiere--her partner in private as well as in the Lesbian sequence of Miss Jones. "For God's sake," she cries, "don't call us bisexual. We're sexual people, that's all." Either way, or both, Georgina has made 16 sex films since last summer, playing Charlie Chaplin in a short and leads in Well of Frenzy, Sexual Witchcraft and Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig.

Blond, handsome Calvin Culver, 29, appears to be fulfilling Variety's prediction that he might be the first actor to make a clean leap from sex stardom to "legit" movies and theater. Though he first achieved recognition with the gay set (as Casey Donovan) in Casey, The Back Row and Poole's Boys in the Sand, Cal has also acted on Broadway with Ingrid Bergman, plays a strong straight part in Radley Metzger's Score and is front runner for a major role with Maggie Smith in the film version of Mary Renault's The King Must Die.

Of all the impressively endowed males laboring in the phallic wonderland of hard-core, none can match California's formidable John C. Holmes, known as Johnny Wadd or Supercock because his erect penis tops a foot-long ruler by one inch, according to Holmes's own calculations (a vital statistic checkable in Teenage Cowgirls, a porn detective series, and some 1700 other hard-core films of varying length). "When I was six years old, my cock hung down to my knees. I was embarrassed about it," says Holmes. Now in his late 20s, tall and lean, with a physique remarkable in only one respect, he offers no apologies for his fame as a fuck-film phenomenon--and hustler. "I was in Europe for six years, fucking a famous movie producer's old lady, who introduced me to people. That's how I got into films. Lately I'm also writing scripts."

Pursued with equal zeal by males and females who somehow secure his address or phone number, Holmes much prefers older, wiser and wealthier members of the opposite sex. "Women send me air fare and expenses. I've been to New York five or six times, and went to England once with a woman who was leaving her husband behind in Florida. You meet some nice people. I'm just me, doing what I do the best I can--I turn a few tricks and make fuck films. Hell, I know factories in California where they show fuck movies during the lunch break. My biggest following is in Hawaii. I spent six months in Waikiki with a stripper, doing a nude night-club show. The island was saturated with Johnny Wadd publicity. And there was a whole section devoted to me at the Porno Exhibit in Copenhagen in 1971. 'The Best from America.'"

The only East Coast rival to Holmes is New Yorker Marc Stevens (nine inches erect), who, as number two, presumably tries harder in The Whistle Blowers, Deep Sleep, The Hypnotist and It Happened in Hollywood. "I've been peddling my ass for twenty-seven years. I'm the only true exhibitionist in the business." Talking with Stevens tends to blur the line between uninhibited revelation and shrewd self-promotion by a superstud who claims to make "an outasight obscene phone call" and is hell-bent on becoming a male sex symbol. Regarding a sequence that may or may not remain in the final cut of the widely heralded sequel to Deep Throat, Stevens says, "Linda gave me a hand job and a mediocre blow job. I challenge her to deep-throat me in Madison Square Garden." (Inching way ahead of Stevens, Linda asserts in her book that she could deep-throat even Supercock, and says she'd welcome the chance to brave it in a future superporn epic.)

There are things, of course, that porno performers will not do for lust or money. Anal intercourse is ruled out by many actresses--especially with performers the size of Stevens. Perhaps half the men rule out homosexual scenes, and bestiality is a no-no for a majority of actors, as are sadomasochistic scenes, unless simulated. Doing anything whatever with a prodigy like Holmes is considered "horrible" by L.A.'s Cindy Hopkins, a busy body who--until recently, when she decided to quit the business--also danced nude at The Ball, a private club in Santa Monica where she offered absolute proof that California sex queens possess unbeatable physical assets. "All of us doing films out here are a very tight family," says Cindy, who worked with Holmes once and only once, in a movie called Double Exposure. "Lots of girls are crazy about him, and he's a very nice guy, but my God! Last year, I did a tour promoting Teenage Fantasies. I'd be in the theater lobby in Chicago or Indianapolis. It was really a groove, and touching, the way men and women from eighteen to eighty would tell you their sex hang-ups and ask advice."

