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A taste for trash: the persistence of exploitation in American cinema, 1960-1975

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A taste for trash: the persistence of exploitation in American cinema, 1960-1975

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A TASTE FOR TRASH:

THE PERSISTENCE OF EXPLOITATION IN AMERICAN CINEMA, 1960-1975

by

David Lerner

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2012

Copyright 2012 David Lerner
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As a project that was several years in the making, this dissertation is the product
of many people and ideas, debates and discussions, friendships and welcome distractions,
of which I am endlessly indebted. I would first like to thank my committee: Richard
Jewell, Akira Lippit, and Tania Modleski. Rick’s tremendous intellectual support and
guidance of this project is matched only by his personal and emotional support. Whether
discussing drive-in theater experiences or NCAA sanctions, his constancy and good
humor was the perfect antidote to my neuroses. Akira’s eclecticism and gift for making
other people’s ideas seem brilliant were always welcome in our meetings, and
particularly at the dissertation’s defense. Tania has been unwavering in her support,
challenging my assumptions and elevating the overall quality of the work despite her
initial misgivings when I asked her to wade back in to exploitation territory.
In addition to my committee, I have been extremely lucky to be surrounded by the
faculty and staff in the USC Department of Critical Studies. In particular, David James in
his balancing of curiosity and rigor in his scholarship and as an excellent source of
counsel on 1960s cinema; Priya Jaikumar in her commitment to graduate students and
their professional development; Aniko Imre as a tough and thorough reader of an early
draft of the conclusion; and Drew Casper, who exposed me (and many others) to so many
1960s and 1970s films in 35mm projection. The department’s administrators, Linda
Overholt, Bill Whittington, Alicia Cornish, and Kim Greene have been exemplary in their
guidance through the ever-changing university protocols and guidelines. This project was
also supported by a Completion Fellowship awarded by the USC Graduate School, and
the Frank Volpe Scholarship awarded by the School of Cinematic Arts.
ii
Eric Schaefer’s research and scholarship on exploitation cinema has been a
constant source of inspiration, and I am indebted to his generosity in conversations, email
exchanges, and the occasional package of press kits from his personal collection. I have
also been fortunate to be in contact with Joe Rubin, an adult film archivist and historian
whose work outside the academy will benefit those within it for years to come. My
friendship with Austin Miller has improved the overall quality of this project through his
vast knowledge of exploitation history and the gift of a large Cinemageddon cigar that is
still going strong. Exploitation filmmaker Matt Cimber and historian/collector Brett
Hosier were kind enough to grant interviews with me and correspond over email. My
research was also aided by Ned Comstock and Billy Smith at the USC Cinema Library,
Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library, and the staff at the UCLA Library’s
Department of Special Collections. I have been fortunate to research exploitation films at
a time when accessing and viewing them has been a painless task – I am especially
grateful to Brian Quinn and Eric Caidin, the curators of “Grindhouse” nights at the New
Beverly Cinema; Mike Vraney and Tim Lewis of Something Weird Video; and Bob
Murawski and the late Sage Stallone of Grindhouse Releasing for making so many of
these titles available.
The Department of Critical Studies was a revolving door of inspiring scholars and
great friendships during my time there. It is impossible to acknowledge each of them, but
some who were particularly important to the work in this project as well as my
psychological health were: Drs. Paul Reinsch, Carlos Kase, and James Cahill, all experts
in their respective medical arenas; Elizabeth Affuso, my partner in quals and my steady
comrade throughout graduate school; Kristen Fuhs, a generous reader, editor, and an
iii
exemplar of professionalism and transparency; Alessandro Ago, my curatorial co-
conspirator among the cinephiles and section 17s of the USC filmgoing community;
Jennifer Rosales and Taylor Nygaard, with whom I finally started writing in earnest; and
Suzanne Scott, Brett Service, and Chris Hanson, stimulating thinkers and dear friends.
Although my family expressed equal parts confusion and sympathy over my
choice of subject matter for this project, their support never faltered. My love and thanks
go out to Mama Beth, Mama Jeanne, Rachel, and, most of all, my parents.
My most heartfelt gratitude is reserved for Kate Fortmueller, my companion and
best friend, whose faith that I would one day finish this project outweighed everyone
else’s, including my own. She read every word of every chapter, most of them more than
a couple times, and I cannot imagine this work without her insights and encouragement.

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract vi

Introduction: The Shapelessness of Exploitation Cinema 1

Chapter One: From Mondo to White Coaters: Ambivalence, Obscenity
and the Last Gasp of Sexploitation 13

Chapter Two: Hip to Be Square: Exploitative Culture, the Counterculture
and the LSD Film 81

Chapter Three: “There is a New Major…It’s Called ‘Cinemation Industries’”:
Exploitation, Independent Distribution, and Casualties
of the New Hollywood 139

Postscript: Cinema of Regression: Grindhouse and the Limits of the
Spectatorial Imaginary 192

Bibliography 224

ABSTRACT

This dissertation, “A Taste for Trash: The Persistence of Exploitation in American
Cinema, 1960-1975,” aims to situate the development of marginal independent genre
filmmaking in the 1960s alongside the broader historical, cultural, legal, industrial, and
intellectual trends that characterize the period. Rather than attempting a holistic model
focused on one particular exploitation filmmaker, company, or genre, this project opts for
an eclectic methodology, isolating three particular entry points by which to explore
exploitation cinema and its rhetorical strategies – sex, drugs, and money. Within this
broad structure, the dissertation’s chapters address the equivocal address of softcore
filmmakers when they were threatened by the advent of hardcore pornography; the
negotiation of educative content and titillating content in LSD films and exploitation’s
unstable relationship with the counterculture; and an in-depth analysis of an exploitation
production/distribution company that failed in its attempt to ascend to mainstream
viability. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the 2007 film Grindhouse as an
example of exploitation nostalgia and a misguided attempt to recreate on a large scale the
often accidental appeal of low-budget cinema.
“Exploitation” is a descriptor that resists definitive meaning – this project
embraces the term’s inherent polysemy and examines a range of genre cycles and films
with particular emphasis on their contradictions and paradoxes. Exploitation films offer
an additional paradigm by which we can better understand the relationship between
studio and independent filmmaking; the distinctions between narrative and experimental
cinema; and the ways in which the New Hollywood negotiated legal and industrial
developments during the tumultuous 1960s. Exploitation cinema’s mode of address – the
vi
means by which it presents subversive imagery and content under the guise of educative
and/or conservative moral positions – embodies an ambivalence that maximizes
commercial opportunities and mitigates the risk of legal persecution. Exploitation films
thus exist at a unique cusp of industry and culture, offering a map of the content that
mainstream Hollywood studios refused to present, and a barometer of the cultural
strategies that could effectively justify the taboo.

vii
INTRODUCTION: THE SHAPELESSNESS OF EXPLOITATION CINEMA

“There are so many arts and crafts that go into movies and there are so many
things that can go wrong that they’re not an art for purists.

-Pauline Kael
1

As Pauline Kael suggests in the epigraph above from her essay celebrating the
virtues of trashy cinema, filmmaking is an inherently artisanal project. Despite the
surrounding discourses of industrial organization and large-scale budgets, international
cooperation and a global corporate film culture, holistic works by cinematic visionaries,
and producers and audiences engaging in an organic cultural conversation about gender,
race, class, power, etc., films remain an imprecise and unstable potpourri of disparate
parts, a Frankenstein monster of original ideas, pre-sold concepts, cultural detritus, and
other miscellany. Many of the film texts that surround us aspire to deny the piecemeal
operations that constitute them, from the distracting excesses of Hollywood blockbusters
to the organic simplicity of individually produced experimental cinema. However, it is in
the realm of exploitation cinema, independently produced and commercially motivated,
that the instabilities of the cinematic economy emerge at the textual level, that the myriad
determinations that inform a filmmaking enterprise are most visible. Although
exploitation derives from the carnival huckster tradition and many of its most prolific
producers see themselves as, essentially, con artists, it is in this respect that exploitation
cinema is one of the most honest forms of filmmaking.
That exploitation films are relatively forthright regarding their unstable
significations does not make the task of analyzing them any easier. The study of
exploitation film requires a constant attitude of vigilance. Compared to mainstream
Hollywood films and experimental films, the purely textual meanings contained within
1
exploitation cinema are paltry – typically, very little of narrative substance “happens,”
and the plots meander between static, dialogue-heavy sequences and moments of
spectacle which contain the exploitable elements (nudity, sexual deviance, drug use,
violence, “exoticism”) that form the industry’s raison d’être. Rather than discussing
“great” individual works, fans and scholars of exploitation films often discuss cycles of
films. In the absence of textual plenitude and without the likelihood of authorial clarity,
contextual information takes on a more central role.
2
The study of exploitation film in a
given period benefits from a broad approach to historical doings in that period, including
considerations of the other tentacles of the film industry, film technology, as well as
contemporary political, cultural, and intellectual undercurrents.
Beyond the reading and research challenges that exploitation films pose, the term
exploitation itself is fraught with tension. As Thomas Doherty reminds us, before
“exploitation” connoted a type of film content (marked by transgression, disgust,
offensiveness) or a type of film praxis (minuscule budget, ignorance of mainstream
Hollywood codes and styles, exhibition “events”), the term referred simply to the
promotional apparatus at major studios to publicize and market films.
3
Oftentimes the
term exploitation was used particularly to describe a studio’s hardest-sell tactics that went
beyond the usual posters and trailers, such as local contests and product tie-ins at theaters.
The term “exploitation” did not connote any notion of ill repute – unless, of course, the
business of Hollywood production is inherently held in this negative regard. Exploitation
tactics provide a constant reminder that films are products to be shilled to publics.
The understanding of exploiteers as hucksters in not a critical intervention, but a
badge of pride among the filmmakers signifying their outsider filmmaking mentality.
2
Dave Friedman, the inimitable producer and historian of exploitation films, referred to
the exploiteers of the 1930s with admiration as “the forty thieves,” and “the light-footed
carpetbaggers of cinemadom.”
4
As they travelled around the country with their film
prints in tow, stealth was a necessity, both to evade local law enforcement and potential
censorship wrangles, as well as the ire of an inevitably dissatisfied audience. Yet despite
this romantic notion of nomadic exploitation producers, their relationship to Hollywood
was always ambiguous and symbiotic – even Friedman got his start in the publicity
department at 20
th
Century Fox, and many exploiteers aspired to edge closer to the center
of Hollywood, even if they benefitted from its margins.
The evasiveness of these classical exploitation producers is manifested in the style
of the films themselves throughout their development in the 20
th
century. Despite Jeffrey
Sconce’s useful catch-all category, “paracinema,” to describe all manner of films that
reject Hollywood economic and stylistic protocols, it is important to distinguish
exploitation cinema (in all of its subgenres and cycles) from other forms with which it is
often collapsed.
5
The exploitation film is distinguished from the Hollywood B-film, a
historically specific designation that identifies a studio product that was more modestly
budgeted than an A-film and tended to star either new, unknown actors or older, no
longer bankable actors. Richard Jewell notes the problems with this simplistic A-vs.-B
rubric, acknowledging that some studios produced even more modestly budgeted films,
usually Westerns, than the typical B-film – however, these films, which had budgets of
less than $50,000, still cost more and presented a higher degree of production values than
most exploitation films, and also benefitted from the capital and organization of a larger
studio structure.
6
Exploitation is also distinctive from cult cinema. Both forms are often
3
marked by oppositional content to the normative address of mainstream commercial
cinema, but cult films, by most definitions, lack specificity at the level of production. A
work’s cult status can stem as much from its reception as from its content – for Ernst
Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, the repeat communal viewings of Titanic (1997) by groups
of teenage girls designate it, the highest-grossing film of all-time, as a cult object.
7

Similarly, a film that would be considered mainstream in one historical period, such as
Casablanca (1942), can become an object of cult adulation in another based on the
character of the fandom it engenders.
8
Cultism is best understood, as Greg Taylor
positions it, as a critical excavation strategy, rescuing unheralded works through the
application of provocative aesthetic criteria.
9
Although exploitation films represent a
broad range of types and styles and have been consumed across diverse locations (from
drive-ins and grindhouses to repertory houses and MOMA), the designation
“exploitation,” I would argue, refers to the juxtaposition of a specific industrial context
with oppositional film content – independent production and distribution of a low-budget
film that, in some way, appeals to its audience using lurid and/or offensive
representations. Thus, while Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) has developed a respected
critical reputation, it remains, as ever, an exploitation film (and few would consider it a
cult object).
The economic limitations noted above should not be misconstrued as some form
of pigeonholing exploitation cinema, or establishing clear borders around which it cannot
exist. On the contrary, the project of exploitation is a persistent transgression of borders,
a condition that can best be described as willful shapelessness. The slippery nature of
meaning in an exploitation film is one of the key sources of pleasure in their reception. It
4
is also manifest in the ideological diversity of approaches to exploitation cinema that
have been undertaken by critics and scholars. Despite the clear violence enacted on
women in a significant number of exploitation films, Pam Cook used exploitation (and
particularly the work of director Stephanie Rothman) as a means to promote it as a form
of feminist cinema, with its shoddy production values representing an alternative to the
patriarchal language of Hollywood cinema.
10
Tania Modleski continues Pam Cook’s
project in her struggle to redeem some of the violent and misogynist imagery in the work
of Doris Wishman. Modleski proposes the idea of a “counterphobic cinema” whereby
female viewers can take pleasure in the exaggeration of masculine codes in male
genres.
11
Exploitation has been mobilized by Eric Schaefer and Jeffrey Sconce as an
entry point for discussing pedagogy and undergraduate education. Schaefer notes the
importance of contextual information and a broad multi-media approach to illuminate the
history of the form as an alternative aesthetic.
12
While Sconce argues that Dwain Esper’s
Maniac (1934) is an ideal text to bridge the gap between formal analysis and cultural
studies – he sees Esper’s “sub-zero degree cinema” as a means of defamiliarization,
allowing students to examine the constructedness of a film’s codes without being
absorbed by its narrative.
13
Exploitation cinema is also commonly adopted as a site for
discussions of class, taste, and authenticity, usually deriving ideas from the work of
Pierre Bourdieu. This is the case with Sconce’s “paracinema” essay (discussed at more
length in this dissertation’s final chapter), and in the work of Mark Jancovich and Matt
Hills, both of whom are concerned with the troubled and contradictory relationship
between oppositional fandom and an exclusionary subculture.
14
Finally, analyses of
broader currents of film style and the film industry have taken up the concerns of
5
exploitation cinema, as seen in treatments of documentary (Chuck Kleinhans),
independent cinema (Stephen Thrower, Richard Nowell), geography and space (Elena
Gorfinkel, Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford), and film art and authorship (Kael, V. Vale
and Andrea Juno).
15

The contemporary recognition of exploitation cinema as a separate and
independent register that is alternative to mainstream Hollywood product represents a
victory more for the major studios than the exploitation producer. As Eric Schaefer has
discussed in his essential history of the classical exploitation film, Bold! Daring!
Shocking! True!, from the 1920s through the 1940s, exploitation was defined precisely by
its parasitic relationship with Hollywood product, operating deliberately at the margins of
the mainstream industry’s representations to maintain its profitability.
16
The original
taboos in the Hays production code - including bans on representations of nudity, drug
use and drug trafficking, prostitution and white slavery, venereal disease –provided the
essential menu from which exploitation producers would choose material for projects.
Throughout its history, the exploitation film industry deliberately courted a certain degree
of evasiveness in its generic and industrial boundaries. Both the exploitation film industry
and its mainstream Hollywood counterpart produced and distributed the film product that
filled the screens of independent exhibitors throughout the country in the 1930s and
1940s, but the approaches taken by each industry in terms of business organization,
choices in subject matter, formal techniques, and imagined audiences differed
dramatically. The extent to which this differentiation between the two competitive
industries was unclear to the 1930s and 1940s filmgoing public comprised an essential
aspect of the exploitation industry’s commercial appeal, and, consequently, a persistent
6
threat to Hollywood, especially as it faced the prospect of federal intervention and
governmental censorship. Schaefer has demonstrated how the failure of audiences to
distinguish between exploitation films and Hollywood films was simultaneously a threat
to Hollywood and boon to exploiteers.
17

Although the exploitation film underwent a serious transformation in its style and
economy after 1960, it remained responsive to shifts in mainstream Hollywood, still the
industry’s problem child well after the consent decrees altered the industry’s relationship
to censorship and independent production. Histories of the American film industry in the
1960s and 1970s often argue that the opening up of new screen freedoms and the
increased imitation of teen-oriented (and watered down) exploitative formulas led to a
triumph of Hollywood over independent exploitation filmmakers (or, alternatively, a
gentrification of exploitation). Thus, this period demands new sets of questions to
determine how (and if) this occurred. How did exploitation film content, style,
distribution and exhibition strategies adapt to a Hollywood industry that increasingly
colonized its content with New Hollywood bids for youth audiences and hip
representations? What is the relationship between art house exhibition outlets, which
mobilized highbrow taste registers to court audiences, and the drive-ins and grindhouse
theaters that mobilized lowbrow taste registers, especially considering that both outlets
are marginal to Hollywood? Considering the productivist ideology of classical
exploitation films (discussed by Schaefer), and the celebration of rural and working-class
values, how did the political valences of exploitation shift as the national economy
moved toward a more openly consumerist economy?
7
This dissertation aims to situate the development of exploitation films in the
1960s and early 1970s within the context of other significant legal, cultural, and
industrial trends of the period. Rather than attempting a completist volume on a particular
exploitation subgenre or filmmaker, I have organized the project in a way that
demonstrates a range of lowbrow interests and a diversity of methodologies that are
applicable to the analysis of exploitation cinema. Taken together, the three body chapters
comprise what I believe to be the three principle interests of exploitation film and
filmmakers in this period: sex, drugs, and money. The first chapter uses legal shifts in the
definition of obscenity as a lens through which to interpret a crisis point for softcore
sexploitation cinema and the impending threat of hardcore pornography. Building off
Chuck Kleinhans’ work, I use the concept of the “alibi” and authorial equivocation to
examine the development of sexual representations, and locate the subterfuge of
sexploitation producers as an intrinsic property of the exploitation mode of address. In the
second chapter, I use the LSD film as a way to investigate broader cultural and
philosophical issues related to the counterculture. Exploitation cinema, as Schaefer
argues, has always relied on a dynamic vacillation between the education and titillation of
its audience – I find that in the LSD film this binary comes unglued when titillation is
situated at the college campus and student life is implicated as part and parcel of a
broader exploitative culture. The third chapter is an in-depth study of an exploitation
company, Cinemation Industries, and its ill-fated attempt to use the Hollywood recession
and product shortage of the late 1960s to launch itself as a new mini-major company.
This industrial analysis illustrates the inherent marginality of exploitation cinema, and the
durability of Hollywood power, particularly in the realm of distribution.
8
Although I engage in specific film analyses (and analyses of specific marketing
campaigns) in each of these chapters, I am more concerned with understanding the
contextual strands that are relevant to each topic and developing an interpretation of
exploitation cinema that positions it as, while marginal to the film industry, responsive to
larger popular trends. I have not attempted to redeem or condemn the consistently
offensive imagery and ideology in many of these films in favor of a methodology that
seeks to understand the cultural and industrial reasoning for such imagery. It is for this
reason also that my project moves away (for the most part) from an analytical method
derived from Bourdieu. Instead of engaging with the taste strategies used by viewers to
distinguish themselves vis-à-vis class and cultural capital, I have examined the ways in
which films and filmmakers render such distinctions available, where industry and style
converge with taste and power.
The death of cinema has been and continues to be a pervasive object of cinematic
discourse, but exploitation cinema, with its demonstrably short-lived genre cycles and
trends, demonstrates a continuous death and rebirth process as its standard operating
procedure. The industrial strategy is to find taboo subjects that other filmmakers can’t or
won’t address before these subjects become acceptable to mainstream culture.
Unfortunately for exploitation filmmakers, these gaps were increasingly rarefied in the
1960s, with major studios, foreign imports, and experimental filmmakers all troubling
categorical boundaries and forcing exploitation filmmakers to seek new content or adopt
new strategies for profitability. In this sense, all three of the main chapters of this project
deal with a form of death – the death of softcore sexploitation; the death of the
counterculture; the death of Cinemation Industries. The last chapter uses a contemporary
9
film, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007), to demonstrate the
persistent centrality of death (and nostalgia for death) in the filmmakers’ attempt to
reconstruct exploitation as a moment of medium specificity (with CGI burns and
scratches of “film”) and theatrical experience (romanticized grindhouse scumminess in
the comforts of the suburban multiplex). Tarantino and Rodriguez’s film is, in a sense,
recuperative, mourning the loss of grindhouse cinema through their love letter to it.
Unfortunately their decision to do so in a big-budget commercial Hollywood project
belies the fact that ephemerality and unsustainability are crucial elements of a grindhouse
culture that cannot, by definition, be reproduced. As Greil Marcus argues about punk
rock in the late 1970s, failure forms both the authenticating feature and inevitable demise
of the exploitation mode.
18

However, I cannot afford to attack Tarantino and Rodriguez too harshly. My
dissertation faces similar contradictions and paradoxes to the ones they faced in
Grindhouse, namely the attempt to excavate a history that is resistant to analysis, to give
shape to something that is willfully shapeless. It is fitting that my project examines the
cultural tumult of the 1960s, featuring scenes that occur on college campuses, because
this also marks an academic moment at which the idea of taking on popular culture as
objects of serious study became viable. While his work on taste and distinction has been
less influential for me than for other exploitation scholars, Bourdieu’s work on reflexive
sociology is a key influence in the understanding that this project is not only about the
exploitation film as an object, but the act of the studying the exploitation film as an
object.
19
Bourdieu proposes, “one must establish a theory of the theoretical relationship, a
theory of all the implications, starting with the breaking off of practical belonging and
10
immediate investment…”
20
While it is no longer necessary to heed Pauline Kael’s
warning against taking trash seriously, it remains imperative to understand the inherent
contradictions of bringing trash into a university setting and to resist the urge to explain
these contradictions away – they might be there for a reason.

1
Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in Going Steady: Film Writings 1968-1969
(New York: Marion Boyars, 1994), 106.

2
Eric Schaefer suggests the same in his piece on teaching exploitation cinema to
undergraduates. See Eric Schaefer, “Teaching Sin in the Suburbs,” Cinema Journal 47.1
(Fall 2007): 94-97.

3
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in
the 1950s (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002), 3-8.

4
David Friedman, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1990), 169.

5
Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess and the Emerging Politics of
Cinematic Style,” Screen 36.4 (Winter 1995), 371-393.

6
Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood, 1929-1945 (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2007), 69-70.

7
Ernst Mathijs and Xavier Mendik, “What is Cult Film?,” in The Cult Film Reader (New
York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 5.

8
Umberto Eco, “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage,” in The Cult Film
Reader (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 67-75.

9
Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

10
Pam Cook, “Exploitation Films and Feminism,” Screen. 7.2 (Spring 1976), 122-127.

11
Tania Modleski, “Women’s Cinema as Counterphobic Cinema: Doris Wishman as the
Last Auteur,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed.
Jeffery Sconce (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 63.

12
Schaefer (2007).
11

13
Jeffrey Sconce, “Esper, the Renunciator: Teaching ‘Bad’ Movies to Good Students,” in
Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, ed. Mark Jancovich,
et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 14-34.

14
See Mark Jancovich, “Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural Capital and the
Production of Cultural Distinctions,” Cultural Studies 16.2 (2002), 306-322; and Matt
Hills, “Para-Paracinema: The Friday the 13
th
Film Series as Other to Trash and
Legitimate Film Cultures,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and
Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 219-239.

15
Chuck Kleinhans, “Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi,” in Sleaze
Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 96-120; Stephen Thrower, Nightmare USA: The
Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (London: FAB Press, 2008); Richard
Nowell, “‘The Ambitions of Most Independent Filmmakers’: Indie Production,
the Majors, and Friday the 13th (1980),” Journal of Film and Video 63.2 (Summer 2011),
28-44; Elena Gorfinkel, “Tales of Times Square: Sexploitation’s Secret History of
Place,” in Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, ed. John David Rhodes and
Elena Gorfinkel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 55-76; Bill Landis
and Michelle Clifford, Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse
Cinema of Times Square (New York: Fireside, 2002); Kael (1994); V. Vale and Andrea
Juno, Incredibly Strange Films (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1986).

16
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-
1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

17
See especially Eric Schaefer, “Resisting Refinement: The Exploitation Film and Self-
Censorship,” Film History 6, no. 3 (October 1994): 293-313.

18
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

19
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans.
Matthew Adamson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

20
Bourdieu (1990), 20.
12
CHAPTER ONE: FROM MONDO TO WHITE COATERS: AMBIVALENCE,
OBSCENITY, AND THE LAST GASP OF SEXPLOITATION

We must ask the question very seriously: how does science conduct itself in such
an enterprise? Certainly it does not conduct itself the way it says it does.

-Lionel Trilling on The Kinsey Report (1948)
1

[T]he dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art.

-Stanley Cavell
2

Introduction: Narrative, Spectacle, Alibi

In the opening monologue of John Lamb and Jack Hill’s Mondo Keyhole (1966),
the voiceover warns the viewer about the tenuous nature of representations of reality. The
narrator notes that the line between reality and illusion is “blurred at best” and that the
viewer must “draw it carefully, for beyond that line, madness lies.” Despite the film’s use
of the “mondo” moniker in its title, a word that, following international hit Mondo Cane
(1962), connoted a cinematic revelation of exotic documentary truths, Mondo Keyhole
consists of a narrative drawn from the overtly fictional roughie model. The roughie
narrative formula, a staple of 1960s exploitation cinema exemplified in Scum of the Earth
(1963) and The Defilers (1965), associates the sexual energy of its repressed and
psychologically troubled characters with acts of violence toward women, allowing the
violence to serve as a substitute for the forbidden sexual acts. Following the introductory
voiceover of Mondo Keyhole, the narrative hews closely to Howard Thorne, a softcore
publisher and filmmaker, and centers on his troubled marriage with a sex-starved wife,
and his addiction to sexual violence. Despite the fictive storyline, the “mondo” of the
film’s title and the concerns of its opening voiceover demand an interrogation of the
film’s relationship with reality, or, as the narrator states, “so-called reality.” Is the film
13
positing some notion of subjective truth, accessing reality through the proto-psychedelic
dreams and hallucinations of its characters? Are we to interpret Howard’s violent
proclivities as symptomatic of real-life producers in the sex industry? If so, should we
separate Howard’s on-screen demeanor from John Lamb and Jack Hill, themselves
producers of sex-oriented fare in the form of Mondo Keyhole? Are they complicit in the
dissemination of sexual violence? Or perhaps “mondo” is solely used as a marketing
device, an attempt to cash in on the success of other mondo fare in the wake of Mondo
Cane, and mask its essentially conventional approach to fiction?
The commercial appeal of the title was certainly a factor in the producers’
decision, but that does not suggest that the film’s potential “mondo” qualities should be
ignored. Indeed, the uneasy relationship between truth and fiction is a pervasive issue in
the realm of sexploitation and, later, hardcore pornography – the titles Mondo Porno
(1972) and Porno Mondo (1971) elucidate the connection. On one level, scenes
presenting the spectacle of sexual encounters necessarily depict real human bodies
performing real human acts – colloquially, they present “the naked truth.” Graphic
displays, or even strong suggestions of sexuality, also have physical effects on spectators.
Pornography’s capacity to arouse is often a key factor in its legal prosecution,
establishing a high / low binary in which higher artistic pursuits that stimulate the brain
or the proverbial heart strings are protected, while lower pursuits, such as pornography,
take aim at the body’s lower regions and are proscribed.
3
Thus pornographic
representation foregrounds physical bodies at both registers of its address – the bodies of
the performers and the bodies of the spectators – joined by the notion that the body
cannot lie. Images of sexualized bodies are among the most politically charged cultural
14
representations. The controversy they draw is a marker of their unique power. Sexual
imagery is a testament to the curious ways in which certain images can undermine the
distancing property of visual imagery when they seem to have a real, physical impact on
human bodies. The power of pornography, and the reason it evokes the censor’s ire, lies
in the image’s perceived ability to affect lived behavior.
The seemingly “natural” truths of hardcore pornography have been theorized by
Linda Williams as the pornographic “will to knowledge.” She writes, “In contrast to both
mainstream fictional narrative and soft-core indirection, hard core tries not to play
peekaboo with either its male or its female bodies. It obsessively seeks knowledge,
through a voyeuristic record of confessional, involuntary paroxysm, of the ‘thing’ itself.”
4

For Williams, the hardcore pornographic “will to knowledge” is an originary feature of
film history. Linking the desire to reveal bodily truth to Muybridge films and other early
cinematic projects, she constructs a binary that resembles Tom Gunning’s “cinema of
attractions” model, contrasting narrative cinema with a cinema ordered around spectacle.
Williams suggests that the early “primitivist” films lay bare a desire for “maximum
visibility,” a desire invariably focused on female sexuality, which is present throughout
the development of hardcore pornography in the spectacle of sexual bodies. On the other
hand, the development of narrative cinema can be understood as an evolution of
fetishistic techniques that displace female sexuality through the deployment of cinematic
language and tropes (the gaze, off-screen space, etc.).
5
The 35mm hardcore features of
the 1970s are typically remembered as the “golden age” of pornography because the
films appealed to audiences from previously uninitiated demographics, such as women
and celebrities, and returned unprecedented box office receipts. However the period is
15
actually notable as a limited and historically specific attempt to negotiate the relationship
between sexual representation and a fictional narrative frame, to resolve the seeming
paradox of “maximum visibility” and fetishistic avoidance. Or, as Eric Schaefer has
phrased it, the golden age of hardcore narrative is best considered “merely an entr’acte
between reels of essentially plotless underground stag movies in the years 1908 to 1967
and the similarly plotless ruttings of porn in the video age.”
6

In this chapter, I will be examining commercial sexploitation films in the period
prior to the golden age of “porno chic,” from approximately 1969 to 1971. Rather than
treat these films as a preamble to the hardcore narrative feature, I will position them as an
intersection, a way station between the sexploitation and mondo features that preceded
them (in the early and mid-1960s) and the hardcore features that followed (in the early
1970s). This is a transitional moment in the history of sexual representation, when sex on
commercial screens first began to display explicit (hardcore, rather than simulated)
depictions of male and female nudity and intercourse, but was not yet ready to situate its
sexual spectacle within an overtly fictional narrative framework.
7
Although the mondo
films from the mid-1960s were comparatively tame, these films relied on the same
documentary aesthetic to justify their sexual content using two primary generic
approaches. The first, sex documentaries, purported to function as sociological reportage
on shifting sexual attitudes, behaviors, and laws. They could range from found-footage
films illustrating the history of stags (such as History of the Blue Movie (1970) and
Hollywood Blue (1970)), to guided tours of pornographic shops, adult film shoots, and
global sexual mores (such as Pornography in Denmark (1969) and San Francisco Blue
(1970)). The second, white coaters, functioned as cinematic marriage manuals, educating
16
the viewer on sexual positions and advocating progressive, pleasure-oriented sexual
experience. White coaters typically opened with the direct address of a doctor and,
perhaps, anatomical charts, while the bulk of the runtime consisted of scenes of hardcore
heterosexual intercourse accompanied by medical descriptions on the voiceover
soundtrack. In both instances, the presence of an authority figure as narrator and guide
offers a veneer of seriousness to the proceedings. As a mediator, the narrator stands
between the sexual activity depicted on screen and the sexploitation audience, thus
disallowing an unhindered erotic experience for the spectator.
Based on the marketing of these films and the previous experience of their
producers in other sexually oriented fare, the erotic content is undoubtedly the reason for
their production and the location of their commercial appeal. While the narrative frame
distances the viewer from any potential visceral response and punctuates all sexual acts
with dry analysis, medical information, or scientific data, the pseudo-documentary frame
was essential as the foundation for any legal defense if and when the films came under
local, state, or federal scrutiny. As I will discuss in the following section, the Supreme
Court heard a number of landmark cases on obscenity in film and publishing between
1957 and 1973, but their rulings never reached a consensus on the issue and failed to
fully protect expressions of obscenity under the First Amendment. The court’s failure,
however, was the exploiteer’s gain.
Exploitation cinema has always thrived in grey areas, lurking around the margins
of legality and expression. If obscenity were fully legal, exploitation films would be
unable to compete with higher-budgeted productions from the mainstream industry; if
obscenity were criminalized, exploitation filmmakers would not risk prison sentences, but
17
rather find a new boundary to transgress where mainstream filmmakers feared to tread.
The narrative frame serves as a constant reminder in sex documentaries and white coaters
that sexual expression is not fully legal, and the presence of sex is contingent on legal
loopholes insuring that a work is not deemed, in the words of the Supreme Court, “utterly
without redeeming social importance.”
8
Although the authoritative narrative voices often
express approval of sexual displays and transgressions of sexual mores, the narrative
frame undermines this rhetoric, choosing to skirt the law rather than openly challenge it.
If one can locate pleasure in these films, it does not lie in the sexual content,
“maximum visibility,” or “the will to knowledge,” but in the radical disconnect between
frame and spectacle, in the obviousness of the frame’s legal, not aesthetic, intent. Chuck
Kleinhans addresses similarly ambiguous territory in his analysis of 1960s mondo films
and sleazy documentaries. He argues that the concept of “sleaze” can be located precisely
at the juncture between the “discourse of sobriety” offered by the voiceover narrator in
counterpoint to the racy images that expose the voiceover as disingenuous. Rather than
simply referring to a text that is sexual in nature, a sleazy work “is not sincere but is
adopting whatever ethical and moral stance it has simply to exploit its subject.”
9
The
discursive acts on the soundtrack serve as an excuse to view forbidden and taboo
imagery, but, in the case of many mondo films, the flimsiness of the excuse is a key
element of spectatorial pleasure, positing a knowing audience in a position of superiority
over the text itself.
10
When these sleazy narrative strategies are deployed alongside the
presentation of real human bodies performing real sexual acts, the “will to knowledge” of
the sexual spectacle is uneasily juxtaposed with a narrative will to deceive.
18
Exploitation films are notoriously hard to define. Unlike genre cinema, they are
not classified by familiar iconography or narrative patterns. In Eric Schaefer’s essential
history, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, Schaefer identifies many of the features that
define classical exploitation cinema: an independent mode of production, an emphasis on
ballyhoo and promotion, and subject matter defined by the topics that could not be
broached by mainstream Hollywood producers, to name a few. But what separates
exploitation films from pornographic films? When exploitation producer and raconteur
David Friedman refers to hardcore content as “the last act,” or John Waters refers to the
release of Deep Throat (1972) as “the day exploitation films ended,” what do they
mean?
11
In this chapter, I will argue that the sex documentaries and white coaters from
1969 to 1971 constitute the last phase of pure sexploitation films because, in
juxtaposition with the pornographic features that followed, they draw attention to the
fundamental ambivalence of exploitation cinema and the always uneasy relationship
between spectacle and narrative frame.
12

The incorporation of filters, alternate contexts, legalese, court cases, etymologies,
discursive strategies, euphemisms, and the scientific language of sexology are all writerly
techniques by which the potentialities of sex on screen have been obfuscated. The sense
of caution that often characterized early scholarly work on sexual representation, what
Linda Williams refers to in her introduction to the 2
nd
edition of Hard Core as cowardice,
is, ironically, the area in a theoretical Venn diagram where academics and pornographers
share the most common ground.
13
The sexploiteers and proto-pornographers of the 1950s
and 1960s walked on similar eggshells with respect to the sexual image and the sexually
charged written word. With constantly shifting legal definitions, radically different
19
perspectives on community standards, and evolving interest in the sociology of sexuality,
sexual representations were in a prolonged liminal stage throughout the 1960s. Producers
jostled for position on which sexual mores could be transgressed next, and how they
could legally get away with it and reap a profit from the new screen freedoms,
exemplifying the “bad taste” of exploitation cinema as an inherently relative term. The
specific content of exploitation films and the precise nature of their bad taste always
develop in relation to the parallel mainstream developments in “good” taste. It is the
exploitation mode of address that remains consistent.
Exploitation transgresses boundaries, but only with its alibi carefully constructed
for plausible deniability and its tongue firmly in its cheek. The films may push
boundaries, but only from within those boundaries, eschewing revolutionary potential or
“art for art’s sake” in favor of a surefire economic windfall and “dirt for dirt’s sake.” The
lack of sincerity, which Kleinhans calls “the politics of the alibi,” is an essential feature
of the sex documentary and white coater, both of which constitute texts that are marked
by internal divisions.
14
Through their equivocal structures, sex documentaries and white
coaters remained safe from legal prosecution while offering a modicum of sexual
excitement to their spectators. However, they also maintained a fundamental
conservatism, rhetorically advocating sexual transgression, but depicting that
transgression only in the form of a legal defense masquerading as a subgenre.

