Vintage New York Porn and the Birth of the "Pornoteur" Phenomenon

The popular Hollywood film Boogie Nights (1997) enshrined California’s San Fernando Valley as the hub of the American porn industry. 

The Weirdos and the Oddballs

Boogie Nights, as everyone now knows, was based on the collaborations between Chinese-American UCLA graduate Bob Chinn and infamously well-endowed actor John Holmes on a series of movies known collectively as the Johnny Wadd series, beginning in 1971.  Between 1973’s Deep Throat (actually filmed in Florida) and Johnny Wadd, the common perception was that US porn was a West Coast based phenomenon and later industry.  However, that is not the entire truth of the matter: New York City on the US East Coast boasted a creative “porn” impetus that pre-dated Deep Throat and brought New York erotic film to festivals as far away as France.

East Coast, New York porn began with Eduardo Cemano.  Cemano was a friend and associate of both noted New York avant-garde filmmaker / actor John Cassavettes and raconteur comedian Joseph Bologna.  Whilst Cassavettes began a series of improvisational movies with Faces (1968) towards the end of the 1960s, Cemano branched into advertising (much to his friend Cassavettes’ disdain), but soon would up collaborating with a New York City bound Frank Zappa on experimental music videos and commercials, headlining the original Mothers of Invention on some 16 hours of footage much of which was used later for Zappa’s Uncle Meat project.   Cemano was then contacted by nudie-cutie film producer Doris Wishman and contracted to film two “one-day wonders” (features shot in one day) to take advantage of the burgeoning hardcore market. 

Eduardo Cemano

Cemano used the opportunity to apply a similar improvisational inter-textuality as Cassavettes to adult film, overtly ridiculing America’s obscenity and “artistic merit” laws and expertly parodying screwball comedy in The Weirdos and the Oddballs (1970).  

Not content with this, Cemano parlayed the success of the one day wonders into larger budgets and made three feature films – The Healers, Fongaluli and Madame Zenobia (1970-1972) – which demonstrated a remarkable thematic journey charting the joyous sexual liberation of early 1970s swinging, anticipated the disillusion with sexual freedom and culminated with the open celebration of monogamous sexuality and loving commitment.  With a cultural background in Borscht Belt comedy, Cemano developed a reputation as a pornographer’s answer to Woody Allen, his comedy also localized around New York City establishing shots (going so far as to steal erotic scenes of simulated masturbation filmed in Central Park in broad daylight).

Just as Cemano used the newly (almost) legitimized adult feature film for thematic examination and stylistic experimentation as much as revealing the explicit “secret” sights of sexuality decried as sinful by Christian moralists, so too Gerard Damiano was a Pornoteur of considerable ambition.  Damiano had completed Deep Throat in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and had another idea.  In his midtown Manhattan offices he was introduced to actress Georgina Spelvin, a former Broadway chorine and then Greenwich Village resident who had taken to communal living in an abandoned Pickle Factory.  Spelvin was 36 when she agreed to star for Damiano in The Devil in Miss Jones (in a role eventually praised by such as Judith Crist if not Paulene Kael).  An enormous hit, The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) matched the intellectual impetus behind Cemano’s trilogy: Damiano structured his New York adult film opus as a deliberately pornographized Biblical allegory with an ending lifted from existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s acclaimed play No Exit.

Damiano was not loyal to New York and fluctuated between the East and West Coasts over his subsequent adult film career.  However, contemporary adult filmmaker Henry Paris had a loyalty to New York, in setting and culture. 

Paris was the pseudonym chosen by European erotic filmmaker Radley Metzger when he came to the Big Apple to explore the potential of the adult feature film as a narrative format.  With considerable aplomb, Paris directed The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) – perhaps the most ambitious porn film ever made and with a plot that reworked George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, replacing the humble flower-seller with a NYC porn theatre hand-job specialist turned into a sexual superstar by a Machiavellian Jamie Gillis.  Paris (who augmented his New York City location work with locations in Paris and Rome for a true jet-setting porn classic) had earlier worked with Miss Jones’ Spelvin on The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974) lampooning – as had Cemano before him – the Supreme Court ruling that sexually explicit material had to have “redeeming social value”. 

Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann

Always ambitious, Paris acquired screen adaptation rights to the controversial Naked Came the Stranger (1975), which by then had the distinction of being a high-profile literary hoax.  Newsday writer Mike McGrady reasoned that – on the basis of the popularity of novels by Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins – literarily vacuous trash with sex would sell big in sexual revolution America.  He thus concocted a story of Long Island resident sexual intrigue amongst NYC radio breakfast show hosts and recruited several of his fellow Newsday writers to contribute chapters written as inanely as possible.  A pseudonym was concocted for the “author” – Penelope Ashe – and McGrady’s sister-in-law played the part well in public appearances to promote the book.  The book became a success – hitting the New York Times bestseller lists – and the authors, now with generous royalty checks, exposed the hoax on David Frost’s television talk show. 

McGrady later declined to write a sequel but would ironically ghost-write much of Deep Throat star’s Linda Lovelace’s coerced denouncement of the porn industry in the book Ordeal.  Metzger-Paris was delighted by this successful hoax and contacted porn superstar Darby Lloyd Rains to star in the feature film version of Naked Came the Stranger, shot on authentic NYC locations and described as “a bubbly and fast-paced trifle that plays like Ernst Lubitsch after a hit of Ecstasy” (Mondo Digital).  Yet, Paris downplayed the hoax nature of the original source material to turn the content into a clever farce of New York sophisticate pop culture and American sexual morality.  In that, the work emerged less as an American hoax than a Europeanized look at American morality in the mid-1970s. 