New York's hard-core film colony consists of 30 to 40 performers who work together, ball together, talk shop together and call up to exchange tips about casting. Andrea True, Jamey Gillis, Kim Pope, Cindy West (winner of the Best Actress Award in the 1972 Erotic Filmfest), Mary Madigan and Davey Jones have appeared, individually and together, in dozens of hard-core features. But perhaps the steadiest-working actor of the lot is Harry Reems, most memorably cast as the teacher who schools Miss Jones in deviltry and as the doctor whose diagnostic tool is engulfed by Linda Lovelace in Deep Throat. Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris has compared Reems (an alias chosen to conceal his identity as a moonlighting member of the Screen Actors Guild) to Marlon Brando in Tango, and gave Harry more points for "his superb performance of sexual swordplay without sexual swagger." Once named corespondent in a divorce suit brought by a man whose wife appeared opposite him in a porn picture, Reems expects to earn $50,000 this year from sex films--unless he defects to a major talent agency that feels reasonably certain his sex appeal can be exploited on a larger scale. According to Reems, most performers are valued for a specialty, his being that he can ejaculate on a 15-second cue and still keep track of where the camera is. "You need total concentration and involvement," he says, and finds a cum shot very little different from a scene that requires an actor to cry.

Jason and Tina Russell are a bisexual couple who live in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and seem typical of urban young marrieds--except that both hail from small-town America and have not yet told their parents how they earn a living. The secret will be hard to keep after publication this summer of Tina's paperback, Porno Star, describing their sexual explorations onscreen and off. A 24-year-old brunette with finely chiseled features and a crisp Radcliffe air about her, Tina writes and speaks with total candor about the night she came upon Jason and a friend named Eric making love and decided to join them: "Friends should make love; it helps friendship to grow." About social diseases, a professional hazard: "People worry a little about vaginitis, because the guys can transmit it from girl to girl, but we seldom worry about V.D. because everyone knows everyone else. Anyway, there are only seven or eight people we're willing to fuck on film." And about marriage: "I never knew love could be so perfect until I met Jason. Whenever I have to fantasize in a movie, I relate it to him."

Tina has much in common with San Francisco's Marilyn Chambers, 21, who appeared in the soft-core Together and had a bit role in The Owl and the Pussycat before her spectacular hard-core debut in Behind the Green Door. Marilyn was also visible lately at neighborhood supermarkets on boxes of Ivory Snow, as a young mother obviously 99-44/100 percent pure--a reminder of her modeling days and presumably an embarrassment to Procter & Gamble when the story broke in hundreds of newspapers. (Though P. & G.'s Manhattan ad representative, perhaps noting a climb in sales, later paid $1000 for a five-year extension of Marilyn's contract.) Happily married to a professional bagpipe player, Marilyn senses no real contradiction: "People expect me to be a horror, I know, but I feel I am the way I look, clean-cut and wholesome. I hate the expression 'fuck films,' and I'd be very hurt if my husband were unfaithful to me, and I'd be embarrassed to go to an orgy. But I've done everything I can think of with guys and chicks, and I feel it's made me a mellower person, taken the pressure off."

If the performers in hard-core sound like rebels, however diffident, against traditional moral standards, it's because that's just what they are, with few exceptions. Well aware that they are looked upon as freaks or perverts by the vast majority of middle-class squares, they risk a lot--personally, professionally and legally. One sign of significant social change, however, is that actors are generally much, much younger and substantially better looking than the battered harlots and paunchy studs in black socks who appeared in stag films a generation ago. Ugly people doing dirty deeds have little value in today's feature market. Sex is in, youth is in and--taken as a group--the young professionals who have put the two together seem as healthy, articulate, liberated, immature, idealistic, vain, headstrong and cocksure of themselves as a cross section of under-30 actors or students one might encounter anywhere else.