Capitalizing on Confusion: Obscenity Law on Screen

In the trailer for Girls Come Too aka How I Became a Nudist (1968), the opening
image depicts a man throwing a football to an offscreen figure. The man is fully nude, but
the voice on the soundtrack is not concerned with the erotic potential of his nudity.
20
Rather than addressing an adult film audience seeking titillation from the naked body on
screen, the voiceover announces, “All rise. The court is now in session. It is the decision
of this court that nudity in and of itself is not obscene.” Girls Come Too is a nudist camp
film, part of a subgenre of adult films and magazines from the 1930s to the 1960s that
used the nudist movement as a legal justification to depict images of nudity. The legal
argument was that nudism constituted a legitimate and wholesome subculture whose
views and behaviors were worthy of expression and publication.
15
Although the degree of
sexual prurience varied from film to film, the nudist movement itself was consistently at
great pains to insist on its sexual innocence, and distance itself from the more lascivious
cinematic interpretations.
Nudist colony films are, in the words of Roger Ebert, “one of the most pathetic
and least significant of the 1950s subgenres.”
16
However, in terms of the history of
obscenity on screen and producers’ attempts to bypass legal restrictions, the subgenre is
of paramount significance. The exhibition of Brian Foy’s nudist film Elysia, Valley of the
Nude (1931) resulted in several local and state court cases, and Foy had every intention of
fighting the case in an attempt to force a legal precedent that would define obscenity. The
1954 release of Walter Bibo’s Garden of Eden also faced a number of legal wrangles, due
possibly to the fact that it was the first nudist colony film shot in color.
17
The seizure of a
Garden of Eden print in New York led to Excelsior Pictures Corp. v. Regents University,
a 1957 New York Court of Appeals ruling that stated that the film was not obscene
because nudity per se is not grounds for obscenity. The floodgates for nudity in the key
New York market were now open to commercial filmmakers.
18

21
The significance of nudist camp films derives from the visibility of censorial
institutions in the structure and address of the films themselves. The allusion to
censorship and taboo characterizes exploitation cinema from its beginnings, and positions
it as an alternative model to Hollywood cinema, specifically Hollywood’s attempt to
render invisible the censoring bodies that mediate it. As Eric Schaefer has argued,
exploitation cinema operates through a system of negotiations between education and
titillation, as opposed to the Hollywood system of efficient narrative, continuous time and
space, and psychologically motivated characters.
19
When viewed retroactively, the nudist
camp films can indeed be criticized for a shortage of titillation and erotic appeal.
However, as the trailer for Girls Come Too reveals, the negotiation between education
and titillation in the exploitation film is not a contract signed between producer and
spectator; exploitation cinema does not necessarily offer titillation, even if it’s promised
in the advertising campaign. Exploitation films derive from a carnival tradition rather
than a narrative one, and an honest exchange between buyer and seller is not
characteristic of the P.T. Barnum humbug effect. The contract should more accurately be
seen as one that exists between producer and censor, a relationship mediated by the
evolution of obscenity laws. The language used in the voiceover of the Girls Come Too
trailer comes directly from the Excelsior decision, despite the fact that it was released
eleven years later. Unlike the Hollywood audience, which is immersed in narrative
cinema, the exploitation audience is a bystander, witnessing the dialogue between
filmmakers and censors.
The address in the Girls Come Too trailer, at least rhetorically, is directed at a
courtroom audience, not a cinematic audience. The film thus overtly functions as a site of
22
legal contestation, a literal courtroom drama, enacting legal decisions of past, present,
and future. As Amos Vogel notes, the relationship between boundary-pushing
representations and censorship is inevitably a symbiotic one. Vogel writes, “What
induces censors to withhold…is also their realization that the abolition of a taboo leads to
its devaluation and ultimate acceptance as ‘normal,’ no longer either threatening or
stimulating; censors, after all, have a vested interest in sin.”
20
From 1957 to 1973, the
Supreme Court simultaneously expanded the boundaries for screen representations of
nudity and sexuality, while maintaining a shifting list of caveats that guaranteed certain
vague limitations. This situation benefitted both of the principal groups involved: the
lawyers and would-be censors of erotic content, who could not stop talking about dirty
movies, and film producers and film critics, who could not stop talking about the law.
As William Brigman notes, the history of obscenity law in the United States has
been traditionally divided into three legal phases: the period prior to the 1957 Roth
decision (Roth v. United States); the Roth period from 1957 to 1973; and the period from
1973 to the present following the Miller v. California decision.
21
Because of the
symbiotic relationship between filmmakers and obscenity law, it is important to
understand how the legal definition of obscenity evolved in the years prior to commercial
sexploitation exhibitions.
Before Roth, no noteworthy legal attempts were made to link obscene speech with
the protections of the First Amendment. The legal standard for determining obscenity
before 1954 derived from an 1860s case in England, Regina v. Hicklin, which determined
that an object could be found obscene if it tended “to deprave and corrupt those whose
minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this
23
sort may fall.”
22
Operating under this definition, the actual content of material under legal
scrutiny was less important than the seeming intentions of its producers and the apparent
effects it would have on the minds of its audience. The Hicklin precedent, which was
based on a case in which the alleged obscenity was an anti-religious pamphlet, positions
the state as a protector of innocence. The innocent who needed protection were usually
characterized as children or members of the working classes who were incapable of
reaching their own judgments on prurient or controversial material. The underlying
assumption established a logic based on contagion – exposure to obscene material would
induce susceptible minds to commit anti-social acts. State intervention amounted to
preventing the spread of disease to which, notably, the bodies of intellectuals and legal
scholars seemed immune. The logic behind the Hicklin precedent is a key feature in the
1915 Mutual v. Ohio case, ruling that cinema was not an art form, but “a business, pure
and simple.” Using a similarly paternalistic approach, the court ruled that cinema would
not be accorded the First Amendment protections of newspapers or “serious” literature on
the grounds that it appealed to a mass audience that was vulnerable in the face of explicit
material and lewd ideas.
23
High culture, that which appealed to higher-minded audiences,
garnered more legal protection than low culture which addressed the mass audience and
the susceptible bodies of the masses.
The Hicklin standard thus came to be understood throughout the court system as
an affective model, less interested in content than that content’s “tendency to corrupt.”
Moreover, the means by which controversial material was tried in obscenity cases under
the Hicklin precedent granted significant leverage to the prosecution. Rather than
invoking the entirety of a work, prosecutors could isolate particularly egregious passages,
24
and, if that individual passage were found to demonstrate a tendency to corrupt, the entire
work would be banned as obscene. In hindsight, the cases that exemplified this approach
appear notorious because they involved precisely the high-minded works that are so
different from a post-hardcore understanding of obscenity. Some of the canonical literary
works challenged in local and state courts include Dreiser’s An American Tragedy,
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Joyce’s Ulysses, usually on the basis of
obscene language excerpted as testimony for the prosecution. In 1934, an effective
challenge was posed to the “isolated passage” aspect of the Hicklin model in a New York
Court of Appeals trial of Ulysses. The judge, Augustus Hand, granted Ulysses protection
under the First Amendment, amending the limitations of Hicklin and insisting that the
judgment of obscenity must account for the “dominant effect” of a work.
24
Based on
Hand’s ruling, the isolated passages from Ulysses could not be seen to appeal to prurient
interests due to the context of the novel’s seriousness and high modernism, which would
presumably alienate the children and working classes who were most in need of legal
protection.
One of the key legal developments here is an attempt to assess the content of a
work in an obscenity trial rather than its visceral impact on the audience. However, the
courts only offered protection to material that reinforced the elitist argument separating
high and low culture, a divide fundamentally rooted in a work’s affective relationship to
the body. In the case of Ulysses, the novel’s very lack of popular appeal determined its
free speech protection. The cultural values regarding sex and obscenity remain intact,
with obscenity still operating as a potential inciter of lustful thoughts and, worse, actions,
in the minds and bodies of susceptible individuals. However, by preventing episodes of
25
prurience in otherwise “serious” works from proscribing the work itself, the legal issue of
obscenity begins to resemble a realm of aesthetic debate and literary subjectivity. In this
legal context, the courtroom becomes a staging area for literary expertise, and free speech
a hallowed ground reserved for works that manage to elevate their treatment of sex to a
place of disinterested, non-visceral high-mindedness. However, as Loren Glass notes,
“For the crusaders against vice, the distinction between high and low was patently false,
simply a ruse whereby dissolute intellectuals attempted to satisfy their taste for smut.”
25

Once defense teams began to seek the opinions of literary experts, obscenity trials came
to resemble an early battleground in the culture wars, pitting literary modernism against a
prosecution increasingly perceived as puritanical and anti-intellectual.
It is fitting that the legal transition marked by the 1957 Supreme Court case, Roth
v. United States, involved a publisher, Samuel Roth, whose literary interests ran the
gamut from the high-minded to the low-bodied. In the late 1920s, Roth was the first
American publisher to release Ulysses, in serialized form and without Joyce’s permission.
According to Roth, who lost money on the Ulysses enterprise, his efforts were a key
factor in goading Random House to publish Joyce’s novel in a more official capacity, and
ultimately net a profit when Ulysses was elevated to artistic status in court. Roth
knowingly quipped, “The rich publisher lets the poor one set precedents in moral
standards.”
26
By 1954, Roth was well known in the field affectionately referred to as
“precarious publishing,” and had already served multiple prison sentences on obscenity
convictions. In the case that came before the Supreme Court in 1957, Roth faced a five-
year federal prison term for violations of “pandering” in the mail system, advertising his
sexually-oriented material to allegedly unwilling consumers. Some of the publications at
26
issue included the magazine, Good Times, which contained nude photographs (tastefully
airbrushed), and a hardcover book, American Aphrodite, which reprinted an erotic story
and accompanying illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. While the question of the
material’s obscenity was always implicit, the actual conviction Roth faced was for the
method in which he advertised his products. When the case reached the Supreme Court,
the majority opinion agreed with this argument, upholding Roth’s conviction and
sentencing him to a five-year federal prison term.
However, the wording of the majority opinion, written by Justice William
Brennan, marked a legal turning point as the first Supreme Court denunciation of the
Hicklin standard, and its initial attempt to construct a working legal definition of
obscenity. Brennan wrote that, while all ideas have “even the slightest redeeming social
importance,” obscenity exists as a category for expression that is unprotected by the First
Amendment, and thus “utterly without redeeming social importance.”
27
The new test for
the courts to define obscenity, replacing Hicklin, was as follows: “[W]hether to the
average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the
material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.”
28
As Chief Justice Earl Warren’s
concurring opinion clarified, the Roth conviction was upheld because the court ruled on
the conduct of the individual, not the content of the allegedly obscene material (which
was never effectively ruled on despite the court’s new obscenity definition). The central
irony is that Samuel Roth, a staunch anti-censorship advocate throughout his publishing
career, was convicted in a case that became synonymous with limiting the power of
censors and increasing freedoms of expression.
27
By appealing to “social importance,” the emphasis in obscenity trials moved away
from the necessity of artistic merit toward a more expansive definition of how ideas and
expressions about sexuality could be deemed acceptable. Whereas in earlier trials the
prosecution was able to excerpt racy material to prove obscenity, now the defense could
excerpt material to prove “redeeming value.” The ambiguity of the phrase “redeeming
value” radically shifted the burden of evidence in obscenity trials, particularly with the
other cultural changes occurring around sexual culture in the 1960s that led to an increase
in the overall dialogue about sex. As Linda Williams writes, “Try as one might to identify
a pornography without ‘redeeming social importance,’ it was becoming increasingly clear
that all sex was socially important.”
29
Many of the obscenity trials over the next decade
enacted this judicial dilemma, wherein obscenity still existed as a form of expression that
was not protected by the First Amendment, but the ability to articulate or identify what
this kind of expression was remained enigmatic. The inability to clearly identify
obscenity created a grey area of representation in which exploitation films could assert
themselves, negotiating a particular market share and capitalizing on the ideological
debates around sexuality and its cultural function.
In Justice Potter Stewart’s concurring opinion in the 1964 Jacobellis v. Ohio
ruling, the usual meticulous word choice and citation of precedents gave way to
colloquialism and homespun wisdom. Stewart confessed, in his now-famous phrase, an
inability to define the limits of legal sexual representations, admitting only, “I know it
when I see it.”
30
Stewart’s phrasing in this opinion is infamous as much for its deviation
from the usual exactitudes of legalese as it is for the starkness of its ambiguities. The
phrase demands more questions than it answers. The lack of clarity defining “it” was a
28
matter that elicited concern within the legal community, but it was a financial and
creative boon for the producer of sexually charged materials. Moreover, the “I” of
Stewart’s phrase demonstrated an unexpected concern for multiple identity formations
and group interests, refusing to reject works based on narrow community standards, and
opting instead for a national standard that undermined state and local censorship.
While the Supreme Court remained consistent in its prosecution of individual
publishers who pandered their material with lurid advertising campaigns and mailers (as
in the 1965 cases upholding the convictions of Edward Mishkin in Mishkin v. New York
and Ralph Ginzburg in Ginzburg v. United States), the judgment of obscene content only
became increasingly destabilized. In the Jacobellis majority opinion, Brennan amended
the phrase “socially redeeming value” to proscribe only works that were “utterly without
redeeming social importance.” In the 1966 case against Fanny Hill aka Memoirs of a
Woman of Pleasure (Memoirs v. Massachusetts), the court found that the 18
th
century
erotic novel was not obscene, and in so doing, virtually eliminated the possibility of any
written or literary document being deemed obscene. However, the court only reached this
conclusion by six-to-three majority with five separate opinions written. More so than the
judgments themselves, the divisions within the court educed the inevitable subjectivities
involved in the judgment of obscenity, and thus the range of responses open for feature
films dealing with issues of obscenity.
While the courtrooms were filled with talk about sex in the 1960s, representations
of sex on screen were littered with talk about the law. After all, if sex on screen dealt
directly with contemporary legal turmoil, how could it be accused of “utterly” lacking
social importance? Add to this equation the aura of sophistication and integrity offered by
29
a foreign setting, and a legally foolproof exploitation subgenre emerged. Along with the
white coaters to be addressed in the next section, sex documentaries, beginning with
films that focused their attention on Denmark, were among the first commercially
screened features to include hardcore content. Hardcore content was already available in
major cities, but screened only in small theaters or proto-nickelodeon storefronts in short,
often soundless loops, and typically on 16mm gauges.
31
The documentary exposés and
white coaters played in larger houses, usually alongside softcore sexploitation films
(fictional narratives with nudity and simulated sex) from the same distribution outfits –
for example, Red, White, and Blue (1971) played alongside Trader Hornee (1970), both
releases from David Friedman and Dan Sonney’s company, Entertainment Ventures Inc.
(EVI).
Even though exploitation films were consistently operating at the vanguard of
legal allowances for representations on screen, their formal and narrative approaches
were shamelessly retrograde. In the 1960s documentary cinema, particularly the direct
cinema movement, experimented with new aesthetic approaches, including fly-on-the-
wall camerawork and an observational approach to narrative. Exploitation films,
however, reverted to a regressive model of documentary form, employing expository
narration and omniscient voiceover to assert an epistemological axis to their films.
Starting with Mondo Cane (1962), an arthouse and mainstream success (due at least in
part to its foreign origins), domestic exploitation filmmakers capitalized on the film’s
format, recognizing it as reminiscent of classical exploitation jungle films for its
provocative imagery paired with the sober tones of anthropological discovery. The
veracity of the images in mondo films presents a broad range of approaches with regard
30
to the degree of truth on display. Mondo Cane appears to consist of images that were
legitimately gathered from around the world, while films like Mondo Freudo (1966) and
Mondo Bizarro (1966) function more as parody, with the majority of footage obviously
staged – the latter concludes with scenes supposedly gathered from a Lebanese white-
slavery auction, though they are clearly filmed in Topanga Canyon. The mondo format
though, not unlike the documentary format from which it draws, demands that the viewer
interrogate the truthfulness of the images as part of the viewing process. Particularly
when the images seem staged or disingenuous, the mondo narrative framing and
voiceover function as a visible brushstroke, an indexicality that refers as much to the
film’s tenuous negotiation of truth and hoax than to the film’s actual relationship with the
objective world.
Alex de Renzy’s Pornography in Denmark aka Censorship in Denmark (1969)
seems to have been the first American-made feature-length sex documentary.
32
From the
alternate release titles alone, it is clear how interrelated sexual representations and
societal control of these representations are in this sexploitation subgenre – if the word
“pornography” is too racy or legally dubious as a title, it can seemingly be replaced by
“censorship” as a synonymous term. De Renzy owned a storefront theater space in San
Francisco called the Screening Room that exhibited 16mm hardcore loops, and he was
already a prolific producer of some of the loops that screened in his venue. Pornography
in Denmark was de Renzy’s first feature-length film, focusing on the cultural response to
legal pornographic expression in Denmark, and culminating with hardcore footage from a
Danish live-sex show. When Denmark legalized pornography in June 1969, the country
became an immediate touchstone for American adult filmmakers as a litmus test for a
31
truly progressive society, and potential proof that legalization of pornography would not
lead to an increase in sex-related violence or anti-social behaviors. Pornography in
Denmark also became a litmus test in the film industry, ending with the film’s
exoneration in a local court case, People v. Alex de Renzy. The “socially redeeming value
argument” was proven to be legally effective, even with the inclusion of hardcore
content. The film was also a massive commercial hit; according to adult film historian
and archivist, Joe Rubin, the film grossed over $2 million on a $15,000 budget.
33

Exploitation filmmakers could recognize a lucrative formula when they saw one, making
the Danish sex documentary, and soon the more general sex documentary, a viable
subgenre for several years to come.
Throughout much of the 20
th
century, Scandinavia symbolized sexual
progressiveness, usually in direct juxtaposition to the puritanical nature of sexual culture
in the United States. The Kinsey Reports exemplify this attitude as early as the 1940s.
Although they present scientific data, the tone is not one of a distanced and impartial
scientific approach. Kinsey seems directly concerned with the cultural response to his
findings, and the two volumes are littered with editorializing commentary lambasting the
backwardness of American (and British) thinking on sex. Kinsey never travelled abroad
as part of his research, but that did not prevent him from imagining Central Europe,
oddly, as a “Polynesian sexual paradise.”
34
The role of Scandinavia is a fascinating one in
exploitation history, as well, from David Friedman’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s
Summer with Monika (1953) into sexy drive-in fare as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl, to
Lee Frost’s use of Scandinavian-sounding pseudonyms on his cheapo biker film, Ride
Hard, Ride Wild (1971), which he shot on the film scraps thrown out by development
32
labs. As late as 1976 with the release of Taxi Driver, when American pornography far
outweighed European imports in adult theaters, Scandinavia still connoted sex in the
scene in which Travis Bickle takes Betsy out on a misconceived date in Times Square to
see a film advertised as “Swedish Marriage Manual.” However, the footage shown from
the film as they sit in the theater does not come from the Swedish white coater on the
marquee, The Swedish Marriage Manual aka Language of Love (1969). The footage is
actually excerpted from the sex documentary Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970), one of
the successful American follow-ups to Pornography in Denmark. The unstable balance of
truth and fiction that characterizes the sex documentary even inserts itself into Taxi
Driver, misidentifying one of the genre’s most famous titles.
Although the director in the opening credits of Sexual Freedom in Denmark is
identified by the vaguely Teutonic name, M.C. Von Hellen, the film was directed and
produced by John Lamb (the same individual who produced Mondo Keyhole) and
distributed by his company, Art Films International. An analysis of Sexual Freedom in
Denmark will reveal some of the key tropes and attitudes underlying the sex documentary
form in 1969 and 1970. It has been argued that sexploitation films before the advent of
hardcore features are reliant on a narrative system that situates sexuality as an
irresolvable problem. Elena Gorfinkel writes,
[S]exploitation offers a narrative and discursive space distinct from the utopian
and naturalist tendencies ascribed to pornography…Instead of a sexual economy
dependent on an endless exchange and multiplication of sex acts, sexploitation, as
precursor to the hard-core feature, provides a more stringent economy which
enumerates teleological outcomes and is dependent on a logic of scarcity and
guilty expenditure.
35

The description of this sexual economy accurately reflects the sexploitation features of
the early and mid-1960s, especially in the moralistic displays of sexual violence erupting
33
out of sexual promiscuity and openness in the period’s roughies, including Mondo
Keyhole. The sex documentaries, however, anticipate the sex-positive pleasures of the
hardcore feature while maintaining the vestiges of earlier reflections on the forbidden. It
is for this reason that I characterize them, along with the white coaters, as a liminal space
between sexploitation and pornography, occupying elements inherent to both forms. Sex
documentaries function through a dynamic that I think of as a “both, and” structure,
integrating the obscenity laws and conservative cultural attitudes that cast sex as the
villain, and simultaneously championing a youthful flow of sexual energy and an ideal of
sexual progress (as in the titular “sexual freedom”). Yet the villain in the scenario, sexual
regression, is an essential component of the formula from a legal standpoint, and an
assertion of the taboo that underlies the films’ commercial appeal. Without this
acknowledgment of censorial sexual control, the producers risk legal action and print
seizures. With it, the films are necessarily marked by paradox and internal contradiction
defined by the gaps and fissures between what is stated about sex vs. what is shown of
sex. Sexploitation films of the mid-1960s attempted to sublimate sexual desires through
violence and fetishizing narrative techniques, rendering the censorial institution a
structuring absence in the text, informing it from without. In the sex documentaries,
however, the producers foreground the discussion of censorship, positioning it as a
structuring presence.
Sexual Freedom in Denmark opens with an image that seems lifted from a nudist
colony film – a fully nude couple walking through an idyllic setting while the voiceover
narrator quotes Biblical verses about God making man in His own image. However,
unlike the nostalgic undertones of the nudist camp films, with their inherent criticism of
34
urban life imagined through rural nude-topias, the ensuing sequence consists of urban
images. Storefronts, especially those of adult theaters and porn shops, and pedestrians,
would-be flaneurs and flaneuses all, fill out the street life of Copenhagen. This is not an
approach that advocates escape from society, but rather a valorization of the city as a site
for sexual exploration, and the suggestion of what it looks like when a modern society
makes informed decisions about its relationship to sexuality. As the narrator states over
images of various tourist destinations in Copenhagen, Danish culture has “outgrown the
taboos that made human bodies the only product of all nature too evil to look upon.” And
look upon them we will, but only under the guise that this film is a sociological study
whose aims are educative and worldly, not prurient or seedy. The Variety film review
immediately recognized the formula employed by the film as one that was destined to
succeed, noting, “This is a landmark film,” but asserting that its landmark status stems
from its ingenuity in negotiating the limits of legal screen representations: “‘Sexual
Freedom,’ in the words of the bygone innocence of ‘Oklahoma!’, goes about as far as she
can go, yessir.”
36
In this juxtaposition of films, Variety offers Sexual Freedom in
Denmark an unexpected legitimacy, positioning it as the kind of film that could play the
exact same downtown theaters which once screened Oklahoma!, albeit in a more
downtrodden neighborhood by 1970.
Sexual Freedom in Denmark is structured through interviews conducted by a
Danish reporter-figure examining various facets of pornographic representation and
response, intercut with montage sequences narrated by a different voice exemplifying the
rhetorical strategies used to advocate for the legalization of pornography. The film serves
as a political document, enumerating the avenues by which an activist might lobby for
35
freedom of sexual expression. This is a structure with direct ties to the law in that it
assumes the mutability of obscenity legislation and cultural positions toward sex. The
film stakes out a political claim, using the imagery and narration to simultaneously
describe and demonstrate certain aspects of sexual expression. For instance, a montage of
erotic art throughout history and across global cultures exemplifies that pornography is
not unique to 20
th
century western civilization, and thus should not elicit horror or shock.
The images demand that we historicize pornographic representations appropriately.
Indeed, the narrator suggests that legalizing pornography would increase the aesthetic
quality of sexual expression, because more accomplished artists would explore the
subject matter if it were not culturally frowned upon. The implicit argument here is, of
course, the suggestion that the line between art and pornography is too thin to be drawn
in a court of law – and if a society does not wish to ban art altogether, no limitations can
justifiably be made on sexual expression.
Beyond this legalistic argument about art and pornography, the montage journey
through erotic art history also reveals certain inherent properties about arousing imagery
and human responses. Unlike the stag film compilations, such as de Renzy’s follow-up
feature, History of the Blue Movie, this montage sequence eschews moving image
material, instead offering up a steady stream of static paintings and drawings. Art
historian David Freedberg notes the importance of photographic realism and
photographic reproduction in the history of images and their assumed impact on the body
of the viewer. He writes, “When one deals with responses to images that seem to be not
just images, but rather the bodies or objects or things they represent, then the problem of
possession arises with great clarity.”
37
What Freedberg means by “possession” here is the
36
viewer’s imagined possession of the pictured body, a transformation from picture to
bodily response and desire. Art, however, operates in a way that stifles these desires,
forcing viewers into a realm of self-consciousness that they are looking at art (not “life”),
and often impelled to discuss its aesthetic qualities over its visceral ones. Freedberg
argues that, when confronted with art that arouses, we deny it and take refuge in critical
analysis, ostensibly separating the act of speech as mental, and the response of the body
as not-mental.
38
The threat of pornography in society is tethered to the idea that
pornographic images provoke a bodily response in a way that art does not, or, at least, is
not supposed to. Yet the montage of erotic art in Sexual Freedom in Denmark, places art
in the context of a sex documentary in which arousal is a principle reason for attendance,
thus challenging the usual boundaries between art and pornography, and, implicitly, those
between photographic realism and painting.
Stemming out of the Edenic opening of the film with a young nude couple at
harmony in the forest, the film also appeals to the “naturalness” of sex. The narration
even manages to combine such unlikely bedfellows as religion and psychoanalysis in this
line of reasoning. On the one hand, the religious angle suggests that society should not
censor God’s creation, that we should not feel shame in our blessed bodies. Yet at the
same time, Freud is acknowledged in the film’s roll call of progressive thinkers for his
theories on the intrinsic nature of repression in developed societies. In addition, the
liberation of sexual representation is shown to increase sexual honesty between married
couples, freeing partners from the inhibitions that stifle their sex lives.
More than any other claim, Sexual Freedom in Denmark refutes the most
persistent argument given in attacks on pornography, that exposure to sexual material
37
will result in sexually violent behaviors. All of the Denmark documentaries inform
viewers that sex-related crime rates have gone down in Denmark since legalizing
pornography, although, as Vincent Canby notes, this may very well be a statistical
anomaly due to the fact that some of the previously reported crimes are no longer
illegal.
39
The notion of obscenity is discussed as a counterpoint to the naturalness of the
sexual act; the images deemed to be “truly” obscene here include mushroom clouds and
war photography. This indictment of society is typical of the sex documentary defense,
and noteworthy in its concern over the legal interpretation of obscenity. Finally, in its
most dramatic montage sequence consisting of images of starving children, droughts, and
poverty, the narrator argues that sexual liberation will lead to increased sexual openness
toward contraception, thus impacting global problems with overpopulation, spread of
disease, and, seemingly, military conflict. Although the documentary frame is a model
explicitly built on the legal concept of “socially redeeming value,” the ideas advocated by
the film mark a complete reversal from the approach toward sexual content in Hicklin
obscenity cases. Whereas the idea of disease was once associated with the sexually
obscene, here disease exemplifies a repressed and neurotic society that is frightened of
the obscene.
The documentary veracity of the images in Sexual Freedom in Denmark seems,
for the most part, legitimate. One does not get the sense that the subjects being
interviewed are actors, or that the scenes witnessed in Copenhagen are enacted
specifically for this production. However, the sobriety of the film’s tone, particularly that
of the interviewer and the voiceover narrator, belie the main commercial purpose of the
project – namely, to present sexual imagery within a legally protected framework. In one
38
sequence, the Danish interviewer visits the set of an adult film production and interviews
the female stars. They offer valuable information as to their wages on an average film
shoot and the impact adult film labor has on their personal lives, but the degree of interest
in the women’s experiences is undercut by the striking image of a sober and suited
interviewer sitting down with (and being casually fondled by) fully nude women, a sort
of contemporary update on Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Sexual Freedom in Denmark: interview at an adult photo shoot
The film’s instability derives from its contrapuntal juxtapositions: it presents a sex-
positive argument and hardcore footage, but it is not really pornography; it uses voice-of-
god narration and educative montage sequences, but it is not really a documentary.
Perhaps this is why critics at the time noted that the audiences for sex documentaries,
many of which were commercial hits, left the audience “restless and bored.”
40
By the
39
time the film’s anatomy lesson montage transitions into the long-awaited hardcore
sequence, it is under the auspices of maximizing pleasure between married sexual
partners (a trope that will be taken up in white coaters, as well), and accompanied by a
voiceover description of each sexual position. The scene also consists of a voiceover
reminder that moving images are far superior to drawings or anatomy books in the realm
of sex education. Amounting to an advertisement for the adult film industry, the narrator
states that, not only has viewing adult films been “proved harmless,” but that “viewing
erotic films is one of the mental approaches to solving problems of frigidity or
impotence.” In addition to their role as arbiters for open sexual expression, the sex
documentaries are also inherently advocating for the importance of the adult film industry
as a venue for sexual expression. However, the documentary frame affirming a film’s
“socially redeeming value” distances the project from any philosophy on pleasure and
naturalness argued for within the text.
In Gerard Damiano’s sex documentary Changes (1970), a feature-film he
produced and directed before making Deep Throat, Damiano takes the basic structure of
the Denmark films and applies it to an analysis of sex laws and mores in the United
States. He interviews a psychiatrist, adult theater managers and adult magazine store
clerks, the owner of a private club that allows (male) patrons to photograph and paint
female models, Screw editor Al Goldstein, and others along the spectrum of the booming
business around sexual representation in New York. Unlike some of the earlier Denmark
documentaries, Changes attempts to offer a balanced perspective on sexual culture,
notably including an interview with a young feminist activist and member of N.O.W. She
articulately discusses some of the current projects and causes in the women’s rights
40
movement, and, when asked about her feelings on pornography, her ambivalence on the
issue subtly reveals the tensions that would form a divisive line in the feminist movement
over the next thirty years. She reiterates the sex documentary party line in her support of
sexual candor and openness, but has concerns about the exploitation of women in the
pornographic industry, especially because all of the images are constructed by and for
men.
Unlike the narration in Sexual Freedom in Denmark, which used Danish
censorship legislation as an ideal exemplar, Changes reveals some of the anxieties around
shifting sexual culture. Nearly all of the interview subjects who work in the adult film
industry note the sea change in sexual representations in the three years prior to 1970;
many of them assert that the bulk of the representations on screen and in magazines at the
time of the interview (1969) could not have been sold even one year before. They also
acknowledge that there are still limitations – for instance, full-frontal male nudity is ok,
but only if the penis is not erect. But most (inaccurately) predict that the United States
will soon go the way of Denmark and full legalization of pornography for adults, a
process that Al Goldstein refers to as America’s “maturing.” The subjects who work in
the adult film business demonstrate an intimate knowledge with the progress of court
cases on obscenity and the imbrication of the law in their work. Goldstein refers to
Supreme Court justices by name, and jokes about their private lives; a club owner notes
the importance of the 1969 Stanley v. Georgia case that argued for a citizen’s right to
pornography within the privacy of the home. The awareness of the law and its role in the
development of sexual expression and the sex industry demonstrate the reflexivity of
41
Changes, the way in which it is commenting on the precise legal predicament which
determines its own existence.
Changes parallels Sexual Freedom in Denmark in its inclusion of hardcore
footage in the last third of the runtime, but in this case the voiceover is neither dry
narration nor overly concerned with anatomy. The voices on the soundtrack over the
sexual display come from interviews with subjects who perform in a private live-sex
club. As they describe their sexual experiences it is not clear whether the bodies on
screen belong to the voices on the soundtrack – it is likely that they do not, considering
that the hardcore footage actually cuts between two different couples (probably taken
from two loops produced earlier by Damiano). Here, once again, the paradox of the sex
documentary emerges. The central irony is that the hardcore sexual display connotes
documentary legitimacy, while the documentary frame that renders it legally safe seems
somehow dubious. The divisions in the sex documentary text are a direct result of the
letter of the obscenity law, allowing for producers to present a slice of socially redeeming
value to exonerate an entire work. This process is not only a feature of exploitation
cinema – Henry Miller argued that he was only able to write about sex because he
followed it up with writing about surrealism.
41
Based on the legal definition of obscenity,
the most effective aesthetic approach to sexual representation, in both literature and
cinema, is that of montage, a conceptual juxtaposition posed between two ideas.
Pornography emerges in this early stage as an additive process, with two sides, sex and
the law, symbiotically linked and paratactically layered – one cannot exist without the
other.
It is useful to remember that the effect of legal strategies that isolate prurient
42
passages in a trial, without regard for narrative or aesthetic context, is akin to precisely
the actions of an exploitation filmmaker presenting a “hot” reel of forbidden footage to
audiences that felt duped by a lack of racy content. A novel like Ulysses only appears
pornographic when its isolated sexual passages are read aloud out of context. Outside of
theaters that catered to exploitation crowds, it is likely that courtrooms witnessed more
public analysis of sexuality than any other venue. Although the prosecutors rarely
demonstrated self-awareness about their own implication in the increase of overall sex
discourse, a footnote in Charles Keating’s 1970 report attempting to discredit the findings
of the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography is instructive. Keating
notes that the Commission had access to “vast quantities of obscenity” to research the
report, but he assures his audience, “We purchased and used second-hand original
sources wherever possible to minimize the risk of providing a substantial original market
for purveyors. These materials should be stored for five years in the National Archives,
thereby allowing access for future critics of the report, and then destroyed.”
42
Keating’s
attitude here reflects what J.M. Coetzee has referred to as the “embarrassing structural
paradox of censorship,” that “if a crime is to be satisfactorily attested in court, the
testimony will have to repeat the crime.”
43
Moreover, the repetition of the “crime” in
court expands the market for the original crime, granting free publicity to the
sexploitation filmmakers who would presumably like nothing more than to receive the
attention of the court system, and, ultimately, its allowance in the public sphere.
The mutual symbiosis of the legal system and the industry for sexually explicit
material, at the very least in terms of free publicity for the adult content under review,
cannot be understated. Jules Feiffer suggests that the court system and anti-censorship
43
legislation were ostensibly working in tandem with the artists who create supposedly
obscene work. He writes,
It’s incredible the money that can be made out of anti-smut. Cleanliness becomes
bankable, not in the film business (no one past puberty goes to see family movies),
but the film cleaning business! A multi-million-dollar corporate boom! Movies are
less than ever! Shoot to ban. Produce product for the court. Feed it into the
obscenity bureaucracy: more filthy films, more censors needed, more community
boards, more court challenges, more lawyers, more clerks, more paper work, more
jobs – this may be the answer to the economic crisis! Censorship: the new growth
industry. Don’t kill chickens, kill movies, plays, books. Art for court’s sake.
44

Feiffer’s Kafkaesque vision of an obscenity bureaucracy is not inaccurate – in the late
1960s, particularly in the sex documentaries, obscenity law and sexual representation
were undoubtedly reciprocal forms.
45
Indeed, one of the most loyal audiences for adult
films was the Supreme Court itself. When obscenity cases were appealed to the Supreme
Court (including the cases that were not ultimately heard by the Court) the Justices had
what they affectionately called “movie day,” to screen the alleged obscenity.
46
Some of
the Justices chose not to go - Warren Burger abstained because he hated pornography
while William Douglas and Hugo Black believed in First Amendment protection of
obscenity, so the individual content of a film was inconsequential. For the Justices who
did attend, it afforded a unique opportunity to see their laws enacted at the service of the
very prurient interests the laws tried to proscribe. During the screening of erotically
charged scenes, for instance, Justice Thurgood Marshall would state, pointing at the
screen, “That’s it, that’s it, I know it when I see it,” mocking Potter Stewart’s famous
phrase. When they screened Sexual Freedom in Denmark, Marshall knowingly quipped
to Justice Harry Blackmun regarding the film’s socially redeeming value, “Well, Harry, I
didn’t learn anything, how about you?”
47

44
White Coaters: Willful Ambiguity at Exploitation’s Arriere-Garde

For scholars and historians of Hollywood censorship and sexual representations
on screen, the 1960s are often characterized as the culmination of an ongoing battle
between emboldened liberators of the screen and conservative keepers of screen morality.
With the creation of the Code and Rating Administration (CARA) to replace the
increasingly outmoded Production Code Administration in 1968, MPAA president Jack
Valenti seemed to be ushering the film medium into a more sophisticated period in which
auteur-driven cinema could thrive in America alongside the frank sexuality of its foreign
arthouse counterpart. But, as Jon Lewis has argued, the cultural betterment of cinema was
likely not among Valenti’s chief concerns when these changes were implemented. Lewis
argues that the rating system was effective primarily as a means of centralizing power
among the major studios, insuring that the majors could safely distribute racy films
during the box-office downturn of the late 1960s. Lewis writes, “[F]irst and foremost the
rating system was a business proposition. The studios needed to update their product lines
and the new rating system was a means toward that end.”
48
The rhetoric of screen
liberation operated as a way to bring Hollywood films closer to the raw aesthetics (and
lower budgets) of successful independent films, while the ratings system itself functioned
to limit the distribution possibilities of the independents being usurped. The fates of films
flirting with controversial material since the beginning of the ratings system bear out this
hypothesis – a risqué film distributed by a major Hollywood studio is more likely to earn
an R-rating, whereas an independent film will not, as demonstrated by the early X-ratings
bestowed on Greetings (1968) and The Killing of Sister George (1968).
49

45
Clearly not all screen freedoms are created equally. And, even if one ignores the
persistence of the studio system’s oligarchic business practices, the extent to which an
increase in sexual representations on screen portends a larger revolution in cultural broad-
mindedness is itself debatable. The sexual revolution to which these battles are often
linked was largely organized around heteronormative male perspectives and desires. The
sexual permissiveness that developed in countercultural communities in the 1960s simply
allowed men to engage in free love without the burdens of family and commitment, and
all under the auspices of politically engaged activity.
50
The evolution of Herbert
Marcuse’s philosophy offers a telling window into the ideological shortcomings of the
countercultural sexual revolution. His 1955 book, Eros and Civilization (republished in
1966) laid the groundwork for foundational 1960s leftist ideals, including “free love,”
and the equation of sexual liberation with the subversion of the corporatist-national war
machine (i.e. “Make Love, Not War”). Marcuse calls for a regression of sexuality in
order to overcome the repression and guilt imposed by society, arguing,
The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed
– an instrument of pleasure. This change in the value and scope of libidinal
relations would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private
interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the monogamic and
patriarchal family.
51

However, by the time Marcuse published One-Dimensional Man in 1964, he had already
become disillusioned by this way of thinking about sexual liberation, even in its nascent
cultural development. The idea of an advanced industrial society providing a high degree
of sexual freedom would have seemed like a contradiction in Eros and Civilization, but
here it is acknowledged as fact, and lamented. Rather than representing true liberation,
sexuality, despite its increased openness, remains bound through labor and institutional
46
mechanisms. In a dramatic reversal from the hopefulness and idealism that characterizes
Eros, Marcuse concludes, “Thus society turns everything it touches into a potential
source of progress and of exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and of
oppression. Sexuality is no exception.”
52

In retrospect, Marcuse seems to acknowledge that his optimism about sexual
liberation rested on the assumption that it would not be co-opted at an institutional level,
nor would it be paired with discursive activities. To discuss sex openly does not
subversively flaunt it, but rather nullifies its radical potential. This is the argument later
taken up by Foucault, who challenged the motives of the sexual revolution, and
particularly the potential economic gains for those sex radicals who emphasize the links
between sexuality and repression, and then profit from their transgression.
53
In this
rhetorical framework, economic profits and political gains can be reaped from both sides
of the sexual debate – it is a logic that sees pornographers and the enemies of
pornography benefitting equally from “speaking sex,” often in a cycle where they are
predominantly speaking to each other. Although we should be hesitant then to consider
the shifts toward more explicit sexual representation on screen as “gains” or “freedoms,”
the rise of the public discourse around sexuality in the 1960s was profound, echoing from
the medical and scientific discourse of sexology to the ever-shifting legal terrain over the
definition of obscenity, from independent and avant-garde books and cinema to
mainstream literature and Hollywood films. The only “gains” were the profits drawn
from sexual representations, as well as the funding bestowed on citizen’s groups and anti-
smut campaigns (not to mention the Presidential Commission researching obscenity and
pornography).
47
The speakers of sex on screen in the 1960s came from a variety of political,
cultural, and economic perspectives. In the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography, the committee draws a distinction between three broad types of films that
incorporate sexual content: general release films, art films, and exploitation films (with
16mm films briefly discussed as a growing site of expression in which further research
needs to be done). General release films are, according to the Commission, “the heart of
the motion picture business,” produced by the major Hollywood studios and exhibited in
90% of the nation’s theaters.
54
Art films are, echoing Potter Stewart’s sentiments on
pornography, “almost impossible to define specifically,” but generally consist of foreign
films and low-budget American films that appeal to foreign film audiences; the
Commission estimated that 500 to 800 theaters screen art films domestically.
55

Exploitation films are defined as explicitly sex-oriented fare, limited to about 500
exhibitors willing to screen such material.
56
The Commission notes that these films were
traditionally confined to their respective categories and exhibition venues, but many of
these distinctions were beginning to become more fluid at the time of the Commission’s
publication (1970), specifically with the incorporation of the ratings system and
loosening censorship standards for general release films as a catalyst for change.
This fluidity of categories was not invented in the late 1960s nor should it be
interpreted solely as a product of the demise of the Production Code. In a 1964 interview
with exploitation producer Barry Mahon, pre-dating the Commission’s report by six
years, he suggests that the only difference between his nudie films and the sexual content
produced by Hollywood is a matter of higher budgets and superior creative talent in
Hollywood. Like the major studios, Mahon is unapologetically interested in producing
48
profitable films – the only difference is one of scale. He makes about 15 films per year,
all of which have approximately a $15,000 budget, and earn between $40,000 and
$60,000 in receipts. He even compares his audiences to those of Hollywood B-westerns,
saying, “every nudie is the same, but every Saturday they will go to see a new one.”
57

Mahon also discusses his experience on what would be characterized as an example of an
American art film, when he produced John Cassavetes’ Shadows on a $50,000 budget.
Shadows did turn a profit, but Mahon considers this profit “lucky” given that, for the
same budget, he could have produced three nudie films, all of which would have been
guaranteed to turn profits. For Mahon, the differences in content and perceived quality
are negligible – he calls Shadows not a better film, simply different. The only decisions
for Mahon’s company are financial ones, or, as he phrases it, “what we can do with
limited financing to stay in business.”
58
The emphasis on the bottom line is of course also
a central component of the Hollywood production system, but the low-budget nature of
exploitation films foreground the savings of the filmmakers at the production end. The
visibility of corners being cut at the level of film sound, repetitive story scenarios, and
other technical areas cause the audience to be confronted with the specific profit motive
of the exploitation filmmaker, a low cost / midrange reward economic model.
The amount of sexual content in a film is not an accurate barometer for how to
locate it among the categories described in the Commission’s Technical Report; however,
the primacy of money in a producer’s rhetoric is a crucial indicator for how films are
socially and culturally classified. Using Pierre Bourdieu, Barbara Wilinsky argues that
the prestige of foreign art films in the 1950s, despite their prevalent sexual content,
derives from their “disavowal of the economic,” whereby their status as art (serious,
49
high-minded, etc.) negates the controversies that their depictions would otherwise
evoke.
59
Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press, a leading publisher of explicit material
and the distributor of (the very profitable) Swedish sexually-themed film I Am Curious
(Yellow) (1967), used similar techniques to distance himself from entrepreneurship in
favor of literary pedigree. Rosset positioned himself as a countercultural anti-censorship
advocate, and described the Grove offices as more a family than a business. Rosset’s son
stated that Grove Press “wasn’t a business. It was a project driven out of passion, which
Barney completely self-identified with.”
60
Rosset’s notoriously poor organizational skills
and the spectacular failure of Grove in the late 1970s only affirm this aspect of his
mythology. Lionel Trilling writes, “Money, in short, is the principle of the inauthentic in
human existence,” and it is on this principle that the sexual representations in art cinema,
the avant-garde and erotic publishing claimed their authenticity, outside the logic of
capitalism or any perceived flirtation with the sex industry.
61

Exploitation films, however, with their painstaking attention to legal definitions,
“socially redeeming value,” and formulaic reiterations of past box office successes,
explicitly aspire toward commercial success. It is a calculated business decision, and one
that is often anchored by the seeming sophistication of foreign arthouse cinema.
Exploitation producers hope to capitalize on the veneer of art film pedigree to justify their
own more lascivious content. For example, many of the exploitation producers in the
1960s also produced magazines that included nude photos, usually still photographs from
the films produced by the same companies. A sampling of the titles of some of these
magazines includes Art Films, Art Films Review, and Adult Art Films, clearly attempting
to confuse the categories that foreign film producers would likely prefer to remain intact.
50
Porn entrepreneurs and distributors, William Mishkin and Radley Metzger, would import
foreign arthouse titles and then add stock nudity footage for their exhibition, advertising
them as “for American audiences only.”
62
As this strategy suggests (and many scholars
have noted), arthouse and exploitation films were mutually imbricated in their dual
treatments of nudity and sexual content in the 1960s. In this section, I will examine a
particular sexploitation subgenre that foregrounds one of the crucial ways in which
arthouse and exploitation differ, specifically their approaches to the auteur and
authorship.
The sexual themes of arthouse cinema, as well as those addressed in the
“underground cinema” of the American avant-garde and experimental communities of
filmmakers, are consistently interpreted in conjunction with the authorial vision of a
particular filmmaker. The contemplative pacing of foreign arthouse cinema encourages a
viewing strategy grounded in philosophical inquiry, and the government subsidies that
often supported foreign arthouse films grant them institutional and ideological weight.
American avant-garde films, commonly organized around an amateur aesthetic, are
perceived as emerging directly from the subjectivity of their authors. Experimental
filmmaker Peter Mays has discussed the close ties between pornography and the avant-
garde in the 1960s, with artists often working in both worlds, using 16mm gauges, and
each camp aiming to express the “life force” of sexual energy. Mays also emphasizes the
centrality of the “non-literate” aspects of sexual expression on film.
63
However, like the
sex documentaries discussed above, white coater films are not particularly concerned
with expressivity or the “life force” of sexuality, but rather present a sexual economy that
is hyper-literate, deploying language and narrative frame to ensure the work’s protection
51
within the vagaries of obscenity law. Further, unlike the arthouse auteur or the
subjectivity of the experimental amateur filmmaker, the white coaters are more often
unauthored texts, produced by shell companies posing as outlets for adult education. The
fundamental conservatism and reactivity of this subgenre marks it not as an avant-garde,
but as an arrière-garde (or, perhaps, a derrière-garde), textually resembling progressive
and radical representations, but contextually concerned with legal defense and financial
gain; seemingly invested in progressive sexual representations, but bringing up the rear of
the ideological argument championing them.
White coaters constitute a unique and limited period in sexploitation history,
produced between 1969 and 1971. In the white coaters, the underlying alibi was medical,
guided by, per Foucault, the “scientific discourse of sexuality” to advocate for mutual
heteronormative pleasures in the sexual act. The films, like their classical exploitation
forebears, typically opened with a square-up affirming the producer’s earnestness and
professing a desire to morally or intellectually uplift viewers, not, as the images might
indicate if taken “out of context,” to offend them. Following this, the sexual matters to be
explored are usually introduced by a medical expert who explains the topic of the film’s
sexual focus, always in the sex-positive form of enlightenment for viewers and resistance
to societal repressions. The bulk of the prototypical white coater, with occasional scenes
that cut back to the desk-bound expert, consists of cinematic representations that
demonstrate the suggested sexual positions (a strategy later adapted in the 1972
bestseller, The Joy of Sex), accompanied by detailed voiceover narration and explanation.
Usually the narrator is a white male doctor, but there are instances of female doctors, as
in Master’s Degree in Feminine Liberation (1971) and 101 Acts of Love (1971), and non-
52
white experts, including the African-American anthropologist who leads the narrative in
Africanus Sexualis aka Black is Beautiful (1970). The genre is characterized by its expert
medical tour guide, but the nominal white-coated doctor is merely a figurehead – beyond
the fact that the doctor is played by an actor, the doctor primarily fulfills a metonymic
function, standing in for a different kind of authority, the legality that mediates the film’s
representations. The doctor symbolically performs the legal definition of obscenity that
precludes sexual depictions without his presence. It is legality, not medicine or marriage,
which is the intrinsic subject of these films, and the lawyer who stands in as the film’s
functional author.
The film that inaugurated the subgenre was Man and Wife (1969), directed by
Matt Cimber and produced by Marvin Miller under the flagship production company, the
Institute for Adult Education (the company was owned by Miller, an adult publishing
magnate before he began producing films in 1969). The careful balance of medical
education and clinical distance with sexual prurience emerges fully formed in this film.
Man and Wife immediately calls attention to its relationship with monogamy and the
marriage manual, drawing quotations in its opening square-up from T.H. Van DeVelde’s
“Ideal Marriage” pamphlet from 1930. The film’s lecture advocates for a sexual
relationship between married couples that maximizes the sensual pleasure of each
partner. The bulk of the runtime features a couple, alas, not wearing wedding bands,
demonstrating sexual positions, while the voiceover instructs viewers on which positions
maximize genital contact, which are the least tiring, and which are most conducive to
people of varying body types. The minuscule budget for the film is indicated by the fact
53
that the coital couple performs in the same wood-paneled office that the doctor occupies
in the opening and conclusion, most likely on a rollaway bed.

