Living in Los Angeles in the late ‘eighties, I was fortunate enough to fall in with the wrong crowd. Without their help, my two years there would have been a lot less fun.Some worked in the “adult” movie business, and I got to know that world and the people in it. I even attended the presentation of the annual awards for excellence given each year by the X-Rated Film Critics’ Organization. Presented on Valentine’s Day, they were known, not very originally, as the Heart-Ons. (Categories included "Lascivious Lesbian" and "Orgasmic Oral". )
Nobody at the time saw that those years would come to be known as a “golden age” of X-films, a late flowering before videotape replaced film.
To write a book on the history of “stag” or “blue” movies and those who performed in them was the logical next step. It was almost completed when I moved to Paris, so I brought the manuscript with me, thinking it would be my re-introduction to the European literary scene.
My agent didn’t agree; not, at least, if I wanted to be taken seriously by “the establishment”. So Secret Cinema went on the shelf, where it remained until a new independent publisher asked last year if I had anything they might put into print.
A lot happened to erotic film after the ‘eighties, none of it good. Home video wiped out almost overnight the hundreds of x-rated cinemas, only to be obliterated by the DVD, which succumbed in turn to internet porn, making erotica more ubiquitous than it ever was in the days of Deep Throat. The trick today is not finding sex on screen but avoiding it.
I mourn the friends I made in the business, most of whom died young, some by their own hands, or from drug overdoses – often the same thing. In particular, I miss Bill Rotsler, a small-time producer and occasional performer in X-films who condensed his knowledge into a scholarly but witty study, Contemporary Erotic Cinema.
Bill Rotsler
To Bill, the variety and complexity of erotic films, as reflected in which of them people chose to watch, appeared limitless, particularly since their appeal changed according to the person viewing them, each bringing to a film his or her own unexpressed desires.
“You see a man and a woman balling,” he said. “You know nothing about them except, say, they’re brother and sister. No, no. I made a terrible mistake. They’re not. He’s blind and she’s being nice to him. Uh, no, that’s another film. Sorry about that. They’re really long-lost lovers. Oh, no, that’s another movie too…
“You can go on like that, with the same couple, but just switching their characters. Each time, the context in which you put them alters your feelings. If it was brother and sister, or son and daughter, or father and mother – none of those may excite you. But it’s a hell of a lot different if it’s, say, a student and his teacher.”
Or, for that matter, husband and wife. British journalist Simon Hoggart was startled by an X-rated film in which actors indulged in steamy sex while playing a married couple, something so uncommon it almost seemed like a perversion. He imagined a customer murmuring furtively to the video store clerk, “Do you have something… er, matrimonial?”
You can buy John's book from Amazon in the UK in various formats at various prices IF YOU CLICK HERE
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