To collect testimony against them would be redundant and facile. In a society still monitored by vigilantes ever-ready to stem the rising tide of decadence, condemnation comes easy. Understanding is a bit harder. One who tries and frequently succeeds is Dr. John W. Money, medical psychologist and chief of psychohormonal research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (also a witness for the losing side at the Deep Throat trial in Manhattan, where he said the movie "has a cleansing action that puts an egg beater in people's brains"). Dr. Money has used High Rise to punch up his lectures to med students and asserts that Marilyn Chambers and her kind are merely trail blazers for the new awareness: "They are defining new possibilities in arbitrary sexual relationships, breaking down the stereotypes as to what is male, what is female. This is the first generation of humankind which can separate its recreational sex from its procreational sex, and I find it very valid that people of this generation claim the freedom to expand their sexual horizons. Expansion beyond their parents' standards is a normal step. For the first time in history, young people are teaching lessons to the older generation, and that is what these movies are really all about."

If the kind of people who make them and perform in them are less inhibited than their mainstream counterparts, the casting and shooting of a fuck film involves the same endless waiting, long hours, short tempers, setting up of lights and general tedium as movie-making anywhere else. Unknown performers who apply for a role are usually asked to take their clothes off (only Screw's doggedly outrageous Jim Buckley and Al Goldstein admit being raunchy enough to suggest that a girl demonstrate her proclivity for oral sex). Once the work begins, hard drugs are forbidden on most sets, though some unobtrusive grass smoking may be tolerated.

Last March, director Jonas Middleton, a camera crew, leading lady Andrea True and a supporting cast of six had $28,000 and a long Saturday-through-Tuesday weekend to spend making Illusions of a Lady at a rented beach house in Hampton Bays, New York. By the fourth day, the elderly French landlady, who padded to and from the kitchen in brunch coat and bedroom slippers, had grown accustomed to finding her paneled living room a clutter of cables, cameras, hot lights and heaving flesh. Middleton, whose only previous feature was a oneday wonder called Cherry Blossoms, had the actors on set running through a scene in which Andrea, as a freaky lady shrink, briefs some patients she has invited for a country weekend of encounter therapy.

"We're going to test the limits," she said, "and the first thing I insist on is that we all remove our undergarments."

Moments later, Middleton stopped the scene to have a word with actor Jamey Gillis. "We need your reaction shot, Jamey."

"What am I supposed to be reacting to?"

"She just exposed her tit. She just exposed her cunt, for Christ sake!"

Jamey broke up but was more than ready when his turn came to doff suit, tie and underdrawers. "Better wait a minute. I have an erection. Is that in the script?"

"No." Middleton had to call a break, in any case, while an aide went to silence a barking dog. "I tried to find really good people for this film," he said in a weary aside. "It's got SM, Lesbianism, rape, every sort of perversion going."

A subsequent fantasy sequence involved a girl-boy-girl trio--all nude except for extravagant eye paint--licking and fondling and probing one another with the contents of a fruit basket complemented by some light-red wine. All went well until a necessary erection failed to materialize. "Cut!" snapped Middleton. "Would one of you girls give him head until he gets hard again?"

Oral stimulation offcamera to prepare a male actor for a scene is a common practice in hard-core, and the job most actresses like least. The men's chief complaint is being asked to stand in and come for a tired, tense colleague who can't keep it up or bring himself to climax. Jamey, Mary Madigan and Davey Jones discussed both problems while they stood in a doorway watching Middleton direct a balling scene between a lissome blonde named Michelle and a muscular stud named Al, a former high school science teacher from Philadelphia.

"He's only semihard," said Davey. "I hope he makes it. I had to do a cum shot for him the other day. And, man, two or three cum shots in a day gets to be too fuckin' much."

Jamey nodded. "Jonas is giving directions again. That makes it worse, when the director keeps talking at you."

Davey grinned. "Al must be wasted. He was in on the action at the motel last night. I had this chick with me, and when I came out of the bathroom, she was balling him...."

On tiptoe, Mary tried to check the progress inside. "It gets to be really a drag to give head like that. A while back I had to work on a guy for forty-five minutes to do a five-minute fuck scene."