Advertisement, New York Times: June 3, 1970
This advertisement from the New York Times is primarily text-based, with the
exception of an accompanying piece of graphic design, small and tasteful, depicting two
legs entering the frame on the left.
64
The copy advises, coinciding with the film’s expert
testimony, that “it may save your marriage,” situating the advertisement as more inclined
to sell the film’s alibi than its sexual content. The educational aspects are foregrounded,
and the film’s status as marriage manual is not undermined by the markers of prurience
or titillation that characterize ads for many of the other sexploitation products in similar
theaters at the time. Moreover, the ad distances the film from traditional cinematic
authorship, eschewing the director credit in favor of the “Produced by Matt Cimber”
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Display Ad 171 -- No Title
New York Times (1923-Current file); Jun 3, 1970;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2007)
pg. 53
54
credit, symbolizing the exploitation economy’s foregrounding of films as products rather
than authorial / authored visions.

Advertisement, Variety: March 18, 1970
In a Variety advertisement for Man and Wife, which more explicitly addresses
independent exhibitors, potential film buyers and industry insiders, the other half of the
film’s double meaning surfaces.
65
In large print at the top, the film is billed as “the box
office SEXPLOSION of 1970,” alerting buyers that the prurient interests of film
audiences will be met. The dichotomous approach to audience expectations aligns with
the double meaning of the term “square-up” as explained by David Friedman. Friedman
understood the square-up in terms of its carnival origins as an abbreviated expression for
55
resolving potential problems, or, in carnival argot, “squaring the beef.” When carnival
hucksters and, later, exploiteers faced a potential threat at a given playdate, they needed
to make it right with the offended party by squaring the beef. But the beef could take on
two distinct and contradictory forms. If authorities threatened to seize prints, incarcerate
projectonists, and the like, the beef would be squared, partially, by the presence of alibis
to justify offensive content, such as opening title cards, medical lectures and the sale of
instructive manuals (a fringe benefit to producers, also capitalized on by the producers of
Man and Wife), or the promise of a “cold” version of a film with the racy portions
excised. However, the other potential beef might come from the patrons who recognize
these alibis as larks, resent the conservatism of the “cold” versions, and expect the
producers to deliver on the salient content that is implicit in the pitch – this beef is then
squared by providing the prurient goods.
66
This bifurcated strategy is evident in the
juxtaposition of these two ads, positioning the white coater film as firmly within an
exploitation legacy of parataxis, juxtaposing two dissimilar ideas uneasily into a whole.
But, as the numbers in the Variety advertisement indicate, while the ideological
juxtaposition may be uneasy, the financial results were unarguable – these films,
produced on minuscule budgets, were enormously profitable. The legal alibi is not
abandoned in this Variety ad – rather it is flatly alluded to, an alibi qua alibi. In other
words, the film was attacked as hoax, not as obscenity. Man and Wife did prove to “beat
the legal rap wherever tested,” assuring exhibitors that its alibi was sturdy, even if was
insincere. In one of the legal cases against Man and Wife, State v. Griffith (a local case in
a Florida circuit court), the alibi was so effective that the legal prosecution was not even
56
waged based on the presence of hardcore action, but rather on the validity of its medical
information, attacking the film for its “patently inaccurate medical description.”
67

In its cinematic adaptation of the marriage manual, Man and Wife displays an
honorable adherence to its alibi, stymieing viewers who are primarily invested in the
film’s erotic content or potential to arouse. Although the two “stars” of the film never
appear wearing a stitch of clothing, the action is rarely truly titillating (or, at least, its
potential for titillation exists in direct correlation with the film’s acknowledgement of
potential legal entanglings and possibilities of danger). Unlike the live sound of sexual
performance or the ubiquitous psychedelic or funk scores of 1960s and 1970s
sexploitation and pornography, the sex is described, play-by-play, in the dry voiceover of
male medical authority. In pauses between commentary, the action plays silently and, as a
result, uncomfortably, with awkward pauses and cue cards intercutting between sexual
positions. However, it is the place between the silence, the authoritative medical
voiceover, which punctuates the acts and determines at least one level of interpretation.
Linda Williams argues that the aural register and a preponderance of dialogue formed the
“primal scene” of Hollywood sexuality on screen, before Hollywood films were willing
to “go all the way.” She positions both deployments of film form outside the visual
register as a means for “bracketing” off sexual material, writing, “Hollywood’s new
practice…would be to situate the spectacle of sex as an affectively controlled interlude
distanced by the effect of editing and music.”
68
Although the white coaters bear a closer
affiliation with the hardcore sexuality to which all sexual representations ultimately refer,
the distancing effect of the voiceover maintains this anchor to prevent pure sexual
spectacle in the visual realm. Even though the films were among the first to commercially
57
screen sex, the unwillingness to abandon the practice of speaking sex is a testament to
their liminal position. Similarly problematic is the transition from pictorial to cinematic
representations. As in the classics of medical exploitation, such as Mom and Dad, the
doctor moves from his desk to begin a lecture on human anatomy with the aid of visual
diagrams. Then, in an odd series of cuts, the film shifts between the pictorial
representations on the wall and shots of the naked man who will perform the sexual
positions. One is left to wonder why the need for the pictorial images at all, when a
voiceover description over the human figure seems more desirable, and just as effective
for an anatomy lesson. As in their Hollywood counterparts, white coaters simultaneously
show sex and conceal sex, maintaining the essential taboo that defines their commercial
appeal even as they discursively challenge its relevance. Williams calls this brand of
simultaneity “the double standard of the sexual revolution.”
69
The blending of liberal
ideology and discussion of sex as natural, with the impression that sex is perverse
because of its narrative frame, persists as a defining characteristic of exploitation’s
ambivalence.
In Susan Sontag’s essay, “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag laments the
fact that most pornographers seem to be uninterested in treating sexual depictions with
any degree of creativity. She argues that this stifling of imagination is a product of the
separation between pornography and art, that “pornography is treated as only a social and
psychological phenomenon.”
70
Sontag’s assessment of the pornographic discourse is
accurate, yet, once again, the loss of artistic potential provides a commercial opportunity
for the exploiteer. If pornography and sexuality are treated as clinical problems, then
clinical addresses of those problems befit the general discussion, and the exploitation
58
filmmaker has no reason to strive for artistry – indeed, artistry would be more legally
dubious. As in some of the works of classical exploitation, the medical discourse and the
clinical attitude pervades the otherwise prurient depictions, and the role of the artist is
either rendered absent or pseudonymous. Some of the leading producers of white coaters
included the Institute for Adult Education (Man and Wife, He and She, Black is Beautiful,
Master’s Degree in Human Sexuality), the Institute of Sexual Behavior (ABCs of
Marriage, The Love Clinic), the Nevada Institute for Family Studies (Art of Marriage),
and the European Institute of Marital Relations (Marital Happiness, Sexual
Understanding). Indeed, Cimber claimed that the square-ups that open Man and Wife and
He and She (assurances to the audience that the intentions of the filmmakers are not
prurient) were actually written by producer Marvin Miller and his attorney, Burton
Marks, the man who defended him before the Supreme Court in 1973’s Miller v.
California. So in stark contrast to the New Hollywood privileging of auteurism and
singular authorial vision, the white coaters were authored by legal functionaries, favoring
the anonymous author and the pseudonymous institution, and always in the service of
defending the alibi of the text.
The pretentions of these pseudo-scientific companies not only provide a cover
story in the court system, but they also, in their sheer audacity, invite the knowing
audience to participate in the joy of the hoax. Contrary to the will to knowledge that
characterizes hardcore pornography, these films and their obvious attempt to cash in on a
legal loophole undermine the value of any education they offer. The institutional imprint
also separates the film from notions of authorship, and thus from any problematic
questions of intentionality. As Stanley Cavell brilliantly noted, “intension is not a
59
substitute for intention,” meaning that the various ways in which an expression can be
interpreted do not necessarily reflect the meaning intended by a speaker.
71
In fact, the
presence of ambiguity increases the potential for multiple meanings. It is in this sense
that the deliberate confusions of the white coater text, balancing between hoax and hard
core, between institution and author, enable the form to be a model of polysemy and
readerly interpretations. In The Smut Peddlers, a diatribe against the adult film and
publishing industry, James Jackson Kilpatrick acknowledges the “mask of culture” worn
by the pornographer, but sees behind it “the leer of the sensualist.”
72
However,
Kilpatrick’s polemic is only able to speculate on what exists behind the mask – the mask,
rather than the leer, remains the work’s more visible trait. In this way the sexploitation
form stands in marked distinction from the clearly authored texts of arthouse cinema and
the avant-garde, as well as the growing investment in auteurship as a marketing strategy
of the New Hollywood. While the films from major studios in the late 1960s were
beginning to incorporate the practice of using a director’s name as a publicity tool and
bestower of an aura of sophistication, exploitation filmmakers benefitted from the
anonymity of institutional authorship. The inconsistent credits for Matt Cimber (some
reviews acknowledge him, others do not), and the dismissal of Marvin Miller’s presence
as producer and financier, give the film an illicit status, maintaining the taboos that are
essential to the appeal of sexploitation. As Dana Polan notes, auteurist criticism lends
itself to lists, collections, and investigations, all of which attempt to realize a form of
completism that is antithetical to the slippery ambivalence of exploitation practices.
73
To
“authorize” these films would remove their ephemerality, an essential component for
60
future commercial possibilities including the different titles, versions, and venues through
which future profits can be gained.
In my interview with him, Matt Cimber, more than forty years after the films’
productions, seemed to still be equivocating about his level of involvement with the
Institute for Adult Education films and the degree of his authorship. For Man and Wife
and He and She, Cimber admitted to having directed the doctor sequences, but claimed he
was not involved in the hardcore material. However, this is difficult to believe given that
the scenes are shot on the same set and, by some accounts, on the same night (in a
backhouse on Marvin Miller’s property). Also, if Cimber’s claim were true, the extent of
his direction would be less than fifteen minutes of screen time. Cimber also claimed to
have had no involvement in Black is Beautiful or Sex and Astrology (1971) despite the
fact that all of the trade papers at the film’s release credit him (if they credit anybody) as
the director. Cimber’s career did not end with the white coaters – he made successful
blaxploitation films in the mid-1970s (The Black Six (1973) and Lady Cocoa (1975), for
example) and continued to work on his own projects from the 1980s to the present; he
would seem to have nothing to lose in accurately historicizing his role with Miller and the
Institute for Adult Education. My only interpretation of Cimber’s equivocating on his
white coater work is that it represents the persistent ethos of sexploitation production, an
internalized logic of prevarication, even when the profit motive is in the past. The white
coaters’ immense commercial success, though, challenges the producer’s capacity to
deceive effectively, and thus any legitimate claims on the truly illicit nature of their
representations – Variety reported that Aquarius Releasing, the East coast sub-distributor
for the Institute for Adult Education features, was booking Man and Wife into major
61
theaters outside the grindhouse circuit, including the Boston’s Symphony Theater,
making it the first commercial hardcore screened in Boston.
74
The ability to vacillate
between the illusion of the illicit while earning profits from mainstream venues represents
a pinnacle in exploitation humbug.
The commercial success of the Institute for Adult Education, noted here and in
their own Variety ads cited above, did not prevent them from under-reporting their
grosses. Psychologist Fred Goldstein served as a “consultant” on Man and Wife, and was
allegedly promised 5% ownership of the film. Goldstein sued the filmmakers when they
told him in 1970 that the film had lost $221,472, when he believed it had made over
$2,500,000 (and this is probably a low estimate).
75
The idea of the hoax, so essential to
the text’s mediation between sexual content and narrative frame, pervades the film’s
reception and financial records as well. The contradictions of the film’s structure benefit
the producers, positioning them in an enviable position outside of truth. In Harry
Frankfurt’s philosophical analysis of “bullshit,” he situates the term as a relative of P.T.
Barnum’s humbug (and, incidentally, Kleinhans’ formation of “sleaze”) – expressions
characterized as “bullshit” are deceptive, but they are “short of lying,” adopting instead a
disinterest in the truth value of a statement. He writes that the essence of “bullshit” is that
it is phony, not that it is false, stating, “although it is produced without concern with the
truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he
necessarily gets them wrong.”
76
As with all of the alibis for representing legally
contentious content, there is a layering of textual meaning in the white coaters that
challenges monolithic interpretation – the white coaters are saying one thing, and
simultaneously meaning another. But to claim that these films are simply disingenuous
62
hoaxes simplifies the point. As past scholars have noted, the marriage manuals of the first
half of the 20
th
century from which these films derive may indeed appeal to prurient
interests, but that does not undo any real sexual knowledge and enlightenment that they
offer, knowledge that was extremely rarefied until the 1950s and 1960s. The
documentary form is, as white coater director Matt Cimber discussed in my interview
with him, merely the “gimmick” for these projects.
Matt Cimber’s next white coater, He and She (1970), deviates slightly from the
documentary gimmick, and thus from the film’s legal alibi, marking the exploiteer’s
continuing need to both push the boundaries of legal representation and maintain
distinction within the marketplace. He and She uses the same basic structure as Man and
Wife (medical authority figure narrates heterosexual couple in sexual depictions), but
features key additions: first, the film eschews the conservative approach of espousing
marriage and procreation, instead featuring sex acts performed between a vaguely
countercultural young couple. The film focuses on foreplay (or, as the narrator says, “the
art of seduction”), with scenes of arousal and oral sex, saving intercourse for its last act.
Also, the sexual imagery is now choreographed to music between voiceover excerpts, and
it is told as a “love story,” intercutting the sex with scenes of the couple meeting and
going out on dates, such as eating on the Santa Monica pier and frolicking naked in a
field. The opening narration explicitly acknowledges the superiority of the film form for
the marriage manual genre, comparing the print version to “electric power,” and the film
version to “nuclear power.” The film attempts to substantiate this point with the
aforementioned intercutting between the couple’s dates and the couple’s sexual interlude,
as well as the theatrical setting for the sexual encounter. No longer limited to the wood-
63
paneled doctor’s office, He and She places the performers in a luminescent staging area
without markers of the objective world, an idealized space for a pure visual / sexual
spectacle. With a more developed sense of the cinematic, white coaters became more
visually interesting and arousing, but this arrived at a cost. As doubt creeps in over the
earnestness of the alibi, the legal defense of the film’s scientific or medical merit comes
unglued. In the shift from anonymity to a more overtly authored text, the will to
knowledge and the claims to science lose their grip on the letter of the law.
In the concluding sequence of He and She, the doctor prepares the audience for
the film’s most significant use of cinematic form that might cause it to question the
scientific approach of the film. The doctor, in direct address, invites the viewer to
“cinematically enter the mind of an individual engaged in the act of sexual intercourse,”
through a montage sequence consisting of the couple having sex (with periodic close-ups
on the woman’s face) juxtaposed with images that visualize the thoughts she is
experiencing. The doctor warns the audience that the images may seem absurd, but
assures us that the images conjured by the mind during sexual intercourse reflect the
“bizarre logic of the unconscious.” Some of these images include a girl being spanked
(presumably by the father), tidal waves, an urban skyline, cubist paintings, and finally a
full moon, paired with corresponding buttock shots. With the medical introduction
provided by the doctor, the montage sequence is given a veneer of scientific authority, the
suggestion that the images represent some kind of visual marker of psychic interiority in
the same way an x-ray or an MRI would represent an index of physical interiority.
However, the absurdity of the images, along with the punctuating African rhythms on the
soundtrack, mark a clear divide from the more earnest medical tone of Man And Wife.
64
The gradual transition in white coaters from earnest medical alibi to overtly constructed
cinematic techniques must be considered with respect to the gestation of the hard core
fiction feature. Although there are some disputes as to whether or not it was the first, Bill
Osco’s Mona: The Virgin Nymph, released in 1970, was certainly among the first
commercially screened features to present hard core sexuality without a documentary or
medical alibi. This evolution in the pornographic feature undermines the necessity of the
alibi, and forces a new approach for the white coater before the genre would be
abandoned altogether.
The white coater genre fundamentally relies on the positioning of a medical figure
in a position of authority. As Felicia Feaster has argued, the juxtaposition of medical
discourse and exploitation genre formulas is a time-honored tradition that allowed
producers to push the limits of screen representations while maintaining fundamentally
conservative approaches to gender and femininity.
77
However, the discourse on sexology
in the 1960s, particularly as it pertained to the work of William Masters and Virginia
Johnson, offered a new medical paradigm from which exploitation subgenres could draw.
Unlike Alfred Kinsey, who relied on interviews as data for his sexological conclusions,
Masters and Johnson used an observational method. Paul Robinson argues that their
techniques situate Masters and Johnson as clinicians first, and scientists after, more
interested in a therapeutic relationship with their subjects than Kinsey and other earlier
sexologists.
78
Although the actual clinical films of Masters and Johnson were
unavailable, it was widely known that their studies had conducted filmed experiments of
masturbating and copulating subjects, and thus formed a mythological ur-text for the
white coater genre. In a similar manner to the white coaters, the Masters and Johnson
65
publications seem tacitly defensive about their clinical trials, obfuscating the observed
sexual behaviors they studied behind layers of jargon and overly complex phrasings.
Language persists as a form that seems antithetical to sexual representation.
Masters and Johnson understandably aim to distance themselves from an
observation made by 19
th
century anatomist John Robertson, that “the greater part of a
physician’s professional duties are really what you would term obscenities.”
79
While the
early white coaters under discussion attempt a similar distance from overt obscenity,
Carlos Tobalina’s Refinements in Love (1971) represents the next logical step forward
from He and She, a comic and ironic treatment of the doctor as legitimate authority figure
in the sexual realm. Tobalina, like Alex de Renzy, was both a porn producer and theater
owner; he managed several adult theaters in the Los Angeles area, including the
(formerly) ornate downtown Mayan theater. Refinements in Love features more extensive
opening credit listings than is typical of a white coater, and it is not produced by a
purported institution of merit (although a number of “prestigious” institutions are noted in
the credits as consultants). In addition to its white coater sections, Refinements in Love
serves a paratextual purpose as advertising for Tobalina’s theaters and his film
productions, with a number of shots of his theater marquees and promotions of the 40%
discount rates for women and couples who attend. Pornographic moving imagery has
replaced erotic paintings and sculptures as, in and of itself, a legitimizing force to
advocate for sexual freedom of expression.
66

Refinements in Love: Carlos Tobalina plugs the Mayan Theater
The white coater sequence in the film, placed in this alternate context and
removed from the medical alibi that traditionally underlies its legal defense, functions as
an open mockery of the white coater formula. The medical figures discussed thus far,
despite any inaccuracies in the monologues or eccentricities in aesthetic techniques, are
always situated outside of the sexual act. Indeed, the doctor is only physically present in
the clinical office setting, existing solely as a voice on the soundtrack for the sexual
representations. In Refinements in Love however, the doctor is not only present for the
sexual act; he is an active participant. One scene is centered on the attempt to increase
female pleasure and study a female orgasm, and the doctor understands that his
participation in this act may be shocking. He states, “It is understood that medical ethics
forbids a practicing doctor from having relations with a patient. However, I believe that
using my own body as a tool will help this patient to have a climax.” The doctor gets the
67
patient’s medical consent to have sex with her, which she is very willing to give,
although she expresses disappointment that he insists on her being hypnotized during the
sexual act, an odd request which marks the doctor as the clear star of the scene. Unlike
the silence or the clinical voiceover of previous white coaters, this scene features a comic,
slapstick soundtrack, and frequent close-ups of the doctor’s face, smiling in a decidedly
non-medical expression. While Robinson suggests that Masters and Johnson (and, I
would add, the early white coaters) rely on a logic of demystifying sexuality through the
figure of medical authority, this sequence remystifies sexuality, eliminating the authority
of the doctor and displacing it onto the voyeuristic fantasies of a pornographic audience.
While Refinements in Love contains elements that define the white coater, its send
up of the previously revered and humorless medical figure and its abandonment of the
necessary legal alibi, mark a point of transition. This is the crisis point of sexploitation, a
time when sexploitation was slotted between increasingly risqué mainstream Hollywood
content on one hand, and hardcore producers on the other. As a result, the alibi of the
expert lecture is decentralized, and the documentary gimmick moves from hoax to
mockumentary, anticipating the humor that characterizes the golden age of pornography
and its parodic attitude toward sexology. As the alibis that defined exploitation cinema’s
paratactic structure for 50 years gave way to unabashed “sex for sex’s sake,” a new
politics of sexual representation was required to map it.

“The Last Act”: Deep Throat, Marvin Miller, and the End of the Alibi

Laura Kipnis suggests that the scholar of pornography performs the role of a
cultural anthropologist, mapping the boundaries of social taboos and cultural
developments through the analysis of transgressive representation.
80
In the examination
68
of sex on screen, one is inherently providing a compass for the margins of respectability
and legality at a given historical moment. But the depictions of sexuality on screen,
particularly in the pre-hardcore moment for commercial cinema, are less effective in
mapping what can be shown on screen, than in establishing how they can be shown. The
history of sexual representation is also a history of sexual alibis; through depictions of
sexuality, and, of course the ensuing legal battles that accompanied them, we begin to
plot an evolution of what images required defending, how they were defended, and what
images, by their absence, were indefensible. When histories of pornography note, as they
often do, that the success of Deep Throat (1972) represented the birth of the hardcore
fiction feature, they discount the fact that, Deep Throat equally marks the death of the
hardcore alibi.
The relationship between commercial sexploitation producers and hardcore 16mm
loop producers in the late 1960s and early 1970s was fraught with tension, much of which
had a generational overtone. The producers of sexploitation were positioned by their
younger counterparts as old, white, carnival barkers, uninterested in sexuality except as a
source of exploitation and profit; the fact that the sexual activity was mostly simulated
provided evidence of their disingenuous intent. The hardcore producers were, by contrast,
countercultural types, aligned with the Marcusean philosophy discussed earlier. The
sexual representations were, in this context, artful and exploratory, rather than distanced
and (purely) financially motivated. Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne’s oral history of
the New York hardcore scene in 1970 finds performers such as Harry Reems and Jamie
Gillis describing the period of their first hardcore performances as their “hippie days,”
along with recounting casual marijuana consumption on set.
81
Elena Gorfinkel’s account
69
of the first annual Erotic Film Festival (1970) in San Francisco offers more proof of the
growing divide between sexploitation and hardcore producers. Although the festival
attempted to draw from a wide range of sexual expressions, from avant-garde and 16mm
loops to commercial sexploitation, it was Zodiac Couples (1970), a film Gorfinkel
describes as a “marriage-manual-style sexploitation film,” which seems to have drawn
most of the audience’s ire.
82
Quoting newspaper reports on the festival, Gorfinkel notes
that audience members were bored by the film, “supplying science fiction sound effects
and loud laughter” over the earnest voiceover narration.
83
For a festival championing the
artfulness of erotica and attempting to elevate the form to a new realm of culture and
prestige, the artlessness of the white coater format was not only laughable, but retrograde.
Although Gorfinkel argues that these film festivals represent a rare moment when
disparate economic registers of sexual expression converge, the response to Zodiac
Couples demonstrates the persistent distinctions that audiences felt compelled to assert,
particularly “hip” audiences in 1970 that wanted to distance themselves from the need for
a legal alibi to produce cinematic sexual content.
Although pornographic representations were a novelty for a significant portion of
the “porno chic” audience in the early 1970s, the white coater lineage is notable in
arguably the period’s most visible film, Deep Throat. Unlike the white coaters and the
conservative reputations of their producers, the film’s ideology is grounded in a
countercultural ethos, with multiple characters expressing a “different strokes for
different folks” valorization of sexual variety and sexual difference. Linda Lovelace (in a
nod to the amateur appeal of pornography, the credits collapse actress and character into
one identity) plays a sexually dissatisfied woman – she enjoys sex, but desires a
70
transcendent experience, an orgasm that evokes “bells” and “fireworks.” Despite her
friends’ best efforts, she is only able to achieve sexual transcendence when she seeks
medical attention, and her doctor discovers her clitoris in the back of her throat and
proceeds to educate her on the “deep throat” technique. In an extension on the trends that
were evident in Refinements in Love, the medical authority figure is presented here as a
source of humor in the relaying of overtly inaccurate medical information, and an active
participant in sexual activity, not only with Lovelace, but with his nurses as well.
Moreover, the concluding montage of ringing bells, bursting fireworks, and overflowing
dams recalls the montage sequence in He and She, a visualization of Linda’s subjectivity
during sex. The alibi has not only been rendered wholly unnecessary, it has been
transformed into camp, placed into quotation marks and parodized to situate Deep Throat
as the more progressive and sexually authentic text. As a further insult to the older set of
sexploitation producers, the setting of Deep Throat in Florida usurps the same space that
is most notably associated with the nudist colony films of the 1950s and 1960s,
reorienting it for the new expressions of sexuality and negating the sociological relevance
of nudism to depict nudity.
Once hardcore content could be contextualized within a fictional narrative, once
porn was, at least to some cultural factions, chic, obscenity in and of itself no longer
needed to be defended by the accompaniment of any external rubric of merit. “Sex for
sex’s sake” liberated pornography from a position of defensiveness, and rendered its
previous alibis and legal defenses a subject a mockery. The parodic white coater figure
also appeared in more mainstream sex comedies, such as What Did We Learn in School
Today? (1970) and Is There Sex After Death? (1971), a development of the medical
71
figure that suggests a textual shift in the location of pleasure. As Roland Barthes argues, a
pleasurable text cannot be talked about; it can only be talked from within.
84
In order to
mount an effective legal alibi, the films had to be constantly talking about sex, distancing
the visual pleasure with an emphasis on the aural register. The limited erotic potential in
white coaters and sex documentaries stems from their discursive preoccupations. With
the hardcore narrative feature and the death of the alibi, the sexual expressions are no
longer distanced with discourse, rhetoric, or “bullshit.” As pornography becomes
associated with the counterculture and a (seemingly) genuine concern with sexual
liberation and openness, acknowledgments of the law and “socially redeeming value”
outside sex itself bear the stigma of conservatism and warrant open mocking.
Marvin Miller, the producer of white coaters at the Institute for Adult Education,
was one of the key figures who elicited countercultural cynicism about the sexploitation
old guard, not only for his films and publications, but in his takeover of the Los Angeles
Free Press. When Art Kunkin, the editor and publisher of the Freep, ran a story that
published the names and addresses of local and federal narcotics officers in June 1969,
the legal battles that ensued forced him to relinquish his ownership of the newspaper.
Miller, who operated a printing plant and a typesetting firm for his adult publishing
ventures, took on ownership of the Freep, leaving Kunkin in charge as editor. The
business opportunities that the underground press offered to purveyors of adult material
were manifold. By 1969, Nixon had outlawed record companies from advertising in the
underground press, leaving the ad space open primarily for head shops and adult
publishers and filmmakers, in addition to the personal ads that provided a venue to attract
young hippies to perform in features and loops. Although the extent of Miller’s
72
involvement in the Freep is debatable, by 1970 the publisher’s name on the masthead
was “Therapy Productions,” a moniker that evokes a clear white coater sensibility.
85
The
inclusion of sex ads, not only in the Freep but throughout the underground press, limited
its potential to serve local communities. As Jesse Kornbluth argues in his 1969
moratorium on the underground press, the flood of advertising dollars made the majority
of newspapers “unwittingly professional,” concluding that, “the groovy psychedelic
underground we’ve talked so much about these last few years is now just another pillar of
the society it claims to reject.”
86
As with art cinema and the avant-garde, the disavowal of
the economic is an essential countercultural marker of authenticity, and one that is
difficult to maintain with the presence of Marvin Miller, who, according to his
colleagues, published “the shoddiest books of all of us” and used none of the liberatory
rhetoric of Barney Rosset’s Grove Press or Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press.
87

Miller is now synonymous with the legal case that bears his name, Miller v.
California (1973). In this ruling, along with four other cases decided the same day, the
Burger court was able to roll back on the loopholes opened up by the ambiguous
language and internal disagreements of previous obscenity rulings. Obscenity remained
legally undefined, but the “utterly without redeeming social value” clause was rejected as
overly permissive. Moreover, the new Nixon majority of judges (led by Burger) ruled
that states could determine their own regulatory structures for adult material, thus
essentially outlawing hardcore pornography outside of urban spaces. Marvin Miller, once
the purveyor of effective legal alibis in white coater films, was now going to jail for,
among other publications, a film entitled Marital Intercourse. The Miller rulings in June
1973 effectively severed the practice of documentary or medical artifice as protector of
73
sexual expression – the only protector now would be a permissive local community
standard, alibi or not.
The sex documentaries and white coaters thus represent a very specific historic
niche for producers. But unlike other erotic films from the 20
th
century, which are often
treated with warm nostalgia, these films tend to meet a similar reluctance to that
displayed at the 1970 Erotic Film Festival. Charles Kilgore of Something Weird Video,
the distributor that has made many of the white coaters commercially available, provides
historically valuable but decidedly snarky opinions on the genre in his film descriptions.
Sex documentaries and white coaters emerged out of a mondo approach to truth, but,
unlike other exploitation forms, their juxtaposition with hardcore features transformed
them into a barometer for asserting countercultural authenticity and anxieties about
cooptation. As unauthored texts and open frauds, these films challenge many aesthetic
assumptions that are brought to bear on both mainstream and pornographic films; but as
legal documents and obscenity footnotes, they are invaluable resources to chart the
evolution of sexual expression, and the fundamental difficulty of knowing it when we see
it.

1
Lionel Trilling, “The Kinsey Report,” in The Moral Obligation To Be Intelligent (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2000), 125.

2
Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 188-189.

3
This binary is commonly adopted to separate erotica from pornography, with the former
gaining a modicum of cultural cache in its appeal to the mental processes, and the latter
associated with lower classes who need to be protected from the visceral energy of
hardcore sexual representation . This argument is perhaps best elucidated in Kenneth
74

Tynan’s defense of pornography, “Dirty Books Can Stay,” in Perspectives on
Pornography, ed. Douglas A. Hughes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 109-121.

4
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 49.

5
Williams (1999), 49-50.

6
Eric Schaefer, “Gauging a Revolution: 16mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic
Feature,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Spring 2002), 4.

7
Hardcore sexual representations, including both heterosexual and homosexual
depictions of intercourse, had a long history on stag circuits before this period, and the
1960s saw the growth of short hardcore loops presented in small nickelodeon-style
storefront theaters of major urban centers. Many of these small public spaces operated as
private clubs in which patrons bought memberships rather than tickets in order to attend.
This chapter will be examining only feature-length films that were exhibited in
commercial American theaters.

8
This language was used in the 1954 Supreme Court decision on Roth v. United States
and Alberts v. California, in the majority opinion written by Justice William Brennan. It
is printed in Obscenity: The Complete Oral Arguments Before the Supreme Court in the
Major Obscenity Cases, ed. Leon Friedman (New York: Chelsea House Publishers,
1970), 62.

9
Chuck Kleinhans, “Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi,” in Sleaze
Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 99.

10
Kleinhans, 106.

11
The Friedman reference comes from David Andrews’ Soft in the Middle: The
Contemporary Soft Core Feature in its Contexts (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2006), 18. The Waters quotation comes from Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne’s The
Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry (New York:
ReganBooks, 2005), 52.

12
Sexploitation refers to a subset of exploitation films that focus on sexuality and nudity
as the primary theme of transgression. I will use the terms interchangeably, primarily
because, in the 1960s, the vast majority of exploitation films fall into this category, and
many of the filmmakers themselves use the terms interchangeably.

13
Williams (1999), x-xi.

14
Kleinhans, 97.
75

15
The nudist camp films were often shot by exploitation filmmakers in Florida nudist
colonies. However, many filmmakers quickly realized that professional models would be
a more attractive box office draw than the actual nudists, a shift that undermines some of
the legal arguments of the filmmakers. For a description of Dave Freidman’s casting of a
model in his nudist camp production, Daughter of the Sun (1962), see David Friedman, A
Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King (New York: Prometheus Books,
1990), 274-290. See also Mark Storey, Cinema au Naturel: A History of Nudist Film
(Oshkosh, WI: Naturist Education Foundation, 2003) and Schaefer’s section on nudist
films in Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 290-302.

16
Quoted in McNeil and Osborne, 2.

17
Friedman, 214.

18
Or, in the words of Dave Friedman, “Like hyenas patiently waiting for the lions to eat
their fill of the zebra carcass and find a shady spot to go to sleep, the veteran exploiteers
keenly watched the court cases, primed to pounce the minute the decision came down.”
Friedman, 215.

19
Eric Schaefer. “Dirty Little Secrets: Scholars, Archivists, and Dirty Movies,” The
Moving Image, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2005), 90.

20
Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: D.A.P., 2005), 204.

21
William Brigman, “Politics and the Pornography Wars,” Wide Angle, 19.3 (1997).

22
Paul Bender, “Definition of ‘Obscene’ Under Existing Law,” in Technical Report of
the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Vol. II (Washington D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1971), 7.

23
This connection is drawn out in Jon Lewis’ discussion of obscenity law in Hollywood
v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New
York: NYU Press, 2000), 233.

24
Bender, 10.

25
Loren Glass, “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism,”
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 2006), 345.

26
Quoted in Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor’s Wife (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 97.

27
Obscenity, 62.

28
Obscenity, 63.
76

29
Williams (1999), 95.

30
Stewart’s opinion states that the only type of material that should be deemed obscene is
hardcore pornography. He goes on, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds
of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I
could never intelligibly do so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture
involved in this case is not that.” Quoted in Obscenity, 175.

31
See Eric Schaefer (2002).

32
A homegrown, Danish sex documentary actually predated Pornography in Denmark, a
film called Sex and the Law aka Danish Blue (1968), which was directed by Gabriel
Axel, who would go on to international auteur status with films like Babette’s Feast
(1987). Sex and the Law is a documentary examination of sex laws in Denmark from a
time before pornography had been legalized, so the tone is considerably different from
the valorization of Denmark portrayed in the American made films. The film was
distributed in the United States in 1970 by Grove Press, a major publisher of progressive
material led by anti-censorship advocate Barney Rosset. But Grove was an amateur in the
film distribution business, and was unable to repeat the success it had in 1967 with I Am
Curious…Yellow. For Grove’s attempt to shift into film distribution, see Albert Goldman,
“Old Smut Peddler Barney Rosset of Grove Press: His New Four-Letter Word is ‘Film,’”
Life (August, 29, 1969), 49-53.

33
See David Wagner, “Looking Back on S.F. Porn’s Golden Era,” San Francisco
Chronicle (July 12, 2011).

34
See the treatment of Kinsey’s scientific approach and research methods in Paul
Robinson, The Modernization of Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 42-119.

