The Rape Films of Porn’s Golden Age

Today’s “gonzo porn” includes many categories of women subjected to brutal sex.  But these are cheap and dirty “wall-to-wall (sex only, no story)” videos.  They can’t compare with the big-budget 35-millimeter epics of the 1970s and early 80s that featured elaborate production values and intricate stories that involved debasing women in the grossest possible ways.

The audiences for these theatrical films were angry, sexually-frustrated men who comprised a large portion of that era’s “raincoat crowd.”

My duties as film and tape manager at VCX, Inc., included supervising the transfer of these films to videotape.  Among these pictures were the following “classics”:

(Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

In Alex DeRenzy’s Pretty Peaches (1978), real-life mental patient Desiree Cousteau plays a car accident amnesia victim who’s raped by the men who hit her. A quack doctor treats her amnesia with enemas. She’s gang-banged at a job audition.

At Compact Video, I supervised the transfer of Defiance, with underaged (16 year old) Jean Jennings gang-raped by the staff and inmates of an insane asylum; Expensive Tastes, in which a prostitute plays decoy to help bust a gang of rapists; and The Seduction of Lyn Carter, in which future rock singer Andrea True plays a housewife with a compulsion for further and further debasements from kinky sex researcher Jamie Gillis.

A Dirty Western (1975) featured a gang of outlaws raiding a ranch and raping the owner (Barbara Bourbon) and her daughters.

In Waterpower, Jamie Gillis (You want kink? He’s your man.) played an enema rapist.

After I left VCX, my new business partner Joe Loveland (a nom de porn) gave me a tape that his S and M protege Stephanie Bonds wanted to emulate:  The Mitchell Brothers’ Never a Tender Moment starred Marilyn Chambers suspended by wrists and ankles while butch lesbians beat her with whips; hung upside down while they insert all of a dildo the size of a baby elephant’s leg in her rectum.

Serena (Blaquelord) in All the King’s Ladies

Before she appeared in my video feature All The King’s Ladies, Serena had retired from porn after a shoot that nearly led to her death. In Mai Lin Versus Serena (1982), a filmed contest to see which actress could take on the most men, the compliant masochist was penetrated not only by forty or more studs but by the microbes they carried. “My doctor said the germs ganged up,” Serena told me. “My belly swelled up like I was pregnant.” Delirious from septic shock, she spent months hospitalized with severe pelvic inflammatory disease (PID)–epidemic in the wake of the libertine ’70s. The filmmaker didn’t even send a get-well card.

“It’s a unique irony,” wrote the historian (Jim) Holliday in the 1990s, “that under Nixon’s presidency adult films were rougher than they are currently.”

Yet, even after home video brought an influx of female viewers in the mid 1980s, there remained an audience of disgruntled men who made best-sellers out of videos like Biff Malibu’s Gang Bang Girls series.

Today’s misogynist porn can’t match the budgets of yesteryear, but it’s just as brutal.  Anti-porn academic, Gail Dines, rails against this gonzo genre, blaming it for corrupting the sexuality of all American men.  Dines has produced one of the most inadvertently hilarious jeremiads against porn that I have ever read.

Next post: Pornland by Gail Dines: A Primer for Perverts

 

 

 

The “Smut Glut” Part 3: The Victors and the Vanquished

The depression into which the porn industry had plunged produced at least one good laugh.  Finances had become so bad at Visual Entertainment Productions (VEP) that the company’s in-house bill collector had turned against them   My mob-connected, former boss Tony Romano had staggered into VEP only to find his partner Norm on the floor. ( Passages from SKINFLICKS are in italics.)

According to a VEP saleslady, “Tony came in, drunk as usual, and goes, ‘What’s Nahmy doin’ layin’ dere on da flahr?’ Somebody tells him Ron punched Norm out.  Tony just shrugs and says, ‘Hey dese t’ings happen.’  Then he goes into his office and locks the door.  A couple hours later, his secretary looks in. There’s Tony with his head on his desk, fast asleep.”