Inside, under the lights, Michelle arched her body upright, astride and facing her co-star. "I think they're OK now," said Jamey, "but she's not too good in that position. She always sits up at an angle that bends your cock over."

"Hey, he's gonna make it...."

"Yeah ... yeah!"

On the set, Middleton suddenly said, "Beautiful ... beautiful! All right, cut!"

Their cheering section relaxed as Michelle went scurrying to the dressing room, followed by a somewhat sheepish Al, nude, still moist and semi-erect, a smile on his face. Jamey grinned back at him. "Nice going, Al, baby. You did it."

In a generally permissive social climate, with such footage accessible to any customer with the three-to-five-dollar price of a theater ticket, it seems logical to assume that there might be a corresponding decline in public demand for what used to be called stag films. As a matter of fact, the reverse is true. The stag market is enjoying a comparable boom, though the movies today are called "private films," "mail orders" or, more simply, "eights"--because 90 percent are 8mm and Super 8 shorts, 200-foot soundless reels of approximately ten minutes' running time, shot in color. Making and marketing them--across the counter in adult bookshops or through the mails--has become a multi-million-dollar growth industry. According to one busy distributor's estimate, 1000 new numbers are issued each year, up to half made in California. The rest are apt to come from New York, Florida, Denmark or even Colorado, and retail for $15-$50, depending on quality and content. With performers paid an average of $50 per film, the cost of making a new number runs $500-$700. The best are shot in 16mm, then reduced to 8mm to ensure good quality, and an enterprising director may broaden his profit margin by hiring a repertory company of olympic sex stars to grind out seven to ten movies in one day at a cut rate of something like $3000. If he's lucky, he may sell up to 500 copies of each at a wholesale price of eight dollars a print--a handsome total profit for a day's work, no matter how you figure it, even subtracting the considerable cost of copying film.

Private sex reels have been in circulation almost since movies began, but the current crop is markedly different from the classics of yesteryear. The heavily plotted story films of the Twenties are out--like traveling-salesman jokes and tales of the farmer's daughter--and so are the favorites of subsequent decades, usually photographed in grainy black and white and featuring rather sleazy types who appear to be shacked up in fleabag hotels. The trends of today, which began during the Sixties, are heading in bolder and kinkier new and birection as byers become directions as buyers become less embarrassed to confide their interest in whatever subject may be their particular thing. For a contemporary collector, the essential requirements are simple: new and beautiful faces, with figures to match; top-quality color photography; sex in an identifiable social context, but without too much footage spent on storytelling; and at least one spectacular cum shot--preferably sperm splashing over the face, fanny or groin area of a partner of either sex. There are, after all, established limits to what a movie can cover in ten minutes.

Aside from Arabian oil sheiks, jet setters and movie stars, who buys 8mm sex films? "My best customers are doctors, lawyers, businessmen and ranking military personnel--people of above-average income with extensive social contacts," says the owner of San Francisco's House of Art, a leading mail-order company that sells through advertisements in San Francisco Ball and Screw, and only to buyers who swear in writing that they're at least 21 years old; most seem to be in the 30-50 age group. "These films are a very private thing, for a woman and a man, or a mixed group, some of whom aren't loose enough to go see movies in public. For others, theatergoing stimulates interest, and they want more far-out stuff at home."

House of Art's mailing list includes a number of tireless correspondents who aren't the least shy about spelling out their rather special needs. "I have some people in San Jose who keep saying they want to see a huge black guy with a tiny white girl. I also hear from a young, very successful doctor in the South. He and his wife belong to a swingers' club and want only anal films; they're all into ass fucking. He tells me about parties where they don't get even halfway through a film before the action starts."