35
Elena Gorfinkel, “‘Indecent Desires’: Sexploitation Cinema, 1960s Film Culture, and
the Adult Film Audience,” PhD dissertation, New York University (2008), 7-8.

36
Variety, “Film Review: Sexual Freedom in Denmark,” March 13, 1970.

37
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 318.

38
Freedberg, 330.

39
Vincent Canby, “Have You Tried the Danish Blue?” New York Times (June 21, 1970).

40
Vincent Canby, “The Blue Movie Blues,” The New York Times (May 10, 1970).

77

41
See Carolyn See, Blue Money: Pornography and the Pornographers (New York:
McKay, 1974), 186.

42
Anonymous, The Obscenity Report: The Report to the Task Force on Pornography and
Obscenity (New York: Stein and Day, 1970), 60. Although no author is cited, it is widely
reported that this response was authored by Charles Keating at the behest of President
Nixon. The intent was to offset the damage that would be done to his hard-line anti-
pornography stance by the official Technical Report, which found no connection between
pornographic material and violence, and advocated the legalization of pornography for
adults. For more on this fascinating history, see Talese, 363-414.

43
J.M. Coetzee, Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 35.

44
Jules Feiffer, “Art for Court’s Sake,” part of a roundtable “Has the Supreme Court
Saved Us From Obscenity?” New York Times (August 5, 1973).

45
For more on the commercial industry that emerged around censoring institutions, see
Whitney Strub, “Perversion for Profit: Citizens for Decent Literature and the Arousal of
the Antiporn Public in the 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, No. 2
(May 2006), 258-291.

46
Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 198.

47
Woodward and Armstrong, 199.

48
Jon Lewis, 135.

49
Jon Lewis, 164-165.

50
Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (New
York: Citadel, 1991), 207-221.

51
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 201.

52
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 78.

53
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books,
1990), 6-7.

54
John J. Sampson, “Commercial Traffic in Sexually Oriented Materials in the United
States (1969-1970),” in Technical Report of the Commission on Obscenity and
Pornography, Vol. III (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 7.

78

55
Sampson, 7.

56
Sampson, 7.

57
Barry Mahon, interviewed by Gordon Hitchens, “The Truth, the Whole Truth, and
Nothing by the Truth About Exploitation Films,” Film Comment, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1964), 1.
The title of this interview again marks the persistent link between exploitation and the
law.

58
Mahon interview, 7.

59
Barbara Wilinsky, “‘A Thinly Disguised Art Veneer Covering a Filthy Sex Picture’:
Discourses on Art Houses in the 1950s,” Film History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1996), 143.

60
Loren Glass, “Counter-Culture Colophon,” Los Angeles Review of Books (September 7,
2011), http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/9912170402/counter-culture-colophon

61
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1972), 124.

62
Lewis, 201.

63
These comments came out of a Question and Answer session at the “Alternative
Projections” conference, organized by L.A. Film Forum and held at University of
Southern California, November 13, 2010.

64
Advertisement, New York Times (June 3, 1970).

65
Advertisement, Variety (March 18, 1970).

66
The square-up is discussed at length in Friedman’s Youth in Babylon, as well as
Schaefer’s Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!.

67
State v. Griffith, No. 184584, 13
th
Cir. Ct. Fla. (January 29, 1970).

68
Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 84.

69
Williams (2008), 91.

70
Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” in Perspectives on Pornography, ed.
Douglas A. Hughes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970), 134.

71
Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say?
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31.

79

72
James Jackson Kilpatrick, The Smut Peddlers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co.,
1960), 5.

73
Dana Polan, “Auteur Desire,” Screening the Past, No. 12 (2001),
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/dpfr12a.htm

74
“Levene’s Aquarius Expansion Path: N.Y. Sub-Distrib to Mini-Showcase of ‘He and
She,’ to National Operation,” Variety (September 30, 1970).

75
“Psychologist Sues For Cut of ‘Man and Wife’ Skinflick,” Variety (October 15, 1970).

76
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 47-48.

77
Felicia Feaster, “The Woman on the Table: Moral and Medical Discourse in the
Exploitation Cinema,” Film History, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Autumn 1994), 340-354.

78
Robinson, 121.

79
Quoted in Roberta McGrath, Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 45.

80
Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in
America (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 162.

81
McNeil & Osborne, 40, 44.

82
Elena Gorfinkel, “Wet Dreams: Erotic Film Festivals of the Early 1970s and the
Utopian Sexual Sphere,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 47, No. 2
(Fall 2006), 62.

83
Gorfinkel (2006), 70.

84
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975).

85
Miller’s background and takeover of the Los Angeles Free Press is covered by Stephen
J. Gertz in “The Man Who Screwed Things Up,” Everything You Know About Sex Is
Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to the Extremes of Human Sexuality, ed. Russ Kick
(New York: The Disinformation Company, 2005), 237-250.

86
Jesse Kornbluth, “This Place of Entertainment Has No Fire Exit: The Underground
Press and How It Went,” Antioch Review (1969), 92.

87
Gertz, 241.

80
CHAPTER TWO: HIP TO BE SQUARE: EXPLOITATIVE CULTURE, THE
COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE LSD FILM

What will be the next step in biological and social evolution? Here are two clues:
(1) You are more likely to find the evolutionary agents closer to jail than to the
professor’s chair. (2) Look to that social freedom most abused, most magically,
irrationally feared by society. Exactly that freedom which you, the intellectual,
the liberal, would deny to others. Good. Now you are getting close.

-Timothy Leary (1963)
1

You know, let’s play word games, let’s analyze it. Soon as you analyze it, it’s
dead, it’s over. You read a book and say well now I understand it, let’s go back to
sleep.

-Abbie Hoffman (1969)
2

When events converge to create a moral panic, sensational headlines abound
about youth running amok, and a hostile atmosphere limits reasoned academic treatment
of a subject, it can only mean one thing: the introduction of a new exploitation subgenre.
As I argued in the previous chapter, the increased openness toward representations of
sexuality in American obscenity law ultimately had a negative impact on the market
share of sexploitation filmmakers. While liberation is bad for business, a moral panic
creates limits that ought not be transgressed, and thus it benefits those who profit from
existing on, near, or slightly over those limits. Because of their taboo cultural status, drug
use and drug trafficking had been dependable topics for American exploitation films
since the 1910s, with the earliest films dealing primarily with the evils of urban depravity
and narratives that found cocaine and heroin tempting well-to-do protagonists into lives
of despair. In the 1930s, Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, positioned marijuana consumption as the leading drug scourge of the period.
He launched a national media campaign that disseminated stories of horrific violence
81
under marijuana’s influence, including tales of crazed rapes and murders. As Eric
Schaefer has argued, these stories played particularly on the fears of white middle-class
Americans by linking marijuana to minority groups (especially Mexican communities),
and suggesting that their spread would inevitably encompass innocent white youths.
3

Although drug-based exploitation films still included the titillating content that
constitutes their primary market value, their themes were ideologically aligned with
Anslinger’s media onslaught, sometimes enacting the exact stories that were carried in
newspaper accounts regaling against “the devil’s weed.” The alignment of the films with
conservative and discriminatory ideologies helped to shield their controversial content
from local persecution and cultural backlash.
Films such as Marihuana (1936), Reefer Madness (1936), and Assassin of Youth
(1937) capitalized on the national moral panic around marijuana, serving as co-
conspirators with the government organizations attempting to criminalize the drug. As
Felicia Feaster and Bret Wood point out, this symbiosis should not imply that exploiteers
were unwitting dupes performing the government’s dirty work. The films’ tendencies
toward playful exaggeration of the moral panic are clear in actress Thelma White’s
recollection of the direction she received on the set of Reefer Madness to “hoke it up.”
4

However, the symbiosis demands further interrogation beyond the recognition of a degree
of humor on the part of the exploiteers. To acknowledge tonal exaggeration and irony in
exploitation films seems to dismiss the hyperbole that was also characteristic of the
government’s own propaganda campaign. How is White’s “hoking it up” significantly
different from the falsehoods espoused by Anslinger, such as his dubious claim that the
word “assassin” derived from the eleventh-century Persian word, “hashshashin”?
5
How
82
are the commercial rewards enjoyed by exploitation filmmakers dissimilar from the
political cachet gained by the moral entrepreneurship of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics?
The similarities between exploitation films and panicked media stories are more
conspicuous than their differences. This is particularly true when one accounts for the
fact that both champion the same ideological value system privileging productivity and a
Protestant work ethic. Schaefer writes, “Implicit in the arguments for the control of the
drug was that the minorities who used marijuana were in some way unproductive.”
6

Schaefer sees this ideology of productivity across a range of exploitation subgenres in the
1930s, aligning it with the populist appeal of exploitation films and the effect of the
Depression on the American working class. However, by the 1960s, America was
dominated by the Baby Boom generation who did not remember the Depression, and the
economy had predominantly shifted from an ethic based on production to an ethic based
on consumption.
By examining the moral panic surrounding LSD and the counterculture in the
1960s, this chapter will evaluate the development of a new relationship between
exploitation films, drug use, and the performance of moral panic. My argument will focus
on LSD films, also known as “head” films, with particular emphasis on those that were
independently produced with the intention of commercial profitability (i.e. not produced
by major studios, not intended for avant-garde exhibition sites). I will outline their
specific properties and discuss key texts later in the chapter, but, broadly, these films can
be characterized by two main thrusts: content that deals with characters taking LSD, and
psychedelic, “trippy” visuals that aim to re-create the subjectivity of an LSD trip.
83
The most sustained scholarly argument forwarded on LSD films comes from
Harry Benshoff in his article, “The Short-Lived Life of the Hollywood LSD Film.”
7

Benshoff historicizes the LSD film as one of several aspects of “Hollywood’s nervous
breakdown” in the 1960s and 1970s, when declining box office returns and front office
turnover in the major film corporations resulted in an unprecedented wave of films
featuring previously taboo narrative content and stylistic experimentation.
8
He provides a
thorough chronology of films that addressed LSD and his argument linking the unstable
nature of LSD representations to industrial instability in the film industry is convincing.
However, Benshoff’s chronology does not delineate the films according to their
production, distribution, or exhibition context, which results in a collapse of Hollywood
and exploitation products, two economies that bear very different responsibilities to their
audiences. Using Rick Altman’s genre terminology, Benshoff posits that the LSD film
was pleasurable for spectators in its semantic appeal (repetitive iconography including
trippy visuals, body painting, etc.), but that the precariousness of its underlying moral
position toward LSD prevented the genre’s durability. He writes, “The LSD film’s short
lifespan is attributable to the fact that it never developed a consistent syntactic meaning.”
9

By Hollywood genre standards, the LSD film is certainly contradictory in its ideological
underpinnings toward drug use, and it is indeed short-lived. However, by the standards of
exploitation subgenres, which emphasize topical currency and cheap, efficient
production, I would argue that the ambivalence of the LSD film is de rigueur, that it is
typically short-lived.
The examination of genre in terms of the repetition of isomorphic characteristics
does not account for exploitative film cycles, which operate on registers other than the
84
purely semantic or syntactic. The vicissitudes of exploitation films foreground other
features, few of which demonstrate consistent thematic patterns: taboo subject matter,
poverty in production and distribution network, emphasis on title and promotional
viability, unabashed materialist ideals. Because exploitation is less a genre than a mode
of address, the films cannot be expected to posit an overarching syntactic structure or a
consistent ideology. Most of these films are defined by internally contradictory structures
that juxtapose opposing syntactic arguments within the same film, and ultimately suggest
that the search for syntactic meaning is futile. The contradictions embodied in the
exploitation square-up, the desire to perform morality for both sides of a moral issue
(while maintaining plausible deniability), mark exploitation content as fundamentally
ephemeral. Topical subject matter is desirable only to the extent that the topic retains a
degree of controversy and uncertainty within cultural discourse.
The LSD film thus serves as an ideal site to examine this aspect of the
exploitation film address precisely because the cultural meaning of LSD was in a state of
flux throughout the 1960s. The polarized views of LSD, ranging from medical emergency
to religious sacrament, generated an excessively mediated environment in which all
stated opinions were necessarily politicized. A film that demonized drug use could be
fairly criticized for catering to the countercultural market by broaching the topic at all; a
film that sensationalized and celebrated hallucinogenic pleasures could be accurately
accused of contributing to the moral panic by associating drug use with hedonism and
decadence. The unanchored meaning of LSD in culture rendered it a desirable subject for
exploitation films that revel in contradiction and equivocation. For Gramsci, historical
85
moments are defined by heterogeneity – when a historical moment is identifiable with a
single meaning, it is the result of a cultural victory achieved through struggle. He asks:
And is not the person who expresses ‘reactionary’ and anachronistic elements also
representative of the ‘moment’? Or should he be considered representative who
expresses all those contrasting forces and elements in conflict among themselves,
that is, the one who represents the contradiction of the socio-historical whole?
10

Although the polysemy of exploitation cinema is rooted in a desire to court controversy,
confound expectations, and maximize profitability, Gramsci’s argument applies to its
unabashed contradictions, and situates it as an exemplary form of representation for
contentious objects. Exploitation’s double bind, its allegiance to both conservative values
and progressive screen content, evinces a kind of cinema that exemplifies cultural
struggle rather than waging it.
Moreover, in the LSD exploitation film, the contradictions continue to accrue
beyond the level of representation, extending to the political economies of the films
themselves. In David James’ work on 1960s alternative cinemas, he argues that films
need to be understood not only as aesthetic objects but also as documentaries of their own
production, allegories of the social relations that generated them. He writes, “Even as it
encodes its mode of production, every alternative film practice encodes its position in
respect to the dominant mode of production, to the mass media.”
11
For James, the
political failings of Easy Rider (1969) derive from the tensions of two oppositional
economies: an independent production aiming to celebrate social alternatives, and a
simultaneous obligation to undermine those social alternatives in order to achieve success
in the commercial marketplace.
12
A structural embodiment of cooptation, these kinds of
films inscribe their own failures (ideologically) in order to succeed (financially), thus
86
perpetuating a short-lived genre cycle consisting of film entries cannibalizing their own
content.
Although it was unable to prevent it, the counterculture in the 1960s was well
aware of the dangers of cooptation, and typically distrustful of media accounts of the
hippie lifestyle. LSD exploitation films create a particularly uneasy relationship with the
counterculture because of their structural dichotomies. On the one hand, exploitation
films maintain a degree of authenticity on the basis of their independent production; they
are aligned with countercultural anti-establishmentarianism in their opposition to
dominant Hollywood aesthetics and production paradigms. On the other hand,
exploitation filmmakers are not “of” the counterculture – they are entrepreneurs who do
not share the same distrust of money, and they use countercultural representations in
overtly sensationalized depictions, often packaged implicitly for the “silent” majority.
Shifting countercultural attitudes toward exploitation films in the 1960s are
perhaps best exemplified by college campus screenings of drug films from the golden age
of exploitation. As noted earlier, classical exploitation films contained elements of
humor, but their marketing campaigns and ancillary book sales offered at least a veneer
of sincerity. By the 1970s, the college campus revival of Reefer Madness and The Pace
That Kills (1935) symbolized the beginning of a cultural amnesia in which it became
nearly impossible to historicize the sincere intentions of exploitation filmmakers. The
college audience’s transformation of an anti-drug film into a film to take drugs to is an
act comparable to contemporary campus screenings of Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. Both
were sponsored by left-wing student groups and can be understood as against-the-grain
readings that re-frame conservative earnestness as politically subversive humor.
13

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It is fitting that the exploitation film officially lost its credibility on college
campuses because they were also the space where larger cultural battles were waged in
the 1960s. As the epigraphs that introduce this chapter suggest, the 1960s witnessed an
assault on analysis, interpretation, and the role of a college education. The cultural
trajectory of LSD and its circuitous routes into and out of various university departments
demonstrates academia as a site of conflict and contestation. And the exploitation film,
which classically relied on educative tropes, is an unexpected contributor into these fluid
cultural networks. The 1970s college screening societies reveal exploitation cinema as
not only a producer of co-opted countercultural drug representations, but an object that is
capable of being co-opted. It is these complex matrices of mutual cultural imbrication
that my chapter will explore, using the LSD film and the economy of exploitative cinema
to deepen our understanding of the 1960s as a decade of profound challenges to cultural
assumptions, drug use, educational institutions, sexuality, materialism, hierarchies, and
canons.

Expanded History: LSD Before the Counterculture
Before LSD became associated with body painting, Haight-Ashbury, and electric
kool-aid acid tests, before it was featured in panicked media reports of flashbacks,
chromosomal defects, and teenagers flying out of windows, and well before it was a
subject to be exploited by America’s profit-minded mainstream and independent film
companies, LSD had already made its entrance into Hollywood. Considering the history
of Hollywood scandal, much of which includes drugs and movie stars, it is actually
remarkable how little controversy attended the introduction of LSD-25 (chemically,
lysergic acid diethylamide) throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, even amid its
88
associations with the film industry’s elite. Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist searching for
a drug that would cure migraines, first synthesized LSD in 1938 and then realized its
hallucinogenic properties when he accidentally ingested trace amounts in 1943. Even
more shocking than his unexpected experience with expanded consciousness was the
minuscule amount of the chemical that induced it – 250 micrograms, or a millionth of an
ounce. The power of microscopic doses of LSD, along with the tastelessness and
odorlessness that renders it undetectable upon ingestion, soon got the attention of the
American military apparatus that had been searching for useful chemicals of warfare
since (at least) the middle of World War II. LSD entered America in the mid-1940s,
imported from the Swiss company, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, under the auspices of
military testing. It was primarily utilized by the CIA in experimental trials to either
unleash its assumed properties as a psychotomimetic (imitator of psychotic states) to
create super soldiers, or to assess its potential as a truth serum for enemy interrogations.
14

As the CIA scientists explored its applications as a Cold War weapon, LSD continued
down the scientific pipeline, making its way through medical and psychiatric laboratories
and departments throughout North America. While many of these projects aimed to
harness the best therapeutic applications of LSD, many other seemingly independent
efforts were in fact underwritten by the CIA or Department of Defense.
The popular cultural history of LSD tends to foreground the drug’s transcendental
and psychedelic properties, the main characteristics that align it with the counterculture
that embraced it. However, this account is limited, effacing LSD’s domestic origin story
and the ten-year period in which LSD research was wide-ranging in the kinds of
applications that were explored and the research that was executed with an attitude of
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medical seriousness. Although the origins of the psychedelic movement seem peculiar
when placed against the backdrop of a sterile science lab, the evolution of LSD’s
applications in the mainstream medical establishment anticipate many of the
counterculture’s core ideals well before it became a dominant social movement. And
when the counterculture did become such a highly mediated enterprise, an embodiment
of the generation gap that polarized the United States along axes of revolutionary and
reactionary fundamentalism, the institutional struggles to define the role of LSD in
society remained resonant in the representations of LSD on film, particularly in the
uniquely ambivalent and equivocal strategies of independent exploitation companies.
According to Steven Siff, LSD was the subject of 2,000 scientific papers, six
conferences, and was administered by clinics to 40,000 Americans between 1950 and
1965, numbers that suggest a research project that cannot be accurately categorized as
fringe medicine.
15
Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at the Los Angeles Neuropsychiatric
Hospital (associated with UCLA and the Veterans’ Administration), was one of many
serious 1950s LSD researchers, but he is, most notably, among the scientists responsible
for the drug’s introduction to intellectual and artistic communities in Los Angeles,
including members of the film industry. Cohen’s research interests were initially centered
on mental illness, examining physical and biochemical strategies to better understand the
catatonic, schizophrenic, and psychotic behaviors of his patients. His early interest in
LSD stemmed from its reputation as a psychotomimetic, with its particular value for the
psychiatrist resting on its ability to make the physician temporarily experience stimuli as
the schizophrenic patient does, a physical embodiment of empathy.
16
Cohen hoped that
the knowledge gained from these states of alternative consciousness would generate new
90
understandings between doctors and patients in therapy sessions. In a reversal of the
Marat/Sade scenario positioning inmates at an asylum as figures of authority, the doctor
here becomes the patient, potentially at the expense of authoritative control. While the
psychotomimetic function might illuminate aspects of mental illness, it also inevitably
troubles the power relations between doctor and patient. Realigning the Marat/Sade
perspective from the patients to the doctors ultimately reaches the same thematic
conclusion as Peter Weiss’ play, that the boundary separating the sane from the insane is
a thin veil. This version of medical empathy represents the beginning of a larger medical
and cultural trend in which the traditional boundaries separating the expert from the
amateur are challenged, a breakdown I will be exploring throughout this chapter as it
pertains to LSD, cinema, and the counterculture.
However, for Cohen’s medical purposes, these issues were moot. When he first
tried LSD in 1955, he found that, contrary to its reputation, its effects did not in fact
produce a psychotic state. He felt neither paranoid nor disoriented; instead he had a
mystical experience, feeling that he had “finally arrived at the contemplation of eternal
truth.”
17
Although there is a rich history of fictional and confessional narratives detailing
transcendence and profundity elicited by states of drug-induced rapture, this moment
marks an important paradigmatic shift because Cohen’s scientific credentials granted this
perspective a previously unattained medical (and thus, for Western audiences, objective)
credibility.
18
As Cohen’s interests in the effects of the drug drifted more toward
philosophical and humanistic concerns, he sought the input of established national figures
such as Henry Luce, president of Time-Life, and his wife Claire Boothe Luce, both of
whom “turned on” in controlled environments with Cohen. Cohen’s decision to remove
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LSD experimentation from the laboratory environment and focus on influential and
intelligent individuals as subjects was, as Steven J. Novak notes, inspired by Humphry
Osmond and Aldous Huxley, two well-known British intellectuals and autodidacts whose
experiments with mescaline formed the basis of Huxley’s The Doors of Perception
(published in 1954). Osmond, and later Huxley, argued that the effects of LSD would be
best understood by “refined psyches” that were skilled in “self-observation.”
19
That
Huxley participated in these trials with Cohen amounts to a tacit approval of his research
mission. Huxley’s participation also demonstrated a more humanistic than scientific
leaning; Osmond coined the term “psychedelic” (meaning “mind-manifesting”) in 1956
in an attempt to distance the drug from its “psychotomimetic” reputation, and situate it in
the context of inner space and transcendental exploration.
20

Research on LSD in the late 1950s largely addressed the drug’s potential to
facilitate psychotherapy, cure alcoholism, and improve creativity, but Cohen’s largest
influence in the cultural development of LSD came through the sponsorship of continued
trials (often self-guided but meticulously recorded) with Huxley, Osmond, writer and
mystic Gerald Heard, and many among the elite of the culture industry. Charles Brackett,
Billy Wilder’s writing partner from 1936 to 1950, participated in an LSD session
presided over and recorded by Heard on March 1, 1958. This session demonstrates a
marked emphasis on “set and setting,” a term popularized by LSD advocates who argued
that the conditions and environment in which the drug was ingested had a direct
relationship to the effects it would have on the individual. This position assumes a
multivalent drug experience, a recognition that the same dose of the same chemical will
produce a range of effects or serve potentially opposing purposes. If LSD can be
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theorized as a weapon by the CIA and simultaneously as a cure for psychiatric ailments
in the medical community, the drug functions as a polymorphous symbol. Cohen’s
attention to the environment and context of the LSD experience helped to usher LSD
trials out of the laboratory and medical facility, which were deemed too clinical and
sterile for users. The trials were often relocated into the homes and gardens of the
subjects to maximize comfort and exploration on the trip, a move that portends a larger
migration of LSD into the cultural ether. Based on the limited records that have been
saved, it seems that Brackett took LSD in the presence of Gerald Heard and Michael
Barrie, probably at Heard’s home. Brackett took LSD at 10:00am, and within thirty
minutes, he was expressing a profound effect on his senses, noting an “increasing
deafness” early in the trip, and, amazingly, a subsequent realization of musical beauty
that he had not previously experienced (“I see what other people get out of music now
that I don’t”).
21
Brackett opined, “philosophic consideration when analyzed seems
ridiculous – let’s have music for the next 400 years,” explicitly rejecting an analytical
approach to music, with LSD seeming to unlock its experiential properties to him.
Brackett’s concern with music during his trip demonstrates the link Cohen and Huxley
aimed to forge between the LSD experience and the stimulation of the artistic and self-
aware individual. In this case, LSD seemed to serve its purpose by easing one’s conscious
access to inner spirituality, and beginning to forge the links between the psychedelic
experience and the importance of one’s environment. By 3:30pm, after enjoying new
musical consciousness and some “3dish feelings,” the trip was over, and Brackett was
returned to his home, another case study for Cohen’s files and another established artistic
voice championing the psychedelic experience.
22

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Although LSD received relatively little media attention in the 1950s, (and what it
did receive was either positive or ambivalent toward the drug), LSD caused a brief media
sensation when Cary Grant confessed to use of the drug in psychiatric treatment for over
a year. In a 1959 interview for Look magazine, Grant claimed that LSD had an
overwhelmingly positive effect on his personality, not to mention his sex life, stating,
“young women have never before been so attracted to me.”
23
Although Grant later
backed away from his unabashed support of the drug, his psychedelic dabbling was
actually not a notable source of controversy – it did not significantly impact his
reputation in Hollywood, and it is merely a footnote in his biography.
LSD experimentation was limited to an elite set of drug-takers partially because
one needed to have access to the scientific community that imported the drug (legally)
from its only source, Sandoz Laboratories. One of the key points of conflict among LSD
experimenters at the time was to what degree the general public should be exposed to the
visionary powers of this nascent psychedelic culture. Clare Boothe Luce was, privately,
an avid LSD advocate and credited LSD with helping her through a particularly difficult
time in her marriage. However, she did not believe that LSD should be made widely
available to the public, stating, “We wouldn’t want everyone doing too much of a good
thing.”
24
Despite this reluctance, the Luce’s were a significant influence on the
credibility of medical LSD experimentation, taking an active editorial interest in several
positive articles published in Life and Time magazines on LSD research.
25
This optimistic
perspective trickled down to newspapers as well. A 1959 Los Angeles Times article refers
to LSD as “a new weapon against drug addiction, alcoholism and mental illness.” and
compares the drug to any other medical technology: “In the hands of a trained therapist,
94
[LSD] is a powerful tool and like the surgeon’s knife may lay bare the source of the
infection.”
26
However, throughout LSD’s cultural development, there would be pervasive
disagreements as to what exactly “the source of the infection” was, and who should have
access to this “bizarre” new drug. Anaïs Nin briefly experimented with LSD in the
intellectual circles around Huxley in Los Angeles, and she was similarly enthusiastic
about the drug’s effects, yet hesitant about its potential impact on the masses. She
embraced the cult aspect of a small group exploring alternative consciousness and
visionary experience, but she felt these explorations needed to remain self-contained. She
argued, “You couldn’t mass produce the mystical: too many initiations, too many
complex rituals were required,” a sentiment that seems to call for deliberate encryption of
the LSD experience.
27
However, when she expressed these concerns to Huxley, he
challenged her perspective as arrogant and elitist: “You’re fortunate enough to have
natural access to your subconscious life, but other people need drugs and should have
them.”
28

This debate between Nin and Huxley foregrounds some of the key tensions in the
debate over the role LSD would play in society, specifically the degree to which the
revolution it offered would be egalitarian. However, it also evokes larger issues on taste,
class, and the distinctions between social detriment and social betterment. Nin takes a
paternalistic position toward access to LSD, but her concern is notably distant from any
sense of the moral panic that would pervade discourses around the drug in its purportedly
viral spread among the nation’s youth by the mid-1960s. Nin’s anxiety is really a class
anxiety, a concern over the policing of the boundaries that dictate elite statuses and
determine cultural distinctions. Her response aligns with the mass culture debates that
95
dominated 1950s intellectual circles in New York, where the main concern was the
tyranny of the middlebrow. Dwight Macdonald, while lamenting how difficult it would
be to “rebuild the old class walls and bring the masses once more under aristocratic
control,” demonstrates the intellectual challenge in the 1950s (a challenge derived from
the Frankfurt school) to defend High Culture without resorting to overtly elitist patrician
ideals.
29
He writes, “If there were a clearly defined cultural élite, then the masses could
have their kitsch and the élite could have its High Culture, with everybody happy. But the
boundary line is blurred.”
30
Likewise, Leslie Fiedler, in an essay that is sympathetic to
middlebrow sensibilities (caught between the vulgarity of Low culture and the
incomprehensibility of High culture), notes the fundamentally political stakes of the post-
war culture wars: “The problem posed by popular culture is finally, then, a problem of
class distinction in a democratic society.”
31
The Nin-Huxley debate on access to LSD
illustrates the political and cultural nature of a larger argument on class and taste at a time
when LSD was almost exclusively treated as a medical and scientific issue. If LSD were
made available to a larger population, its influence would be diluted. If threatened by
populist associations, psychedelic experiments at the homes of elites and intellectuals
would begin to take on the appearance of “LSD parties,” and the seemingly productive
scientific work would be characterized as hedonistic and pleasure seeking – the same
associations that would soon dominate LSD film publicity campaigns.
In 1959, the media was not inclined to approach LSD stories with the moralistic
claims that undergird a drug panic. The interest in and control of LSD was still
definitively in the hands of the government and the medical community. There were
certainly breaches of scientific and medical etiquette, but, for the most part, all exposure
96
to LSD before the early 1960s could be directly linked to someone associated with a
hospital or university. And yet, even within this veneer of professionalism and media
acceptance of LSD in its investigational stages, the gestures toward its vilification and the
1960s counterculture are evident. The questioning of power dynamics between doctors
and patients; the increasing relativism of therapeutic possibilities; drugs as a means of
self-improvement; the religious, mystical, and transcendental properties of the drug
experience; and, with Grant’s overt sales point, the link between the drug experience and
sexuality - all of these unstable discourses pointed toward a quaking that would erupt in
the LSD cultural explosion that began in the media in earnest in 1965, and continued
throughout the remainder of the 1960s.

Anatomy of an LSD Film
Although this chapter is primarily interested in the relationship between
independently-produced and distributed exploitation films and the counterculture, I
would like to first describe the dominant characteristics of LSD films, and briefly outline
the major periods and economies of LSD-themed releases from 1959 to 1970 outside the
exploitation market. I divide the representations into the following categories: pre-
countercultural, Hollywood, off-Hollywood, avant-garde, and educational films.
The first cinematic representation of LSD was featured in William Castle’s
gimmick-horror film The Tingler in 1959, released by Columbia. As the cultural history
of LSD would suggest, this depiction predates the drug’s associations with psychedelia
and mysticism, grounding it instead in the realm of medical science. The protagonist of
the film, Dr. Warren Chapin (Vincent Price), is a researcher who has discovered an
97
organism that attacks the body when it experiences fear – the only means of preventing
this organism from cracking one’s spinal column is through screaming. Chapin uses LSD
as a catalyst for an experiment with his own fear, locking himself into a room and taking
LSD to hallucinate and terrorize himself into confronting his own inner tingler. In this
regard, LSD’s status as a tool for medical self-experimentation is affirmed, and the much-
publicized psychotomimetic properties determine the drug’s depiction. Although The
Tingler provides LSD’s first screen appearance, it anticipates two key LSD film tropes.
First, the film privileges a visceral and synaesthetic audience response. While later LSD
films would be marketed as “experiences” for the viewer, “trips” for the senses, The
Tingler is a low-budget horror film featuring Castle’s gimmick, Percepto. The gimmick
consists of electric buzzers wired under theater seats to create a haptic exhibition event in
much the same way that LSD films later advertised themselves as immersive sensory
experiences. Second, The Tingler is predominantly shot in black and white, but when a
woman dies of fright at the sight of a blood-filled bathtub, the film stock shifts to
saturated red color. The technique of shifting from black and white to color is repeated in
several LSD films, including The Hallucination Generation (1966) and Alice in Acidland
(1969), though, unlike its incorporation in The Tingler, the LSD films use the technique
to suggest expanded vision while experiencing an acid trip – in The Tingler, the color
shift is tangential to LSD.
Mikita Brottman argues that the narrative of The Tingler symbolizes an
acknowledgment of multiple layers of the human consciousness and a triumph of
psychoanalysis, suggesting “that emotions we fail to get ‘out’ somehow remain repressed
‘within’ us until they find their way ‘out,’ possibly of their own accord, and possibly in a
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rather frightening and dangerous way.”
32
LSD, in its pre-countercultural iterations, drew
attention to the permeable borders between the mind and body, challenging, as
Brottman’s linguistic attention to prepositions does, bodily wholeness. The Love Statue
(1965), a New York independent film directed by David Durston, appears to be the first
exploitation film to feature LSD and to replicate an acid trip on film. Timothy Leary and
Richard Alpert were fired from Harvard University amid suggestions of LSD-related
improprieties in 1963, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters rode their magic bus across
the country in the summer of 1964, and Congress passed the Drug Abuse Control
Amendments in 1965, effectively limiting medical research with psychedelics.
33

However, in 1965, when The Love Statue was produced and distributed, the
counterculture had not yet crystallized in the public consciousness, and its associations
with LSD were still preliminary. Its narrative is a sort of Warholian version of
Pygmalion, featuring a downtrodden artist in a troubled relationship who, following a
three-day LSD bender, arrives back to his studio to find a sculpture come to life. The
Love Statue, shot on location in the cafés and jazz clubs of Greenwich Village, has more
of a Beat than a hippie sensibility in its slang and geography, and its LSD preoccupations
hew closer to cognitive concerns than spiritual ones. The drug is referred to as “the
newest thing in dreams” and “instant psychoanalysis, baby.” The acid trip sequence used
novel low-budget techniques to achieve an alternative subjective aesthetic. These
included placing a crystal decanter in front of the lens to seemingly replicate insect
vision, but the impression is a far cry from ‘60s psychedelia, especially in black and
white. According to exploitation film historian Michael Bowen, The Love Statue was
independently financed by a group of investors who requested a film specifically about
99
LSD (it was originally titled “The Love Drug”). However, when filming was completed,
they discovered that “indie distributors had little interest in handling a film concerning
the still-esoteric subject of LSD.”
34
The producers decided to add three softcore sex
scenes (against Durston’s wishes) to market the film, which went on to playdates with
more conventional sexploitation fare, including an Adults Only screening in Chicago
with Blond in Bondage and an intermission featuring “In Person - Frisco Style Go-Go
Girls.”
35
The reference to “Frisco style” in the advertisement suggests that San Francisco
was utilized as a marketing tool connoting loose sexual mores at least a year before it was
linked to countercultural youths and hippie iterations of free love.

