Word: porn
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...production centers for early American public porn films were San Francisco and New York, and the movies reflected the temperaments of their respective home towns. The San Francisco films have a grainy, cinema-verite style and a behavioral openness that seems a residue of the Summer of Love. Sex is free, man, sex is beautiful, and as long as we're having sex, why not share it with the camera? I don't know much about the performers in films like Mona and School Girl, but I imagine they were friends of the directors rather than professional thespians...
...York porn was both slicker and edgier, more professional, as were its actors. Gillis cites a Shakespeare gig he did for Manhattan's Classic Stage Company. Eric Edwards starred in a Close-Up toothpaste commercial; it was pulled when he was spotted in a porn loop. In his 1975 memoir Here Comes Harry Reems (quoted in The Other Hollywood), the actor recalls, "I was doing Coriolanus in some marginal coffeehouse where they passed the hat around at the end of the performance." He got more valuable training when he signed on with two burlesque vets...
...performer C.J. Laing. "I despised the people in these films that said they were actors. I was like, 'You've got to be kidding me! This is about fucking and sucking!'" But quite a few thought it was about process and progress. Once the off-Broadway types got into porn, they relied on the actor's invaluable gift for self-hypnosis to convince themselves it was somehow legit. Spelvin, who says she appeared on Broadway in The Pajama Game and Cabaret, recalls, of Devil in Miss Jones, "I took the role very seriously. I was doing Hedda Gabler here...
...Early porn directors also talked themselves into believing they were committing art. Ron Wertheim, Damiano's assistant director on Deep Throat, may only have been shooting porno loops but, he says in the documentary, "I approached those films as if I was Luc Godard or somebody." Damiano, who went directly from hairdressing to helming hard-core, had a similar sense of vocation. He says that after the success of Deep Throat, "If people wanted to interview me because I was a porno filmmaker, I just was not interested in talking to them. But if anyone wanted to speak...
...similar scene in Deep Throat and later devoted an entire movie, Water Power, to high colonics.) With plenty of boy/girl, girl/girl and orgy "action," Devil still takes itself solemnly enough to risk being laughable. But heaven knows it's intense, and an honorable attempt to blue the line between porn and "real" films. As for Spelvin, she isn't a slut; she is a theater-trained actress giving...