Girls in
Midnight Cowboy (1969)

1969 stands as the year that pop culture evolved from the mass grooviness of Woodstock and the far-out giant leap of the moon landing to the horror of the Manson Family murders and the Hells Angels stomping out flower power at Altamont.

It was also the year that Hollywood erupted with new creative freedom, emboldened by expanding societal mores and the new MPAA rating system.

Filmmakers could now dip into the palette of patently adult material, including coarse language, unflinching violence, and, most importantly, sex and nudity.

Let’s trip on back to 1969 and dig nine classic nude scenes from that headiest of daze gone by.

1. EASY RIDER
Toni Basil
(1:26)
Toni strips full-frontally nude in a New Orleans cemetery while tripping on LSD.

Easy Rider is indisputably one of the hippie era’s ultimate artistic statements. Toni Basil’s “Hey Mickey!” video is one of the most indelible media images of the 1980s. How interesting that one cultural touchstone unwittingly begat another. On acid. Naked.

Mr. Skin’s DVD Pick of the Week

Crank 2: High Voltage (2009)—Blu-Ray
STUDIO: Lions Gate
NUDE: Jenna Haze (breasts) (Picture), Bai Ling (breasts) (Picture), Amy Smart (body double—breasts, bush, butt) (Picture)
In the blockbuster action sequel Crank 2: High Voltage (2009), Jason Statham reprises his role as hit man Chev Chelios. This time around, Chinese gangsters have stolen Chev’s heart and replaced it with an artificial one that he has to keep charged by repeated electric shocks. Along the way he meets up with a prostitute named Ria (Bai Ling), his old girlfriend Eve Lydon (Amy Smart), and the leader of the Asian street gang The Triads, Poon Dong (David Carradine). There’s nudity from Bai Ling as well as porn star Jenna Haze, Amy Smart’s body double, and some uncredited extras. Best of all, there’s a lip slip from Amy as the dude she's wrestling with hikes up her thong. Crank? Spank.

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 Anaïs 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.

Acclaimed filmmaker Tom DiCillo rose to the highest ranks of indie auteur status via a succession of distinctive arthouse hits such as Box of Moonlight (1986), Johnny Suede (1992) (Picture: 1), Living in Oblivion (1995) (Picture: 1), The Real Blonde (1997) (Picture: 1), Double Whammy (2001) (Picture: 1), and, most recently, the comedic paparazzi meditation Delirious (2006).

Indie Sex reveals all, from scandalous silent films and censor-shocking breakthroughs of the 1960s and '70s to '80s teen romps and erotic outrages of today.