Advertisement: The Chicago Tribune, December 29, 1965
The Tingler and The Love Statue constitute some of the earliest cinematic attempts to
convey the LSD experience before the counterculture emerged as a dominant cultural
paradigm. Without the topical associations of youth movements or a hippie cultural
100
milieu, both films required gimmicks beyond LSD in order to compete in the marketplace
– a literal gimmick in the case of Castle’s Percepto, and more reliable exploitation
content in the form of increased sexuality in Love Statue. By 1966, and consistently over
the next three years, every economic register of film production would address LSD,
most often by associating the drug’s use with the counterculture and capitalizing on
topical subject matter.
As Andrew Syder argues, this cinematic fascination with LSD was mutually
shared by psychedelia’s fascination with cinema. The philosophy of psychedelic writers
and thinkers, including Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and R.E.L. Masters and Jean Houston
in their treatise on hallucinogens, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, is rife with
cinematic metaphors and diatribes on visuality. Syder writes,
Given this strongly perceived conceptual bond between the experience of cinema
and the experience of psychedelics, it is also not surprising that the cultural and
artistic productions of the era explored this union too. Filmmakers were drawn to
LSD just as much as the psychedelic movement was drawn to cinema as a
creative tool.
36

Although it has already been noted that the LSD film is an especially unstable genre in
terms of its syntactic meaning and thematic attitude toward drug use, there are a few
dominant tropes that recur throughout many of the films. By 1966, the characters in the
narratives are typically countercultural youths, and the settings hippie communities and
rock clubs, most often the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles or Haight-Ashbury in San
Francisco. The protagonist is usually a novice “head,” whose introduction to
hallucinogens occurs during the course of the narrative and serves as a surrogate for the
audience’s exposure to LSD. The dialogue is dominated by hippie slang, often in
juxtaposition with “straight” characters (parents, police) who stand in to mock the hippie
101
fashions, modes of address, and lifestyles (either sympathetically or unsympathetically,
depending on the film’s dominant attitude toward drug use). Generational conflict is a
common theme, as is the recurrence of academics or anthropologists “studying” the
counterculture, another way in which these films seem to educate square audiences on
LSD culture. When the protagonist takes LSD, the aesthetic style shifts to account for the
character’s subjective shift in vision, usually relying on techniques that reduce clarity in
favor of visual excess. Some of these techniques include split-screen compositions,
multiple exposures, rapid montage sequences, lens flares and solarizations, manipulation
of the speed of motion, and the aforementioned shift from black and white to color stock.
All of these techniques offer visual plenitude to exemplify the psychedelic trip, and
aesthetic distortion to replicate an altered state. Syder characterizes acid sequences in
terms of a dual purpose of “simulation” and “stimulation”: on the level of the diegesis,
the sequences simulate the experience of the character undergoing a trip; on the level of
spectatorial pleasure, they stimulate viewers who may themselves be tripping in the
theater.
37

To create a complete chronology of LSD films is a Sisyphean task because the
topic was addressed with varying degrees of centrality to the narrative, and in myriad
economic contexts. In major Hollywood 1960s releases, LSD often featured as a
background aspect of countercultural sequences to lend authenticity to hippie depictions
– LSD is deployed in this way in the Factory sequence of Midnight Cowboy (1969) and
the San Francisco go-go club scenes in Petulia (1968). In the major studio films where
LSD takes center stage, such as Skidoo (1968) and The Big Cube (1969), it is used as a
device to enliven otherwise staid genre formulas, a gangster parody and a thriller in these
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examples. Although Skidoo and The Big Cube were both box-office failures, Hollywood
studios benefitted more from psychedelically suggestive marketing campaigns. The
reputation of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as a head film was a key contributor to its
three-year-plus run at some box offices.
38
Disney re-releases of Fantasia in 1969 and
Alice in Wonderland in 1974 also used trippy ad campaigns, psychedelic colors and
slogans to turn a profit. Variety wrote of the National General campaign for the re-issue
of Fantasia, “[I]f Disney is not specifically pitching its pic to those nice, unwashed pot-
smoking citizens who buy tickets by the bundle that National General has targeted, they
are at least aiding and abetting the campaign.”
39

LSD played a more central role in the productions of studios that I refer to as “off-
Hollywood,” particularly the output of American International Pictures (AIP) and Trans-
American Films (an AIP offshoot). These studios operated in a commercial space
between major Hollywood companies and exploitation companies: the films targeted
teenagers with topical youth-oriented subject matter, but did not alienate their parents
with coarse language or excessive sexual content. These films had low-budgets and
schlocky aesthetics, but were “official” in the sense that they were submitted to the PCA
for production seals and (usually) existed in only one version of non-recycled parts; they
were exhibited at drive-ins, but also at slightly more upscale theaters than the urban
grindhouse mainstays of exploitation.
40
This “in-between” status is evident in the
publicity documents and script notes for some of their LSD-related productions. James
Raker, a marketing agent who freelanced with AIP and Trans-America, wrote copy for
The Hallucination Generation (1966), Psych-Out (1967), and The Trip (1967), all LSD
films sold using the language of drug sensationalism. The Hallucination Generation is
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purported to offer “a trip behind the screaming headlines, magazine articles and medical
reports” and “actual scenes with Acid Heads, Dream Merchants, Pill Pushers, Hop Heads,
Needle Operators.” But these scenes are not solely for youth consumption, as they also
included slogans asking, “Are your children indulging in these sensual orgies in the name
of Science.”
41
Psych-Out, an LSD film located in the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene, is
similarly a journey “behind the headlines,” but, by 1967, its publicity evinces a stronger
sense of countercultural slang and iconography (as well as an effort to link drug use to
sexual content) in its slogan, “They’ll mooch a dime from you, or a nickel, but they’ll
give you Love for nothing.”
42
For the marketing of Roger Corman’s The Trip, probably
the most iconic of all LSD films, Raker struggles to incorporate both the synaesthetic
pleasures of LSD hallucinations with the horrors of panicked drug scare language. The
famous tagline when the film was released, “A Lovely Sort of Death,” foregrounds a
relatively balanced trip, but earlier iterations of the same concept ranged from pure
pleasure (“Love Sex Delight”) to camp-levels of drug panic (“Loneliness Sorrow
Depravity”), along with a strange, experimental option (“Molested”). A typo in Raker’s
notes indicates the extent of his confusion as to the film’s intentions, when he
accidentally refers to “mods” as “mobs.”
43
Norman Herman, an executive at AIP,
provides script notes on Psych-Out that indicate a fear of the film straying too far from
mainstream sensibilities. In the marginalia, his notes warn the production staff about
“watch words” (including “hell”), and he changes the line “I’m just an animal here to
ball,” to “I’m just an animal here to make out, baby.”
44
He also requests that the script
add a police perspective and make sure to depict “how the hippie scene has turned sour
and looks tawdry.”
45
These films, along with other AIP releases including Riot on the
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Sunset Strip (1968), Wild in the Streets (1968), and a number of biker film releases
created the dominant cultural images of LSD and the counterculture on film, but they
emerged from a hybridized production context between Hollywood and exploitation.
46

Further afield from Hollywood, LSD provided inspiration for avant-garde and
experimental filmmakers. Jordan Belson, Bob Cowan, John and James Witney, and Stan
VanDerBeek were among the independent experimental filmmakers who aimed to
produce a form of, what Gene Youngblood refers to as, “cosmic cinema,” equating the
ideal of expanded consciousness with the cinematic medium in celebrations of pure
visuality and, often, Eastern religious philosophy. As Youngblood notes, these
filmmakers can be immediately set apart from Hollywood, off-Hollywood, and
exploitation in commercial terms. He writes, “We’ve seen the urgent need for an
expanded cinematic language. I hope to illustrate that profit-motivated commercial
entertainment, by its very nature, cannot supply this new vision.”
47
(It should be noted
that Youngblood made an allowance for The Trip, of which he wrote, “I never thought
I’d be moved to praise a Hollywood film with the wholehearted enthusiasm I feel for this
one.”
48
) Avant-garde filmmakers worked on films as well as multi-media events in
conjunction with other musicians, performance artists, and acid gurus. The first Trips
Festival, organized by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in January 1966, represents
an intersection of the avant-garde and the counterculture, fusing rock performances from
the Grateful Dead and other area rock bands with experimental musical performances
from members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
49
Also, in the campier tradition
of avant-garde filmmakers like Jack Smith and the Kuchar brothers, John Waters (an avid
LSD proponent in the 1960s) produced The Diane Linkletter Story (1970), a short film
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parodying the moral panic around Diane Linkletter’s supposed LSD-related death. Divine
stars as Diane in a film that mocks the generation gap and painfully uses an anti-drug
song written by Diane’s father, music executive Art Linkletter, over the opening credits
(“We Love You, Call Collect”).
A final context for screen representations of LSD was the drug education film. In
the mid-1960s, an upsurge in demand for 16mm educational films coincided with the
moral panic around LSD. So by 1967, LSD replaced heroin as the main subject for anti-
drug educational films, and the films were distributed to schools in unprecedented
numbers.
50
Many of these films, including LSD: Insight or Insanity (1967), LSD: Trip or
Trap (1967), LSD: A Trip to Where (1968), and Case Study: LSD (1969), have been
included in releases from Something Weird Video, a respected curator and marketer of
paracinema. Indeed, the connections between educational films and exploitation are
manifold – both forms mimic sincerity in their moral obligations to the audience, yet, in
each case, content is chosen to maximize profits and, occasionally, to sell textbooks
alongside. The connection was strong enough to warrant a guidebook in 1970, 99+ Films
on Drugs, which reviewed films for educators, and attempted to steer them away from
producers who are “merely pushers of their own brand of bad dope.”
51
Despite these
connections, the editors of 99+ Films are anachronistic in their warnings about
exploiteers invading the educational film market – the 1960s educational films bear a
stronger resemblance to 1930s and 1940s classical exploitation films than their
contemporaries. By the mid-1960s, the university campus and the student delinquent
were starring in exploitation narratives, implicating educational institutions as simply
another aspect of a larger exploitative culture including drugs and sex.
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The LSD exploitation films, which I will explore in the remainder of this chapter,
are distinguished from the types described above in that they were distributed by
independent companies that were not affiliated with the MPAA, and they were produced
with the express intention of making a profit. Like other exploitation films of the period,
they were typically distributed on a regional basis, with less than 100 prints circulating
throughout the country’s drive-ins and urban theaters over the course of less than a year.
Although some of the exploitation filmmakers were young and ideologically aligned with
countercultural politics, such as William Rotsler, most were holdovers from earlier
exploitation cycles and periods, using LSD and representations of hippies purely as a
motivation to explore familiar exploitation themes and content within a topical narrative.
The films were often advertised in the underground press, but it is generally assumed that
the primary audience skewed older, locating the hippie appeal here as a distanced and
othering identification.
LSD subject matter was often included in exploitation films to emphasize its
associations with sexual liberation, aphrodisia, or a pseudo-documentary celebration of
hippie communities; some of these titles included Something’s Happening aka The
Hippie Revolt (1967), The Acid Eaters (1968), Like It Is aka Psychedelic Fever (1968),
and Revolution (1968). It was also treated in the context of a film’s occult narrative
leanings, as in Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Something Weird (1967). But most exploitation
representations can be broadly categorized as negative, with characters using LSD as a
sexual weapon, as an object that exacerbates emotional trauma, or as a preamble to
criminal prosecution; some of these include: Unholy Matrimony (1966), Weird World of
LSD (1967), The Animal (1968), Mantis in Lace aka Lila (1968), Blonde on a Bum Trip
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(1968), Alice in Acidland (1969), Scream Baby Scream (1969), The Sadistic Hypnotist
(1969), Hooked Generation (1968), I Drink Your Blood (1970), The Student Nurses
(1970), The Wild Scene (1970), Ghetto Freaks aka Love Commune (1970), The Hard
Road (1970), Psychedelic Priest aka Electric Shades of Grey (1971), Pot Parents Police
aka The Cat Ate the Parakeet (1972), and a late entry to the genre cycle, Blue Sunshine
(1978), which focuses on flashback anxiety.
52
There were also a handful of films that
used LSD as a tool to explore more overt horror themes and bodily transformations, such
as Werewolves on Wheels (1971) and Blood Freak (1972). The genre peaked in the
exploitation industry between 1967 and 1969; as with many other subgenre cycles, acid’s
appeal in theatrical exploitation waned as it made its way into hardcore pornographic
loops and features, such as Professor Lust (1967) and Summer of ’69 (1969), and later
SSP: Sexual Sensory Perception (1975). While this list is in no way complete, the
chronology suggests that the LSD representations were largely contemporary with the
mainstream media backlash to the drug amid its associations with the hippie movement.
The titles also provide indicators as to the broad range of themes around which LSD was
positioned in exploitation films – in the remaining sections I will isolate a few of these
films and parse out their resonances with respect to education, the university, and the
counterculture.

“Can You Pass the Acid Test?”: Education On and Off Campus
In Lionel Trilling’s essay “On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” the cultural
critic adopts the irascible tone of an aging and misunderstood professor in a 1960s
university environment that has outgrown him. He attempts to diagnose the problems of
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the undergraduate study of modern novels, lamenting, “To some of us who teach and
think of our students as the creators of the intellectual life of the future, there comes a
kind of despair.”
53
Trilling sees the contemporary study of modern literature as an
abandonment of objective scholarship – however challenging and worthy of study the
works may be, their intimacy with the reader filled Trilling with a sense of anxiety and
unease. He was uncomfortable with the way modern authors espoused a confessional
pedagogy which called for a classroom atmosphere in which he felt compelled to discuss
his own personal philosophy or spirituality, rather than the traditional retreat into esoteric
verse structures or arcane ancient contexts. Trilling self-deprecatingly epitomizes the
generation gap, writing “To stand up in one’s own person and to speak of them in one’s
own voice to an audience which each year grows younger as one grows older – that is not
easy, and probably it is not decent.”
54
This perversion of classroom relationships
underlies his larger argument, that teaching modern literature within a traditionally
structured academic environment is a self-destructive and unsustainable enterprise.
Trilling’s anxiety about the relationship between a changing culture and the
university setting (with its attendant hierarchies between professors and students) was
limited neither to Trilling nor to the humanities. As the LSD cultural history suggested,
the movement of the drug out of the laboratory and into the home demonstrates a
comparable fragmentation of traditional boundaries. Trilling’s misgivings speak to broad
1960s trends that re-positioned the role of popular culture, subjectivity, and minority
voices in the academy. With these shifts came an erosion of faith in the classical goals of
a university education, and a concomitant undoing of the traditional relationship between
education and titillation in exploitation films. The ubiquitous dichotomy between
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education and titillation, theorized by Eric Schaefer, was the guiding principal of classical
exploitation films. Titillation provides the primary raison d’être for the films, while the
educational context (in the form of square-ups, book sales, and authority figures
embedded in the narrative) provides the alibi by which the titillation is provided.
55
While
the educational motives of the filmmakers may have been unsound, there was no
questioning the legitimacy of the Puritanical and productivist moral principles they
espoused. However, in the 1960s, from Susan Sontag’s treatise “against interpretation” to
John Cage’s embrace of “purposeful purposelessness,” intellectual undercurrents
championed the experiential and the visceral as equal to, if not superior to, distanced and
analytical learning.
56
Psychedelic culture is central to this discussion as a site that
advertised itself as “real” education through mind expansion and self-awareness, in
contrast to passive and conformist university educations. Two of the enduring phrases of
the counterculture (along with “make love, not war”) explicitly address LSD and its
oppositional attitude toward traditional educational pursuits – Leary’s “turn on, tune in,
drop out” and Kesey’s “can you pass the acid test?”
I contend that the ways in which education is deployed in 1960s drug films
parallel contemporary intellectual trends. Whereas education was a legitimizing alibi for
classical exploitation, the alignment of LSD films with the countercultural questioning of
the university system results in a collapse of education and titillation into a single space.
LSD films represent college campuses as sites for sexual and narcotic transgressions, and
narrativize the gradual deterioration of educative subtext through either the abandonment
of an authoritative voice of morality or the open mocking of educational institutions. In
so doing, they mobilize countercultural criticisms of the university. However, in the
110
typically contradictory style of exploitation cinema, these films also mobilize the anti-
intellectual criticism of the university from the political right, depicting LSD as a weapon
rather than a sacrament. In the immediate juxtaposition of titillation and education, the
LSD exploitation film reveals the ease with which the countercultural anti-intellectual
position can be situated to serve the interests of the Establishment as both a source of
profit and affirmation of the moral panic around LSD and the hippie lifestyle.
The 1960s was not the first decade in which American institutions of higher
education were a source of conflict. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in
American Life historicizes education in America as a gradual movement away from its
European, aristocratic roots. Classical education is seen as wanting in a country rooted in
values like pragmatism and democracy. Hofstadter argues that, like any other service in a
political system devoted to the privacy and free will of its citizens, public education had
to be “sold” to the government on the basis of its political and economic value, not its
cultural value, and thus had to eschew any illusions of elitism.
57
Dana Polan’s
investigation into the nascent beginnings of film courses and programs in 1920s and
1930s American universities confirms this need for extra-aesthetic justification. Film
studies perhaps best dramatizes the shift due to the academy’s resistance to populist
forms in the ivory tower. Polan establishes that the first film class in the United States
was overtly conceived as a money-maker for Columbia University, farmed out to the
adult-education school in an effort to isolate “lower” educational pursuits, generating
revenue for the university while preserving the dignity of its core mission.
58
In the 1927
cinema course offered at Harvard University, business superseded aesthetics as the
course’s focus, privileging a practical symbiosis with the studio system in its
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transformation of the classroom into a training site for students aspiring to careers in the
film industry.
Another common way that the university invoked the study of film while
simultaneously disavowing it was through the distanced language and methodological
rigor of social science. Whether the studies were defined as psychological, as with Hugo
Munsterberg’s early theoretical film work, or sociological, as in the Payne Fund Studies
and early attempts to deal with “media effects,” the pretense of objectivity was the
necessary legitimizing element. Distance between analyst and subject was staunchly
maintained, a relationship that often belied the motivations of the research project that
may well have been funded by conservative groups seeking to generate “data” to
demonstrate the moral turpitude in which films positioned their viewers (here, victims).
In Mark Lynn Anderson’s essay, “Taking Liberties,” which locates the origins of the
media expert in these early sociological film projects, he notes how this scientific
distance operates to empower the media analyst as ethnographer and disempower the
subjects of the study, film audiences, filtering their “lived experience[s]” through the
alienating jargon of the scientific community.
59
Following the work of Georg Simmel,
these sociologists theorized their role within the group as that of the “sociological
stranger,” bearing witness to the group’s activities in question, but never being of the
group.
60

However, by the post-war period, the methodology of distance in sociological
research was becoming increasingly suspect. Howard Becker’s Outsiders: Studies in the
Sociology of Deviance illuminates the cusp of this shift. His central argument is a
progressive one, re-locating deviance from the individual who exhibits deviant behavior
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to the “moral entrepreneur” who has a vested interest in the enforcement of taboos that
ultimately define deviant subcultures. Moving from behaviorism to cultural exchange and
“labeling theory,” Becker is critical of the studies that draw conclusions solely from
empirically defined deviant behavior. This empiricism is, for Becker, already flawed
because it concedes the label of “deviant” without justifying how it was assigned to the
subject and who assigned it.
61
Before his academic career, Becker moonlit as a jazz
musician in Chicago. He is open about his personal experiences and how they led him to
some of the interview subjects for his project. However, despite this closeness to the
subject, he also goes to great lengths to dissociate his study from the lived experiences
and language of the treated groups. In one telling passage, he introduces the transcript of
an interview with a marijuana user in which he was the questioner, and braces readers for
the shift in language they will encounter: “Where it was possible and appropriate, I used
the jargon of the user himself.”
62
The slang he uses is hardly noteworthy in itself (“How
can that be, man?” in response to descriptions of people who don’t know they’re high),
but in juxtaposition with the language of the social sciences throughout, the slang marks
the protean nature of Becker’s work and inadvertently suggests some of the
contradictions that exist between the two worlds he attempts to inhabit simultaneously.
The conclusions of his research, while progressive in their attitudes toward drug users
and deviance, still apparently require the necessity of distance in order to gain respect
within the academy.
Whereas Becker contributed to the collapse of the border between observer and
participant while working within the academy, Timothy Leary shattered it by ushering
these debates into the cultural sphere with LSD as the primary object of contention.
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Leary was consistently billed in the media and at countercultural events as “Doctor
Timothy Leary” or “Professor Timothy Leary” (and even “Ex-Professor Timothy
Leary”), both acknowledging and disavowing his academic credentials for the
countercultural audience. In an early research project at Berkeley (with co-author Frank
Barron), he analyzed patient recovery rates under psychoanalytic treatment, and his
conclusions point toward this self-imposed distance from his training in professional
psychiatric methodology. His findings demonstrated that the conditions of one third of
the patients he studied in psychoanalysis improved, another third deteriorated, and the
conditions of the final third were unchanged, identical to the statistics of patients who
receive no treatment at all.
63
He challenged some of the core assumptions of psychiatry,
including the maintenance of scientific objectivity, and called for scientists to become
involved with their studies as “democratic participant[s],” undermining the notion of
outside authority.
64
Leary’s existential-transactional philosophy argued that all social
roles were a series of games, and the job of the researcher is to “see the research situation
as a social network, of which the experimenter is one part.”
65
Leary claimed that he never
really saw himself as a professor at all, but rather as someone “playing the professor
game.” Scientific jargon is a linguistic game played by academics for self-
aggrandizement, a power play that underlies all endeavors, regardless of objective
appearances. In response to his first psychedelic experience in 1960, Leary gradually
shifted the language of his discourse from the medical jargon of psychiatry toward the
liberatory rhetoric of psychedelic writing to come, all the while admitting that he had
shifted to the “guru” game.
114
As has been noted, medical investigations into LSD were administered with a
range of fidelity to medical standards. Even with the issues of self-experimentation and
inquiries into even fringier topics like telepathy and reincarnation, most researchers were
willing to commit to long-term experiments and analyze the curative value of
psychedelics on specific diseases. Leary though was less interested in the
pharmacological properties of the drug, as he was already convinced of its spiritually
curative potential. Perhaps inspired by the address from which he based his research at
Harvard, 5 Divinity Avenue, Leary transformed himself from a researcher with marginal
ties to the academic community to a high priest of the new psychedelic culture, in self-
imposed exile from the scholarly world. The distanced and controlled approach of the
social sciences was completely abandoned, as he and his team of researchers had
psychedelic experiences along with the prisoners they were analyzing in one experiment
in 1961, and he actively sought to “turn on” authors, musicians, and celebrities rather
than patiently undergo the rigors of social science methodology. In a strange re-staging of
the debate between Anaïs Nin and Aldous Huxley, Leary’s radical democratizing of LSD
forced Huxley into the elitist position, warning Leary that adherence to scientific
institutions and “the medical model” was the safest way to disseminate information about
LSD, even if it would be a slower process.
66

Leary, who was never a full-time faculty member at Harvard, was fired in 1963,
and his dismissal is the event that confirmed his credibility with 1960s youth culture. He
publicly bragged about his being fired before receiving official word from the
university.
67
As a hyphenate ex-professor, he embodied the drop-out mentality, regardless
of who rejected whom. Although his age marked him as separate from the counterculture,
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he gained credibility by mocking the prestige of America’s most revered academic
institution. Leary’s charismatic personality and his ability (with advice from Marshall
McLuhan) to market himself as an LSD guru and youth icon was quickly deemed a
catalyst for the media panic around LSD. As Erika Dyck notes, up until 1962 the New
York Times devoted several articles to LSD, all of which were assigned to science and
research staff journalists, were relegated to back pages, and did not address the drug’s
negative properties or cultural relevance.
68
After 1962, the same time that Leary’s
Harvard psychedelic persona began to attract public attention, LSD articles began
spiking, and now dealt with the abuses of researchers, the preponderance of drug abuse
on university campuses, as well as the dangers and fatal consequences of the drug. A Los
Angeles Times article quoted an LAPD sergeant saying of LSD use on campus, “We
know that they’re eating the stuff like gumdrops at UCLA and at least one former student
is known to be selling large amounts.”
69
In 1966 alone, there were 500 references to LSD
in the New York Times, and it was now front-page news, led with sensational headlines –
not surprisingly, 1966 also was the year LSD was criminalized.
70
Leary’s persona was
essential in ushering the shift from “LSD research” to “LSD culture,” but considering its
repercussions in legal action and cultural backlash, his was a self-consuming prophecy.
From the perspective of scientific researchers into LSD, Leary is often positioned
as a kind of “Manchurian candidate” of the left, a kook whose seemingly pro-LSD
advocacy mobilized anti-drug forces on the right and set research on the drug back
decades.
71
However, if one situates Leary in the context of other 1960s ideas, especially
Becker’s work challenging the border between participant and observer in the social
sciences, his approach to LSD aligns with larger anti-intellectual and anti-establishment
116
cultural currents of the period. The LSD panic is inextricably bound with a broader 1960s
crisis of faith in American educational institutions. The belief in the university’s
complicity with state and corporate power was a core tenet of the countercultural
position. George Gross writes:
Narrowly specialized courses instill technical knowledge but preclude real
knowledge of individual and social human reality, the socio-economic structures
of history and the place of the individual within it; they preclude intellectual
synthesis, adventure and commitment. As the teaching structures, methods and
curricula are tailored to an instrumental conformity with the technocratic needs of
the dominant class, education is experienced, by staff and students as an alien,
impersonal, utilitarian process.
72

For LSD supporters, the subjective knowledge gained from an acid trip is more authentic
than anything that can be learned in a university setting; it represents the “real
knowledge” that gets left behind in a technocratic society. In Jerry Rubin’s Yippie
manifesto, Do It!, he praises direct experience in contrast to “bogus” education in the
university classroom. While the university was “a place for making it, a high-pressured
rat race,” the non-enrolled hippies in the Berkeley community were “real students in the
classical sense of education as self-growth. And since many of the hippies were ex-
students, they had the zealous mission of reformed sinners.”
73
Rubin dismisses critical
thinking and analysis as passive, expressing admiration for action of any kind (including
Reagan’s suppression of student activism). In his most scathing passage, he writes, “The
goal of the revolution is to eliminate all intellectuals, to create a society in which there is
no distinction between intellectual and physical work: a society without intellectuals. Our
task is to destroy the university and make the entire nation a school with on-the-job
living.”
74

117
Similarly,
Leary’s politics of ecstasy offered liberation not only from the tethers
of the conscious mind, but also from academia and analytical language. Rejecting the
university system, Leary wrote, “Gone the perceptual machinery which clutters up our
view of reality…Gone the mental machinery which slices the world up into abstractions
and concepts.”
75
The counterculture embraced LSD as a means of regressing the self to
its most basic and authentic form, what Leary called “breaking set.” A successful
hallucinogenic experience revealed the development of one’s conscious self as a series of
elaborate games, and thus offered truths about living in a simpler, more authentic way. In
Stuart Hall’s analysis of Leary’s slogan for the counterculture, “turn on, tune in, drop
out,” he notes that each of the phrase’s three components uses a metaphor to suggest a
form of rejection. To “turn on” is both to experience the expanded consciousness of an
LSD trip, but also “to switch (in the sense of turning the dials on a TV set) to a more
authentic mode of experience, to leave the safe routes of middle class society, for more
private, apocalyptic channels.”
76
A “drop out” represents both a rejection of formal
education, and a more general rejection of lifestyles based on stable jobs, families, and
middle-class values – the hippie instead “actively ‘opts in’ to the ‘deviant’ round of
life.”
77

The counterculture’s other principal guru, Ken Kesey, also advocated for people
to reject the mainstream and familiar. Kesey, who first used LSD as a subject in a
medical study at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, was more extreme than Leary in his
desire to democratize the LSD experience. Even after Harvard fired Leary, he still
thought of his LSD consumption as research, and adhered to a strict regimen of weekly
LSD sessions followed by reflective writing. For Kesey, the idea of taking notes after an
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acid trip was ludicrous; he felt that his doctors at Menlo Park were “out of it” because,
“They never took LSD themselves and they had absolutely no comprehension, and it [the
acid experience] couldn’t be put into words anyway.”
78
His LSD philosophy rejected
education in an even more profound way than Leary’s. The question posed in the
advertisements for his acid happenings, “can you pass the acid test?” like Leary’s slogan,
operates with layered meanings. It directly references taking acid and undergoing a test,
but the compound “acid test” suggests that this particular hurdle is of the utmost
importance, that it will be the final word on an issue.

Merry Prankster’s poster for the Trips Festival, January 21-23, 1966
While Leary and Kesey had many detractors, their ability to mobilize anti-
intellectual and anti-university sentiment was a defining characteristic of the
counterculture. They were also the locus of the key rift in most histories of 1960s left-
wing politics, between the lifestyle-oriented hippies of the counterculture and the political
activists of the New Left. Todd Gitlin, a leader of the New Left in the 1960s, is relatively
119
positive in his attitude toward the hippies, allowing that the divide between the two
groups is often too strongly drawn considering the fashion-conscious sensibilities of the
anti-war movement. But he does not fondly recall Kesey’s appearance at the October
1965 Vietnam Day rally, when Kesey’s advice to the audience was to “‘look at the war,
and turn your backs and say…Fuck it.”
79
Theodore Roszak’s 1968 book, The Making of
the Counter Culture, is also generally supportive of hippie lifestyles and the rejection of
middle class mores, but he draws the line at LSD consumption. Roszak considers the
LSD lifestyle “decadent” and a “counterfeit infinity,” writing, “Ironically, the vice is
typical of the worst sort of American commercialism. Start with a gimmick; end with a
Weltanschauung. Madison Avenue’s strategy of strategies: don’t just sell them a can
opener; sell them a new way of life.”
80
Roszak advocates radical oppositional culture and
rails against technocracy in the university; his rejection of psychedelic culture derives
from the ease with which it can be co-opted and thus weaken other legitimate
countercultural positions.
Roszak’s argument is borne out by LSD films. The rift between the counterculture
and the New Left created an avenue by which exploitation films could transition from a
model based on an educative alibi to one in which education could be safely mocked and
rejected. With the left divided on political issues, filmmakers could present the
counterculture without the necessity of a clear political position, and still maintain at least
a modicum of credibility in their representations. The opening scene of The Tale of the
Dean’s Wife (1970) reveals the speed with which exploitation films could move from the
countercultural subtext to the purely exploitative text. The first images of the film are
found footage shots of rioting in Berkeley, with students chanting and being hosed down
120
by police officers. The stern voiceover grapples with the origins of the political turmoil:
“Its beginnings are simple enough: unrest on the campus, the breaking down, the
widening of the gap between generations. Demands are made and refused.” As the
voiceover continues, the handheld footage intensifies, depicting flares going off, chaotic
movements, jump cuts, and increasing levels of violence. The voiceover asserts, “The
film that follows will attempt to illustrate one of the underlying reasons for…the
destruction,” an assertion that is followed (after the opening credits) by a woman in a
bikini walking in the forest. When she joins her group of hippie friends, they announce
that they are gathered for a “love-in.” While the men are fully clothed, the women are in
various stages of undress (except for one “square” female character). The love-in
involves each woman being paired with one of the men to be his “mate for the day,”
meaning she has to “do anything he tells her to.” Given the sequencing of the two scenes,
the cause of the student unrest that opened the film is seen to be directly linked to male
sexual desires and female sexual obeisance.
The group of students has a list of demands for the dean of the university, but
most of the members are more interested in the love-in and don’t feel the need to read
them. Where educative subtext was once the alibi for the exploiteer, here political
activism is an alibi within the narrative for the students to engage in free love. Political
action is a means to a sexual end for both the students and the faculty members. A
professor invited over to the dean’s house is a scholar specializing in erotica, a dabbler in
narcotics, and an ally of the student movement (unlike the dean). Other than the dean, the
actions of the hippie students and the adult academics are not distinguishable – both
groups demonstrate the same sexual and drug desires, though they experiment under
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different pretenses. The dean is the one character in the film who does not express
support for the counterculture, rejecting the student’s list of demands (the content of
which is never revealed to the audience). His monologue to the students about protecting
the mission of the university from anarchy is the kind of speechifying that would
conclude a classically-oriented exploitation film. However, in this film, it is summarily
dismissed by the hippie, and the beginning of the next phase of their plan: to dose the
dean with LSD, photograph him in sexually compromised positions, and blackmail him
into accepting their demands. At the film’s conclusion, their plan backfires. The dean
emerges from his trip to find his wife naked and giddily aligned with the student group
(particularly their leader, Peter). The dean, realizing he’s been blackmailed, goes to his
bedroom and commits suicide, the only way he can refuse the hippie demands. In the
film’s final scene, the hippie group reads the college newspaper announcing a new dean,
and they express the hope that he won’t be a square. Meanwhile, as the camera pans left,
we see the dean’s wife has now joined the group, seemingly as Peter’s mate for the day.
Andrew Ross argues that one of the key battles against injustice fought by the left
in the 1960s was a “politics of knowledge” waged from within the institutions that
produce knowledge. He writes that this struggle involved a “general critique of the
privileges of education, expertise, knowledge, and skill, and thus it was the one that most
deeply challenged the sensibility of traditional intellectuals whose cultural authority and
identity was raised on these privileges.”
81
It is clear from the above discussion that the
dean in Tale of the Dean’s Wife is not one of these traditional intellectuals, and the film,
an LSD sex farce, is not fighting a battle over the politics of knowledge. However, by
engaging with countercultural issues and the role of the university, and, moreover, by
122
doing so from an economic position of independence from the Hollywood film industry,
the depictions must be considered political. The film is demonstrative in its support of
sexual openness and a “do your own thing” mentality (provided that one’s thing is, of
course, sexual openness). The opening depictions of student protests and the erosion of
boundaries between the students and the faculty suggest a tacit support for
countercultural attitudes. However, the vagueness of the students’ demands, the
persistence of the film’s titillating elements, and the blatant misogyny that characterizes
the gender dynamics, undermine their political seriousness. The film’s contradictions are
most clear in its depictions of LSD. Although solarizations and gels create a spectacle of
visual pleasure for the LSD trip, the drug is deployed as a weapon. The goal is blackmail,
and the result is suicide, a story that seems ripped from the headlines of an LSD panic
article. In a classical exploitation film, the authoritative opening voiceover that
introduced the film’s political context would recur, guiding the morality of the film, even
if those moral principles are sabotaged by the intermittent sexual encounters. However,
Tale of the Dean’s Wife abandons its voice of reasoned distance in favor of baldly
titillating motivations. The college campus and the exploitation film are mutual sites of
hallucinogenic revelry, both dismissive of their educative contexts.

Selling (Out) the Counterculture: LSD and Sexploitation
The confluence of sexuality and psychedelic culture in exploitation films
contributed to prevailing assumptions of apolitical hedonism in the counterculture as a
whole. However, these connections were not only forged in the minds of exploiteers.
Huxley’s warnings to Leary about containing LSD research within a medical model
123
extended to a more specific warning regarding the supposed aphrodisiacal property of the
drug that “everyone who used psychedelics was aware of, but one that was seldom
mentioned.” Huxley told Leary, “‘I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the
bag…We’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and
religious experiences.”
82
But the cat came out of the bag almost immediately upon
Leary’s release from Harvard. The commentary in the earliest articles on Leary’s post-
university LSD research in Time and Newsweek was largely negative, but the photos told
a story of glamour and sexual openness with images of bikini-clad women roaming the
premises.
83

If questions remained about the relationship between LSD and sexuality, they
were answered in September 1966 with Leary’s interview in Playboy magazine. He drew
a direct connection between the opening of psychedelic consciousness and sexual
awakening, asserting that, “sexual ecstasy is the basic reason for the current LSD
boom.”
84
When asked to describe the experience of an orgasm on LSD, he knowingly
demurred, “only the most reckless poet would attempt that.”
85
Throughout the interview,
the Playboy interviewer is insistent in steering the conversation toward sexual matters,
forcing Leary to take a position on everything from the number of potential orgasms one
can experience on acid (“several hundred”), to its role as a cure for sexual hang-ups
including frigidity, impotence, and, shockingly, homosexuality.
86
Leary claims that LSD
caused Allen Ginsberg to experience his first sexual feelings for a woman, but this claim,
if it is valid at all, ignores the fact that Ginsberg remained a self-identified gay man, as
did Richard Alpert, Leary’s closest psychedelic ally at Harvard and Millbrook throughout
the mid-1960s.
124
Leary’s homophobic attitude reveals one of the fundamental paradoxes of 1960s
countercultural philosophy, a conflation of sexually liberated rhetoric and conservative
attitudes toward sex roles that is directly reflected in the period’s exploitation films.
However, while I do not intend to dismiss his homophobia or the potential negative
impact it may have had on the psychedelic movement, the fact that this opinion was
stated in Playboy magazine is noteworthy, as it appeals directly to the magazine’s straight
male readership. After his stint as a Harvard intellectual, Leary became an LSD salesman,
a marketer of the Weltanschauung that Theodore Roszak feared. He was, as Lee and
Shlain describe, “a carnival barker for the psychedelic movement,” who readily admitted,
“Of course I’m a charlatan…Aren’t we all?”
87
When the Playboy interview was
excerpted in The Politics of Ecstasy, a collection of Leary’s writings published in 1968, it
is introduced with the footnote, “If this interview had been conducted for Sports
Illustrated, the conscientious interviewee would naturally consider the question, How
Can LSD Raise Your Batting Average.”
88
Leary acknowledges here that he is playing
neither the professor game nor the guru game; this is the Madison Avenue game, with a
different pitch for every LSD market, and a clear understanding that (heteronormative)
sex sells.
Although Leary’s methods were effective, concern about co-optation and rampant
commercialism in the counterculture was pervasive. In her analysis of Hollywood
attempts to cash in on the youth market in the 1960s, Aniko Bodroghkozy reveals a
number of contradictory tendencies. Films that depict student protests and campus
revolts, such as Getting Straight (1970) and The Strawberry Statement (1970), betray the
anxiety of the executives who greenlit the projects in their inability to adopt a clear
125
ideological position, and their typical displacement of political revolution onto narratives
of youthful romance.
89
The inevitable failure of the mainstream commercial film industry
to “get” the counterculture was widely held, and articles in the underground press
reflected the misgivings of the counterculture toward their cultural absorption by the
mainstream film industry. In an issue of Tuesday’s Child, an underground paper based in
North Hollywood, the reporter (Blaine) is invited to the set of The Strawberry Statement
and given interviews with the film’s producer and director. Recognizing that he has been
given this level of access in an effort to sell the film’s authenticity to a hippie audience,
Blaine is antagonistic throughout the article. He writes,
MGM presents ‘The Strawberry Statement,’ in glorious plastic color, featuring a
rip-off of the peoples (sic) culture. For a long time the big wheels at Culver City
studios have known that they had to come up with their own ‘Easy Rider’ or
‘Medium Cool’ or something – anything, but they wanted a piece of the
revolutionary action. And now it looks like they have it.
90

The entrepreneurship of Hollywood filmmakers is evident in their outsider status; their
motives for wanting “a piece” of the counterculture were assumed to be unsound.
However, in the back pages of the same underground press issue, advertisements
abound for the psychedelic boutiques and head shops in the Sunset Strip run by “hip
capitalists,” as well as listings for sexploitation theater chains announcing their line-ups.
The hippie enclaves of the 1960s are often historicized in ways that resemble the
transgressive pleasures of a Bakhtinian carnivalesque. Bakhtin argues that the fair is a
space in which the lower classes can safely perform an oppositional politics against
bourgeois culture. Like the revelers in Bakhtin’s history, the hippies live outside the
establishment and resist mainstream etiquette, engaging in an erotics of the body and
dabbling in narcotics for the mind. However, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note,
126
the fair also functions as a site of commercial exchange, oscillating between business and
pleasure. They write, “[T]he fair, far from being the privileged site of popular symbolic
opposition to hierarchies, was in fact a kind of educative spectacle, a relay for the
diffusion of the cosmopolitan values of the ‘centre’ (particularly the capital and new
urban centres of production) throughout the provinces and lower orders.”
91
Many of the
hip capitalists in countercultural neighborhoods claimed that their profits were minimal,
and a large percentage of their incomes was funneled back into community development.
But the businesses exist solely on the basis of hippie patronage, and thus any profits are
easily interpreted as exploitative of the community. This is especially the case when their
business plans are adopted by outsider entrepreneurs who make no claims regarding
community development, yet maintain a market niche based on their resemblance to
“authentic” countercultural enterprises.
The Weird World of LSD (1967) and Alice in Acidland (1969) are two exploitation
films that function explicitly as sex-oriented capitalizations on the counterculture,
demonstrating a lack of interest in hippie philosophy, or even a desire to appeal to a
hippie audience. Shot in Florida far from the hippie environments of the west coast or
eastern cities, The Weird World of LSD is non-linear film, consisting of several vignettes
with characters undergoing LSD trips. The film does not contain sync sound, with all of
the action described by a voiceover narrator and scored by a non-psychedelic burlesque-
oriented soundtrack. The effects of the drug on the characters are incredibly varied: in
one instance, a tripping woman plays with her cat for several minutes, in another, a fight
erupts outside a diner between two acid-dosed men. In the spirit of classical exploitation,
the narration is unwavering in its anti-drug convictions, even when the images on screen
127
do not support its assertions. In one sequence, a tripping woman begins an erotic dance in
front of friends while on LSD. No one involved in the scene seems perturbed by the
performance, least of all the dancing woman. However, as the sequence winds down
uneventfully, the narrator informs us that this woman later jumped out of a window to her
LSD-induced death. The audience sees no evidence of this tragedy other than a
subsequent shot of the newspaper headlines. Although I have found no specific evidence
to support this, it seems likely that this film is a compilation of parts from other sources
(previous exploitation features and softcore loops). Because of the infrastructure that
developed there in the 1950s and 1960s nudist colony films, Florida was a common
enough location for exploitation shoots, and little of the footage seems to suggest a hippie
narrative. The most telling example of the film’s probable disingenuousness is a sequence
at an outdoor car racing event. The production values are notably higher, including
overhead shots of the cars on the track and panoramas of the audience for the event and
the large parking lot. The narrator attempts to contextualize it into the LSD context as “an
intoxicating world of speed,” but the sequence is clearly here because it pads the running
time, and because it was available. Although some of the acid sequences display
subjective visual abstraction and were likely shot for this particular film, many others are
included to ensure a feature length ticket price. The counterculture exists in Weird World
of LSD solely as a marketing tool.
Alice in Acidland begins with a narrative that also seems to hew closely to the
classical exploitation formula. Like Weird World of LSD, it is shot in black and white,
and narrated throughout by a male voice of authority in the absence of sync sound. The
film opens with an image of a young girl in a straitjacket, accompanied by the voice of a
128
psychiatrist who introduces the narrative as a story about a girl named Alice which will
demonstrate the dangers of conformity and LSD. The narrator consistently demeans Alice
and the other delinquent characters with whom she interacts.

Alice in Acidland: Alice in a straitjacket following her bad trip
It soon begins to deviate from the formula though when Alice is invited to a pool party
with the dangerously persuasive “in group;” here we begin to get the sense that the
psychiatrist-narrator is potentially not watching the same film as the audience. As the
narrator inveighs against the immorality of these characters, it is difficult to ignore the
voyeuristic gaze of the camera. The level of nudity and sexual content cannot be
categorized as a digression for this anti-drug film when it has a runtime of about 55
minutes, 45 of which consist of softcore sequences with full-frontal female nudity (and
hardcore versions also exist). Throughout all of this pervasive titillating content, the
indignant tone of the narrator never relents, berating Alice for her lack of morality while
129
the audience he speaks to spends nearly all of its time watching her in states of undress.
Also, while the film does switch to color for the final “trip” sequence, its aesthetic is not
particularly psychedelic. As in Weird World of LSD, the hippie parties are scored to jazz
music, and male hippies, who look like suburban squares, keep their socks on during sex.
The juxtaposition of extreme moral judgment and prurient content creates an
unstable tone for the viewer, perfectly encapsulating Chuck Kleinhans’ definition of
sleaze.
92
This textual incoherence challenges the supposed authority of our narrator, a
figure notably associated with academia. The narrator, who achieves the distance
necessary to diagnose his subject, does not accurately assess her situation; and the
filmmaker’s intimacy with the subject merely revels in her sexual behavior rather than
contemplating it. Distance and participation are both failed options that only support the
moral panic around LSD use as misunderstood and corruptive, either by explicitly
espousing the jargon of moral crisis, or failing to recognize an alternative use for LSD.
The incoherence is most evident in the film’s conclusion. We return to the image of Alice
in a straitjacket, with the narrator offering his closing argument about the dangers of
LSD. However, this stern warning is followed by the playful partial nudity in its end
credit title design – another example of footage that was likely used in other projects.
130

Alice in Acidland: A racy “end” credit
Both The Weird World of LSD and Alice in Acidland use LSD and the counterculture in
purely material contexts, wringing profits out of likely recycled parts and slapping a
voiceover track onto the proceedings to create textual confusion. And, just as Leary’s
claims about acid’s aphrodisiac potential gained credibility because of his Harvard
credentials, these films resisted countercultural protest because of their independent
means of production and their minimal market impact. On one hand, these films embody
the subversion of establishment and bourgeois values in their outsider status in the film
industry and their disregard for puritan morality. But on the other hand, they drive a
wedge between the political goals of the New Left and an apolitical counterculture,
undermining any legitimate sincerity of the countercultural quest for spiritual or
metaphysical uplift. They demonstrate what Stanley Cohen has referred to as an
“exploitative culture.” The filmmakers and the LSD experimenters are posed in a
“symbiotic relationship between the condemners and the condemned” wherein “the
deviant is being used for societally defined ends without regard to the consequences of
131
this for the deviant himself.”
93
The countercultural lifestyle’s concern with the collapse of
boundaries was a defining characteristic of the 1960s: the borders between participant
and observer, performer and audience, intellectual and experiential, high and low, were
all problematized. The exploitation films’ own classical borders break down as well,
particularly in the convergence of education, titillation and profitability. But in their
deliberately ambivalent portrayals of the hippie lifestyle and its excesses, they exemplify
that with cultural confusion comes the ease of co-optation and assimilation.

