By Sir Richard Lickington
Hollywood has always had an ambivalent relationship with its black-sheep cousin across the way in the San Fernando Valley. Whether they're lauding it for its brave stance against censorship and sexual prudery or denouncing it as disgusting and exploitative whoremongering, Hollywood filmmakers can't leave porn alone.
Let's take a look at some of the feature-length movies that have been cranked out on the subject over the past twenty-five years or so.
Inserts (1975)
Oh, baby, baby it's a wild world. How does a verbose, set-bound character study merit inclusion in a list like this? By dealing with the most overlooked era in the saga of spank movies, the production of 16mm porno loops in the1930s. Richard Dreyfuss plays an alcoholic director reduced to cranking out dirty movies for boss Bob Hoskins. Things get a little hairy when his star OD's in the bathroom, but, on the bright side, he talks Jessica Harper (Picture: 1) into showing us her tits. Inserts clearly fits into the category of film that uses porn as a metaphor for defeat and debasement. Playing a drunken dropout too wasted to do real movies in 1975 turned out to be sadly prescient for Mr. Dreyfuss, whom the coke-fueled madness of the '80s sucked up like a bump off a stripper's fake tit.
Hardcore (1979)
George C. Scott has often been called (by me) "the greatest actor of his generation, who makes everyone from Marlon Brando to Laurence Olivier look like diarrhea caked on the inside of a stopped-up toilet." Between this movie, Firestarter, and The Savage Is Loose (C.'s Swiss Family Robinson-Oedipus complex ego-trip masterpiece), Scott has all the overacting bases covered. About the movie itself, there's so much I could say. It teaches us about Calvinism and Mind Science, it takes place largely in peep shows and massage parlors, it's the greatest movie about porno ever made ... the list goes on. Don't rent it, buy it.
Delirium (1987)
This Lamberto Bava psychedelic giallo flick is primarily a slasher movie that rips off the plot of Eyes of Laura Mars and only uses porno as a backdrop. Instead of the world of fashion photography, though, Delirium is set at the offices of an Italian porno mag. There's not much insight into the world of adult publishing, but there's a great three-way lesbo sequence that takes place in a pool and some truly bizarre death scenes. This won't satisfy your curiosity about what makes an eighteen-year-old girl get fucked six ways from Sunday on camera, but if you ever wanted to know how to kill somebody with bees, you rented the right flick.
Rented Lips (1988)
All the elements for a hoot of a movie are in place in Rented Lips. It's directed by Robert Downey (a true weirdo), it stars Martin Mull, the film's music is by Van Dyke Parks, and the great Dick Shawn appears here for the last time on screen. Unfortunately it sucks. It's about a small-time director who gets brought in to finish a Nazi Nasty Nudie. Unlike most other movies about porn, it's also a comedy.
Boogie Nights (1997)
For better or for worse, Boogie Nights played a large part in ushering in the brief resurgence in the popularity of Golden Age Porn that put Ron Jeremy on prime-time TV. Basically a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of John Holmes, Boogie Nights faithfully follows the Hollywood party line. TheIndustry used to stand for something (sexual freedom, the First Amendment, non-stop coke-fuelled disco orgies, etc.) but, as soon as someone invented the Betamax, it became just another casualty of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In his comeback role, Burt Reynolds plays an artistically inclined director who finds his muse in well-hung Marky Mark Wahlberg. After Wahlberg destroys his life and career with a steady regimen of freebasing and male prostitution, Reynolds finds himself going through the motions of shooting on video with no-talent actors, but in the end he redeems himself and Wahlberg during a rain of frogs. Or maybe that was in the other movie. One thing's for sure, though: You can see more of Heather Graham's (Picture: 1 - 2) tits in the DVD extras.
8MM (1999)
8MM truly raises some serious questions in the mind of the viewer, but not the kind of unsettling questions about power, privilege, pornography, and perversion the producers had in mind. Rather it raises questions like: Who keeps giving Nicolas Cage acting jobs? Did he sell his soul to the Devil before or after Wild at Heart? Who thought mainstream movie audiences were hankering for a movie about snuff in the late '90s? Whoever it was, they were wrong. Weasaly Cage plays a weasely private dick trying to authenticate a snuff movie some old lady found in her rich husband's vault. After this the plot closely follows that of Hardcore, but where the snuff film is an afterthought in HC, it's the central concern of 8MM. The hunt for snuff takes our hero through a sleazy, depraved underworld of hardcore S&M populated by ethnic-looking bikers and people with accents. My favorite part--the giant Danzig poster in the villain's room.
Scoutman (2000)
This title is somewhat difficult to track down, but it's worth a mention because it opens a window on the strange world of the infamous Japanese "Pink Movies". The titular Scoutman is the guy whose job it is to track down girls to get naked on film--a job that can be done by a twenty-five-word classified ad in L.A. but requires a professional in Tokyo. What happens to these girls once they get recruited? Bad, bad things, of course. Unless you're the one watching them on TV with your pud in your hand, then they're good, good things.
