Hollywood—1968 to 1969
The History of Pornography
Having decided that I had experienced enough of the hippie life, it was now time to light a fire under my ass and get myself back to work. After all, I still wanted to become a film director. I also realized that, in spite of everything, I had to make a living. It was time to shit or get off the pot. Sadly, I realized that the only actual filmmaking work I had managed to get that paid actual money had been shooting a few beaver girl loops. It occurred to me that if I was going to be shooting these things, then I should probably be shooting these things on my own.
By now I knew where to sell them. I knew that the people who bought them basically paid double the money it cost to make them. I realized that if I shot the things myself and sold them, there would be a 100-percent return on my investment, plus more because I didn’t have to hire anyone else. The only problem was the depressing fact that I didn’t have the initial money to invest to get that 100-percent-plus return.
My opportunity came in 1969 when I moved in with a commercial artist named Linda Adrain. I had met her one night when Norm and Jack and I had ended up at a sidewalk restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. She was an imposing young woman with a beautiful face, big and tall, and she dressed well and usually wore a distinctive long, black cape. She was there with two other attractive girls, but she was the one who definitely stood out.
Norm, Jack, and I had spent most of the evening out drinking and I was somewhat plastered and feeling particularly bold, so I had tried hitting on her. She’d seemed amused at my clumsy pickup lines and at first she simply ignored me. I persisted, following her out to the parking lot when she left, and eventually she gave me her phone number.
About a week later I found the phone number on a piece of paper in my shirt pocket and decided to call her up. She surprised me by asking what took me so long. We made a dinner date for that evening, and after a good meal and more than a few drinks somehow ended up in bed together.
I ended up telling her what I planned to do in life. She listened to me intently, and with apparent interest, before telling me that what I wanted to do sounded feasible to her, and since she had a little money, she would be willing to help me to do it.
And then she surprised me again when she invited me to move in with her, which I immediately did. We were not really romantically involved, although we did get along very well and shared a lot of good, sex as well as a lot of good food.
So it turned out to be just as simple as that. My so called “hippie” days were over and since they had become a thing of the past, it was now time to settle down and get back to work. As it happened, Linda was absolutely serious about helping me form a film company.
We formed a limited partnership, setting up a company that we called Chinn-Adrain Productions. Since Linda was a commercial artist, she designed our letterhead and business cards and had our business stationery printed up. I purchased copies of basic contracts, business forms, and talent releases to use as templates.
And then Linda took the big plunge and purchased the camera that I had selected, a Beauleau 16mm movie camera, so we could shoot our own films.
The new Beauleau camera had a larger film capacity, which was much more convenient, but we primarily chose it because it was capable of shooting synch sound when coupled with a Uher quarter-inch tape recorder with Crystal Sync capability. We were now prepared to start up our own film company and produce our own beaver girl loops.
Linda opened an account with her credit card for our production company at a small film lab called Pacific Film Industries. The lab gave us a total credit line of $300. Now that we were able to get our film developed on credit, I put on my only denim jacket, combed my shoulder-length hair, and went to Eastman-Kodak Professional Motion Picture Services, where I smiled at the serious, straight-looking middle-aged men in white shirts and ties and casually bought some 16mm Ektachrome Color Reversal film stock so we could commence shooting.
I thought to myself, Boy, if the people at Kodak only knew what kind of images I was going to be recording on their product, they would shit one huge brick.
The sexual revolution in America can trace its roots back to a forward-thinking biologist from Indiana University named Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey decided to make a scientific study of human sexual behavior and the result of his research was published in two ground-breaking books: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Both books created a firestorm of controversy, but one key thing had happened—the wraps had finally been lifted from the long-taboo subject of sexuality.
The doors were now open, and in 1957 the research team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson began looking into the nature of human sexual response by conducting actual experiments with human subjects at their institute in St. Louis, Missouri. The result was the publication of two other scientific studies, Human Sexual Response in 1966, followed by Human Sexual Inadequacy in 1970.
While the Masters and Johnson books proved to be a shade more titillating than the Kinsey Reports, they were still cold, ponderous scientific studies that left a lot to be desired as a no-holds barred, truly effective method of sexual education for the average male and female. But the stage had now been set for the appearance and evolution of the adult film industry.
