Dirty Movies
When I was fairly young, Roddy McDowell, the actor who played Cornelius in “Planet of the Apes,” was arrested for having some two hundred “illegal” motion pictures. You may have never thought about this, but ownership of motion picture film (as film) remains with the distribution company in perpetuity. It will say right on the can, “property of Paramount Motion Picture Distribution Company,” and an address where you can return it.
I once had a copy of “Birth of a Nation” with “Property of Jackson Citizens’ Council” Written on the can and reel. There are conspiracy theories about why the copyright on Birth was never renewed, based on KKK plots. I honestly think it was just a matter of the company thinking there was no commercial value in the film, although it’s true that Birth was used by the KKK (and the Citizens Council, apparantly) as a “sales tool” for many years. Things don’t have to be a conspiracy to be fucked up.
Included in the films seized in the raid on McDowell’s house were boxes and boxes of gay stag reels. I don’t believe in outing somebody who doesn’t out themselves, so please don’t take this as me outing McDowell, but gay pornography is as prevalent as straight pornography. Until YouTube came along, there were many times more pornographic films than cooking films.
For generations, it was generally held that straight women had no interest in pornography. If you ever read a bodice-ripper paperback novel, you’ll know that’s simply not true. The internet opened up the world of film pornography, and while some are disgusted, others are more like, “wait, I wanted to see that.”
The motion picture industry settled on the standard of thirty-five millimeter width because, among other reasons, it meant you could build cameras and projectors with parts originally meant for clocks.
Originally, 35mm film stock had perforations on both sides and a soundtrack on one. The soundtrack was added optically. Without it, you just had a fuller frame. Cut in half, 35mm becomes 16mm. You flip one side so that both have perforations. Cut in half, 16mm film becomes 8mm; again, perforations are cut on the side without them. Super 8mm film is regular 8mm film without the extra perforations cut in and with the frame rotated 90 degrees. Isn’t that exciting?
With black and white film, as long as you have a larger format, you can make a “reduction copy” pretty easily and cheaply. 35mm becomes 16mm. 16mm becomes 8mm. So far, nobody really uses 4mm, except pinhole or “spy” cameras. If you ever bought 8mm or Super 8mm films from the back of Famous Monsters, this is how they were made.
As you may know, I have a pretty deep fascination with the “jazz age.” To me, it’s when the world changed, and the change started in America. In some ways, it was the beginning of American Cultural Hegemony.
Some of you will be offended if I say that I had a pretty extensive collection of “Stag Films” from the Jazz Age. A “Stag Film” is a film made for “Stag Parties,” which were parties of just men, with whiskey, beer, and cigars. We may have had some of these at the KA House. It may sound strange, but Stag Parties were considered gentlemanly, although they are straight Sodom and Gomorrah.
Pornographic stag films were generally distributed on 16mm or 8mm stock. Their cans or boxes usually just had the title on them, often handwritten with no studio. No studio claimed them. They were often distributed by organized crime. This is barely hinted at in Godfather Part II.
Rather than shooting in 35mm, these were often shot directly on 16mm or 8mm. These were clockwork cameras, motivated by a spring. Shots lasted about sixty seconds because that’s how long it took for the spring to run out, and you had to rewind the clockwork.
The photographers were usually just mobsters or pimps. There was no lighting, and usually just whatever lens the camera came with. The result is a film of amorphous blobs, shifting in tonal value, barely recognizable as human beings in the midst of unspeakable acts. This was not HD. It was barely recognizable as pornographic. It was as if Rothko, Van Gogh, or Jackson Pollock made a pornographic painting.
For a while, I was involved with a much younger, borderline insane, jewish woman from Seattle. Curious about this, she wanted to see a copy. I found a digitized version of one of my films and sent it to her via Skype.
“What the hell, dude! You can’t SEE anything!”
I think I made her laugh, but I also made the point that erotic is a state of mind, not what you’re actually seeing.
There’s a stag film that’s supposed to be of Marilyn Monroe. You cannot tell it’s Monroe. You can barely tell it’s a naked human being. But when it was sold at auction, it was very, very, very expensive.
Ive tried a few times to write short fiction about what I know about what it was like to be a porn actor (I don’t use the word actress much anymore) in the 20s or 30s. While I’ve met people who were working actors in the 20s and 30s, I never had the courage to ask them about it. I’ve also never had the courage to show a living soul what I wrote. I just don’t think that goes with my other writing. Well, it does, but I don’t think my readers could get past the pornographic bits to see the parts about a young woman, at a time when being a woman was redefined every day, making very “outside the box” choices about her life.
A lot of people have tried to “legitimize” pornography. I don’t know if that’s worth doing. I also think that, if you take away the forbidden nature of it, then you lose two-thirds of your audience.
Isabella Rossellini made a series of films called “Green Porn” where she dresses like an insect and discusses how they reproduce. While they’re fascinating to watch, I’m sure some people were disappointed.
Erotic exists, not on paper, on film, over the radio, or on a plate. Erotic is a state of mind. Stag films are not really very erotic, but it’s fairly fascinating to think about the people who made them.
