Church - Disposable Passions

Disposable Passions

Global Exploitation Cinemas

Series Editors

Johnny Walker, Northumbria University, UK

Austin Fisher, Bournemouth University, UK

Editorial Board

Tejaswini Ganti (New York University, USA)

Joan Hawkins (Indiana University, USA)

Kevin Heffernan (Southern Methodist University, USA)

I. Q. Hunter (De Montfort University, UK)

Peter Hutchings (Northumbria University, UK)

Ernest Mathijs (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Constance Penley (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

Eric Schaefer (Emerson College, USA)

Dolores Tierney (University of Sussex, UK)

Valerie Wee (National University of Singapore)

Also in the Series:

Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond

Disposable Passions

Vintage Pornography and the Material
Legacies of Adult Cinema

David Church

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

First of all, my thanks to Austin Fisher and Johnny Walker for the invitation to launch this book within their Global Exploitation Cinemas series. As one of the first books to be published in the series, their guidance and support along the way have been invaluable, as have the comments that I received from the series editorial board members, including Kevin Heffernan, I. Q. Hunter, and Constance Penley. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury Academic for believing in the series and this books place within it. Likewise, Mary Al-Sayed helped shepherd the manuscript through the publication process.

Joan Hawkins offered patient criticism over multiple drafts of what became the seed of this project, subsequently expanded into my first chapter. The following people also offered fantastic feedback on other chapter drafts in various stages of composition: Peter Alilunas, Will Scheibel, Sean Smalley, and Gregory Waller. I must also thank the formative advice offered by the anonymous peer reviewers for the publications where, as noted below, earlier versions of chapters first appeared.

Other historians, fans, and archivists contributed to the project by providing early drafts of unpublished manuscripts, helpful research tips, specialized knowledge, or even simply productive conversation along the way. Among them, I must particularly thank Peter Alilunas, Michael J. Bowen, Stefan Elnabli, Dan Erdman, Elena Gorfinkel, Mark Hain, Kevin Heffernan, Lucas Hilderbrand, I. Q. Hunter, Austin Miller, Kinohi Nishikawa, Lisa Petrucci Vraney, Ryan Powell, Raymond Rea, Casey Scott, Russell Sheaffer, Sean Smalley, Dan Streible, Whitney Strub, Andy Uhrich, Joshua Vasquez, Tom Waugh, Ashley West, and Linda Williams.

My heartfelt thanks to the various individuals who consented to be interviewed for the last two chapters, including Jane Hamilton, Steven Morowitz, Joe Rubin, Eric Schaefer, Casey Scott, Annie Sprinkle, and several former video industry personnel who wished to remain anonymous. Many of these interviewees also generously offered critical feedback on their relevant chapter sections, but as always, any omissions or oversights are my own.

A special thanks to Jon Vickers, director of the Indiana University Cinema, for inviting me in as the resident expert during the accession of a massive shipment of adult/exploitation film prints on behalf of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which was an invaluable glimpse into the early stages of a long archival process. Thanks as well to Russell Sheaffer, Eric Schaefer, and Dan Streible for encouraging one of these formerly lost prints, The Orgy at Lils Place (1963), to be digitally preserved by Mike Mashon at the Library of Congress and subsequently screened at the 2013 Orphans Midwest symposium at Indiana University (as I discuss in up with innumerable requests for a veritable truckload of materials. DeAnna Berger at the Pacific Northwest Library for Sex-Positive Culture in Seattle was fortunate enough not to be peppered with such requests, but she nevertheless opened up the librarys collection and provided plenty of porn-related conversation along the way. The students of my History of Porn class, taught through the Seattle International Film Festival, also provided wonderful discussions about the genres past and future.

Excerpts from this book first appeared in earlier form in several publications. I thank the editors and publishers of these publications for encouraging my work on the topic and granting permission to reprint the following material here:

A much earlier version of appeared as Stag Films, Vintage Porn, and the Marketing of Cinecrophilia, in Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 2, edited by Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (New York: Wallflower Press, 2012), 4870. Copyright Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb. Reprinted with permission of Yoram Allon and Columbia University Press.

An earlier version of appeared as Between Fantasy and Reality: Sexploitation, Fan Magazines, and William Rotslers Adults-Only Career, Film History 26, no. 3 (2014): 10643. Thanks to Indiana University Press for permission to reprint it.

Various excerpts from appeared in the short articles Desiring to Merge: Restoring Value in Niche-Interest Adult DVDs, Film International 11, no. 34 (2013): 1121; and Something Weird This Way Comes: Mike Vraney (19572014), The Moving Image 14, no. 2 (2014): 5167. Thanks to Daniel Lindvall and Intellect Books for reprint permission for the former; and to the University of Minnesota Press for the latter.

Finally, my thanks to the various parties who granted permission to reproduce the books illustrations. Efforts were made to contact all relevant rights holders, but any cases of accidental omission will be corrected in future editions of the book.

I should explain that adult moviesX movies, Triple X, whatever you want to call themhave never particularly aroused me. On the contrary, I found myself drawn to them because of my disenchantment with mainstream films, confesses the narrator in the opening pages of Tim Lucass novel Throat Sprockets, shortly before he becomes obsessed with an erotic horror film, chanced upon during a lunch break spent at a local porn theater. Adult films also had a peculiar knack for capturing the listlessness I found at the core of real life, better than so-called legitimate films, he continues. By the time you reach thirty, as I had, youre either just learning to appreciate the anesthetic value of escapism or growing sick of the vapors.

Appropriately enough, this sentiment echoes my own thoughts about sexually explicit cinema in many ways. In their often crude attempts to arouse the audience, their hyperbolic depictions of sexual abandon rendered in oddly mechanistic strokes exude a sort of melancholy admission about cinemas overall powers of mimetic representation, as if to ask, Is this all there is? For all of its many paradoxical qualitiesit is notoriously hard to define, yet we supposedly know it when we see it (to paraphrase U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart); it is the most demonized of genres, yet perhaps the most popular in terms of widespread consumption; it is deeply invested in providing documentary evidence of sexual pleasure, yet simultaneously creating fantasies that viewers might seldom live out in actualitypornographic cinema is perhaps at once the most and least cinematic of all moving-image genres. While it exemplifies the mediums basic roots in a visual fascination with moving bodies that affectively stimulate the viewers own body, it can also do so in the virtual absence of conventional standards of narrative, characterization, technical skill, and production values.