1
Timothy Leary, “The Fifth Freedom – The Right to Get High,” in The Politics of
Ecstasy (Oakland, CA: Ronin Publishing, 1998), 65.

2
Abbie Hoffman, “Media Freaking,” The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer
1969), 49.

3
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-
1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 230.

4
Felicia Feaster and Bret Wood, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation
Film (Baltimore, MD: Midnight Marquee Press, 1999), 17.

5
This claim is quoted in Schaefer, 230.

6
Schaefer, 231.

7
Harry M. Benshoff, “The Short-Lived Life of the Hollywood LSD Film,” The Velvet
Light Trap 47 (Spring 2001), 29-44.

8
Benshoff, 30.

9
Benshoff, 29.

10
Antonio Gramsci, “Art and the Struggle for a New Civilization,” in Selections from
Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), 94.

11
David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989), 12.
132

12
James, 15.

13
For a detailed account of exhibition culture on college campuses in this period, see
Andrea Comiskey, “The Campus Cinematheque: Film Culture at U.S. Universities, 1960-
1975,” Post-Script, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter-Spring 2011), 36-52.

14
For a thorough history of American military experiments involving LSD, see John
Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian” Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), as well as Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid
Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond ( (New
York: Grove Press, 1985), 3-43.

15
Stephen Siff, “Henry Luce’s Strange Trip: Coverage of LSD in Time and Life, 1954-
1968,” Journalism History Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall 2008), 129.

16
Steven J. Novak, “LSD Before Leary: Sidney Cohen’s Critique of 1950s Drug
Research,” Isis, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Mar. 1997), 89-90.

17
Novak, 92.

18
For a historical overview of drug confessionals and “literary” drug writing, see Sadie
Plant, Writing on Drugs (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).

19
Novak, 93.

20
Novak, 95.

21
Charles Brackett Papers, “Hand-written Notes on Charles Brackett’s LSD Session,
March 1, 1958,” Box 19, f. 54, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

22
Charles Brackett Papers, Box 19, f. 54.

23
Quoted in Novak, 103.

24
Lee and Shlain, 71.

25
Siff, 127. Siff also notes that countercultural icon and LSD advocate Abbie Hoffman
was quoted saying that the LSD-friendly Life and Time articles did more for the
proliferation of LSD in the counterculture than Timothy Leary.

26
Joe Hyams, “A New Shock Drug Unlocks Troubled Minds,” Los Angeles Times
(November 8, 1959).

133

27
Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Harper and
Row, 1987), 66.

28
Stevens, 66.

29
Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts
in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: Free Press,
1965), 69.

30
Macdonald, 61.

31
Leslie Fiedler, “The Middle Against Both Ends,” Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: Free Press,
1965), 546.

32
Mikita Brottman, “Ritual, Tension, and Relief: The Terror of The Tingler,” Film
Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Summer 1997), 9.

33
Lee and Shlain, 92.

34
Michael Bowen, “The Love Statue,” DVD liner notes for Alternative Cinema release
of The Love Statue LSD Experience (2008).

35
The admat for this screening is found in The Chicago Tribune (Dec. 29, 1965).

36
Andrew Syder, “‘Shaken Out of the Ruts of Ordinary Perception’: Vision, Culture and
Technology in the Psychedelic Sixties,” PhD Dissertation, University of Southern
California (May 2009), 128. It should be noted that the explosion of LSD-related material
was not limited to cinema. Pulp paperbacks also experienced a boom during the LSD
panic, especially as a subgenre of erotic literature known as “drug-porn.” Titles included
The Sexual Paradise of LSD, LSD Orgy, Acid Orgy, LSD Lusters, LSD on Campus, and
Campus Go-Go Girl. For more on drug pulps, see Stephen J. Gertz, Dope Menace: The
Sensational World of Drug Paperbacks, 1960-1975 (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House,
2008).

37
Syder, 143.

38
For more detail on these campaigns, see Benshoff, 32.

39
Rick Setlowe, “Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ Going to Pot?!?! That’s How Nat’l Gen. Sells the
Reissue,” Variety (Nov. 13, 1970).

40
For more on these companies and films see Mark Thomas McGee, Fast and Furious:
The Story of American Internation Pictures (New York: McFarland and Co., 1984);
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime
134

(New York: Da Capo Press, 1998); and Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The
Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 2002).

41
James Raker Papers, “Hallucination Generation: Marketing Ideas,” Box 3, f. 174,
Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences.

42
James Raker Papers, “Psych-Out: Marketing Ideas,” Box 6, f. 333.

43
James Raker Papers, “The Trip: Marketing Ideas,” Box 8, f. 435.

44
Norman Herman Papers, “Marginal Notes on Psych-Out Script #1,” Box 12, f. 154,
Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences.

45
Norman Herman Papers, “Marginal Notes on Psych-Out Script #2,” Box 12, f. 154.

46
I believe that the same argument applies to a number of independent productions that
had distribution deals with major Hollywood studios, particularly the BBS films released
by Columbia, Head (1968) and Easy Rider.

47
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), 59.

48
Gene Youngblood, “Film Review: The Trip Makes It Sexually, Cinematically,” Los
Angeles Free Press (September 15, 1967).

49
For more on this, see The San Francisco Tape Music Center, ed. David W. Bernstein
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 239-251.

50
For more on educational drug films, see Ken Smith, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films
1945-1970 (New York: Blast Books, 1999).

51
C. Cameron Macauley, 99+ Films on Drugs (New York: Educational Film Library
Association, 1970), 6.

52
Some of the films listed here deal more with marijuana than LSD, but when the effects
of marijuana are depicted as psychedelic and/or hallucinatory, I’ve decided to include the
titles for the purposes of this chapter.

53
Lionel Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: The Viking Press, 1968), 4

54
Trilling, 10

55
Schaefer, 136-164.

135

56
See Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York: Picador, 1966), 3-14, and John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John
Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).

57
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books,
1963), 305

58
Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 37-38

59
Mark Lynn Anderson, “Taking Liberties: The Payne Fund Studies and the Creation of
the Media Expert,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 52-53.

60
Anderson, 56.

61
Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: The Free
Press, 1963), 1-18.

62
Becker, 46.

63
Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (New York: Harperone, 2010), 18.

64
Robert Greenfield, Timothy Leary: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, 2007), 71.

65
Quoted in Stevens, 130.

66
Stevens, 142.

67
Greenfield, 195.

68
Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008), 112-113.

69
Mal Terence, “LSD: Problem for Both Science and Law,” Los Angeles Times (Nov. 21,
1965).

70
Dyck, 112-113.

71
It is only in the 21
st
century that LSD research has begun to return to university labs,
often addressing the same applications that were abandoned in the mid-1960s as a result
of government criminalization. For more on current trends in LSD research, see John
Tierney, “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Turning On Again,” New York Times (April 11,
2010).

136

72
George Gross, “France, May 1968,” in Student Power, ed. Julian Nagel (London:
Merlin Press, 1969), 93 (my italics).

73
Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1970), 24-25.

74
Rubin, 213.

75
Quoted in Greenfield, 113.

76
Stuart Hall, “The Hippies: An American ‘Moment,’” in Student Power, ed. Julian
Nagel (London: Merlin Press, 1969), 173.

77
Hall, 174.

78
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 38.

79
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books,
1993), 209.

80
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic
Society and Its Youthful Opposition (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 160.

81
Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge,
1989), 225.

82
Quoted in Stevens, 148.

83
Stevens, 217.

84
The September, 1966 Playboy interview is excerpted under the title “She Comes in
Colors,” in Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (Oakland, CA: Ronin Publishing,
1998), 118-159.

85
Leary, 128, 130.

86

It should be noted that other psychedelic researchers strongly disagreed with Leary’s
opinion. For Robert Masters, claims that LSD is an aphrodisiac “are not only false, they
are dangerous.” And, according LSD manufacturer Augustus Owsley Stanley III, “It isn’t
like twenty thousand orgasms…That’s bullshit.” Both opinions are quoted in Greenfield,
289.

87
Lee and Shlain, 114.

88
Leary, 118 (footnote).

137

89
Aniko Bodroghkozy, “Reel Revolutionaries: An Examination of Hollywood's Cycle of
1960s Youth Rebellion Films,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Spring 2002), 41.

90
Blaine, “How Much Are the Strawberries,” Tuesday’s Child, Vol. 1, No. 3 (November
25, 1969).

91
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 38.

92
Chuck Kleinhans, “Pornography and Documentary: Narrating the Alibi,” in Sleaze
Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics, ed. Jeffrey Sconce (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 96-120.

93
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers,
3
rd
Edition (London: Routledge, 2002), 116.

138

CHAPTER THREE: “THERE IS A NEW MAJOR…IT’S CALLED
CINEMATION INDUSTRIES”: EXPLOITATION, INDEPENDENT
DISTRIBUTION, AND CASUALTIES OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD

“The Man has an Achilles pocket book.”

-Melvin Van Peebles
1

On September 2, 1970, Jerry Gross, chief executive officer of Cinemation
Industries, purchased fourteen full-page advertisements in Variety. These pages of letters
and upcoming releases, in addition to three separate articles in the same issue of Variety
and the cover story of International Motion Picture Exhibitor, comprised a calculated
media barrage announcing that Gross’ independent production and distribution company
was inserting itself into the mainstream Hollywood conversation. These announcements,
which were preceded by a tradepaper conference-luncheon at Sardi’s the prior week,
were the first step in an ambitious plan to expand Cinemation’s market share into the
heart of the Hollywood establishment, and an attempt to shift their product line in the
direction of broader-based commercial interests. Cinemation Industries was formed in
New York in April 1965, and, by 1970 had 17 films in release, consisting of low-budget
Cinemation productions, foreign pick-ups, and Hollywood re-issues. In Gross’ “open
letter to the producers of the world,” he positions himself as an underdog in the film
industry, an entrepreneur with the youth and vision to wrest power from an aging and
newly conglomerated Hollywood film industry. He argues, “Finding the proper script and
assembling an interesting and commercial package to present to one of the majors for
financing takes time, effort, and patience. Frustration doubles when six months of
indecision and/or sixty meetings of the proverbial committees yield no straight answers.
Cinemation Industries intends to end this.”
2
With the language of a carnival huckster
139

shilling his company’s distribution potential, Gross emphasizes Cinemation’s “lean and
flexible operation” in contrast to the bureaucratic confusion sure to await an independent
producer at a major studio. He also assures producers that he is not a coldhearted bean
counter, but an experienced filmmaker and cinephile – Gross cites the three films he has
self-produced and directed, promising filmmakers “we speak the same language.”
3

While Gross dabbles in this anti-corporate language, the bulk of his argument, as
it must be for independent producers and distributors, remains a persistently economic
one. Unlike most outfits that released low-budget films, Cinemation became a publicly
owned company in 1967, its shares traded in the over-the-counter market. In an attempt
to assuage the pervasive tensions between distributors and exhibitors, Gross goes to great
pains to assure investors that all financial matters are above-board, providing records of
the profits of several Cinemation releases. One of the full-page Variety spreads consists
of an excerpt from the company’s 1970 annual report (released in March), showing $3.5
million of revenue and $1.2 million in working capital.
4
His plan to broaden
Cinemation’s release schedule sets the bar at 30 features for distribution in 1971 (nearly
doubling the company’s output to that point), and 20 features each year thereafter, with
the goal of a 50-50 split between self-produced projects and pick-ups. He also separates
his company from its independent competitors by highlighting the company’s growing
network of regional sales offices. This strategy aims to improve on the traditional low-
budget alternative of states’ rights distribution in which companies hire territorial
subdistributors that then market the film to the region’s exhibitors in exchange for,
usually, 25% of the film’s profits in that region. Cinemation’s distribution strategy is
modeled on the major studios – outright ownership of a national network of film
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exchanges (or bureaus), of which Cinemation owned six in 1970 (in New York, Los
Angeles, Washington D.C., Dallas, Chicago, and Charlotte) with plans to open more. The
operation of film exchanges requires a large amount of overhead to upkeep – but it is also
part of the rationale for Cinemation to make the claim that forms the footer on all of the
ad copy in Variety and International Motion Picture Exhibitor: “There Is a New
Major…It’s Called Cinemation Industries.”
These bold proclamations coincided with a particularly opportune moment for
independent producers and distributors in the film industry. Al Elrick of International
Motion Picture Exhibitor wrote in reference to the ambition of Cinemation’s claims, “All
this activity would be significant at any time, but coming now, when so much of the film
industry is accenting the negative, it figures to have added impact on exhibition
everywhere.”
5
The announcements came in the midst of a significant financial downturn
for Hollywood majors, and with it high hopes among independent producers and
distributors to capitalize on the failures of the hobbled major studios. As David Cook
notes in his detailed study of American film aesthetics and economic trends in the 1970s,
the years from 1969 to 1971 were marked by massive losses for the major studios,
responding to years of failed big budget spectacles and musicals with an over-investment
in the unpredictable youth and countercultural market.
6
As the majors suffered these
losses, they were also in the process of corporate shuffling and strategic disarray as a
result of conglomerated ownership and shifting executive priorities. In the short-term,
this created an unprecedented (and much advertised) product shortage, with releases by
the major studios dropping 34% from 1969 to 1970, and continued declines through the
end of 1971.
7

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Independent companies that had always existed to fill the gaps in Hollywood’s
distribution slate were emboldened by this product shortage. In addition to Cinemation
Industries, the early 1970s marked the introduction or expansion of other independent
production-distribution companies, including New World Pictures, Crown International
Pictures, Dimension Pictures, Independent-International Pictures, as well as a merger of
Joseph Levine’s Embassy Pictures with the Avco corporation to create the legitimate
mini-major, Avco-Embassy. All of these companies, to varying degrees, modeled their
production and distribution strategies on those of the successful independent outfits
formed in the 1950s, American International Pictures (AIP) and Allied Artists, focusing
their product line on low-budget films aimed at teenagers and the drive-in market.
However, despite the product shortage from the major studios in the early 1970s, none
were able to successfully position themselves, as Cinemation aspired, into a “new major.”
In 1975, less than five years after its Variety announcements, Cinemation filed for
bankruptcy, and in 1976, the entirety of its film library was sold at auction.
In this chapter, I will use the industrial history of Cinemation Industries as a case
study in the failure of companies that initially formed as producers and distributors of
exploitation content to adapt to the economics of the New Hollywood. The history of
major Hollywood dominance in this period is most often written in terms of two central
arguments about film content. First, the adoption of the ratings system in 1968 allowed
major Hollywood films to address topics that were previously only accessible to
independent producers and foreign / art house films. Second, the successes of blockbuster
films in the mid-1970s (particularly Jaws [1975]) were characterized by higher
production budgets, overwhelming advertising campaigns, and a saturated release pattern
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in both indoor theaters and drive-ins, all features that elevated tactics previously unique
to low-budget film content. Hollywood studios adapted exploitation formulas to
exorbitant reaches that independent companies could not hope to match.
8
However, as the
industrial trajectory of Cinemation Industries demonstrates, the policies and practices of
the independent companies bear partial responsibility for their demise as well.
Although Jerry Gross recognized the product shortage as an opportunity for
growth, he failed to direct the company in ways that played to its strengths, namely its
foundations in exploitation content and marketing. By announcing their intentions to shift
their product line away from sexploitation and toward more mainstream fare, Jerry Gross
and his Vice President of Sales, Harold Marenstein, ignored the niche that had produced
their most profitable films to that point. The desire to grow into a distribution
powerhouse spawned a network of film bureaus scattered evenly across the country, but
with most of their films dominant only in Southern markets, the geography of their
distribution network was poorly strategized. Beyond the miscalculated locations of the
film exchanges, the distribution strategy was flawed in other ways. Exhibitors quickly
understood that independent distributors had less power over them than the majors. The
major studios were able to extract favorable profit splits with exhibitors based on the
threat of withholding future desirable releases. However, without this threat, smaller less
established companies could often charge only a 30% distribution fee (compared to the
major’s 40%), thus undermining one of the central components of Cinemation’s
aspirations.
9
Samuel Sherman, president of Independent-International (and
knowledgeable chronicler of exploitation history), stated in a recent interview that, for all
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of Jerry Gross’ pandering to the exhibitors, they were reluctant to be in business with
him. Sherman states,
Well, the exhibitors just want to be sucking up to the majors with the big prestige
movies. They don’t want to play black movies, they don’t want to play horror
movies, they don’t want to play nudie movies. Oh, they’ll play them -- because
they’re greedy -- but they don’t want to play them, and they certainly don’t want
to be buddy-buddy with the kind of person who’s selling that stuff. So Jerry’s got
that kind of product, he’s talking and talking, and there’s a room filled with
exhibitors who weren’t interested in making money with Jerry Gross. They had
only one wish: that he would stop talking, go out of business and disappear.
10

Gross’ strategies as a company president are marked by the persistence of an exploitation
mindset which was no longer suitable to the company’s mainstream aspirations. Where
an exploitation company’s hoaxes and financial transgressions would have once been
swept under the rug or gone unnoticed by producers, now they were published in the
pages of Variety. By the time Cinemation declared bankruptcy, it had weathered a hostile
takeover bid, publicly re-shuffled its executive team several times over, and engaged in
several law suits, all to the detriment of its working capital, which was sorely needed to
support an expansive distribution network. Indeed, the attempt to balance exploitation
and commercial sensibilities proved more profitable when it was undertaken by the major
studios, whose conglomerated financial backing was more effective in putting
independents out of business than the content or marketing campaigns of their releases.

The Birth of an Exploitation Company (1965-1967)
Despite Jerry Gross’ attempts to elevate the status of his company to mainstream
commercial sensibilities in 1970, Gross seems to have been born with the natural
huckster mentality of an exploiteer. According to Arlene Farber, Gross’ longtime friend
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and star of several Cinemation productions, Gross’ first contact with the film industry
occurred when he was nine years old, and he wrote the following letter:
Dear Republic Pictures,
I am the manager of Loew’s 175
th
Street Theater. The mail sometimes gets lost so
please send the following to my home address, listed above.

1 pressbook of ‘DON DAREDEVIL MEETS ATOM MAN’ (your serial in 12
chapters)
1 set “8x10” action stills from each chapter
1 6’x4’ lobby standing display of ‘DON DAREDEVIL AND HIS HORSE
BUSTER’
11

Even as a child, Gross was hustling his way through the film industry, and fittingly
applied his entrepreneurial guile to Republic Pictures, a studio specializing in the B-
westerns and serials that would be phased out by AIP and Allied Artists. In the early
1960s, Gross was working for his uncle’s trucking company in New York and
moonlighting at shipyards, while he tried to make his way into the independent low-
budget filmmaking scene centered on 42
nd
Street. In October 1962, he purchased a small
ad in Variety seeking “attractive strippers and specialty dancers” for a film to be titled
When Burlesque Was King (this project never came to fruition), and he produced local
sexploitation films directed by an NYU film student, Amin Chaudhri, including Vice
Girls Ltd. (1964), distributed by New York outfit, Sam Lake Enterprises. He also
invested in The Love Statue, the New York LSD film discussed in the previous chapter,
which was shot by Chaudhri. The director, David Durston, who will reappear in
Cinemation’s development, described Gross as “a born hustler.”
12

In 1965, Gross formed Cinemation as a partnership with his friend and
collaborator, Nicholas Demetroules. While Gross was the ambitious salesman,
Demetroules brought major studio experience to the company, having worked in
145

advertising and publicity at 20
th
Century Fox. Both men were avid purveyors of
exploitation cinema; they would “attend each new film on 42
nd
Street and study it for its
title oomph, ad campaign, and shock value.”
13
More so than many of their
contemporaries in the New York exploitation scene, including Roberta and Michael
Findlay, Gross and Demetroules entered the low-budget film circuit as businessmen and
showmen first, and filmmakers second – they would sooner admire an effective ad
campaign for an underwhelming film than an effective film with underwhelming
marketing.
Gross and Demetroules’ interest in marketing formed the primary inspiration for
their first production. In 1965, they put together $42,000 for their first production, Girl
on a Chain Gang (1965), which was an open homage to one of their exploitation idols,
Mike Ripps. Ripps’ story is, in many ways, a smaller-scale version of producer-director
Tom Laughlin’s experience with Billy Jack (1971; re-released 1973). When Warner Bros.
failed to effectively promote Laughlin’s revisionist western, Billy Jack, he sued the
company and re-acquired the film. Laughlin then re-released it two years later to
enormous grosses by four-walling the film in particular territories (renting out theaters
and taking 100% of the profits) and blanketing those regions with demographically
specific television campaigns. By most accounts, Laughlin’s campaign was a key
influence on the saturation marketing and release practices that characterized
Hollywood’s blockbuster era in the mid-1970s.
14
However, Mike Ripps similarly reaped
significant profits on an independent campaign for a major studio flop more than ten
years earlier – only, in his case, it was not the majors that took notice, but Gross and
Demetroules.
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In 1957, Ripps produced Bayou, a low-budget melodrama for United Artists. The
film was set in the south and focused on a northern architect wooing a young Cajun girl
despite threats by the community and a jealous competitor for her affections named
Ulysses. With few particularly exploitable elements and the lack of an imaginative or
significant advertising push, the film flopped. Ripps bought the film back from UA, and
in 1961, with a new title, new campaign, and added footage featuring increased violence
and sexuality, Bayou transformed from a financial failure into a legendary exploitation
film that regularly filled out grindhouse double features into the early 1970s.
15
Although
the actors from the original shoot were unavailable, Ripps shot new footage with doubles
to add an opening sequence with a new title song, inserts that suggest a bit more racy
detail, and close-ups of a gore effect when Ulysses is killed. These additions defy
narrative continuity – Bill Landis and Jimmy McDonough write, “There are crude, poorly
matched shots of arms flailing in the mud, strange eyes staring at crosses, and obscure
people running through the woods…[W]hen the inserts are used, it’s as if you’ve veered
off into a bad hallucination.”
16
And yet, as Gross and Demetroules understood, the
aesthetic failures were inconsequential to the film’s economic success, which was
ensured at the level of title and marketing. With its new catchier title, Poor White Trash,
and its slogan, “Born broke, never had no cash, everybody calls me POOR WHITE
TRASH,” Ripps distributed the film using subdistributors, but he directed the elaborate
marketing campaigns himself, tailoring each campaign to the regional market, and
utilizing radio spots and increasingly lurid print ads as the showtimes neared.
17

With the disingenuousness of Ripps’ campaigns serving as a template, the
narrative of Gross and Demetroules’ Girl on a Chain Gang targets the same Southern
147

markets although it was shot in Long Island. Despite its title, the female protagonist is
only briefly on a chain gang, with most of the plot centering on a group of college-
educated civil rights activists (a white woman, a black man, and a white man) who are
harassed and imprisoned by a corrupt Southern sheriff. As in Mike Ripps’ Southern titles,
the image of the South is one of seething, repressed sexuality, an environment filled with
rhetoric about moral purity, but frequently erupting in sexual improprieties (not unlike
the moral positioning of classical exploitation square-ups). The sheriff of the town quotes
from the Bible and is a voice of moral authority, but he is seemingly incapable of viewing
women as anything other than prostitutes, and, as is the logic of these films, rapes the
female lead in order to justify her subsequent sham prosecution for “whoredom.”
When Gross and Demetroules announced the film to the entertainment press, they
did so under the title, Bayou, a tribute to Ripps that elicited a cease-and-desist letter from
him. However, according to Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford, the threat of legal action
was welcome – their title announcement was a ruse designed to put themselves in contact
with him.
18
It was successful, and, over the next few years, Ripps served as a consultant
for Cinemation, charging $100 a night plus a pot of coffee to answer any questions from
Gross and Demetroules about the exploitation racket. As Demetroules remembers,
“[Ripps] was always dangling a mysterious package that included a list of all the
distributors we should approach and all the secrets we needed to be successful. I doubt
the ‘secrets’ really existed, but I was impressed anyway.”
19
In short, Gross and
Demetroules not only studied Ripps’ marketing campaigns for inspiration, but also
recognized the producer as an embodiment of exploitation aesthetics in his manner and
his professional advice, a constant “dangling” without the possibility of revelation.
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Girl on a Chain Gang was a drive-in hit, capitalizing on the term “poor white
trash” in its advertising slogan, and otherwise riding the coattails of Ripps’ hit film in
Southern markets. With the profits from the film (reportedly over $100,000), Gross and
Demetroules continued to mine Southern culture as a lucrative film topic. Their first
acquisition was the Hollywood adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre
(originally released in 1958). They bought 40 beat-up prints of the film for $15,000
(along with the television rights for 18 months), and immediately had a second feature to
sell alongside Girl on a Chain Gang for the drive-in circuit that was tailor-made for
reliable Southern audiences.
20

With Ripps serving as an early mentor for the company, Cinemation’s next
original production continued to exemplify Gross’ admiration for classical exploitation
marketing campaigns and his penchant for deceit in advertising and posters. This film
also marked the company’s first foray into subject matter that was not explicitly oriented
for Southern territories. Written, directed, and produced by Gross and co-written by
Demetroules, Teenage Mother (1967) finds a young Swedish woman, Erika Petersen
(played by Julie Ange, the female star of Girl on a Chain Gang), invited to a small-town
high school by the principal to offer a more progressive sexual education for the students.
While she does not initially offend the conservative morals of the community, her frank
educational approach does cause two unexpected problems. First, Petersen cuts into the
business of the crime boss specializing in the distribution of marijuana and pornography -
everyone’s sexual desires are now satisfactorily aroused through the legitimate textbook
assigned for her sex ed class rather than the illicit eroticism of his wares. Second,
Petersen inadvertently flirts with one of her male students, causing his girlfriend, Arlene
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Sue (played by Arlene Farber) to fake a pregnancy in order to pressure him into marriage.
Arlene’s presumed pregnancy, not the explicitness of the course textbook, is the main
cause for community uproar and a rallying point for the community to call for Petersen’s
termination.
As in Girl on a Chain Gang, the title and publicity are not designed to provide an
accurate description of the film’s narrative elements - there are no “teenage mothers” in
the film because the pregnancy is faked. The trailer shows Arlene Farber appearing
pregnant and strutting around her house, but none of this footage appears in the film.
When the trailer includes a scene with a doctor telling Arlene, “Young lady, there is no
such thing is being a little bit pregnant,” the assumption for the trailer’s audience is that
she is attempting to deny her pregnancy – in the actual film, however, she is futilely
attempting to assert it. The doctor’s statement attempts to posit a Manichean worldview
wherein a woman is either pregnant or not pregnant, but the film’s rhetorical strategies
undercut this moral clarity by actually having it both ways. With the assumed pregnancy
in the trailer, Gross is better able to use the publicity to justify an educational angle for
the film, that young people “need” to see an important and relevant social issue
dramatized. But in removing the pregnancy from the film’s narrative, he can bring in
additional profitable discourses for the exploitation market, including drug use, sexual
violence, pornography, and the ubiquitous collapse of Sweden and sexuality.
The idea of marketing campaigns and titles superseding the content of a film was
typical of post-war teen-oriented films, especially well executed by AIP. But this
particular campaign for Teenage Mother hearkens back to an earlier era, specifically the
classical exploitation film, which, by 1967, as the previous chapters have argued, had
150

evolved into a quite different form. As Eric Schaefer suggests, classical exploitation films
were characterized by carnivalesque exhibition strategies, creating local “events” at
playdates through lecture accompaniments, book sales, stirring of controversy in
newspapers, and segregated seating among genders.
21
The marketing of Teenage Mother
utilized similar tactics: the suggestion of a roadshow in its trailer’s voiceover, the
necessity for children to view the film with parental accompaniment, the presence of a
(fake) police officer. Moreover, the film pays direct homage to classical exploitation by
concluding with an allusion to the most profitable exploitation footage of the Classical
era, the childbirth reel, widely seen in Kroger Babb’s massive exploitation hit, Mom and
Dad (1945). When Erika Petersen needs to convince the community of the soundness of
her educational methods, she turns on the projector at their community meeting,
subjecting the town’s leaders, and the film audience alongside, to eight minutes of recent
innovations in gynecology (purchased by Gross from a New York hospital for $50).
Teenage Mother is, in many ways, best categorized in the nostalgic mode – its inclusion
of birth footage, as well as its treatment of drug use, particularly the depiction of
marijuana use as a cause of laughing fits and temporary insanity, recall golden-age
exploitation films rather than the more common attitudes toward exploitable elements in
1967 releases, such as nudity, S&M, LSD, or gore. Richard Meyers observes, “When a
movie is as plainly exploitative as [Teenage Mother], it can be fun to watch the
remarkably obvious filmmaking wheels squeal across the screen.”
22
In a manner that
resembles the camp sensibility, Gross places exploitation in quotation marks, indulging in
the genre’s profitability as he distances himself from it. Perhaps the best sign that the film
is overtly toying with exploitation tropes is in its treatment of pornography. One of
151

several ironies in the film is the suggestion that the crime boss pornographer’s business is
negatively impacted by the study of sex in classrooms and its clinical treatments. Of
course, the exact opposite is true. Many exploitation films, including white coaters and
medical documentaries, use the clinical treatment of sex as an excuse by which to present
it - all conversation about sex benefits the pornographer.
Teenage Mother functions as a playful imitation of classical exploitation
formulas, taking pleasure in misleading titles and marketing campaigns, and embracing
exploitation content that was no longer fashionable. And Gross continued to demonstrate
his shameless self-promotion – when the teenagers at the school go to the movies, the
marquee indicates that they are seeing Girl on a Chain Gang. In the Variety review of the
film, the author asks the moot question, “That is either perceptive cross plugging – or,
possibly, bad taste?”
23
Gross’ “perceptive cross-plugging” anticipates Cinemation’s
mainstream commercial aspirations in 1970, its dramatic arrival to the Hollywood
establishment and its tendency toward bombastic promotional rhetoric. However, Gross
could not shake the “bad taste” which emanates from a mentality that is so deeply
entrenched in the grindhouse world. Gross clearly learned how to market “bad” films
using time-honored strategies involving contradiction and deception, but Cinemation’s
development hinged on his ability to adapt this mentality to a mainstream sensibility, to
learn how to promote “good” films.

“Part AIP-Part Rugoff”: Cinemation vs. The Auteur (1967-1971)
In 1971, Jerry Gross described Cinemation’s release strategy as “part-AIP, part-
Rugoff,” an aspiration that attempted to merge the successes of low-budget genre films
152

released by AIP with the art house campaigns directed by Don Rugoff, owner of a chain
of prestigious art house theaters in New York and the distribution company Cinema 5.
While the genre films would form “the backbone” of the release schedule, his attempt to
diversify is a facet of Gross’ desire to get away from sexploitation films, a direction for
Cinemation that he continually expressed in the mainstream press. He declared his
company’s intentions “to compete with Rugoff on class pix” and “to offer ‘involved
filmmakers’ the kind of deals which will enable them to see more money faster.”
24
His
stated commitment to working closely with filmmakers was essential to his aspirations in
the film acquisition market – a reliable and honest distributor would be more likely to
sustain relationships with successful producers. However, art house campaigns, as
exemplified by Don Rugoff’s Cinema 5 releases, derived from a “great director”
mystique, selling films on the basis of a visionary auteur and thus minimizing the
bombast of a distributor’s showmanship. Gross’ challenge at Cinemation in the late
1960s and early 1970s would be to negotiate his exploiteer’s roots in producer-oriented
showmanship (à la Mike Ripps) with the desire to offer a well-balanced and more broadly
commercial array of films to distribute. Indeed, his reference to AIP as the low end of
Cinemation’s release schedule is itself aspirational; the 42
nd
Street exploitation
campaigns on which he began his film education occupy a rung further below that which
is usually acknowledged in discourses on the collapse of art house and exploitation.
Roger Corman is often credited with perfecting the hybrid-release strategy to
which Gross aspired, particularly in his work with the company he formed after leaving
AIP, New World Pictures. At this point Corman had abandoned the director’s chair and
committed himself full-time to the distribution business. Like Cinemation, New World
153

aimed to offer a balance of original productions and acquisitions, with a handful of
prestigious releases to offset their primary interest in the drive-in and grindhouse
markets. Corman’s decision to distribute art house fare, including consecutive Academy-
award winners for Best Foreign Film with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)
and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), is often characterized by a desire on Corman’s
part to shed (or at least mitigate) his reputation as the “king of schlock.” (The letterhead
at New World Pictures throughout the mid-1970s bore the stamps of their critically
lauded foreign releases, not, for example, their lucrative student nurses films.) However,
there were concrete economic factors that led to this hybridized release strategy. Without
corporate financial support or public ownership, New World was primarily reliant on the
profits from its releases to fund its upcoming projects. Exploitation films were most
profitable during the spring and summer months, using a “follow the sun” distribution
pattern across the nation’s drive-ins, typically beginning in the south and moving north.
When the time came to produce films in the fall and winter months, the studio was faced
with a cash-flow problem because the bulk of the year’s grosses had already been earned.
Art house films were the perfect solution – they were an ideal winter release because they
thrived in urban areas and benefitted from end-of-year award attention, a factor that also
functioned as free advertising in the form of critical reviews.
25

Although this dual personality made economic sense to independent distributors,
it created a schizophrenic relationship between a company and its polarized release
strategies. This is especially the case when one considers that some of the genre films that
filled out the drive-in schedule were also foreign acquisitions, and the decision over
whether to release them with prestige campaigns or exploitation campaigns rested on a
154

subjective perception of taste. New World handled the distribution for Cries and
Whispers, Amarcord, The Story of Adele H (1975), and The Lost Honor of Katharina
Blum (1975) using variations of a sales pitch that focused on critical accolades and the
cult of the auteur (along with the requisite hint of progressive sexual content that was
commonly aligned with art house publicity since the early 1940s).
However, not all foreign acquisitions were granted the art house treatment that
New World gave to the auteur-driven films listed above. When Corman purchased Shiro
Moritani’s The Submersion of Japan (1973), he considered the film a “terrible Japanese
disaster picture,” and as a result subjected it to decidedly non-prestigious treatment. New
World retained the special effects sequences (the main reason Corman purchased the
film), but many other scenes were deleted and replaced by new footage shot with
American actors. With the new title, Tidal Wave, the film was finally released in 1975
bearing marginal resemblance to the original acquisition.
26
The campaign for Tidal Wave
ignored the vaunted status of the auteur underlying prestige campaigns, not only in its
omission of the director’s name, but in its disregard for the integrity of his authorship in
the final released product. The additions and subtractions enforced on The Submersion of
Japan suggest what Lawrence Levine has termed a “desacralized text.” In Levine’s study
of the movement of cultural forms across taste hierarchies, he finds that the process of a
work’s “sacralization” as a highbrow object involves its assumption of a purified and
auratic status. At the height of Shakespeare’s popularity in the United States in the 19
th

century, audiences viewed the works as interactive, spontaneous, and malleable – Levine
writes, “the play may have been the thing, but it was not the only thing.”
27
The cultural
elevation of Shakespeare as a site for education and intellectual discourse is also the
155

process by which Shakespeare was no longer seen as “common property to be treated as
the user saw fit.”
28
Cultural prestige comes at the price of audience disengagement and a
final product that is “complete” and unalterable – descriptors that are antithetical to the
recyclings, title changes, and “hot” and “cold” versions that delineate exploitation
cinema.
The juxtaposition of prestige and exploitation campaigns for foreign acquisitions
engages issues of taste protocol located primarily at the level of a film’s authorship. At
one end of the spectrum, Don Rugoff was adamant in his respect for the auteur and his
commitment to the director’s vision in a film’s marketing and publicity. Although Rugoff
was admittedly more a showman than an artist, operating a distribution company and a
theater chain rather than making films, he never referred to the films he sold as
“products.” According to Stuart Byron, “Don’s real uniqueness is a combination of
showmanship and taste. The two used to be thought antithetical. But Don’s ballyhoo is
ballyhoo with a Harvard education.”
29
For Byron, Rugoff’s good taste and his prestigious
education are collapsed in terms of his respect for European auteurs. Cinema 5’s uniquely
tailored publicity campaigns ensured that this respect would also be carried over at the
level of sales and exhibition. Byron pointedly notes that Rugoff never alters or cuts a film
without the approval of its director. Despite the success of Cries and Whispers, Bergman
sold Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to Cinema 5, not New World, because Corman
admitted that he would need to cut down the film’s 250-minute runtime.
30
Rugoff was
also willing to go to exorbitant lengths to guarantee the quality of his releases beyond the
art house market. Whereas the dubbing process usually cost no more than $40,000,
Rugoff spent six months and $260,000 dubbing Costa-Gavras’ Z (1969) into a release
156

whose dubbing quality was singled out in Bosley Crowther’s New York Times review.
31

This delicate handling of the film and its campaign, releasing a subtitled version in art
houses and a quality dubbed version across the country, all with the approval of the film’s
director, were hallmarks of Rugoff’s distribution approach.
While Gross expressed a desire to exist in a middle ground between genre and art
house campaigns with vacillating levels of personal commitment to filmmakers, he was
also inspired by distributors and entrepreneurs who were downright hostile to the idea of
“quality” film, producers who culled the foreign markets without the least regard for
prestige. For example, exploitation producer and distributor Jerry Warren, president of
Associated Distributors Inc., frankly admitted that the entertainment value of low-budget
releases was inconsequential. Fred Olen Ray describes, “[Warren] felt that at his level of
filmmaking it simply was not necessary or convenient to put too much effort into his
pictures.”
32
In a practice Corman later continued with The Submersion of Japan, Warren
would typically buy foreign films with the intention of masking their foreign status and
incorporating new footage shot with American actors. He would avoid the costs of even a
poorly executed dubbing process, opting instead for cutting the dialogue scenes
altogether and using voiceover narration to (ambiguously) explain narrative details.
Despite Warren’s claims that dismiss the aspiration toward quality, he clearly relished his
role as a producer – Ray quotes Warren saying, “‘Producers are the ones that have it
all.’”
33
This is of course in contrast to a marked disrespect shown for the director of the
films he purchased. After shooting new footage and adding voiceover content, Warren’s
acquisitions would often be released bearing the credit, “Produced and Directed by Jerry
157

Warren,” thus eliminating the authorship and identity of the foreign director who shot the
majority of the footage.
Although Jerry Gross was never quite as egregious as Warren in his
transformations of foreign pick-ups, the campaigns for Cinemation’s late 1960s and 1970
releases bear more resemblance to the Gestalt composites of the exploitation huckster
than the organic purity of the art house auteur. Considering Gross’ 42
nd
Street
background, it is easy to position Gross’ disregard for the auteur in terms of his excessive
appreciation for the producer and showman. Variety’s Robert Landry writes (seemingly
with admiration), “Gross unhesitatingly plays the role of producer and does not recognize
the director as a Divinity. It is part of Gross’ operational policy on those films he decides
to revive, reissue, or re-vitalize that he does his own editing and cutting. Sometimes new
footage is shot and spliced in.”
34
Cinemation’s vice preseident in 1970, Harold
Marenstein, was formerly an assistant sales manager with Rizzoli films in the mid-1960s,
the American arm for a production-distribution company owned by Italian media mogul,
Angelo Rizzoli. However, like many domestic art house distributors in the late 1960s
(including Pathé and Toho), Rizzoli folded in 1967 when it faced increased competition
from the subsidiaries of major companies entering the foreign distribution market.
35
One
of the assets Marenstein brought to Cinemation was his experience with Rizzoli, which
resulted in Cinemation’s purchase of the rights to re-release several of their titles. Of
course, given Gross’ penchant for self-promotional showmanship, these formerly
auteurist releases took on unexpected marketing campaigns largely eschewing the critical
esteem of their directors. In Cinemation’s advertisement for exhibitors to rent “current
classics,” including the Japanese-Italian co-production, Madame Butterfly (1954), and
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Italian imports, Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Red Desert (1964), the films were all
marketed under the banner “Jerry Gross Presents,” with his name taking up roughly the
same amount of space as Fellini’s and Antonioni’s (and much larger than Carmine
Gallone’s, the director of Madame Butterfly).
Gross’s approach to marketing applied the classical exploitation techniques of re-
titling and elongating the lifetime of all footage under a producer’s ownership, often to
the point of absurdity, despite the fact that he was working with art house films whose
commercial value usually rested on their status as auratic objects. Cinemation’s campaign
for the Rizzoli production, Africa Addio (1966), demonstrated the lengths Gross would go
with a foreign film that actually contained viable exploitation elements. Africa Addio was
directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, the Italian team who made Mondo
Cane (1962) and Mondo Pazzo (1963) (also re-released by Cinemation as a double
feature in 1970). Although the extent to which Jacopetti and Prosperi re-enacted or staged
footage was widely debated even during their careers, they were a well-known and
respected documentary team, with Mondo Cane performing especially well with critics
and commercial audiences alike. Africa Addio was their most extreme film to date. An
attempt to document the end of colonialism in various African nations, the film (which
was shot over the course of three years) featured brutal war atrocities, sexual violence,
and all manner of animal cruelty. The film used voiceover narration and interviews to
provide political context for the events, was released with subtitles, and had a running
time of over two hours, positioning it, at least superficially, in the realm of foreign art
house cinema. Even though Africa Addio shared characteristics of art films, its extreme
violence made it a challenge to market for the art house audience. Rizzoli Films, which
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specialized in auteurist films, had little experience promoting work of this nature, and
thus had trouble negotiating the controversies that developed around the film’s shocking
violence. Rizzoli even considered withholding the film’s release based on the fear that it
would damage its reputation for prestige and negatively impact future art house
releases.
36

Rizzoli prestige campaign poster for Africa Addio
In its 1966 poster art, Rizzoli did not explicitly deny the film’s shocking footage,
but it attempted to position those shocks as an evolutionary step for cinema (“the most
startling motion picture achievement in the history of film-making”). The title is
graphically overlaid atop an image of Africa, with small depictions of an animal being
airlifted and men wielding spears. The text surrounding this central image overwhelms
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the poster, with blurbs from six different critics attesting to the qualities of Africa Addio,
ranging from its “exquisite cinematography” to its “juxtaposition of morbidity and sex.”
Little mention is made of the film’s authorship, but the approval of critics was clearly an
essential part of Rizzoli’s sales pitch, as was an attempt to suggest a degree of
geopolitical commentary.
The Cinemation re-release in 1970 took a rather different approach. Unlike his
other Rizzoli re-releases, which were merely underwhelming art house campaigns, Gross
spent much more time with Africa Addio, giving the film a complete makeover and
transforming it into Africa Blood and Guts, a title and accompanying publicity campaign
that played directly to 42
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Street themes.

