Still Not Going To Do This Every Day

At lunch with an old Timeinc editor friend today I was reminded of this really tremendous, and comprehensive, piece on porn films of the Seventies from Richard Corliss. It’s a long, good read (thus a perfect Instapaper joint), and the lede gets me every time:

Here’s a little statistic that means a lot. In hotel rooms where pornography is available, two-thirds of all movie purchases are for pornos; and the average time they are watched is 12 minutes. The image instantly summoned is of the traveling businessman who wants a smidge of sexual exercise before retiring, but who is too tired, timid or cheap to summon a call girl. He cares little about whatever niceties of dialogue or mise-en-scene the movie may contain. He seeks only a brisk hand job, self-applied, then clicks off the TV, and so to bed. Someone I know, on hearing of this archetypal businessman, wondered, “What did he do the other seven minutes?”

[SNIP]

How drab this seems compared to the heady days of the early 70s, when “There was something exciting about pornography,” as Norman Mailer says in the new documentary Inside Deep Throat. “It lived in some mid-world between crime and art. And it was adventurous.” Porn films preoccupied critics, cops and the courts. Often financed by Mafia families, they attracted the crusading instincts of local, state and federal prosecutors, who shut down the films and secured the conviction of one actor. They were directed by men who could fancy themselves as artists, and starred off-Broadway actors as well as the occasional gifted ingenue —like Linda Lovelace, star of the movie that created the craze (and the phrase) “porno chic,” Deep Throat.

Mainstream newspapers (the Timeses of New York and Los Angeles, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert) and magazines (TIME and Newsweek) reviewed the more ambitious soft-core movies in the 60s and then hard-core, when it was legally exhibited. Why? Because it was sufficiently dangerous, popular, newsworthy and, frequently, ambitious to warrant the interest of reviewers. The opinion of many of them, including me, was that there might be a meeting of pornography, which had quickly established a kind of artistic pedigree, and Hollywood, which was striding toward explicit sexuality. That was also the belief of Deep Throat’s writer-director, Gerard Damiano, who said in 1973: “If it’s left alone, within a year sex will just blend itself into film. It’s inevitable.”

To anyone who wasn’t around in the early 70s, this statement must sound utopian, if not delusional. Well (and I know I’ve written this before, but this time, children, it’s true), things really were different then. You get a sense of those old New Days in Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s Inside Deep Throat, a snazzy documentary now playing in theaters and coming soon to HBO, and a more synoptic view in the new book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia. Diving into the nearly 600 pages of unmediated testimony from the actors, directors and producers, and the cops who kept track of them and tried to bring them down, a reader gets an inside look at a time when porn —the entire cultural life —was different, bolder, weirder, better.