The male of the species has always had a healthy interest in the female anatomy, especially the intimate private parts that are usually kept hidden. For the majority of the mass population of American males, access to this female organ was generally only made available to them behind closed doors and under the discreet cover of darkness. Along with the new era of sexual freedom that had begun to manifest itself across the country, the time had finally come to shed some light on the situation.
By 1969, beaver girl loops had progressed to what was called “split beaver” or “spread beaver,” where girls would spread their legs and reveal all for all to see. Light would finally be shed on the great mystery that heretofore could only be imagined. High-quality lenses would record this wonder in amazingly sharp detail. It would become a true educational experience for curious men across the country.
This all had come about because the Supreme Court had ruled that the human body could not be considered obscene. So, naturally, we took the broad interpretation of this ruling and proceeded to show anything and everything—in other words, the female body in all its naked and unashamed glory.
Men—and even a few interested women—eagerly filled the smoky theaters to see everything revealed just as nature had intended. The theater owners were devouring product like crazy and clamoring for more and more. I easily sold every loop that I made.
At that time, the girls or models that we used were paid thirty dollars for roughly thirty minutes of work. All they had to do was undress and do whatever I asked them to do while the camera was running. It was very simple work for them, far easier than the strain of holding a pose as an artist’s model for hours on end or struggling as a waitress in a cheap diner or working as a counter girl in some burger franchise all day for about the same pay, so they were happy and we were happy. Everything was more or less hunky-dory.
Many of these girls had been budding young actresses who still aspired to make it big in the business, but had to eat and pay the rent in the meantime. Others were slightly older would-be actresses who knew they would never make it in the big time and were just after whatever they could get.
There are so many sad stories about all those “would-bes” who never were. But most of them were young hip girls or flower children that had somehow made it to LA, the big city, for reasons as numerous and varied as they were. Some came seeking adventure. Some came to escape a dead-end life in a small, dusty town. Some came to get away from the abuse they received at home, especially sexual abuse by fathers or close relatives, and now were determined to live life on their own terms. For them, California appeared to be the “Promised Land.”
It was essential, for both their protection and ours, that they could prove beyond a doubt that they were eighteen years of age or over—at or above the age of consent. We required two forms of identification for proof: a legal photo ID, like a driver’s license or passport, and a social security card.
So why did all of these attractive young girls bare their bodies and reveal their innermost charms? It’s not that they were immoral. It was just that the fresh winds of change were blowing, and one could sense the new freedom in the air. A whole new era had dawned, an era that had become known as the Age of Aquarius, and these girls were simply a product of the changing times. These were times that I could never have envisioned while growing up in rural Hawaii and rural southeastern New Mexico.
These girls were usually totally uninhibited when it came to baring their bodies. A few of them plainly stated that they would not be averse to shooting a hardcore sex scene if the pay was right—somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty dollars. I put that information in the back of my mind for future use.
The fact that they were willing to do this, of course, shocked me. I didn’t know whether it was because of my fairly strict moral upbringing or whether I was operating under some kind of a double standard. My own personal life was surprisingly conservative in comparison. I would have been appalled if, say, any woman I knew would even consider doing something like this.
But then I thought, it all boils down to individual choice. If the girl was willing to do what it took to make a film like this, then why not? I reminded myself that I was indeed against censorship of any kind.
Once I shot a loop with a pretty and totally uninhibited young hippie girl with long, straight brown hair and a beautiful face whose name was Debbie Frank. I had given her a leather riding crop as a prop and she began playfully hitting herself with it and rubbing it against her private parts in what appeared to be total abandon.
“All right,” I said as I kept shooting. “Looking great!” It was hot under the lights in the studio that day and we were both beginning to break out in a sweat.
“This is making me hot,” she gasped as she began rubbing faster and faster, “how about you?”
“Yeah,” was all I could think to reply as I wiped the sweat dripping down my forehead so I could see through the camera’s fogged viewfinder.
She continued, “Now this is really starting to turn me on,” and she proceeded to masturbate with her fingers and the whip while I kept the camera running and zoomed-in to tight close-up shots, recording much of the ensuing action in clinical detail. Actually I hadn’t realized what I was doing at the time and was totally taken aback when I heard everybody gasp when the finished film was projected on the big theater screen.