Screw reviews the available product in a weekly column called "Mail Order Madness," and also publishes Sex Sense, a consumers' newsletter that recommends "Safe Sellers" (your money's worth, maybe) and points the finger at "Dirty Dealers" (who take your money and run or peddle old movies with misleading new titles). Current and choice collector's items are any films starring John Holmes or Linda Lovelace, the biggest names in porno, bar none. "Without John Holmes, California porno wouldn't be what it is today," says a dealer who ought to know. One of Holmes's hot sellers, crudely spliced together from pieces of earlier Johnny Wadd films, has him doing eight cum shots with nine different girls. Linda's nine 8mm films, made in New York before Throat, include the titles Dog-1 and Dog-2, and show this sexual wonder woman in the company of lusty canines.

Animal films are hardly new, but the Lovelace dog movies point the way to a rapid, widespread toppling of many long-cherished sexual taboos. To measure the relative frequency of such prosaic forms of deviation as fellatio, cunnilingus and sodomy would be meaningless in the 8mm film world, where just about anything goes. Though the taboos against interracial sex (particularly black men with white women) and against homosexual acts (particularly male) have long since passed, even dedicated swingers might find it hard to stomach--or fathom--the latest batch of 8mm raunch depicting bestiality, heavy bondage, teeny-bopper sex and sex with children.

Only a small percentage of such weirdo junk is produced in America, in the opinion of an anonymous young L.A. moviemaker whose own contributions include the currently popular "Pretty Girl" series. "Beautiful people fucking still can't be beat," he insists. "Bestiality and fetishism are not practical subjects, because the mass market will absorb only so many kinky films." That brand of rough stuff also invites considerable risk of prosecution in a shadowy corner of the hard-core market riddled with constant surveillance and persistent rumors of mob control.

The trouble with a boom, the high-riding launchers of hard-core have begun to learn, is that it's frequently followed by a bust. It can also be lowered on you, as happened in New York when Judge Tyler banned Deep Throat, officially declaring the work not merely obscene but "a nadir of decadence ... this feast of carrion and squalor." Pending appeal to a higher court, the World Theater's wry riposte was an announcement on its marquee in giant red letters: Judge cuts"Throat"--World Mourns.

Much of the world, however, interpreted the decision as token of a backlash movement finding official and fringe-group public support at every level of national life. While the Supreme Court dallied over its long-delayed decisions on obscenity law, local cops and Federal agents were cracking down everywhere, with considerable help from outraged citizen groups. In Lansing, Michigan, a garbage man refused to take trash from a theater chain exhibiting Throat. In Milwaukee, militant moralists tried to obstruct a showing of Throat by flocking to the box office with their pockets full of pennies. Some theaters received bomb threats. Though ruled not obscene in Binghamton, Throat was being busted or legally intimidated in Miami Beach, Dallas, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and a dozen other big cities.

Almost everyone connected in any way with hard-core has felt the heat, and most assume correctly that it is issuing from high places. The position of the Nixon Administration vis-à-vis porno became clear in 1970 when President Nixon personally disavowed the findings of a Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, whose distinguished majority membership declared pornography "a nuisance rather than an evil" with no measurable ill effects on society at large--and further recommended that "Federal, state and local legislation prohibiting the sale, exhibition or distribution of sexual materials to consenting adults should be repealed."

Nixon's reactions are predictably pious in areas unrelated to political espionage and sabotage. "American morality is not to be trifled with ... smut should be outlawed in every state in the Union," he declared, rehearsing the righteous fervor he needed again when his own duly appointed commissions investigating campus violence and drug use told him still more truths he didn't want to hear. Vice-President Agnew put it more pithily, of course: "As long as Richard Nixon is President, Main Street is not going to turn into Smut Alley." (Though in wicked Hollywood, gossips report--or allege--that Presidential aide Henry Kissinger saw Bill Osco's Harlot at Jill St. John's house and that Agnew himself attended a private screening of Throat at the home of Frank Sinatra.)

The Administration found staunch allies in two porno-commission dissidents: Charles H. Keating, Jr., head of the militant Cincinnati-based Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), and the Reverend Morton A. Hill, founder of Morality in Media. With such watchdogs among us, the FCC has begun wondering what to do about sex-talk shows on radio, and the FBI has gotten into the business of busting movies. "They have a hundred FBI men in New York investigating theaters, depots, terminals or anything to do with interstate shipment of films," says distributor Irving Dorfman, presently facing a Federal indictment for shipping Little Sisters and Teenage Fantasies to a theater in Washington, D.C.