Cinemation’s exploitation campaign for Africa Addio re-release as Africa Blood and Guts
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Gross cut approximately 35 minutes from the film, bringing it down to a more reasonable
exploitation runtime (83 minutes), and in doing so eliminated the political context that
attempted to explain (and justify) the atrocities and massacres it depicted. He also
replaced the subtitles with a newly dubbed soundtrack. Whereas Rizzoli tried to distance
itself from the film’s controversial imagery by diverting attention to enthusiastic critical
reviews, Gross foregrounded the controversy in Cinemation’s marketing. As in Gross’
southern films, the promotional text accentuates the film’s racial angle (“Big! Black!
Ugly! Brutal!”), and goes on to describe the film using an urban slang which had been
adopted by the counterculture but originated in black communities and jazz culture. The
tagline reads, “This is Africa like it is baby… where the name of the game is blood… and
you kill or be killed!” In some ads, Gross also includes a quote from the New York Times
review, but no citation is provided, and it is a quote that attests to the film’s violence
rather than its quality – “Perhaps the most gruesome picture in the history of the cinema.”
(The Times reviews was, in fact, a negative one, concluding that Africa Addio was “a
reckless, dangerous film.”
37
) The imagery in Cinemation’s Africa Blood and Guts poster
is also indicative of a national rather than a global interest. The Black Power fist
smashing through the image’s upper border suggests American racial tensions rather than
the allusion to international colonization that is connoted by Rizzoli’s depiction of the
African continent. Small silhouettes of men with spears give way to a large grinning
figure with an eye patch holding an automatic weapon, as well as rather shocking nudity
for a tradepaper print ad promoting the film’s graphic depictions of “native” sexuality.
The film’s exhibition also retained classical exploitation levels of showmanship and
ballyhoo. For the film’s New York premiere at the Criterion theater, Gross decorated the
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theater’s ceiling and floor with grass and hired black actors to wear grass skirts, play
drums, hold spears, and lead patrons through the theater-lobby-cum-African-village.
38

There have been a number of scholarly studies that address the porous borders
between art and exploitation reception. Barbara Wilinsky, Mark Betz, Joan Hawkins, and
others have argued that the barriers separating lurid European imports from cheap
domestic sexploitation were never particularly sturdy.
39
Betz believes that the histories of
high and low cinemas in the 1960s “proceeded not simply as parallel modes of film
practice, but as shared discourses and means of address.”
40
Barbara Wilinsky similarly
identifies an inherent dualism in the art house environment, arguing that art house films
are characterized by ambivalent strains, oppositions that emerge between cultural
enlightenment on the one hand, and progressive representations of sexuality as a
camouflage for pandering sex on screen on the other.
41
Exploitation entrepreneur and
historian, Dave Friedman, noted the same phenomenon with a touch more mockery:
“Weary of morally safe but intellectually immature motion-picture entertainment, snob
and slob alike sought the naked truth in their filmfare.”
42
These accounts of an art and
exploitation convergence all address sexual representations, and the implication that sex
on screen is a slippery object on which a film’s commercial viability can vacillate
between different registers.
However, as Gross’ transformation of Africa Addio reveals, racial representations
occupy an additional point at which art can merge with the commercial imperatives of
trash. In its original 1966 Rizzoli release, Jacopetti and Prosperi could maintain plausible
deniability as to their motivations for depicting racialized violence, sexuality, and gore
based on their status as (relatively) respected documentarians. But the racist connotations
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Gross evoked in Africa Blood and Guts were already latent in the 1966 iteration, Africa
Addio; it simply required a new title and exploitation campaign to bring these issues to
the surface. While it was clearly not Gross’ intention to stage his publicity campaign as a
forum for post-colonial criticism directed at the ethnographic tendencies of art house
documentary, the transformation of the theatrical space at the Criterion bears too many
similarities to the work of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña (particularly their
performance installation, “The Couple in the Cage”) to be ignored. Colonial films are
generally structured with some form of political context to allow for comfortable
resolution, but Gross specifically removes those elements that might offer such comforts
to Western audiences and rationally justify the extreme footage on the screen.
43
Africa
Blood and Guts is a distillation of unanchored massacre, disassembling an art house film
to dissemble its meaning, and revealing the exploitation theater as a persistent site of
conflict and contradiction.
The transition of Africa Addio into Africa Blood and Guts, along with the
consideration that Jacopetti and Prosperi disavowed Cinemation’s version of their film,
suggests the economic and cultural capital that stands to be gained from maintaining high
and low cinema as separate spheres, rather than collapsing them (as is more commonly
suggested among exploitation scholars). The stigma of grindhouse exhibition, as
discussed by David Church, served to erase the actual production values of a film and
replace them with implications of cheapness and sensationalism. Church notes that
grindhouses in the 1960s played a diverse range of films, including Hollywood product
and (uncut) art house releases, but all became equally squalid in the eyes of critics when
they were released in this apparently transformative environment.
44
Thus, it is with
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critical corroboration that grindhouse exhibition maintains its unique identity and
economic niche despite the actual crossover in releases between 42
nd
Street and
mainstream theaters. It is also noteworthy that, as Elena Gorfinkel observes, the low
budgets and shoddy production values of exploitation films reveal the ways in which
specific historical locations in New York’s seedier urban environments are “embalmed
by the sexploitation lens.”
45
In this sense, the ethnographic work of Jacopetti and
Prosperi in Africa Addio metamorphoses, at the industrial level, into a different form of
ethnography geographically located on 42
nd
Street.
Cinemation continued its practice of transforming pick-ups of auteurist films into
exploitation fodder with American cinema, as in its campaign for Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll
(1956), a Tennessee Williams’ adaptation most famous for the censorship issues it faced
from the Production Code Administration and its condemnation by the Legion of
Decency. In Warner Bros.’ 1956 release of Baby Doll, Kazan and Williams’ names are
both prominently displayed in the poster, with the text reading, “She’s nineteen. She
makes her husband keep away – she won’t let the stranger go.” However, for its 1970
Cinemation campaign (released in a Southern-themed double feature with Shanty Tramp
[1967]), Gross lowered Baby Doll’s (Carroll Baker) age to seventeen, and replaced the
already perverse and sexually charged image of her sucking her thumb in a crib, with a
more explicit depiction of her naked back facing the viewer while holding a symbolically
charged limp teddy bear. Further, the Cinemation publicity machine continued to
reinforce racial stereotypes, as it did in Africa Addio and its other Southern films. While
the narrative of Baby Doll actually presents a sexual triangulation between Baby Doll, her
inept husband (Karl Malden), and her Italian suitor (Eli Wallach) (both white men),
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Cinemation adds Wallach’s black assistant, Rock (Lonny Chapman), a minor character in
the film, to the poster, seemingly hedging its pedophilic bets with an additional
investment in miscegenation. The topline of Cinemation’s poster reads, “A 17-year old
baby waiting for her men,” with small captioned pictures of the male actors – Wallach is
“the shifty foreigner” and Chapman, “the big black buck.” The central irony of
Cinemation’s Baby Doll campaign lies in the circumstances under which the company
purchased it. The rights to the film reverted to Kazan in 1967, and, in 1969, he refused to
sell to CBS because they would not accede to his demand that no cuts be made.
46
Gross
abided by this stipulation, but went on to market the film in a way that showed more
interest in the controversy it caused in 1956 than in the film itself, and even added new
(fabricated) opportunities to create additional controversies.
While Africa Blood and Guts and the Baby Doll campaign represent the capacity
for exploitation to market racial depictions in arthouse cinema, other Cinemation releases
capitalized on the usual erasures of distinction between art house and grindhouse sexual
representations. In 1969, Cinemation released its two most profitable films to that point,
both Swedish imports: Joe Sarno’s Inga and Mac Ahlberg’s Fanny Hill. Inspired by the
massive success of Grove Press’ distribution of the Swedish film, I Am Curious – Yellow
(1967), both films use Swedish locations and actors as a subtext to enact fairly
conventional melodramatic sexploitation narratives. Gross also continued to meddle with
the films without regard for authorial purity. The two additional scenes that Cinemation
added to Inga both demonstrate a marked interest in Cinemation’s ancillary products
more than the continuity of the film’s narrative. The first, a dance party playing alongside
the opening credit sequence, features young “Swedish” teens dancing to an American
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rock song that was written for the film by Cinemation’s resident composer, Clay Pitts,
and available as a commercial soundtrack. The second is an inconsequential sequence
featuring Inga leaving her home for the train station – its real significance lies in her
passing by a theater marquee playing Teenage Mother, continuing the cycle of Gross’
cross-promotion. Despite Gross’ attempts to deviate from sexploitation product, it seems
more likely that he wanted to concentrate more on the ambiguities of foreign
sexploitation. Gross’ final project as director, Female Animal (1970), was a faux-
European sexploitation production, shot in Puerto Rico but credited to two phony Italian
and Spanish production companies that never actually existed. Although Gross rarely
shied from the spotlight in Cinemation credit sequences, the commercial viability of
foreign sexploitation (and the desire to distance his company from domestic
sexploitation) resulted in his final credit adopting the moniker “Juan Carlo Grinella.” The
ruse seems to have fooled most of the tradepaper reviewers at the time of the film’s
release, although Gross later accepted credit for directing the film.
Inga and Fanny Hill, which together earned approximately $5 million in film
rentals, were released with the recently minted X-rating, an indicator to viewers not only
of their sexual content, but, as Gregory Waller argues, of their status as independent
productions.
47
However, in the most enduring Cinemation release throughout the
company’s lifetime, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971),
the relationship between the X-rating, independence, and commercial aspirations would
take center stage. Along with Cinemation’s acquisition of Dalton Trumbo’s adaptation of
his anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Sweetback was acknowledged as a
realization of Cinemation’s attempts to finally offer a more diverse line-up of films. As
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Addison Verrill writes, “Cinemation’s handling of the picture [Sweetback] and the very
sweet deal reportedly given to Van Peebles on it, are sparking trade talk as to a new
image for the company which has been saddled with a ‘breast and buttock’ tag since
beginning operations.”
48
Given Gross’ penchant for showmanship and self-promotion,
one would expect Cinemation’s role in the legacy of Sweetback to be significant.
However, despite the film’s original release bearing the credit “Melvin Van Peebles and
Jerry Gross Present,” as well as the centrality of the film’s marketing campaign and
distribution strategy in the film’s legacy, Cinemation has been almost entirely written out
of its history. In Jon Hartmann’s extensive analysis of the film’s reception by a variety of
media sources and communities, Cinemation merits a citation only in the footnotes.
49

Likewise in Van Peebles’ recollections of his experience making Sweetback in A Guerilla
Filmmaking Manifesto, his only mention of Cinemation is to establish that he chose to
work with them despite offers from major studios because he “wanted bread and control,”
dismissively adding, “I liked the style of Gross, the boss, and especially his second,
Marenstein. They had balls and brains, enough brains in fact to know they didn’t know
black folks and that’s pretty smart for white men.”
50

Although the extent to which it was a conscious business decision is not clear,
Gross definitely recedes further into the background than usual in Sweetback’s publicity
and marketing. Van Peebles’ authorship is unquestioned, as he served virtually every
position in the film’s production – writer, producer, editor, composer, director, and star.
The legacy of Sweetback is inextricably linked to its independence, spawning myriad
stories from its production, usually focused on its finances, including Bill Cosby’s
$50,000 loan and Van Peebles’ avoidance of union laborers by claiming that it was a
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pornographic shoot.
51
In addition to his clear authorship of the film, Van Peebles is also
synonymous with the film’s industrial performance and is commonly credited as the
entrepreneurial genius behind its success. The exact terms of the distribution deal were
never publicized; however, Van Peebles was widely considered to have taken advantage
of Cinemation, retaining the rights to the film’s soundtrack and its other ancillary
products (from the novelization [written by Van Peebles] to nightgowns embroidered
with “I am Sweetback”), and maintaining full ownership of the film – its distribution
rights were leased to Cinemation for 18 months. The film has an experimental aesthetic,
marked by narrative discontinuities, jump cuts, and unmotivated dreamlike logic. Given
Van Peebles’ central role at all levels of production, it also bears a homemade, artisanal
quality, beginning with a dedication “to all the Brothers and Sisters who had enough of
the man,” and noting as its stars, “The Black Community.” However, there are few works
in which the gulf between text and context is so great – the film is a low-budget,
experimental condemnation of mainstream society and a critique of police power; but
Van Peebles and the discourse surrounding him are seemingly obsessed with money and
the maximization of market value.
Sweetback is often cited as a landmark independent film, a distinction that situates
it on the margins of the film industry. Yet this claim is also juxtaposed with the film’s
supposed “discovery” of the black audience in America and the inauguration of the
mainstream 1970s action genre, blaxploitation. Van Peebles seems to have cultivated this
uneasy relationship with the establishment, taking great pride in both his oppositional
position toward the mainstream and his ability to play the Man’s game and capitalize on
his work. Discussing the origins of his idea for Sweetback, Van Peebles states, “The first
169

step as I saw it was actually a dual one. To create a commercially feasible vehicle, our
society being capitalistic and all that, plus to do something that wasn’t Uncle-Tommy.”
52

His casual dismissal of any economic potentialities beyond the capitalistic stands in stark
contrast to one of his contemporaries, independent black filmmaker, Haile Gerima.
Gerima’s view of independent filmmaking bears little resemblance to that of Van
Peebles, considering the distinction a matter of aesthetics and morality, not one of
entrepreneurship or the development of a reliable niche audience. Gerima states, “For
some filmmakers ‘independence’ is a kind of waiting room to the industry, or a sign of
rejection from the established order. In my case, and with many others, independence is a
declaration…Profit is the most poisonous environment for creativity.”
53
Indeed, while
Van Peebles reaped significant profits from Sweetback, his film was arguably a more
demonstrable boon for both the major studios and Cinemation. Its publicity campaign
laid the groundwork for MGM’s Shaft (1971), a film which grossed $7.1 million (on a
$1.5 million budget) with a reportedly 80% black audience in an otherwise down year for
MGM.
54
Although there are oppositional undercurrents to Van Peebles’ work, the major
studio blaxploitation films that followed merely benefitted from his mobilization of the
black audience during a financial crisis for the major studios, an audience that Kara
Keeling astutely refers to as the film industry’s “reserve army.”
55
And for Cinemation,
Sweetback grossed $4.1 million, making it the biggest hit in Cinemation’s history and a
clear sign that the company could compete in the commercial marketplace outside its
sexploitation releases. While the film’s famous tagline, “Rated ‘X’ by an All-White
Jury,” superficially seems to marginalize Sweetback from a mainstream audience, the
phrase also represents an acknowledgement of the establishment – Van Peebles could
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have ignored the MPAA’s Classification and Rating Administration altogether and
released the film without a rating. Instead, his tagline became a template that would be
recycled by Gross in future Cinemation releases.

Searching for an Identity: Cinemation’s Failures (1971-1975)
In Kevin Thomas’ Los Angeles Times review of I Drink Your Blood (1970), an
original Cinemation production directed by David Durston, he unequivocally praised the
film, calling it “a tour de force of a caliber not equaled since the similar ‘Night of the
Living Dead.’”
56
I Drink Your Blood is indeed a compelling horror film, evincing the
same anti-humanist values and nihilistic worldview that Robin Wood located in other
contemporary horror films (including Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left
[1972], and, especially, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]); Wood referred to this
period as horror’s “Golden Age.”
57
Released a year prior to similar horrors in Last House
on the Left, I Drink Your Blood presents a vision of hippies gone bad, featuring a
multicultural Mansonian cult of young sadists and acidheads who are led by Horace
Bones, a Satanist played by charismatic Indian actor and dancer, Bhaskar. After
terrorizing some of the townspeople, a local boy gets revenge by injecting rabid dog’s
blood into the group’s meat pies, ultimately causing the entire community to become
crazed sexual predators. As Thomas surmised, Gross commissioned the film as an
explicit follow-up to Night of the Living Dead (1968). According to Durston, Gross told
him at an early meeting that “he wanted to make the most graphic horror film ever
produced, but he didn’t want any vampires, man-made monsters, werewolves, mad
doctors or little people from outer space.”
58
Gross’ desire for a low-budget, violent, and
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visceral film reflects his intention to diversify his film releases while maintaining a
certain edginess and distance from mainstream Hollywood fare (as evinced also by
Johnny Got His Gun and Sweet Sweetback), and also attempting a certain level of
“quality” in his original projects – I Drink Your Blood marked the first in-house
Cinemation production since the company’s marquee press release in 1970.
With the announcement of I Drink Your Blood, Cinemation’s decision making
and industrial policies seemed to be hitting their stride – the company was coming off its
biggest hits with the sexploitation titles, Inga and Fanny Hill and a new trendsetting hit
with Sweet Sweetback that was admired and imitated by the mainstream industry. And
with I Drink Your Blood, Cinemation was preparing to release a provocative and well-
crafted film produced in-house at a modest budget, thus negating any acquisition fees or
future ownership issues. So why did I Drink Your Blood fail to become an underground
hit like Night of the Living Dead or earn a place in Robin Wood’s pantheon of 1970s
horror films? The answer lies once again in Jerry Gross’ persistent exploitation release
practices that did not align with the growing reputation and visibility of Cinemation
Industries. Gross submitted I Drink Your Blood to the MPAA for an official rating, and
the board gave the film an “X,” the first such rating specifically given for violence. In the
spirit of contrition to the Hollywood establishment, he agreed to cut the film down to earn
an “R” rating, however, like many exploiteers before him, he opted instead to simply
release the “X” version to theaters anyway without informing the MPAA. When the
MPAA caught on, the prints were already released to theaters, leaving Gross’ only option
to have the projectionists cut each print individually to approximate an R-rated version.
59

The end result of this failed ruse was the coexistence of multiple versions of the film, and
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the absence of a master text on which critics could base their reviews over the years. The
presence of multiple versions of the same film for different areas was effective for small
time operators traveling the exploitation circuit in the 1930s and 1940s, but such tactics
undercut Cinemation’s production of a quality film and its aspirations to become a
respected distribution company to attract independent producers.
Cinemation’s mismanagement of I Drink Your Blood also led to bad blood
between Cinemation and David Durston: they failed to retain Durston for future projects,
and sacrificed the company’s best opportunity for an in-house writer-director capable of
working on a modest budget. As Ed Lowry notes, the main reason for the success of
Dimension Pictures in the early 1970s was the low-budget producing acumen of two of
the company’s founding partners, director Stephanie Rothman and her producer husband,
Charles Swartz (the third partner was exhibition magnate, Lawrence Woolner).
60

Dimension was able to bring in quality exploitable films at reasonable budgets and
guarantee at least a couple of annual releases to support the company’s distribution
expenses (although Dimension only operated three exchanges, all wisely located in the
South). With Gross focused on the business end of Cinemation and the cultivation of its
distribution network, he would have benefitted from a reliable in-house director.
However, Durston was not entirely pleased with his experience on I Drink Your Blood.
He claims that all of the financial transactions were honest, and he did not take issue with
Gross’ addition of the experimental Clay Pitts score. But Durston resented Gross’
advertising campaign for the film, which he felt betrayed their original vision for an
unconventional and extreme horror film.
61
Gross initially asked Durston to write a project
that did not involve trite horror elements, but he promptly changed Durston’s title,
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Phobia, to its release title, I Drink Your Blood, evoking saleable images of vampires that
never actually appear in the film. Even more damaging for Durston was Cinemation’s
decision to pair the film, in what is now a famous exploitation campaign, with Del
Tenney’s 1964 film, Voodoo Bloodbath, re-titled for its 1970-1971 release as I Eat Your
Skin.

Cinemation double feature, 1971
The proximity of I Drink Your Blood with Del Tenney’s film, a schlocky 1960s mad-
scientist / zombie film, cheapened Durston’s work – Kevin Thomas begins his review of I
Drink Your Blood by insisting on the qualitative disparity between the two films and
advising that audiences avoid judging them by their titles alone.
62
As Durston accurately
assessed in a later interview, the Cinemation decision to pair the films was purely the
result of the company’s attempt to wring profits out of poor acquisition. Durston states,
“Quite obviously Cinemation Industries did not like losing money, even when they made
a mistake. They had bought a dog of a film they could not sell or give away…It was a
Cinemation Industry mistake buying it, and my film had to suffer so that I Eat Your Skin
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wasn’t a loss for the damn stockholders.”
63
Although the marketing campaign remains
legendary for exploitation cultists, the aesthetic qualities of I Drink Your Blood are under-
recognized as a result. Cinemation compounded its mistake in acquiring Voodoo
Bloodbath by pairing it with a quality release, alienating a potential partnership with
David Durston, and thus exchanging a long-term relationship for a short-term profit.
Over the next several years, Cinemation continued to sour relationships with the
producers of its biggest commercial successes. In 1972, Cinemation released the
countercultural animated film from director Ralph Bakshi and producer Steve Krantz,
Fritz the Cat. The film generated a high degree of publicity from the remnants of the
underground press (its characters were loosely based on R. Crumb cartoons), and from
the provocative concept of an X-rated, adult-themed animated feature. In a repetition of
the Sweet Sweetback campaign that foregrounded the film’s X-rating, Cinemation’s
publicity for Fritz the Cat used the tagline, “We’re not rated X for nothin’, baby,” as well
as, “The World’s First X-Rated Full-Length Cartoon;” and, like Sweetback, the film was
a huge hit for the company. But in an interview with the filmmakers following the Fritz
screening at the Cannes Film Festival, Krantz and Bakshi expressed their displeasure at
Cinemation’s publicity tactics and its unwillingness to fight the MPAA for an R-rating.
They claim that Fritz the Cat is “an artistic achievement treated by Cinemation as a fast-
buck leer-o-rama;” when they tried to purchase more highbrow advertisements
accentuating favorable critical reviews (with their own money), “they were screamed
down by Gross…on the grounds that his company had sole booking and advertising
jurisdiction.”
64
In 1973, Cinemation sold the rights to Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat follow-up,
Heavy Traffic (1973), which was eventually produced by rival AIP. Krantz then used the
175

trade press as an organ to express the favorable treatment he received at his new
company, beginning with more involvement in the distribution and marketing decisions.
Moreover, “Krantz disclosed that AIP is giving him three times the minimum guarantee
on ‘Heavy Traffic’ that he received from Cinemation… [H]e was extravagant in his
praise of AIP’s handling of ‘Heavy Traffic’ in a manner which he said has maximized the
picture’s potential at every stage of promotion and distribution.”
65
With Fritz the Cat,
Cinemation demonstrated its unceasing ability to craft a splashy campaign and drum up
audience interest in a provocative film, but their inability to oscillate between film
campaigns for critically respected films and exploitation campaigns for trashy films
negatively affected their relationship with filmmakers committed to producing quality
pictures.
Cinemation’s problems producing and distributing quality films within an
exploitation paradigm even led to difficulties with more traditional exploitation fare -
Cinemation also caused tensions with the filmmaking team behind The Cheerleaders
(1973), which siimarly led them to lose the sequel rights. The Cheerleaders marked the
company’s temporary return to its sexploitation glory days, an X-rated film that did
particularly robust business along the California drive-in circuit before moving to 42
nd

Street. However, when the film’s producers, Richard Lerner and Paul Glickler, began
working on a sequel with Monarch Releasing Corporation (which would become
Revenge of the Cheerleaders [1976]), Cinemation withheld the profits from the producers
in an attempt to intimidate them.
66
This tension resulted in a lawsuit filed by Lerner and
Glickler against Cinemation for their Cheerleaders profits, and a countersuit by
Cinemation for the sequel rights. However this was a battle that Cinemation could not
176

win - as a small distribution company, they needed to appease independent producers and
maintain mutually beneficial relationships, something they failed to do with the
filmmaking teams behind two of their biggest 1970s hits.
Clearly, Gross’ intentions to emulate Don Rugoff and the personal, tailored
approach to a campaign that was reflective of a filmmaker’s vision had not come to
fruition at Cinemation. They produced successful films, several of which spawned
sequels, but Cinemation was never the preferred organization for filmmakers to return. In
addition to their failure to develop sequels or long-term relationships with independent
filmmakers, Cinemation had trouble cultivating a clear identity for itself with its chaotic
release pattern in the early to mid-1970s. Because Cinemation did not produce any of its
own in-house theatrical features after I Drink Your Blood in 1970, the company was at
the mercy of the film market for its entire release schedule. And, as Lee Beaupre notes,
“The search for commercially viable independent pictures is a long, frustrating tour
through more cinematic garbage than most people know exists.”
67
Despite their plan to
amass a steady release schedule of up to 30 films per year, by late 1973, Cinemation went
three months without a single new release – the only incoming profits were earned from
re-releases of former hits, including R-rated versions of Inga and Fanny Hill (playing as a
double feature). In the absence of their former sexploitation identity, their releases from
1971 to 1974 lacked the kind of definable pattern that would be associated with a “new
major,” and tended to release films at the tail-end of trends rather than films that set them.
Cinemation’s diverse releases in this period included: martial-arts imports (Attack of the
Kung Fu Girls [1974], Sting of the Dragon Masters [1974], Wang Yu’s Seven
Magnificent Fights [1974]), blaxploitation (The Black Six [1973], The Black Godfather
177

[1974]), crime dramas (The Mad Bomber [1973], Challenge [1974]), highbrow science
fiction (Peter Fonda’s Idaho Transfer [1973]), and foreign art house (Paul Verhoeven’s
Turkish Delight [1974], Alain Resnais’ Stavitsky [1974]). In April 1974, Cinemation
prepared to release its first three features since the fall of 1973, and explicitly
acknowledged that the films, a horror-rock film Son of Dracula (1974), a blaxploitation-
martial-arts hybrid The Dynamite Brothers (1974), and psychological horror Peopletoys
(1974), would “appeal to three separate and distinct markets,” a daunting challenge for
Cinemation’s distribution team.
68
Some of their releases also suffered from poor timing
in the marketplace. In the company’s August 1973 SEC report, Cinemation detailed over
$1 million in write-offs for its failed acquisitions and underperforming releases. The
document claimed that Johnny Got His Gun suffered from its release as the anti-war
movement was dwindling, and Cinemation’s release of the film adaptation of the
controversial stage play Oh Calcutta! (1973) suffered as a result of the Miller v.
California (June 1973) Supreme Court decision that limited its playdates.
69

The poor timing of Cinemation’s acquisitions and release schedule also extended
into the company’s mistimed business decisions. As noted earlier, Cinemation attempted
to elevate itself to major status through its distribution apparatus and the cultivation of a
national network of exchange offices – after the 1970 press release, the company opened
four additional exchanges in Detroit, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Boston, and ran a
Canadian distribution arm under the name Prima Films. In addition to the aforementioned
poor geography of their bureau locations and the unfavorable percentages they received
from exhibitors, Cinemation attempted this expansion at the same time that the rest of the
major studios were downsizing their distribution networks. As Suzanne Mary Donahue
178

notes, in the 1970s and 1980s, “the number of branches decreased and continues to
decrease as the many facets involved in distribution and exhibition become streamlined,
computerized, and more organized…The need for these offices is being eliminated.”
70

Cinemation faced the high cost of overhead in the operation of field offices at precisely
the time when those costs were going down for the major Hollywood distributors.
Cinemation’s uneven release schedule exacerbated the difficulties in maintaining this
network. Tino Balio argues that the major Hollywood studios earn their profits as
distributors on a “tonnage basis,” meaning that once a company breaks even on its
distribution overhead, all additional films added to the release schedule provide
incremental profits (assuming a minimal investment in promotion).
71
Thus the majors
stand to benefit more from the distribution of independent releases as an added benefit to
their more commercially failsafe features, while the independent distributor that lacks a
reliable roster of films cannot support its expenses with a small handful of risky projects.
It is also likely that Cinemation’s expenses were much higher than the company
could actually afford - Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford claim that Gross took over an
entire floor of the MGM building in Manhattan, and David Durston remembers meeting
with Jerry Gross in a “spacious production office.”
72
Cinemation was in a difficult
position, because it needed to project an image of strong capitalization to attract
independent producers and gain the trust of wary exhibitors, but this image required
much needed capital to sustain itself. Irwin Yablans, a successful independent producer
and distributor in the late 1970s and early 1980s (who was briefly with Cinemation in
1975) states:
The companies that have failed have all done the same thing, opened up
immediately with a bang, with a tremendous overhead – overhead is everything, it
179

eats you alive. If you take the companies that have opened and closed – National
General, Cinerama, Cinema Center, Bryanston – all were started by men who
were established in the industry, and they couldn’t come down from that
philosophy of being important, with large expense accounts and many offices.
73

Although Gross did not have the major studio experience Yablans refers to, his
aspirations were clearly to rise in the film industry despite his latent exploitation leanings.
His original partner, Nicholas Demetroules, left the company because he felt that Gross
was too intense a personality to work with – Demetroules felt Gross’ behavior was
“overreaching,” as when he would “‘sit in his office drinking a bottle of vodka a day on
the phone to different subdistributors and producers.”
74
Beginning with Harold
Marenstein in 1969, Gross surrounded himself with older, more established film
distribution figures, a decision that was well-regarded in the trade press as a contrast with
Gross’ youthful energy and inexperience. But when Cinemation’s financial difficulties
began around its uneven release schedule and rifts with filmmakers, the company’s
internal executive team began to unravel. Cinemation recorded its first year of corporate
losses in 1971-1972, and at the end of 1972 was hit by a costly hostile takeover bid by
two of its former financial counsels, Irwin Meyer and Harvey Bibicoff. The company was
able to reach a settlement and fend off the takeover attempt, but Gross was forced to buy
a majority of the company’s shares in the process.
75
In addition, the takeover attempt
derailed their intentions, announced in 1972, to sell off 275,000 shares of new stock to
help support its distribution expansion, fund future productions, and pay off outstanding
loans. By June 1973, Cinemation continued to delay the sales of shares, claiming that it
was an inauspicious time for the stock market – the failure to generate working capital
from this sale may be a primary reason for the company’s sale of the Fritz the Cat sequel
rights.
76
The postponement of the sale (rather than its outright cancellation) also allowed
180

Gross to remain secretive about Cinemation’s acquisitions and release schedule because
companies are not allowed to “tout” their operations while issuing public shares.
77
But his
demeanor more often read as cagey and paranoid, further damaging the credibility of the
company within the mainstream press.
Despite the company’s continued financial struggles, Cinemation was given a
$1.2 million loan from two different banks in February 1974. Cinemation was forced to
pledge all of its assets as collateral to the banks, but the move was still perceived as a
positive sign for the company – Frank Segers writes, “Either Manufacturers is impressed
by Cinemation’s current assets, or it has positive expectations about the company’s future
activities.”
78
The move was followed by several meetings with shareholders over the next
several months at which Gross assured them that the company would soon be profitable
again, yet the losses continued to mount. By August 1974, the financial problems were
manifested by front-office turnover; Gross replaced his loyal second-in-command Harold
Marenstein with another young, brash personality in Leonard Goldberg, a Broadway
producer who had recently been accused of “deceptive fundraising practices.”
79
Gross
also replaced his other experienced executive, Murray Kaplan, with a young VP in
Steven Rose, creating a core three-man management team with all members (Gross,
Goldberg, Kaplan) in their late twenties or early thirties. Without Marenstein’s
experience guiding Gross’ decision making, the executive leadership continued to present
an image of chaos in the front office, with quick hirings and firings of sales managers
(Harold Wiesenthal and Irwin Yablans), and, soon Goldberg’s exit within a year of his
promotion to an executive position.
181

When Cinemation began making bold announcements in the mainstream industry
press, it often positioned itself in opposition to the majors through its commitment to
theatrical exhibition as its only business outlet. In a pointed criticism directed against
Avco-Embassy, Gross claimed, “Unlike other companies we do not operate factories, we
do not make missiles, we do not run an airplane.”
80
His attack on conglomeration
included the major’s interests in ancillary markets, and their supposed neglect of the
domestic exhibitor in favor of contracts with television companies. However, by 1974,
with everything else unraveling at Cinemation, Gross even betrayed these original ideals,
selling Cinemation’s last original production, All the Kind Strangers, a Southern-set
psychological horror film about a murderous family of children seeking parental figures,
as a movie-of-the-week for ABC. The television sale was likely the only way that Gross
could produce the film (which he’d been trying to finance since acquiring the story rights
in 1971), but even with this decision, Cinemation suffered from poor timing. Steve Ross
notes that 1974 marked the end of a golden period for original TV movies, with theatrical
movies beginning to dominate airtime over made-for-television content.
81
Cinemation’s
rival companies, like New World and Crown, were finding profits in the mid-1970s not
from producing original television content, but from producing more family-friendly
productions and selling those rights to TV for enormous sums (as Corman did with Eat
My Dust [1976] and Grand Theft Auto [1977]).
In September 1975, after failing to pay back its loans from the previous year and
facing eleven separate legal actions from financial institutions, media entities, and others,
Cinemation declared bankruptcy. One year later, despite Gross’ continued persistence
that the company would find a way to recover, the entirety of Cinemation’s holdings
182

were auctioned off, with many of their films quickly purchased and re-packaged under
new titles with new cuts by rival exploitation distributors. Following the auction, in
which even the office furniture was sold, Cinemation was “virtually a shell,” and, in
contrast to his hopeful rhetoric in 1970, “Gross…was not available for comment on the
auction or his future plans.”
82

Gross stayed away from the film industry for a few years (some sources claim he
worked at a 7-11), and he eventually re-emerged with another venture, the Jerry Gross
Organization, that released a number of grindhouse hits, including Jamaa Fanaka’s
Penetentiary (1979), Lucio Fulci’s Zombie (1980), and the new title and campaign for
Meir Zarchi’s Day of the Woman / I Spit on Your Grave (1978, re-released 1981). But it
is Gross’ failures with Cinemation that are most evocative of a particular moment of
promise and letdown for independent filmmakers and distributors in the American film
industry. The product shortage of the late 1960s and early 1970s was an inspiring
industrial event, drawing out the aspirations of several independent companies who
suspected a golden opportunity to compete with commercial Hollywood fare. However,
as Yannis Tzioumakis notes, the second half of the 1970s firmly reversed these trends,
with the majors employing predatory tactics to impinge on the market shares of
independent exploitation companies, including targeting teenage audiences and saturating
drive-in theaters.
83
At the same time, rising real estate values caused many drive-in
theaters to sell their land to developers, eliminating a primary venue for exploitation
films. This shift also impacted the regional subdistributors who thrived on the drive-in
network – and when they went out of business, the independent distributors who hired
them simply stopped being paid. Without these exhibition strongholds, independent
183

companies were forced to adapt, typically by increasing the budgets and production
values on their original films, a catastrophic decision without comparable levels of
capitalization to support a failed high-budget film. Moreover, as Richard Nowell
discusses, independent producers increasingly began tailoring their productions to a
specific template that would make them viable to be sold to the majors, rather than
distribution through independent channels – avoidance of the X-rating, appeal to women,
etc.
84
The desire for major distribution among independent producers serves to affirm
Balio’s tonnage thesis, forcing the struggling independent distributor to release only films
that have been rejected by the majors. Although the independents recognized that
distribution was the key to becoming a successful major film studio, this facet of the film
industry remained the most tightly controlled by the established major studios. By 1978,
94% of the distribution market was controlled by major companies, their subsidiaries, and
mini-major Avco-Embassy.
85
Despite the product gap of the early 1970s, no viable threat
was ever made to the major’s control over the national distribution networks.
When Melvin Van Peebles notes that “the Man has an Achilles pocket book,” as I
excerpted in the epigraph for this chapter, he is suggesting that greed is the weak spot of
the establishment, that the major studios only reluctantly recognized the black film
audience following the success of Sweet Sweetback when they came to realize their
economic power. However, the history of Cinemation reveals that independent
companies similarly suffered from an Achilles pocket book, only theirs was less well
funded and could not support bad decision-making. Lea Jacobs asserts that in the
Classical Hollywood studio era, the gap separating A and B films was continuously
recapitulated at the level of distribution and exhibition, guaranteeing the film’s differing
184

reception patterns even if the B film was aesthetically superior.
86
Exploitation had
similarly thrived in its classical era by foregrounding its shoddy production values, and
explicitly filling a gap in the market that was an alternative to mainstream Hollywood.
During the early 1970s product shortage, the minimal presence of Hollywood films
offered an opportunity not only to enter the market with lowered competition, but to
challenge these aesthetic boundaries that Jacobs describes, and for independent
companies to release films that genuinely blurred the industrial categories. But, as we
have seen in the story of Cinemation Industries, independent companies persistently
utilized the same exploitation tactics that spawned them – rather than adapt their
marketing techniques and release patterns to the new market, Cinemation pursued the
familiar course which could not lead to attaining the “new major” status. Ultimately, only
the major studios succeeded in blurring the lines between mainstream and independent
releases: through their subsidiary releasing companies for foreign and offbeat
acquisitions, their imitation of exploitation content and marketing strategies at exorbitant
budgets, and eventually, their purchase and ancillary releases of exploitation film
libraries, the Man’s Achilles pocket book proved much more durable.
87

1
Melvin Van Peebles, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song: A Guerilla Filmmaking
Manifesto (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), 134.

2
“An Open Letter to the Producers of the World,” Variety (September 2, 1970).

3
“An Open Letter to the Producers of the World.”

4
“Cinemation Industries Inc. Is a Very Successful and Profitable Company,” Variety
(September 2, 1970).
185

5
Al Erlick, “Exhibition’s New Wellspring,” International Motion Picture Exhibitor, Vol.
83, No. 17 (September 2, 1970).

6
David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and
Vietnam, 1970-1979 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000), 3.

7
Cook, 9.

8
The basic tenets of these arguments can be found in Cook; Jon Lewis, Hollywood
v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New
York: NYU Press, 2000); Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-
and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998);
and many others.

9
Gary Edgerton, American Film Exhibition and an Analysis of the Motion Picture
Industry’s Market Structure, 1963-1980 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1983).

10
Chris Poggiali, “Interview with Samuel M. Sherman” (November 5, 2009),
http://templeofschlock.blogspot.com/2009/11/interview-with-samuel-m-sherman.html.