The Girl Next Door (2004)
Never let it be said that I'm not grateful for the teen sex comedy revival brought on by the success of American Pie, but putting impossibly hot Elisha Cuthbert (Picture: 1 - 2) in the role of a porno star and then having her remain clothed throughout the entire movie is truly unforgivable. Despite this glaring sin of omission, there is something admirable in the sheer insanity of this movie, with dialogue that sounds like it was written by a random word generator, a wildly inconsistent moral tone, and an utterly incomprehensible plot. Basically a remake a Risky Business, The Girl Next Door suffers in the realism department because, as is painfully obvious from one viewing, no one involved in this movie has ever watched a pornographic film. Word to the wise, kids: Don't be fooled by the big "Unrated Version" stamp on the cover of this or any other DVD. Any movie that's not submitted to the MPAA is, by definition, unrated. You're not going to see her tits.
The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
Along with Boogie Nights, this flick made porno cool again. Conflating the profit-driven business of publishing hardcore sex magazines with the principled and selfless quest for artistic freedom and First Amendment rights, PVLF turned Larry Flynt into a smacked-out, slurring Thomas Payne for the "Me Generation." Fuck it, I love Hustler. The movie has tits here and there, but no bush to speak of. If Larry stopped counting his money long enough to watch the movie, he would piss his diaper when he saw that a movie about Hustler is completely bereft of split beavers!
Wonderland (2003)
Johnny Wadd, we hardly knew ye. Except for the dozens of sex scenes committed to film, endless eyewitness accounts of his drug-addled last days, a blockbuster biopic, and several plaster casts of his dick, there's hardly anything left to remember him by! Thank God Val "Iceman" Kilmer stepped in to provide us with this feature-length version of an E! True Hollywood Story, concentrating on the most unfortunate aspect of the Hung One's life, the infamous murders to which he was connected. Well-worn territory this, but for the Golden Age Porn junkie, it's never enough, is it? As tragic as Holmes's descent into addiction and AIDS was, the real tragedy of Wonderland is Paris Hilton's (Picture: 1) inexplicably clothed performance.
Rated X (2000)
Teaming up the unstoppable Charlie Sheen/Emilio Estevez combo that first struck gold with Men at Work, somebody or another decided to tell the story of the Mitchell Brothers, whose Behind the Green Door is given at least as much credit as Deep Throat for bringing American middle-class morality to its knees. The tragic murder-suicide that ended the Mitchell Brothers' career takes up the third act, but the recreations of Marilyn Chambers's scenes by Tracy Hutson (Picture: 1) are truly prick-stiffening.
Body Double (1984)
Like Hadcore and 8MM, Body Double uses "The Industry" to represent a seedy underworld into which the protagonist must descend to right some wrong, though not without being irrevocably altered in some "Hard-on of Darkness" way. In the course of following our hero's descent, we get to see a lot of tits and ass, some of which belong to a young Melanie Griffith (Picture: 1 - 2). Griffith plays porn star Holly Body, who looks like a slightly dykier version of Brigitte Nielsen. She does not, unfortunately, do anything dykey. Melanie leaves that to the pros, namely Brinke Stevens (Picture: 1), who has a hot, albeit brief, lesbo threeway in a trailer for a fake porno called Holly Does Hollywood. Also look out for real porn stars Patty Lotz and Barbara Peckinpaugh, who, sadly, didn't survive the '80s, committing suicide in 1987. My favorite pair of tits in the movie, though, belongs to Barbara Crampton (Picture: 1), who is best known to horror-movie freaks as the hot young blonde who is constantly being subjected to one in Stuart Gordon's superior H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. One of the interesting aspects of Body Double is its use of real places and things (e.g. Hustler, Screw, AVN, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood) to lend it an aura of factuality.
Star 80 (1983)
Along with Personal Best, Star 80 gave Ernest Hemingway fans in the 1980s a chance to masturbate to his granddaughter. It's hard for the viewer not to sympathize with Paul Snider, the two-bit hustler who discovered Dorothy Stratten working in a Burger King and saw in her his chance to achieve that age-old dream of every male inhabitant of New Jersey and the Outer Boroughs: "To be somebody." In his sweaty Eddie-Haskell-meets-Travis-Bickle way, Paul pulled Dorothy out of the Burger King, took her to the prom, then persuaded her to take a few boudoir photos, which eventually led to her career as a Playmate. As her manager/boyfriend, Paul rode her coattails to the Playboy mansion, where he promptly made himself persona non grata with his gauche and pushy demeanor. Acting against Hef's advice, the young ing?e married Paul anyway, leading him to believe his star was officially hitched to the Stratten wagon. But, as anyone with half a brain could have predicted, Small Town Dorothy quickly metamorphosed into Hollyweird Dorothy and dropped Paul for equally sleazy Orson Welles prot? and Hollywood hack Peter Bogdanovich. So Paul chopped her head off and sodomized her corpse. Ouch! Mariel Hemingway (Picture: 1 - 2) doesn't give us the full frontal, but her tits are pretty damn nice.
*
Sadly, the people who make movies about porn are often the least qualified to do so. If you're really looking for insight on The Industry, go to your local bookstore and pick up Tales of Time Square or order yourself a copy of Cinema Sewer. But if you just want to see tits and simulated sex without having to be seen coming out of the back room at the video store, porn chic is as good an excuse as any to rent one of these gems.