Similar Federal charges are pending against the producers, distributors and/or exhibitors of Deep Throat in Chicago, Milwaukee, Burlington, Vermont, and Lexington, Kentucky; of School Girl, Peep Freak, The Spy and Lust Cycles in Memphis; of Meatball in Charlotte, North Carolina; of The Blue Balloon in Brooklyn; of Tomatoes, Kitty's Pleasure Palace and eight other films in Buffalo; as well as of Hot Circuit and Distortions of Sexuality in the Washington jurisdiction. The prospect of stiff fines and jail terms makes men like Dorfman understandably tense: "This mass move by the Government must cost millions, and toward what end? Stopping adults from seeing what they want to see. Look at the attendance figures. If they didn't want it, nobody would be in business. The FBI's got to have better things to do."

A Justice Department official, careful to preserve his anonymity, had this to say about the drive against hard-core: "Our last figures show at least fifty indictments and one hundred investigations in progress concerning transportation [of films] by common carrier. We have to go through highly technical, complicated procedures to seize a film, partly because of First Amendment protections, and because these people are very resourceful.... The policy we follow is in line with the President's response to the report on pornography, which he totally rejected, and also a reaction to the more aggressive practices of the people who produce and distribute pornography. There's been an abandonment of any inhibitions. At the moment, there must be a hundred copies of Deep Throat around the country, and each constitutes a separate offense. Under the law, those who accept a print are equally liable with those who send one. Moral standards may have deteriorated, much to our dismay, but not to the point of Deep Throat. A greal deal, now, will depend on the Supreme Court."

Whether the Court will condone or condemn hard-core--or even clear up the confusion about it--remains to be seen. But a year or more of judicial deep-think on a docket of cases related to books, films, periodicals, nude dancing and laws of seizure may soon provide answers to at least two major questions: first, whether the state must provide an adversary hearing before it can seize materials alleged to be obscene; and, second, whether allegedly obscene materials must be measured against a national or local community standard. If a relatively permissive national standard were upheld by the Supreme Court, hard-core films would be subject to few restraints beyond the surefire censorship indicated at the box office.

Ironically, the Court itself created a good deal of the current muddle about obscenity with a series of historic, but not very helpful, decisions dating back 16 years to the Roth and Alberts cases. In affirming the convictions of two mailorder dealers in porno, the Court found obscenity beyond the pale of First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press. Through subsequent refinement in cases concerning The Lovers, Fanny Hill, Ralph Ginzburg and a man in Georgia who legally won the right to watch stag films in his own home (Stanley vs. Georgia, 1969), the laws were boiled down to the famous threefold test for obscenity: (1) appeals to the prurient interest, (2) patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards and (3) utterly without redeeming social value. The Ginzburg case also raised a "pandering" issue related to the aggressive promotion of obscene material, while Stanley vs. Georgia left a new legal loophole through which to slip the argument that a man who has a right to own dirty books or movies must have a prior legal right to go out and buy them. All in all, judges and juries have found themselves stumped. "The tests are explicitly vague," says obscenity lawyer Stanley Fleishman. "Nobody knows what prurient interest is, and no juror knows what anyone else in the community thinks it is."

Until the FBI began to show some muscle, obscenity prosecutions on a local level often turned out to be costly and semi-comic exercises in frustration for both sides. Compared with the staggering number of films seized, the record of convictions has been poor, though very few defendants found themselves amused at the time. Veteran L.A. moviemaker and theater owner Tom Parker, convicted with his son of "conspiracy to commit oral copulation" and "aiding and abetting oral copulation" (in Erotique Boutique), was given 90 days in the prison for "diagnostic study" by a judge who wondered aloud if Tom Parker was a "mentally disturbed sex offender." Fined $15,000 and now on five years' probation, they are forbidden to make movies unless they submit a shooting script to the probation officer ("or to visit homosexual bars," Parker observes wryly)--but were able to open Bad Barbara in L.A. with a gigantic klieg-light premiere.