There, in razor-sharp focus and in all its glory, was a thirty-foot-high gaping vagina. I had totally forgotten how magnified everything was on the big screen. Everyone was stunned not only by the subject of the shot but also by the extreme sharpness and clarity of detail.
One could clearly see the various stages of arousal as her vagina became more and more wet while she masturbated, until a sudden gush of her secretions finally revealed a genuine climax. Even Masters and Johnson would probably have been stunned.
Consequently, because of my penchant for adding extreme close-up shots of the female anatomy in just about all of my films, the adult film critic and actor Bill Margold would eventually credit me with the invention of what he called the “monster shot” and what all of the cameramen I subsequently worked with would refer to as the “Chinn shot.”
I doubt that I was the first person to use that particular close-up shot, but it did become something of a trademark that readily identified my work.
The Debbie Frank loop marked the first time that any of the girls had done something as wild as this, and I was wondering how the hell I was going to be able to sell the loop with all this rough and detailed action.
Later, I incorporated that particular loop into the feature film titled Auto-Eroticism and the Female, and I have no doubt that it contributed much to the film’s success. One could usually tell from the number of splices found in a specific section of a print that projectionists were removing frames of scenes to add to their own private collections. We would always check the condition of the prints after they came back from a play date to make sure that they were in good enough shape to be sent to the next one. That particular scene came back with a whole lot of splices in it.
While I shot a few of them at the various model’s apartments or Linda’s living room, most of these loops were shot on a small soundstage at the old John Garfield studio on Melrose Avenue. A middle-aged theater owner and entrepreneur named Lou Federici owned the building, and since neither he nor anyone else was renting the studio, he let us use it.
The lights in the studio were all set up to light the lone bedroom set. We simply turned them on whenever we scored a model and shot our loop. I shot the film while either Linda or a handyman, Bill Andrus, shot the stills. Everything was down and dirty, quick and easy. By doing it this way, the girls were always finished within thirty minutes.
This whole situation had actually come about because of a phone call I’d made to Art Burnham. I hadn’t seen him for a while and I was wondering if he was doing all right. He told me that although he was no longer at Film Classics Exchange, he was still gainfully employed. He invited me to come visit him at the Encore Theatre where he was working every evening as a ticket taker. From that time on, Linda and I had an open invitation to attend whatever shows at the Encore that we wanted to free of charge.
The Encore Theatre, formerly called the Continental Theatre, was what was referred to at the time as an art theater, meaning they showed primarily foreign and older cult films rather than mainstream commercial fare. When Art Burnham happened to invite me, they were having a foreign film retrospective that included some Kurosawa films that I had never seen and wanted to see, so Linda and I decided to go one evening. It was on this night that Art introduced us to Lou Federici, who offered his studio for our use.
The Encore was a classy theater and it had a classy clientele. I was totally blown away when I was able to meet and befriend one of my literary heroes, Henry Miller. He was there at the Encore Theatre one evening along with his companion, an attractive young Japanese lady.
Henry Miller was very interested when I told him what I was doing for a living and we talked for a while. Then I told him what an inspiration he had been to me and related my experiences trying to obtain his banned books back in the late 1950s by ordering them from Europe.
This made him laugh and he invited me to visit him at his house in the Pacific Palisades whenever I happened to be in the area. I told him that I still had some of those old Olympia Press books and would certainly bring them along for him to sign.
Lou Federici also generously gave us his exhibitor’s invitations to attend the pre-release film screenings at all the major studios because he never went to them himself. As a result of this, we got to see a lot of major studio Hollywood feature films before they were even released to theaters. All we had to do was tell Lou if they were any good after we saw them, not that he was actually ever going to book them.
Lou’s Encore Theatre frequently booked foreign film retrospectives from the extensive Janus Films library. This gave me the opportunity to fill in the blanks with regard to many classics of world cinema that I had not seen during my studies at UCLA. In addition, Lou also liked to book classic American films. When Howard Hughes’ rare and seldom-seen Hell’s Angels was restored, it was premiered at the Encore Theatre.