Roberta Findlay (aka Anna Riva)

Cemano, Damiano and Metzger/Paris were all accomplished filmmakers whose ambitions had them more in stead with avant-garde experimentalism than the peep-show booths of New York’s then flourishing “grindhouse cinema” district on 42nd Street (long before it was cleaned up by a moralizing Rudi Giuliani), known colloquially as “the Deuce”. 

In total contrast to the bulk of New York porn made by men, a young woman named Roberta Findlay took it upon herself to add a woman’s creative touch to the traditionally male genre.  Findlay directed the film Angel No. 9 (1974), its plot of an unrepentant serial womanizer who returns from death in the body of a gorgeous woman (played by Naked Came the Stranger’s Darby Lloyd Rains) being plagiarized by the Hollywood mainstream a decade later as a the basis for the Blake Edwards / Ellen Barkin comedy Switch (1991).  Findlay remarked: “I hire actors who will screw as opposed to screwers who I try to make act, which is impossible" And often cast herself in her sex fantasies, starring as porn star Anna Riva in Dear Pam (1976) opposite Johnny Wadd himself, John Holmes.

Findlay, and her husband Michael (a noted misogynist), next collaborated on an obscure horror movie filmed in South America and based on the Manson family murders.  The film was about to be shelved as ineptly un-releasable schlock when enterprising producer Alan Shackleton hastily added an ending in which a woman is eviscerated on camera for the sexual delight of the film crew.  Although staged (rather dismally – the eviscerated actress can be seen laughing) the film when titled Snuff (1976) and released under the ad campaign “filmed in South America – where life is cheap” drew the ire of the burgeoning New York radical feminist movement.  Organizing themselves into groups, these feminists organized marches along 42nd Street, known collectively as “Take Back the Night” and picketed Snuff showings, much to Shackleton’s delight as he basked in the free publicity and did everything he could to fuel the feminist ire, claiming the sex-murder was indeed real.  Roberta Findlay – as New York’s premier female pornographer was denounced as a traitor to her gender and Snuff was written about as the epitome of pornography, murder for sexual gratification – an indictment of Patriarchy’s sexual objectification of women.

Jane Hamilton (aka Veronica Hart)

The New York grindhouse infiltration of the adult feature film continued with Shaun Costello, a grubby filmmaker who made a porno film about a serial rapist-killer, a deranged Vietnam veteran played by Deep Throat’s Harry Reems in Forced Entry (1973).  Filmed in Forest Hills, Queens, Forced Entry made sly allusions to Vietnam atrocity – the rapist finding in rape the same power he found massacring “gook” civilians – in a visualization of New York as an urban inferno that anticipated the Martin Scorsese / Paul Schrader Taxi Driver (1976)  Graphic sexual violence here infiltrated New York pornography in imitation of a grindhouse tradition known as the “roughie”.  Forced Entry and its demented 1976 follow-up Waterpower (about an “enema bandit” – played by Misty Beethoven’s Jamie Gillis) represented an aesthetic of sexual force and violence intended directly for the Deuce audience, which Cemano, Damiano and Metzger/Paris had all sought to avoid: ironically Damiano would be credited as directing Waterpower as the producers (the Gambino crime family) thought his name would sell the film better than Costello’s.

Carter Stevens (left) with veterans
Joe Sarno and Jamie Gillis

Roommates was highly acclaimed as being a breakthrough porn film and was re-cut into an R-rated version.  Vincent went on to become one of the finest adult directors of the 1980s and crossed over into mainstream filmmaking in a decade when the home video boom took the edge of porno moviemaking and the industry settled into California.  Hamilton parlayed her experience as an actress working for Vincent (whom she described as “a great friend”) into a lucrative career as one of the best producers in the adult business, collaborating by the end of the decade with the revolutionary former CNN editor Michael Ninn. 

Perhaps the most prolific New York pornoteur however was Carter Stevens.  Stevens began in the early 1970s working with adult industry superstars Jamie Gillis and Eric Edwards on a series of increasingly ambitious films.  Stevens was an acute observer of 1970s pop culture, the epitome of which was his 1976 Rollerbabies epitomizing 70s pop culture with its sex on roller skates contest – before the roller derby fad would make the mainstream in the Linda Blair vehicle Rollerboogie.  Stevens was adept at adult film, slipping effortlessly from comedy to more serious explorations of sexual ethics, filming the 1977 kidnapping drama Punk Rock in the East Village, exploring the same world of sex and drugs that had influenced the grind-house scene and that had saturated Scorsese-Schrader. 

Working Girls

For this Stevens featured punk rock band Elda & the Stilettos (whom Stevens found at a favored neighborhood watering hole, Max's Kansas City), making one of the first US films to capitalize on the punk aesthetic imported from the UK, the surprise success of Saturday Night Fever causing Stevens to recall crew and add more music.  Stevens was one of the few New York adult filmmakers to work steadily and consistently through the 1980s and 1990s, surviving the video boom to be inducted in 2009 into the Adult Film Industry Hall of Fame.

Although New York porn was over as an independent production movement with the demise of the Deuce in mayor Rudi Giuliani’s Disney-backed clean-up campaign, it remained a location, its porn houses being the subject of pro-sex feminists Bette Gordon and Kathy Acker’s tale of a female porn theatre projectionist in Variety (1983), shot cheaply in Midtown Manhattan.  Likewise, uptown Manhattan became the setting for another pro-sex feminist’s study of the operations of a New York brothel in Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986).  Although about sex, these feminist looks at what would often be the subject for male-oriented porno filmgoers downplayed any explicit sexual content and were more about porn than actual porn, radically different in their evocation of American sexuality. 

In that, they took up Roberta Findlay’s interest in the subject matter but avoided her aesthetic emphasis on sex, which Findlay had always sought to augment with plot, character and setting anyway.