San Francisco attorney Michael J. Kennedy, who thrives in the original heartland of hard-core cinema, has won so many acquittals in obscenity trials that local authorities seem ready to cry uncle. Two tough city detectives who used to bust his clients, then testify against them as expert witnesses (they saw so many sex movies), have been transferred to the pawnshop detail. More than 40 cases were dismissed from court within a month last spring, and the new assistant D. A. in charge of the vice squad cannot be coaxed into talking about sex films.

Young, handsome and quick-witted, Kennedy is known for his flamboyant courtroom manner and ability to handle juries. In one of his flashier coups, Kennedy challenged the prosecution to let the jury see eight hours of hard-core films. "They picked Johnny Wadd and all the raunchiest stuff, and played them to a packed house. Every off-duty cop was there; we could have made a million selling popcorn. What I wanted was to bore and surfeit the jury, and I did, though one woman nearly fainted when she first saw Johnny Wadd's shlong." The defendant was acquitted.

Kennedy's real secret weapon in court has been a public-opinion survey prepared by Field Research, California's equivalent of the Gallup and Harris polls. From a Field sampling of average Californians, fewer than three percent mention the graphic depiction of sexual acts in films or literature as an important issue. Three out of four say it should be available to any forewarned adults who want to see it, and fewer than 25 percent say it shouldn't be available to anyone under any circumstances.

Besides enlisting the FBI to pile up more indictments than a few shrewd lawyers can handle, the Administration has made other moves to stifle porno. The Reverend Morton Hill of Morality in Media was instrumental in organizing an anti-pornography brain bank known as the National Legal Data Center, opened earlier this year at California Lutheran College. With an initial two-year grant of $250,000 from the U.S. Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the center plans to collect data on porno cases, enlist expert witnesses, conduct seminars, collect data on defense tactics--and, according to some sources, compile dossiers on defense witnesses and attorneys. Material from the center will be made available, of course, only to prosecutors. "We are not established to assist defense counsel," said center director Philip Cohen to a Los Angeles reporter. Added a Justice Department spokesman: "This will, in effect, be a nationwide clearinghouse for obscenity prosecutions."

Edging still closer to 1984 is an ominous bill placed before the Senate with Nixon's backing. Section 1851 of bill number 1400, a general revision of the Federal Criminal Code, spells out Justice Department recommendations for the prohibition of "an explicit, close-up representation of a human genital organ ... any explicit representation, or detailed written or verbal description of an act of sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, anal-genital or oral-genital, whether between human beings or between a human being and an animal...." Exceptions are stated, as usual, for sex "reasonably necessary and appropriate to the integrity of the product as a whole to fulfill an artistic, scientific or literary purpose." And a generous line of defense outlined in section 1851 OKs the private receipt of such sexual material if "authorized in writing by a licensed medical practitioner or psychiatrist." Unless the Senate and Nixon's Supreme Court see this legislated morality for the dangerous nonsense it is, there may come a time when a pornophile will have to obtain a doctor's prescription for Deep Throat and The Back Row, pretending he's after penicillin lozenges.

Hard-core's unpredictable future is weighed with mixed emotions by Dave Friedman, president of the Adult Film Association, who admits that hard-core-film makers--a small minority of its membership--have put soft-core in an economic squeeze. "They were always like bootleggers during Prohibition--but when people can't get hundred-proof bourbon, they'll drink three-point-two beer." Friedman views total freedom as another kind of risk. "If hard-core is legalized, we'll all be in trouble. Exhibitors are scared. And once the major companies get into this business, we're dead. Who will pay to see Linda Lovelace in a sex film if they can see Faye Dunaway? I told the pornography commission to legalize porno if they really want to be rid of it. The greatest of all products is forbidden fruit."