It was at the Encore that I was introduced to the spectacularly choreographed Warner Brothers musicals of the 1930s such as Footlight Parade, 42nd Street, and Gold Diggers of 1933, and the old RKO Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies such as Swing Time and Top Hat. Generally, I don’t particularly care for musicals, but much to my surprise I found all of these old movies very entertaining.
I wound up spending just about every evening at the Encore Theatre, or if we spent it elsewhere, we would always go back so we could give either Art or the ticket seller Milton Kaiser or both of them a ride home so they wouldn’t have to end up taking the bus that time of night.
It was during one of these rides home that Art suggested that I put six of my beaver girl loops together to make a feature-length film, add a soundtrack, and bring it over to him at Canyon Films, and he’d see to it that it would get distributed properly. It was time, he said, for me to start making some decent money.
I did what he suggested and came up with Auto-Eroticism and the Female, and from that day on I stopped making loops and went into the feature film business.
I made a distribution deal for Auto-Eroticism and the Female and for the next one, which was going to be titled The Rise and Fall of Ricky Shuter. At that time, Canyon Films released and distributed softcore adult exploitation films in both 35mm and 16mm, which were booked into the adult film theaters, mini-theaters, and other venues that played such fare all across the country.
Over the years, Art had made a lot of contacts in the film distribution business himself, and he was very good at what he did. Once, he was on the phone talking to a theater owner from somewhere in the Midwest who had already played all of the film product in the entire Canyon Films library and wanted to book something new. Business was a little slow that day, and Art knew that he had to make a sale.
“I’ve got a new one here for you,” Art told him, “matter of fact it’s so new it ain’t even in the catalog yet.” When the guy asked what the title was, Art winked at me and told him, “Well, it’s called Coming Soon, and it’s a real hot one.”
The theater owner booked the film, and after he hung up the phone, Art told me to go to the scrap heap and pick out a print that wasn’t too badly damaged. The scrap heap was a pile of old well-worn prints that sat in one corner of the editing room. They had been taken out of circulation for one reason or another. When we had the time, we would sometimes look at them to see if they could be repaired.
Sometimes they were cannibalized for scenes to use in films that were a little too short, or occasionally we would be able to salvage and put together enough usable scenes to create an ‘all new’ feature.
The coming attractions trailers always ended with a title card that read “Coming Soon,” so I immediately knew what it was that Art wanted me to do. I found the longest print in the scrap pile, added a couple of scenes to it to bring it up to the correct length and spliced the “Coming Soon” title card at the beginning of the scrapped print. Art had himself a “new” film, which was immediately packed up and shipped off to its booking in the Midwest. The theater owners rarely ever watched the films themselves, so they would never figure out what we had done.
At that time, all of the television stations in this vast metropolis were still using film in their news broadcasts. Like us, they shot on Ektachrome ERB, a high-speed hard-emulsion 16mm film stock balanced for tungsten light that could be used outdoors with a lens filter. The lab that I used, Pacific Film Industries, processed this news film for several of the local television stations so their processing machines were just about always up and running, twenty-four hours, day and night.
The only time the machines stopped was when they had to be cleaned to reclaim the silver that had accumulated in them or when the chemicals had to be changed, which apparently wasn’t often enough as the faded colors on a lot of my old films bear witness to.
As soon as I had finished shooting one or two loops, I’d run the film over to the lab and it would get tacked on to the end of some news footage that had just been shot and would probably air on the six o’clock news. After about a thirty-minute wait, my footage would be off the machine and ready, and I’d rush home and quickly edit it with my cheesy setup on Linda’s dining room table.
Once, some of the news footage inadvertently got mixed up with the footage of my beaver girl loop, and of course I didn’t notice it until I got home and took the film out of the can to begin editing it. Surprise, surprise! But I bet it was even more of a surprise for the news cameraman who was looking at my stuff wondering where his was.
Quickly looking up at the clock, I saw that the time was five thirty. In a panic, I rushed back to the lab where the news cameraman was impatiently waiting for me with my footage. He had to rush his footage back to the television station in time to air on the six o’clock news.
