Henry & June, First NC-17 Film, Opens in Theaters -- October 5, 1990

Throughout the late 1980s, beloved Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert campaigned for a rating to replace the MPAA’s dreaded X which, at first, had been used to designate all manner of films containing patently adult content (such as the 1968 Best Picture Academy Award winner Midnight Cowboy).

In the wake of Deep Throat, however, the X-rating became synonymous with hardcore pornography. Siskel and Ebert led the charge for a new rating they suggested “A” (for adult) that could be applied to non-sexploitation films that were intended for audiences over the age of 17.

The MPAA ultimately concocted the NC-17 rating, which stands for No Children Under 17, and the first film to reach the public bearing its imprimatur was flesh-friendly director Philip Kaufman’s Henry June, which opened in theaters on this date in 1990.

Henry June stars Fred Ward and young Uma Thurman in the titular roles, as libertine author Henry Miller and his omnisexual gamine wife June. The story focuses specifically on their mutual sexual entanglements with erotic writer Anas Nin -- scorchingly embodied by Maria de Madeiros -- in 1920s Paris.

Uma and Maria explode in a lust-tastic lesbian scene, and the rest of the movie is chock full of naked nubiles (including Brigitte Lahaie) celebrating sexual freedom as they truly did and as the NC-17 rating, finally, made possible.