With VEP in tatters, my chances of collecting on the $10,000 bounced check they had stuck me with looked slim indeed.  Superior Video’s own money woes were so dire that I actually considered barging into VEP with “Maggie” (my .357 Magnum).  In the porn video business of the late 1980s, “bad paper” had become an epidemic.

So had bankruptcies.  VEP joined such industry giants as Select-Essex and (my former employer) VCX in Chapter Eleven.  Even the “General Motors of Porn,” Caballero Control Corporation, was so deeply in arrears that Adult Video News stopped running its ads.  But emerging from the rubble of fallen leviathans–like small mammals scurrying over the remains of dinosaurs—were niche companies that tapped the limited but steady “specialty” market.

Among their titles were Kinky Midgets, Black Anal, She-Males, The Enema, Foot Worship, Latex Slaves, National Transsexual, Pregnant Mamas, and Anal Nation.  But even good old-fashioned all-American straight sex could be a specialty in the right context.

A popular new genre had lone women taking on groups of men, such as Biff Malibu’s Gang-Bang Girls line.  Agent Jim South complained about girls being offered “a seemingly large amount of money for a day’s work, but on the amount of sex, she’s getting short changed.”  Another genre that allowed dirt-cheap porn-making was the “pro-am” (professional/amateur) hustle, which allowed horny men (the “pros”) to make money screwing new ladies (the “ams”).

Scrawny San Francisco Bay Area porn agent Joe Elliot starred himself in the Joe Elliot’s Girlfriends and Joe Elliot’s College Girls lines.  When a girl answered Elliot’s ads in publications such as The Berkeley Barb, he would give her a quick on-tape interview then proceed to have sex with her.  If a cameraman such as myself wasn’t available, Elliot would lock his camera on a tripod and shoot the sex in one continuous wide-angle shot.

Bespectacled, big-nosed, nerdish-looking Ed Powers ostensibly picked up women in streets and bus stations, then taped himself having sex with them.  Actor/author Jerry Butler wanted to know why every time Powers “picked up” a girl, agent Jim South got $50.  “I DO pick up girls on the street,” Powers protested. “I really do!”

The biggest success in this niche market was cheerfully sleazy John Stagliano, who resembled an anorexic John Travolta.  Starting his Evil Angel Productions in 1988, Stagliano exploited his fascination with the female posterior.  As “Buttman,” he approached women in public, begging them to bare their bottoms before his camera.  With little more than that documentaire shtick and lots of rump-romping sex shot from low, ant’s-eye angles, the Buttman series found a ready audience of males disgruntled with the bland, couples-oriented drift of the overall market.

The “couples market” was a niche in itself. Anthony Spinelli’s Plum Productions, a family affair (wife Roz, son Mitch), adapted well to the age of the micro-budget.  Like haiku, the short stories of H. H. (“Saki”) Munro, and Twilight Zone reruns, their spare, interior dramas appealed to the cerebral end of the market.  Plum’s “one-act morality plays”—as AVN’s Joe Daniels called them—gave couples a springboard for more elevated post-coital conversation than “Was it good for you too?”

A new generation of porn fans discovered—to their delight—the high quality of the 35-millimeter (35mm) films from the 1970s “Golden Age of Porn.”   Reinvigorated, the stumbling 35mm king, Caballero, rose up and purchased Reuben Sturman’s Vidco, creating a 700-title monster.  Caballero head Noel Bloom said, “Catalogue is the strength today.  And now we have…the largest adult video catalogue in the world.”  Another 35mm giant, the over-extended Video Company of America (VCA) roared back to life.  Originally despised as “dupers (video pirates),” VCA’s Russ Hampshire and his menacing, mob-connected partner Walter Gernert had invested their earnings in premium 35’s.  Their new-found success allowed them to pay small creditors like Superior Video.

Superior Video was hemorrhaging money.  My choice: try to ride out the slump in hopes of returning to profitability or sell off rights to my titles and shut down the company.  What finalized my decision was a mistake that could have put me in prison for a long time.

Next post:  Trying to Sell Illegal Pornography in Canada, eh?