Evidence that major film companies may be eying the lucrative hard-core market is slight, but perhaps significant, fed by rumors of deals for Deep Throat and High Rise sound-track albums to be issued under impressive Hollywood labels. Meanwhile, pioneer hard-core director Gerry Damiano, at work in California on a soft-core "woman's picture," was considering a contract with MGM for a film costing upwards of $250,000, though Damiano adds dryly, "I can't fathom spending that kind of money."

In the event of a setback from the Supreme Court, film makers who remain in the porno market are likely to proceed with caution. Many are prepared to excise cum shots and insertions for an overnight overhaul to soft-core, though that might divest most of their films of the only reason anyone goes to see them. Until that happens--and many hard-core moviemakers are gambling a great deal that it won't--audiences are going to be enticed with a variety of new dimensions. Pornorama, a 70mm wide-screen epic by two young L.A. film makers, Alan Roberts and Steve Michaels (who made Censorship U. S. A. and Sex Clinic Girls), promises the awesome spectacle of a mass orgy on a Pacific beach, filmed from a helicopter, as well as oral sex performed on a race-car driver blasting along the freeway at 150 mph. San Francisco's Charlene Webb (an apprentice on Steelyard Blues) has a female crew, financial backing from a female friend and a femme point of view to express in Golden Rod, "a comedy about a guy who gets it up and can't get it down." Wham Bam, Thank You Ma'am!, possibly the first full-blown musical comedy to include cum shots, was written and directed by Lloyd Kaufman (coproducer of the soft core Sugar Cookies). And hold your breath for a Linda Lovelace series offering her further adventures in a far-out format borrowed from The Perils of Pauline. "Linda has not yet performed to the ultimate, or shown anywhere near what she can do," claims her manager. "There's a lot more to come." So to speak.

Fainthearts may cry "enough already," but bolder thinkers seriously doubt that the rollicking progress of hard-core can--or should--be halted. They question--as did Lenny Bruce--the priorities of a culture that allows its children to play with guns but frowns on their playing with themselves. "We have a taboo against the graven image of the groin." declares Dr. Money. "There is nothing to be gained by suppressing graphic depictions of sex and nothing to be lost by bringing them into the open. The ultimate obscenity is that overtly our society places a positive value on hate and violence--whereas the message about sex is that it's nasty and dirty, and don't do it except surreptitiously."

Strong testimony to the redeeming value of pornography comes from sexologist and Methodist minister Ted McIlvenna. director of the National Sex Forum, headquartered in San Francisco and linked to the educational arm of the Methodist Church. "We started out making instructional sex movies for paraplegics and quadriplegics. Ninety-five percent of these men claimed that, given a choice, they'd rather fuck than walk," says McIlvenna. Sex Forum now both collects films and produces many of its own documentaries--using staff members and friends as subjects to portray all aspects of human sexuality. The Forum services major U. S. medical schools, where up to a dozen movies depicting heterosexual, homosexual and masturbatory acts may be shown to audiences of laymen and professional therapists in a weekend film bash called Fuckerama. "We don't buy the voodoo concept that exposure to erotica is going to make you go out and ball pigs," McIlvenna adds, "nor do we buy the bullshit that women are not turned on by sexual stimuli. I think everyone should see a couple of sex films, and I'm very happy that people like the Mitchell brothers are making them.

"People are interested in what other people do sexually. It's that simple. We turned to films because they are the most effective educational tool in existence. We want everyone to celebrate their sexuality." The best of pornography, whether for fun or for profit, achieves precisely this desired effect. The worst of it, God knows, is dreary, tasteless, anti-erotic, expensive and excruciatingly dull--but seldom, if ever, compulsory. Hard-core sex for consenting adults has been called a crime, but no one has yet been able to identify its victims. Wise men are reluctant to try. So let wise men speak:

In 1966, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (dissenting in the case of Ginzburg vs. U. S.) wrote: "Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.... So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance." And in 1973. Andy Warhol, the pop artist, social pundit and sex-film pioneer of the Sixties, said of the high fashion in hard-core he helped create:

"We really wanted to be the Walt Disney of porn. But smut is no longer chic." Maybe Warhol knows something that only time and fickle public taste will tell.