California Hard Core

California Hard Core By Joseph Lam Duong A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Waldo E. Martin, Chair Professor Kerwin Lee Klein Professor Linda Williams Spring 2014 Copyright 2014 by Joseph Lam Duong Abstract California Hard Core by Joseph Lam Duong Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Waldo E. Martin, Chair California Hard Core is a narrative history of the pornographic film industry in California from 1967 to 1978, a moment when Americans openly made, displayed, and watched sexually explicit films. Two interrelated questions animate this project: Who moved the pornographic film from the margins of society to the mainstream of American film culture? What do their stories tell us about sex and sexuality in the U.S. in the last third of the twentieth century? The earlier academic literature concentrates on pornographic film and political debates surrounding it rather than industry participants and their contexts. The popular literature, meanwhile, is composed almost entirely of book-length oral histories and autobiographies of filmmakers and models. California Hard Core helps to close the divide between these two literatures by documenting not only an eye-level view of work from behind the camera, on the set, and in the movie theater, but also the ways in which consumers received pornographic films, placing the reader in the viewing position of audience members, police officers, lawyers, judges, and anti-pornography activists. I argue that in the late 1960s a small group of sexual entrepreneurs, motivated by profit and inspired by the sexual revolution, moved pornographic film from the illicit to the mainstream of American film culture. Hard core film put sex on display, both reflecting and advancing the central tenet of the sexual revolution, which sought to increase the visibility of sex above all else. This movement, however, was mediated by a give and take relationship with the state, a relationship that, in turn, rendered pornographic films relatively tame in comparison to the sexual fluidity that marked the personal and professional lives of industry participants. Their stories demonstrate that when it came to sexual behavior, the sexual revolution was more easily lived in the private realm than the public sphere because the state seemed to have far less influence in private spaces. Paradoxically, however, it was in those private spaces that the state ultimately had the most control over sexual behavior because the individual was unaware of its quiet internalizing, regulatory presence. 1 Introduction California Hard Core is a narrative history of the pornographic film industry in California from 1967 to 1978, a moment when Americans openly made, displayed, and watched sexually explicit films. Two interrelated questions animate this project: Who moved the pornographic film from the margins of society to the mainstream of American film culture? What do their stories tell us about sex and sexuality in the U.S. in the last third of the twentieth century? The earlier academic literature concentrates on pornographic film and political debates surrounding it rather than industry participants and their contexts. The popular literature, meanwhile, is composed almost entirely of book-length oral histories and autobiographies of filmmakers and models. California Hard Core helps to close the divide between these two literatures by documenting not only an eye-level view of work from behind the camera, on the set, and in the movie theater, but also the ways in which consumers received pornographic films, placing the reader in the viewing position of audience members, police officers, lawyers, judges, and anti-pornography activists. I argue that in the late 1960s a small group of sexual entrepreneurs, motivated by profit and inspired by the sexual revolution, moved pornographic film from the illicit to the mainstream of American film culture. Hard core film put sex on display, both reflecting and advancing the central tenet of the sexual revolution, which sought to increase the visibility of sex above all else. This movement, however, was mediated by a give and take relationship with the state, a relationship that, in turn, rendered pornographic films relatively tame in comparison to the sexual fluidity that marked the personal and professional lives of industry participants. Their stories demonstrate that when it came to sexual behavior, the sexual revolution was more easily lived in the private realm than the public sphere because the state seemed to have far less influence in private spaces. Paradoxically, however, it was in those private spaces that the state ultimately had the most control over sexual behavior because the individual was unaware of its quiet internalizing, regulatory presence. Chapter 1, “Overlap and Exclusion,” introduces the reader to the filmmakers and models that built the pornographic film industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In it I argues that a collective feeling of “exclusion” marked the experiences of individuals who would become involved in pornographic film industry. Most of them had failed in their pursuits to land jobs in the mainstream entertainment industry, so they ended up joining the pornographic film industry to make money. A significant cross section of these individuals excluded themselves from the entertainment mainstream, shunning traditional careers to work in the underground precisely because it reflected their politics of authenticity and sexual liberation. This chapter, in addition, shows that “overlap” was a prominent characteristic of the modern pornographic film industry. For example, many of people who made hard-core films came from the sexploitation film industry, a loose collection of filmmakers and models who made films that featured simulated sex. This overlap is significant because scholars treat different film genres as wholly unto themselves. Second, there was also a great deal of overlap between the “straight” and “gay” pornographic film industries. Pornographers in this period made all kinds of sex films that featured all kinds of sexual acts. Actors, especially bi-sexual men, moreover, starred in films made for both gay and straight audiences. The boarder between gay or straight films, in other words, proves to be much more porous than the literature suggests. Chapter 2, “Reinforcement and Resistance,” examines the representations of African- 1 Americans in two of the first pornographic features, Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand (1971) and the Mitchell Brothers’ Behind the Green Door (1972). It argues that these two films wrestle with the cultural legacy of the Black Freedom Struggle through their respective depictions of interracial sex. Wakefield Poole tries to present a utopian vision of interracial sex with “no top or bottom,” mimicking the interracial coalitions that won the Civil Rights Movement. The Mitchell brothers, on the other hand, exploited whites’ fear of miscegenation, which had taken on new erotic valances for both audience and actors alike in a cultural/movie landscape deeply influenced by the Black Power Movement. The movie theater owners that screened films, such as Boys in the Sand and Behind Green Door are the subjects of chapter 3. This chapter, “More than ‘P going into the C,’” posits that the individuals who owned pornographic theater, specifically in San Francisco, saw sex films as a necessary ingredient of the blossoming Sexual Revolution: one of the main tenets of which was to make sex more visible. They hoped that their actions - screening films that violated sexual and racial taboo, creating welcoming theaters for young people etc. - would help, in the parlance of the time, “un-hang,” Americans, or make them more sexually open. The political language that they developed was a unique form of oppositional politics that lost some of its critical edged, though, because of its association with an industry that many considered exploitative. Chapter 4, “Fascination and Disgust,” places the reader into the shoes of police officers who conducted surveillance on Vincent Miranda’s Pussycat Theaters. This chapter demonstrates that in reaction to the pornographic film industry’s success in making sex more visible, the state, using techniques of surveillance, subjected its citizens (moviegoers) to a Foucauldian program of discipline. Over the course of their investigations, state actors developed a keen interest in particular kinds of sex acts such as male ejaculation, masturbation, and sodomy. These types of non-reproductive self-indulgent homoerotic sexual practices became central to the definition of obscenity. The state’s real power, however, can be seen in the self-incriminating confessions it elicited from industry participants and audience members who were caught engaging in this type of sexual behavior. They had been disciplined into knowing what they were doing was wrong and admitted their guilt under very little pressure. After their arrest, industry participants turned to a handful of defense lawyers who specialized in obscenity cases. Chapter 5, “Unorthodox Causes and Comrades,” tells the story of Stanley Fleishman. Between the late 1950s and early 1980s, Fleishman represented Vincent Miranda and countless other sexual entrepreneurs in their legal battles with the state. He collided with prosecutors in the courtroom,

Load more