If I was going to make any money at all in this business, I had to continue making my own films. My next project would be my first synch sound feature. I’d written a small script about a photographer with a weakness for playing the ponies, and when his gambling debts begin to mount, he ends up in deep shit with his bookie. The only solution to his problem would be for him to make a stag film for a gangster known as Mr. Big. Since the only alternative would result in broken or damaged body parts, he agrees. It seemed like a plausible excuse to show some skin and sex on screen, which was the primary goal at the time. Since I really couldn’t afford to pay any actors other than the models, I recruited friends to play the lead roles.
After I promised him that he definitely would not have to do a sex scene, Jack Baker agreed to play Ricky, and Norm Klein agreed to play the non-sex role of Mr. Big. Neither of them had done any acting before and were understandably more than a little nervous at first in front of the camera. But since I needed their help, they had agreed to give it their best shot. That left the casting of the leading lady, which was easy because it was also a non-sex part. A friend of a friend, an attractive young secretary named Cheryl Smith, volunteered to play Ricky’s girlfriend.
This was the first time I had ever attempted a sound feature film. At best, it could only be considered a part-talkie. The dialogue was recorded on a cassette recorder and later transferred to a mag track, which was eyeballed into synch on a Movieola. The rest of the soundtrack utilized a lot of music and narration. It was a Mickey Mouse way of doing things that was extremely difficult and time-consuming. I was working both the camera and the sound recording equipment at the same time, by myself. It took some getting used to, but the shoot was a lot of fun in spite of the fact that no one in the cast was really an actor and their performances, at times, not only strained credibility but were downright awful. I attribute all this to my lack of experience directing, but since we were all having such a rollicking good time, I don’t think any of us got around to caring.
It was becoming more and more obvious that a great change for adult film entertainment was in the air. Pornography had been legalized in Denmark, where hardcore pornographic loops, stills, and magazines were rapidly becoming one of their major industries. A lot of this product was currently being smuggled into the United States where it was quickly counterfeited and sold discreetly in the various adult bookstores that decided to take the risk.
A San Francisco documentary filmmaker named Alex de Renzy got a brilliant idea and flew over to Copenhagen to attend and film Denmark’s first pornography trade show, an event known as Sex 69. Alex had brought a 16mm camera along with him and he decided to film the event for a feature documentary.
He also included examples of Danish hardcore pornography in still and motion picture form into this documentary. It was a decision that would have a gigantic impact on the adult film business.
In October of 1969, the film that he made at that event titled Sexual Freedom in Denmark, or Pornography in Denmark, first made its appearance in theaters in the United States. It contained a good amount of hardcore footage, but managed to elude the scissors of censorship because it was a documentary.
Needless to say, people flocked to see it wherever it was shown, and it was an immediate and unqualified success. Nothing like this had ever appeared on theater screens in this country before, and in its wake adult filmmakers and producers considered it to be a major breakthrough.
This gave Canyon Films owner Ed de Priest the brilliant inspiration to immediately jump on the bandwagon and take full advantage of the situation. Seeing the obvious potential of big dollar signs before his eyes, he decided to make and release a documentary of his own that contained scenes of hardcore pornography. He felt that this time he could get away with it because documentaries, it seemed, possessed that magic ingredient known as redeeming social significance.
I was in the editing room at Canyon Films trying to finish up my second feature film, The Rise and Fall of Ricky Shuter or How to Make a Stag Movie, when Ed de Priest called me into his office and outlined the idea he had for a project to be titled The History of Pornography. Since time was of the essence, he wanted to start on this project right away, so if I took him up on his offer Ricky Shuter would be relegated to the back burner. Still, it was a job that had the potential of offering me some immediate money.
“When do you need the film by?” I asked Ed.
“Tomorrow,” he answered, but I could tell that he wasn’t completely serious about the due date.
“What’s in it for me?”
“I’ll pay you three hundred dollars.”
It had now come down to bargaining time. Eddie might have looked and sometimes even behaved like a carefree beach blonde boy, but in actuality he was a shrewd and crafty businessman. “Sounds like an awful lot of work for three hundred dollars,” I said, shaking my head.
Eddie scratched his chin and said, “Tell you what—I don’t want to spend more than a thousand on it. Whatever you can bring it in for, I’ll let you keep the rest of the money. But I don’t want you to cut any corners on it because I want to end up with a good releasable film.”
“I can make a good releasable film.”
“I know you can.”
Of course, it took more than a day to have The History of Pornography ready for release, but not more than a week.
While the motion picture medium had lagged sadly behind, books had already won the censorship battle. Books depicting pornographic art from ancient to modern times were now readily available in bookstores.
We picked up a bunch of these books, and I set about photographing the color and black-and-white plates onto 16mm film and editing them chronologically into what might pass for a half-assed documentary history of pornographic art.
To supplement the material I had acquired from the bookstores, I was also able to borrow some pornographic still photographs from the private collection of the artist Rudy Escalera, who was by now a very good friend of mine. A true connoisseur of erotica, he had an extensive collection of vintage pornographic photographs of French, Cuban, and Mexican origin, and these images lent our project a great deal of historical interest while adding the much needed running time required to pad out the documentary to feature-length.
When it came to depict pornography in modern times, we decided to incorporate some old hardcore stag movies alongside the pictorial art. After all, weren’t they a significant part of the history of pornography? Of course they were, we decided. Even though these stag films were illegal by themselves, in the context of an educational documentary about a forbidden subject, they might well be considered to have some legitimacy, perhaps even some educational value. But where would we possibly find some old stag films?
Fortunately, Art Burnham had access to a number of 16mm prints made anywhere from the early 1900s through the 1950s—including a complete print of the rare old two-reel stag film classic known as The Nun—and he agreed to loan these to me for the film. After carefully duplicating these old stag movie reels at the lab, the old stag movies were quickly edited in. For good measure, we also added a recent locally made hardcore color loop, hoping that it would pass as something that had been made in Denmark.
All in all, what I slapped together seemed to come off as a kind of documentary. My total cost was slightly below $500, so I walked away from the job with $500 and some change in my pocket.
As soon as The History of Pornography was finished, Ed rushed it into release and it immediately proved to be so successful that he decided I should churn out a second documentary for him. Finishing The Rise and Fall of Ricky Shuter was once again put on hold while I quickly undertook this new project.
Ed had started out his career in the film business making surfing films, one of which he had won a few film festival awards for. As a result, he had amassed a good deal of outtake footage that he had sitting around, which had been shot in Hawaii. He also had a few recent hardcore loops he’d picked up that he wanted me to incorporate with this footage to make a pseudo-documentary about the so-called swinging lifestyle on the islands.
“Are there actually any swingers in Hawaii?” I asked him.
“Sure there are,” he replied, “or at least there will be in this film. Hell, there are swingers everywhere nowadays, aren’t there?”
“I suppose so. Same deal as before?”
“Same deal as before,” he nodded, “except for one thing. Since I’m providing all of the footage for this one, I want to keep the budget at less than a grand.”
“That’s going to be a little tough, don’t you think?” I put forth, seeing my $500 fee in imminent danger.
“Nah,” he countered. “You won’t have to shoot anything.”
“That’s true,” I said.
It was somewhat of a stretch for me to think of Hawaii as a particularly swinging place since this image didn’t really fit the Hawaii that I knew, but Eddie was determined to rush another “documentary” into release, so once again I ended up quickly editing, scripting, and narrating a Hawaii-themed feature-length “documentary” from the footage that he provided.
Pressured to come up with a quick title, I called it Sexus in Paradise, with sincere apologies, of course, to my recent acquaintance Henry Miller.
Although Sexus in Paradise had very little to recommend itself as an authentic documentary—it was more like a bargain-basement travelogue with a somewhat bullshit narration interspersed with occasional raunchy hardcore sex footage—it managed to play the theaters across the country without incident and ended up being moderately successful. And I ended up taking home another $500 paycheck.
The History of Pornography, however, continued the rake in the big bucks, booking after booking. Many years later, toward the end of 1975, I had just walked into the lobby of one of Art Weissberg’s theaters in Southfield, Michigan, to hand-deliver a print of my latest Freeway Film Tell Them Johnny Wadd Is Here—which was due to open on the following day—when I was startled to hear my own voice coming from the theater auditorium.
Curious, I took a look into the auditorium and saw that The History of Pornography was flickering up there on the big screen. Five years later, that movie was still playing in theaters.