11
Arlene Farber, “Remembering Jerry – Jerry Gross January 26, 1940 – November 19,
2002,” http://www.pbase.com/arlene/jerry_gross

12
Stephen Thrower, Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents
(London: FAB Press, 2008), 182.

13
Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford, Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through
the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square (New York: Fireside, 2002), 117.

14
Cook, 40-42, among others.

15
Bill Landis and Jimmy McDonough, “Hillbilly Heaven,” Film Comment
(November/December 1985), 56.

16
Landis and Mcdonough, 56.

17
Some of Ripps’ 1960s screenings of Poor White Trash paired the film with another re-
titled acquisition, Roger Corman’s Southern-set anti-racism film, The Intruder (1962),
featuring William Shatner as a hypocritical, race-baiting bigot. According to Corman,
The Intruder was the only film he made in his career that lost money, and it led him to
conclude that social problems could not be explicitly addressed in low-budget films
without elements such as humor and horror alongside. However, Ripps was able to turn a
profit on Corman’s failure, acquiring the film and transforming it into Shame for inner
city markets, and I Hate Your Guts for Southern drive-ins, titles that demonstrate a
186

demographic ambivalence around the racial tensions depicted in the film, and a
maximization of profits outside of a uniform political ideology. As Kevin Heffernan
observes, industry experts continually debated whether films dealing with “the race
issue” were more marketable as prestigious social problem films or exploitation films –
given Ripps’ successful campaigns, the answer, at least in the early 1960s, is clearly the
latter. See Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the
American Movie Business, 1953-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 207; for
more on the industrial history of The Intruder, also see Landis and Clifford, 90-92.

18
Landis and Clifford, 119.

19
Landis and McDonough, 57.

20
Landis and McDonough, 57.

21
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-
1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 96-135.

22
Richard Meyers, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (Piscataway,
NJ: New Century Publishers, 1983), 56.

23
“Film Review: Teenage Mother,” Variety (October 2, 1968).

24
“Jerry Gross Swerves From Sexpo; Calls Policy Part AIP, Part-Rugoff,” Variety
(August 4, 1971).

25
Jim Hillier and Aaron Lipstadt, “The Economics of Independence: Roger Corman and
New World Pictures 1970-1980,” Movie 31/32 (Winter 1986), 49.

26
Hillier and Lipstadt, 46.

27
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21.

28
Levine, 42.

29
Stuart Byron, “Don Rugoff: Ballyhoo with a Harvard Education,” Film Comment 11.3
(May/June 1975), 25.

30
Byron, 27. Rugoff ultimately did cut the film down to 168 minutes, but he wisely
suggested these cuts after the purchase of the film was complete, and made all the
changes with Bergman’s approval.

31
Byron, 24.

187

32
Fred Olen Ray, The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1991), 2.

33
Ray, 16.

34
Robert J. Landry, “Trade Curious Re Jerry Gross” Variety (September 2, 1970).

35
Lee Beaupre, “Rizzoli Folds U.S. Sales Setup: Latest Defeat of Alien Showman, Per
Rank, Toho, Pathe Histories,” Variety (October 18, 1967).

36
“Riot-Prone ‘Africa Addio’ Endangers Rizzoli Prestige, But No Walk-Out,” Variety
(September 21, 1966).

37
Quoted in Landis and Clifford, 163.

38
Landis and Clifford, 165. See also “Africa Blood and Guts: Premiere Blurb,” Variety
(August 19, 1970).

39
See Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Mark Betz, “Art, exploitation,
underground,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste, ed.
Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro Reboll, Julian Stringer, and Andy Willis (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), 202-222; and Joan Hawkins, Cutting Edge: Art-
Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000).

40
Betz, 204

41
See Wilinsky (2001) and Barbara Wilinsky, “‘A Thinly Disguised Art Veneer
Covering a Filthy Sex Picture’: Discourses on Art Houses in the 1950s,” Film History 8.2
(1996): 143-158.

42
David Friedman, A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1990), 100.

43
For more on colonialist cinema, see Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

44
David Church, “From Exhibition to Genre: The Case of Grind-House Films,” Cinema
Journal 50.4 (Summer 2011), 18-19.

45
Elena Gorfinkel, “Tales of Times Square: Sexploitation’s Secret History of Place,” in
Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image, ed. John David Rhodes and Elena
Gorfinkel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 57.

188

46
Stuart Byron, “CBS Bids For ‘Baby Doll,’ But Kazan’s ‘No Cuts’ Edict Scorches Film
Sale,” Variety (October 29, 1969).

47
Gregory A. Waller, “Auto-Erotica: Some Notes on Comic Softcore Films for the
Drive-In Circuit,” Journal of Popular Culture 17.2 (Fall 1983), 135.

48
Addison Verrill, “Porno Exhibs: Habitual Gyps; Shanghai Film Rents, Prints,” Variety
(May 5, 1971).

49
Jon Hartmann, “The Trope of Blaxploitation in Critical Responses to ‘Sweetback,’”
Film History 6.3 (Autumn 1994), 382-404.

50
Melvin Van Peebles, 133.

51
The film even spawned a documentary/homage feature film, Baadasssss! (2003),
directed Melvin’s son, Mario Van Peebles.

52
Van Peebles, 29.

53
Tony Safford and William Triplett, “Haile Gerima: Radical Departures to a New Black
Cinema,” Journal of the University Film and Video Association 35.2 (Spring 1983), 61.

54
Cook, 260.

55
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 104.

56
Kevin Thomas, “Movie Reviews: ‘Blood,’ ‘Skin’ Twin Bill,” Los Angeles Times (May
7, 1971).

57
Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2003), 63-84.

58
Thrower, 186.

59
Landis and Clifford, 119-120.

60
Ed Lowry, “Dimension Pictures: Portrait of a ‘70s Independent,” Velvet Light Trap 22
(1986), 65-74.

61
Thrower, 186.

62
Thomas, “Movie Reviews: ‘Blood,’ ‘Skin’ Twin Bill.”

63
Thrower, 190.
189

64
Robert J. Landry, “Krantz, Bakshi Resent X on ‘Cat’: Call Stern Rigid, Jerry Gross
Leering,” Variety (May 10, 1972).

65
Will Tusher, “Fritz the Cat Spawns $100 Million B.O. Take,” Hollywood Reporter
(October 23, 1973).

66
“Cinemation Industries Locked In Legal Battle With Producers Of Softcore ‘The
Cheerleaders,’” Variety (December 18, 1974).

67
Lee Beaupre, “How to Distribute a Film,” Film Comment 13.4 (July/August 1977), 48.

68
“Cinemation Sets 3 Pic Summer Schedule For Targeted Markets,” Variety (April 10,
1974).

69
Frank Segers, “Porno Recoil Write-Offs: Cinemation Is One With Pain,” Variety
(August 15, 1973).

70
Suzanne Mary Donahue, American Film Distribution: The Changing Marketplace
(Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 134.

71
Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 231.

72
Landis and Clifford, 119; Thrower, 186.

73
William Condon, “Exploitation Movie Lives! An Interview with Irwin Yablans,”
Millimeter (March 1979), 122.

74
Landis and Clifford, 119.

75
“Cinemation Defeats ‘Takeover Attempt’ Of Meyer & Bibicoff, Ex-Consultants,”
Variety (December 27, 1972).

76
Frank Segers, “Porno Recoil Write-Offs: Cinemation Is One With Pain,” Variety
(August 15, 1973).

77
“Jerry Gross Wearing Hush-Puppies, But Peter Fonda’s ‘Transfer’ Is Expected,”
Variety (July 4, 1973).

78
Frank Segers, “Cinemation’ Borrows $1.2 Mil From 2 Banks For Working Fund,”
Variety (February 13, 1974).

79
“Young Len Goldberg From Legit Looms In Cinemation Calculations,” Variety
(August 21, 1974).
190

80
“Cinemation’s Gross Raps Rival Distribs,” Variety (November 5, 1970).

81
Steve Ross, “The Symposium on Movie Business and Finance,” Journal of the
University Film Association 28.1 (Winter 1976), 41.

82
“Cinemation Films Auctioned,” Variety (March 30, 1976).

83
Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 193.

84
See Richard Nowell, “‘The Ambitions of Most Independent Filmmakers’: Indie
Production, the Majors, and Friday the 13th (1980),” Journal of Film and Video 63.2
(Summer 2011), 28-44.

85
Martin Anderson, “State Regulation of Motion Picture Distributors,” Pace Law
Review, Paper 112 (1982), 107 (fn).

86
Lea Jacobs, “The B Film and the Problem of Cultural Distinction,” Screen 33 (Spring
1992), 1-13.

87
This chapter would have been much more difficult to write without the labor of Chris
Poggiali on his invaluable blog, Temple of Schlock. From March 8 to March 15, 2010, he
posted a series of pages including trade articles on Cinemation Industries, a poster gallery
of their releases, and a meticulous filmography outlining various titles and changes to
properties. I thank him for his painstaking work, which provided the inspiration for me to
begin thinking seriously about this company.

191
POSTSCRIPT: CINEMA OF REGRESSION: GRINDHOUSE AND THE LIMITS
OF THE SPECTATORIAL IMAGINARY

Few films in recent memory have baffled Hollywood studio executives as
thoroughly as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007), the double-
feature ode to and elegy on subaltern 1960s and 1970s cinemas. With the name-brand
recognition of established and successful filmmakers, the casting of recognizable and
bankable movie stars, and a major studio budget and marketing campaign, Grindhouse
was poised to be at least as commercially successful as Tarantino’s previous paeans to
exploitation subgenres, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), and ideally
expected to situate the Weinstein brothers (and their newly founded independent
company) back atop the industry food chain. When the film opened to box office
disappointment (despite relatively positive critical reviews), the question emerged: What
prevented this film from reaching an audience? Many cultural commentators blamed
either the inflated running time or a generalized public misunderstanding regarding the
unusual structure and experimental formal elements, arguments that assume both an
audience too “square” to accept the transgressions of the film, and simultaneously an
audience not savvy enough to interpret the film’s calculated aesthetic and methodology.
In this concluding chapter I will argue that the film’s public failure is not the
result of an audience that was insufficiently savvy, but that its failure can be attributed to
a uniquely sophisticated spectatorial response. The formal shortcomings of Grindhouse
lie in its anachronistic misappropriation of exploitation cinema aesthetics, a problem that
is posed by its very calculatedness. While the film utilizes a bifurcated double feature
structure and employs distanciation techniques in the self-conscious foregrounding of its
192
materiality, both of these strategies exemplify an intentionality that is absent from the
trash cinema that the filmmakers wish to evoke. The problematic anachronism exists in
the gap between the bygone films and filmmaking practices to which they refer and the
means by which these formal strategies are recycled and repositioned in Grindhouse.
Although the film goes to significant lengths to recreate memories of subcultural
cinematic imagery and experience, the space between the filmic and the profilmic
registers constitutes a radically altered relationship between the spectator and the
narrative.
For purveyors of “paracinema,” a broad term that encompasses the exploitation
subgenres that Grindhouse recollects and reproduces, this crucial interstitial space
underlies a textual openness that defines paracinematic narratives.
1
While paracinema
produces pleasure in the individual imaginative practices of viewers and thrives on the
ability of spectators to insert themselves in textual gaps, Tarantino and Rodriguez
unwittingly close these gaps. Sealing the text with a pedagogical reflection on cinematic
history and biographical intentionality rendered through the film’s marketing campaign,
the film presents a nostalgic longing for a lost cinematic past. In this retroactive device of
memorialization, Grindhouse constructs a cinema of stasis, creating a spectatorial
relationship that places palpable limitations on the cinemagoer’s imaginary possibilities.
In its attempt to recreate a medium-specific cinematic experience, Grindhouse situates
itself in opposition to the media trend toward convergence, thus demonstrating its anxiety
around technological change and new mechanisms of participatory interactivity.

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Keeping it Reel: Nostalgia for Authentic Experience
In a contemporary Hollywood culture defined by the remake, Grindhouse exists
in a liminal space. Like a typical remake, the film looks back toward specific films in
both its aesthetic strategies and directly in lines of dialogue; but it departs from the
remake in its attempt to recreate a specific theatrical experience. Although Tarantino and
Rodriguez take unique directorial approaches which will be addressed individually later
in the chapter, the overarching concept that unites the double bill is one of cinematic time
travel. The film attempts to replicate the feeling of being in low-budget 1960s theaters
(“grindhouses”), watching exploitation double bills in a specific historical time and
space, thus transporting 21
st
century cinemagoers from contemporary multiplexes and
outdoor malls to grimy, urban, gone-but-not-forgotten viewing spaces.
2
The double
feature presents Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a zombie action film with militaristic
overtones, and Tarantino’s Death Proof, a vehicular horror film that is itself bisected into
two distinct movements depicting a stuntman serial killer terrorizing different groups of
young women with his “death proofed” car. Grindhouse incorporates additional elements
that give the experiential sense of memorialized filmgoing practices in addition to the
nostalgic films themselves. In its original theatrical release, the filmmakers included
additional textual features beyond the two narratives, including preview cards to replicate
1970s theaters ads for coming attractions and feature presentations, mock advertisements
for concessions, vintage animated clips that provide warnings of adult content, and four
trailers (for nonexistent films) that seek to valorize other unrepresented exploitation
genres.
3
Thus the narrative strategy of the film eschews traditional artistic notions of
continuity. Rather than situating narrative unity in terms of the individual cinematic texts,
194
the film privileges an alternative locus of narrative unity through the historically and
(sub)culturally specific recreation of theatrical experience.
4

In addition to structuring the film as an exhibitory presentation of the past, the
directors use formal strategies to further place it outside the contemporary viewing
context. Through the use of digitally created blips, burns, and scratches in the film print,
the filmmakers replicate an aged and manhandled material object. This aesthetic of decay
serves an ironic function as it simultaneously reminds the spectator that this film is
referring to films from another time period, but also positions itself as grounded in a
voyeuristic present moment because the imitated film prints have been viewed so often as
to appear corroded. In a companion book released along with Grindhouse, the filmmakers
provide production notes, script material, and behind-the-scenes explications of specific
shots and special effects, and they discuss their intentions in creating this putrefied
material look in decidedly experiential terms. Tarantino states, “We wanted to put it all
[trailers, candy ads, ratings warnings] together as a show to kind of give the whole
audience the exact experience. Almost like a grindhouse ride. You get to go into a safe
multiplex and watch this instead of a dangerous grindhouse where you take your life in
your hands.”
5
In this statement Tarantino nominates himself as the arbiter of grindhouse
culture, as he is seemingly the only one daring enough to brave the authentic grindhouse
experience. By creating this distinction between Grindhouse and the “safe multiplex” on
the one hand, and the dangerous originary exploitation subculture on the other, Tarantino
inadvertently positions the experience of Grindhouse as necessarily inauthentic. The
attempt to create a multifarious theatrical revue becomes a half-hearted joy ride down
(someone else’s) memory lane.
195
It is his notion of “the exact experience” that most clearly crystallizes the
particular register of nostalgia enacted by the project, and the postmodern nature of this
retroactive pastiche. Often theorized as an erasure of history, postmodern nostalgia is
typically accused of evoking the past through stylistic flourish alone, and evacuating the
past of its import. The Tarantino-phenomenon in 1990s American cinema is perhaps the
best mainstream cultural visualization of certain aspects of this Jamesonian theorization
on the condition of postmodernity. The rampant allusionism, incessant pop-culture laden
banter, and insistent collapse of high and low cultures make Pulp Fiction (1994) an
essential representation of post-modern film aesthetics.
6
Of course postmodernism has
also been claimed by certain theorists as a liberatory sensibility that incorporates the
critique of capital through its tacit acknowledgement of the emptiness and banality of
commercial economies and products. In this way the deployment of nostalgia is a strategy
by which history can be reconsidered, and the seriousness of conservative histories
undercut.
7
However there seem to be just as many critics who are unnerved and
threatened by the postmodern condition, who identify it as a response to a crisis in the
global media industry and the rapid technological and economic changes that threaten to
displace cinema as a dominant visual form. Christopher Sharrett articulates this
viewpoint, writing:
Allusionism continues to be a central strategy by which the commercial
entertainment industry conceals its exhaustion and attempts to protect its
legitimacy. Suggesting to the spectator that we are all in on the joke, that the
cinema apparatus needs to be exposed, that genre conventions need to be ripped
apart is central to rebuilding enlightened false consciousness. The emphasis on
allusionism is also crucial to furthering the conservative agenda of the new
cinema.
8

196
In addition to changes in the cinema-industrial complex, this critique of postmodernism
stems from a threatened Marxist ideology that sees a transformation of the radical
potential of formalist properties in art. While the foregrounding of the cinematic
apparatus was once utopically considered a revolutionary act of exposure, the cooptation
of modernist techniques in the contemporary corporate-media landscape has shown the
ideologically flexible nature of such artistic practices. The nostalgia evident in
postmodern cinema seems to address, in addition to an idealized past, a potentiality that
no longer exists for art to seriously engage political discourse in contemporary media.
Unlike other examples of the retro-cinema that featured prominently in the 1990s (such
as Unforgiven [1992] or Saving Private Ryan [1994]), Tarantino’s nostalgia is
noteworthy in that he presents a romanticized time period that occurred less than twenty
years before the film’s production. In this sense Tarantino’s nostalgia is expressing a
historical or cultural moment of which he was a constituent part.
The blurred distinctions between cinema and memory that characterize the
Grindhouse project are present throughout Tarantino’s films. But his earlier use of
allusion, reference, and pastiche from Pulp Fiction to Kill Bill is limited to otherwise
closed and formally sealed cinematic texts. Although he is often noted for his narrative
experimentation incorporating achronological plot structures and jaggedly intersecting
story lines, seemingly without ideological motivation, these techniques are more likely to
produce spectatorial pleasure rather than displeasure. The once jarring and dour effects of
modernist formal experimentation transform with postmodernism into playfulness and
levity. When the viewer is able to re-assemble the pieces of a Tarantino story, she feels a
sense of inclusion by “figuring out” a film’s formal operations, and a feeling of
197
accomplishment by restoring the film to a feeling of wholeness (which it may have
lacked if the events were presented sequentially). Indeed it is the explicit intention of the
film that spectators should put the pieces together, granting the viewer a false sense of
empowerment. The self-conscious formalism is not aimed at a modernist revelation of the
apparatus to create aesthetic disjuncture; here classical harmony remains the disguised
goal. Grindhouse does not deviate from this formula, employing the same tropes of
separation through the creation of two distinctive films only to ultimately restore unity
through the double feature format and the employment of certain characters who cross
over and appear in both films. The creation of a singular universe that unites the events of
the disparate films posits a synergy within the double bill that belies an allegiance to the
economics of exploitation cinema. In this format, the history is self-contained; the
allusions move beyond playful reference to become intrinsic to narrative continuity. In
addition, with the reclaiming of exhibition over text as the basis for nostalgia, the
directors elide the central appeal of their revision: they do not attempt a simulation of
liveness, or allow for varying spectatorial positions, and thus create a film that is a
hermetically sealed environment, a time capsule that does not adequately distinguish
itself from Tarantino’s previous allusionism.
Tarantino’s use of nostalgia is rooted not in historical memory but in purely
cinematic memory circulating around cinema and his own unique cinematic experience, a
characteristic to which Sharrett alludes in defining “the narrowness” of his aesthetic.
9

Tarantino’s valorization of this prior cinematic era exemplifies a central insight about the
evolution of authenticity since Benjamin’s influential theorization in the 1930s about the
loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction.
10
Benjamin argues that mechanical
198
reproduction causes the unique art object to be decontextualized, and eliminates the
distance individuals have from objects, which grants them their vaunted status as valued
artifacts. However in a contemporary moment when digital reproduction and new media
has even further challenged the authenticity of the art object, the now traditional
mechanical reproduction attains its own aura. As Andreas Huyssen writes, “Benjamin’s
famous argument about the loss or decay of aura in modernity was only half of the story:
the argument omitted that modernization itself created the auratic effect to begin with.
Today, it is digitalization that makes the ‘original’ photograph auratic.”
11
This regressive
bestowal of auratic status explains the foregrounding of filmic materiality in Grindhouse,
as 35mm film production and projection signifies a waning authenticity. Grindhouse in
fact represents a crucial example demonstrating this auratic shift because of the film’s
focus on the past through a lens of decay and disuse. Despite its mechanical reproduction,
the decay of cinema is the aspect that renders it unique, the death that signifies life. While
the negative of a film print is endlessly reproducible, the individual scratches on a
particular film print maintain the auratic function. They possess what Laura Marks refers
to as “accidental aura.”
12
But if the appeal of decay in cinema is, as Marks suggests,
dependent on a bodily identification with the image, then the digitalization of decay
implies an increasingly body-less spectator.
Tarantino and Rodriguez attempt to combine the valorization of authenticity
through decay with an attempt to create a living document that embodies the exhibitory
authenticity of film spectatorship. However, by granting an object this singular aura, one
is inherently distancing it from the animate world. Huyssen describes the unavoidably
conservative register of nostalgia with the observation that nostalgia is necessarily a
199
counterpoint (if not directly opposed) to progress, thus it must be seen in a dialectical
relationship with modernization and technology.
13
When nostalgia for exploitation
cinema is formulated as static and unchanging, the original 1960s and 1970s cinematic
texts take on elements of the museal. In many ways this is a fitting shift because of
Tarantino’s other public role, that of a film festival curator. Tarantino has programmed
festivals of esoteric and underground films in Austin, Texas over the last ten years, and
he curated a “grindhouse” festival in Los Angeles’ New Beverly Cinema specifically in
conjunction with the release of Grindhouse in March and April of 2007. Tarantino’s
skills as a curator are undeniable, as he is able to consistently forage through the ruins of
cinematic history and uncover some of its forgotten treasures. The festival format is
ideally suited to his enthusiastic recreation of exhibitory contexts, as well as his noted
penchant for allusion and pastiche. As a filmmaker, Tarantino’s style can produce an
unsettling awkwardness, as in the genre hybridity and stylistic confusion in Kill Bill; but
Tarantino’s eclectic taste in films and his ability to unearth the obscure are singularly
positive qualities in a curator. In addition, he highlights the museal aspects of film history
by focusing on some of the documentary qualities in fiction films, and film’s ability to
represent specific histories in often unintentional ways. In a Los Angeles Times article on
his film festival, he noted how many of the films he presented were shot in Los Angeles,
foregrounding the particularly “anthropological” qualities they offer. He says, “In
mainstream films, especially in the 1980s, the Los Angeles you saw wasn't the real one; it
was a character with this back-lot sort of atmosphere. They tried to luxuriate it. In
exploitation films, you see what the place really looked like, you see the bars and mom-
and-pop restaurants.”
14
Tarantino supports his defense of exploitation authenticity with
200
the comparison to 1980s inauthenticity. The question remains though to what extent
authenticity is possible when it is not threatened by obsolescence, and, perhaps more
importantly, whether authenticity can be deliberately encoded into a text, or if it is
fundamentally bound up with the accidental and organic.

Paracinema, Third Meaning, and the Question of the Author
Much has been written about nostalgia in the cinema by Frederic Jameson and
others, often with arguments that focus on the socio-political valence of the texts, and
assessing the extent to which texts can be characterized as conservative or progressive in
their relationship to history. Many of these films, including the titles cited above, tend
toward the mainstream American equivalent to British heritage films, either representing
an elegiac past, or problematizing an elegiac past that ultimately reaffirms the historical
status quo. These films are aimed at high-brow audiences both through the subject matter
of the narrative and the cultural caché surrounding the auteurs who generally present
them. It is in this sense that Grindhouse represents an interesting intervention in the area
of retro-cinema, as well as a study in contradictions. Tarantino and Rodriguez are
undoubtedly recognized as auteurist filmmakers who represent specific brand identities,
generally stamping their names and individual stylistic flourishes in each of their films.
Predictably, the marketing of Grindhouse emphasized their authorial roles. The film was
produced with an immense budget and potent advertising campaign. But the films to
which Grindhouse alludes in its references and nostalgically represents fall outside the
mainstream, and could even be positioned as oppositional to the mainstream. It is thus
important to consider the centrality of authorship and the presence of cultural acumen in a
201
project that is so closely linked to ideas of pedagogy and the education of mainstream
audiences on an unfamiliar (and transgressive) mode of cinema.
This irreverent blending of high and low cultural registers is symptomatic of
Tarantino’s oeuvre. Throughout his films, Tarantino has littered low-culture references
within films that seem otherwise aimed at high culture audiences: Pulp Fiction notably
garnered its first international attention as the winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes
Film Festival, and Tarantino has since headed a jury at Cannes. In this cultural duality
that sees the previously outsider art being uprooted and imported to mainstream
presentations, the question of access and the potential for the transgressive becomes
central.
Drawing from cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, Jeffrey Sconce rightly notes the
necessity of double access in order to understand this bifurcation of high and low cultural
referents. Forcing viewers to embody a cultural and aesthetic double consciousness,
contemporary films that refer retroactively to displaced cinemas demand a specific class
reading that accounts for the embrace of trash cinema from the perspective of high art.
However, without this outsider perspective, where does that situate academic inquiries
into these films? Sconce openly questions the veracity of the academic claim that
paracinematic films engender politically resistant possibilities when some of the texts in
question are politically reprehensible. He asks the provocative question, “[I]s the ‘ironic’
reading of a ‘reactionary’ text necessarily a ‘progressive’ act?”
15
Interestingly, in
Grindhouse, the ironic readings are performed within the text itself by the filmmakers,
constructing a new discursive relationship between academic and object. I would argue
that it is more productive to reformulate the question with reference to Grindhouse, and
202
cynically ask, is the ‘progressive’ reading of an ‘ironic’ text necessarily a ‘regressive’
act?
The political potential of the original paracinematic films that Grindhouse evokes
is challenging to interrogate primarily because of the complicated relationship they
present with respect to irony and earnestness, a slippery spectrum that relies on a
discussion of authorial intentionality. Like the theaters in which they appeared,
grindhouse films were notable primarily for their low-budget character and aesthetic of
squalor. In fact, this economy of means is essential to the active participatory level of
spectatorship that the films engendered. With an insignificant budget, scant production
schedules, and occasionally technical incompetence, 1960s and 1970s exploitation films
often embody a pathology of artful failure that invites genuine audience inclusion in the
narrative through the production of excess. As Sconce argues, paracinematic directors are
not seen as individualist auteurs realizing a grand artistic vision, but rather “eccentrics”
operating under significant limitations and restrictions, decidedly distancing the product
from the filmmakers’ intentions. Sconce writes:
While the academy prizes conscious transgression of conventions by a filmmaker
looking to critique the medium aesthetically and/or politically, paracinematic
viewers value a stylistic and thematic deviance born, more often than not, from
the systematic failure of a film aspiring to obey dominant codes of cinematic
representation.
16

Sconce argues here that there is a pointed difference between “conscious transgression”
and accidental transgression. The former is rooted in traditional philosophies of artistic
unity and a calculated, if not harmonious, relationship between form and content, while
the latter, at least for the paracinematic community, represents a more authentic break
from mainstream codes because the excessive style is not indebted to the diegesis. In an
203
essay that generally pits high-brow aesthetic reception against paracinematic reception
(and consequently academia against trash cinema), Sconce argues, “Whereas aesthete
interest in style and excess always returns the viewer to the frame, paracinematic
attention to excess seeks to push the viewer beyond the formal boundaries of art.”
17
This
attempt to create expansive cinema beyond the frame determines paracinema as a
methodology that transcends both a generic formula and an economic model. Although
Sconce lists the wide range of films that may comprise a list of paracinematic texts, they
are not linked by an aesthetic iconography, or defined by some urtext – they are identified
by a reception strategy. Sconce writes, “Paracinema is thus less a distinct group of films
than a particular reading protocol, a counter-aesthetic turned subcultural sensibility
devoted to all manner of cultural detritus.”
18

While Grindhouse can be symptomatically read as a contemporary paracinematic
text through its mobilization of the aesthetics and narrative sensibility of the films, the
reading protocols it engenders are contrapuntal to the reading strategies described above.
In Robert Rodriguez’s half of the double-bill, he is seemingly more interested than
Tarantino in reproducing an accurate and authentic grindhouse look, but in the process,
he undercuts the empowering reading protocols of paracinema. Through his overt
authorial intentionality, Rodriguez disables the viewer’s imaginary possibilities and
positions spectators as passive, operating in a more classical mode of interpreting texts
through the rubric of artistic unity. In the Grindhouse companion book, Rodriguez details
the ways in which his team of digital artists replicated the aesthetics of aging film stock,
many of whom performed tests on actual film stock and analyzed the results. The irony in
these laborious experiments to create authentic digital recreations is that the test material
204
is what in fact constitutes the film itself. Considering that they shot Grindhouse on 35mm
film (not digital video), it remains difficult to determine exactly what benefit digital after-
effects offer in this case if the primary goal is authenticity. Perhaps the answer is related
to Rodriguez’s emphatic claim that these digital effects of aging film are not intended to
be deployed arbitrarily – they must serve a purpose in the diegesis.
19
Thus in a Planet
Terror sequence with a lascivious military prison guard (played by Tarantino) harassing
the female protagonist of the film (Cherry Darling, played by Rose McGowan), the color
switches to a red hue imitating an old reel’s faded color balance. For Rodriguez this
formal shift serves a double purpose: it both maintains the “ride” aspect of the film’s
conceit, keeping viewers immersed in the 1970s experience, and serves to manifest the
sexual energy of the scene and perhaps Cherry’s rising ire. For Rodriguez, it is essential
that the aesthetic of filmic decay convey meaning for the development of story and
character beyond the experiential project of the overall double feature, an absurd notion if
the pleasure of film decay relies on the accident.
Based on the levels of textual meaning Roland Barthes delineates in his essay
“The Third Meaning,” Barthes would place the meanings set forth in this scene under the
frameworks of the first meaning, the “informational level,” and the second meaning, the
“symbolic level.”
20
The informational level of meaning encompasses the realm of
communication, such that the scene represents a particular “message” which establishes
the relationship between characters and the events of the narrative. The symbolic level of
meaning accounts for issues of signification wherein modes of semiotic or ideological
analysis can be mobilized to interpret what the scene means, essentially a strategy by
which the analyst discerns allegorical levels of meaning. For Barthes, these two meanings
205
work together to intellectualize images on a basic level and determine implied meanings.
These levels essentially comprise the form and content of art, with the second level using
the form to determine the content, and thus creating a closed chain of meanings.
But in this essay, Barthes asks the question, “Is this all?” a remark that aspires to
account for the possibilities of spectatorship (and discourse) beyond implied meaning.
21

The answer to this question lies in his formulation of the third meaning, the absent and
accidental structures in a text that challenge semiotic labor and the search for meaning. In
the general post-semiotic turn Barthes took in his later theoretical work, the politics of
signification are dubious, while the fissures in a text, the gaps that can create pleasure,
take on greater importance. In a discussion Barthes’ later writings, Dana Polan argues
that Barthes shifted his opinion on the distance engendered by Brechtian theatricality;
Polan infers, “[T]his fragmentation leads not to an alienation effect, an analytic distance,
but to a fetishized involvement. Any, every watching of a scene by an audience
establishes representation, involvement in spectacle rather than critical awareness.”
22
As
Barthes attempts to extricate himself from fruitless “critical awareness,” the third
meaning becomes a key term for the level at which communication is unintentional;
moreover these “obtuse meanings” are “in excess.” He writes, “It seems to me to open
the field of meaning totally, i.e. infinitely. I even accept, for this obtuse meaning, the
word’s pejorative connotation: the obtuse meaning seems to extend beyond culture,
knowledge, information.”
23

Indeed the third meaning is an extremely useful lens through which to imagine the
ways paracinematic reading strategies function. In the same way that paracinephiles are
careful to avoid being construed as mocking or undermining the film, Barthes asserts that
206
the third meaning is not intended to subvert or refute the symbolic meaning, merely to
account for excess and the layers that cannot be theorized intellectually through
signification. The insertion of third meanings occurs “where language and articulated
metalanguage cease.”
24
Although Barthes uses stills from Eisenstein films to exemplify
his levels of meaning, paracinema is ideally suited to the third meaning for its own excess
of the accidental. Unlike the taste distinctions enacted in post-modern self-reflexive
posturings toward earlier texts, the reflexivity of paracinema is unintentional; it is an
authenticity attained through failure. The spectatorial pleasure elicited by paracinema is a
pleasure of recognizing the poetic sublime in the incidental cut and the equivocal gesture,
the enigmatic performance and the misplaced object. The meanings of these elements are
extratextual in the sense that they are unaddressed within the diegesis, but paracinema not
only invites these elements to remain in the film – it foregrounds them, often at the
expense of narrative cohesion.
One might assume then that Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a zombie film that revels
in subaltern cinematic tropes and character types, would offer ample excess from which
to extract third meanings. However, as I have indicated, this is not the case. Where the
accidental jump in a film reel would certainly apply to a Barthesian third meaning in its
typical paracinematic exhibition context, here it is limited to solely symbolic meanings,
as during the opening credit striptease when the inserted reel jumps and artificial missing
frames cut on the beat to replicate a stylized music video aesthetic. Cinematic grime
becomes a stylistic element rather than a fissure or spontaneous characteristic of liveness.
Later in the film during an explicit love scene between Cherry and the film’s hero, Ray
(Freddie Rodriguez), the soundtrack begins to crackle and the film visually recreates a
207
melting reel in the projector. Following a card that reads “Missing Reel,” the action
resumes with the audience having missed several critical plot points. Less an issue of
style, this directorial intervention carries a different kind of overt intentionality, with
Rodriguez historicizing the common theft of sex reels by grindhouse projectionists.
Another formal motif rooted in excess has been robbed of the possibility of transgression,
a fact that would be less distressing were it not for the obvious filmic attempts to recreate
authentic experience. But these experiences are deliberately guided at each juncture and
challenge the viewers’ attempts to imbricate themselves in a style of such tightly
controlled and logically reasoned excess. Kristin Thompson writes that the production of
excess in a film is marked as a deviation from the critical view that films represent “a
means of communication between artist and audience.”
25
For Thompson excess allows
for films to be read in terms of both the motivations of a filmmaker and the failed
motivations of a filmmaker – this is where excess deviates from style. In its authorially
motivated excess though, Grindhouse absorbs both terms, thus making it impossible to
separate the excess from the style.
The Grindhouse companion book stylistically resembles the film in its use of
grime and age as artifice. The book’s sepia-toned pages are faded in such a way as to
indicate some form of corrosion, and the edges are illustrated to seem torn and tattered.
But unlike the mystified materiality of film, the experience of a book (as opposed to an e-
book) necessarily includes a tactile component. Thus when a reader picks up this
seemingly ratty edition to then encounter glossy pages and smooth finishes, the artifice is
foregrounded in such a way as to make the attempt appear ridiculous and even
disingenuous. And from a purely economic standpoint, this would also seem to be a
208
justifiable reaction to the film itself, given the exorbitant budget, especially as compared
to the grindhouse fare that is valorized. Several critics and fans noted this paradox when
Grindhouse was released. It was Variety, the economically-savvy trade paper, which
offered the most caustic remark. In a review of the film that initially questions the
necessity of making an “authentic” exploitation film when exploitation elements have
characterized mainstream Hollywood blockbusters since the 1970s, Todd McCarthy
bitterly notes the difference between the film and its sources: “Neither early George
Romero nor the original “Gone in 60 Seconds” had seven-minute end credits scrolls
listing things such as director’s chef and greens gang bosses.”
26
The Village Voice review
also notes the filmmakers’ spending habits, referring to the film as “a digitally enhanced
homage to analogue grime…supercharged to the Weinstein account.”
27
The sense of
waste that pervades these reviews explicates a certain expectation that is not met in the
way the film approaches the 1970s cinema it addresses. Michael Goodwin recognized
this feature of exploitation in 1975, writing, “Exploitation films need to be light and fast,
which is to say cheap; the expensive ones hardly ever come off.”
28
If we view the appeal
of paracinema in terms of its embrace of decay and failure, perhaps the disappointment of
Grindhouse is in the artificiality of its decay, in its failure to fail (organically).

Erewhon: Timelessness, Technophobia, Technophilia

Grindhouse uses the past not only as an homage to paracinema, but also as a
counterpoint to the convergence of media outside the theater, and the dwindling screen
sizes of laptops and iPods. The film embodies a contradiction that evinces palpable
anxiety around contemporary media shifts and the increasingly apocalyptic warnings of
the death(s) of cinema. Beyond the artificial decay and material loss presented on screen,
209
the sense of imminent death is metaphorically represented in Grindhouse, through the
irrepressible zombie figure in Planet Terror, and the aging stuntman in Death Proof. But
the film’s relationship with technology is ambivalent, expressing disdain for all things
contemporary, but simultaneously utilizing all of the tools of contemporary digital
filmmaking to express these concerns and appeal to contemporary audiences.
The overt deployment of style locates Planet Terror closer to the categorical
distinction of “high concept” than “paracinema.” Emerging out of 1970s Hollywood and
the increasingly synergistic corporate structures of conglomerated studios, high concept
does not constitute a generic definition, but organizes films based on economic factors, in
this case those that render them fundamentally sellable to the largest possible markets and
suitable to the marketing of ancillary products. Justin Wyatt writes, “High concept can be
considered as a form of differentiated product within the mainstream film industry. This
differentiation occurs in two major ways: through an emphasis on style with the films,
and through an integration with marketing and merchandising.”
29
Although Grindhouse
was a box office failure, it was budgeted, marketed, and released to be, at the very least, a
modest hit. Stephen Zeitchik writes in a pre-release Variety article, “The project is a
study in contradictions: an ode to low-budget exploitation films that will be marketed as a
mainstream tentpole, opening on some 2,500 screens.”
30
This paradox between the film’s
large-scale release and its seemingly limited audience base is evident in the marketing
campaign the Weinstein Brothers organized for the film.
Assuming the name recognition of the directors and the film’s star-studded cast
would draw initial interest, the promotional materials preceding the film’s release
primarily focus on the education of potential audiences about the meaning of
210
“grindhouse” cinema. This strategy, which runs the risk of alienating the fan base already
familiar with grindhouse fare and paracinema, once again places Tarantino and
Rodriguez in the dubious position of experts, concurrently film historians and
filmmakers. While the education of the public is a crucial element in selling films that
foreground unusual material, the active sale of this material is off-putting to the most avid
pre-constituted fan base.
31
As Greg Taylor notes, the selling of official history and the
canonization of central texts is antithetical to the appeal of the cult object, which prizes
its outsider status. Taylor notes the close relationship between personal connoisseurship
and cult objects, arguing, “The cultist will not be sold culture; instead she displays her
power to choose actively among an array of cultural offerings. Yet as cultism is
inherently reactionary, cult spectators actively define themselves in relation to the
vagaries of the marketplace.”
32
Here the overt intentionality of salesmanship is similar to
the off-putting authorial deliberateness that eliminates third meanings. The paracinematic
spectator desires not only an open text rife with potential meanings, but also the
opportunity to discover that text herself.
In addition, the film education they offer in the promotional material is a
simplification, distilling specific elements of grindhouse cinema that only inform the
viewing of Grindhouse; they avoid discussing the original exhibitory context or the
appeal of multiple viewing strategies, because that is not what they present. Despite the
fact that their film is composed as a memoriam to forgotten cinema, Rodriguez in fact
disparages the earlier cinema by claiming that Grindhouse, because of its increased
budget and, presumably, advanced directorial competence, will improve upon the model.
In a discussion of traditional exploitation strategies that habitually advertise more than
211
they can in fact deliver, he says, “But the difference between our movie and the
grindhouse movies of yesteryear is that we can actually afford to make a really great
movie that is full of great characters, dialogue and story. We’re taking this classic,
forgotten genre and turning it into something big, exciting, and new.”
33
Beyond the
superficial questioning of why “characters, dialogue, and story” are so expensive, it is
important to note the distinction that Rodriguez draws in terms of technology, because
this is the other underlying paradox that determines the film’s liminal positionality.
Representing a confluence of cinematic nostalgia and 21st century technophilia,
Grindhouse manifests anxiety about the pervasive technological changes across the
media landscape, and responds to them with this attempt to marry old and new.
34

Responding to a generalized sense of impending doom for theatrical exhibition
characterized as a 20th century phenomenon, Grindhouse defines itself as an anti-
convergence text. According to Henry Jenkins, convergence can be defined as the
collision and collaboration between increasingly powerful corporate media
conglomerates, and a participatory and empowered fan community. At this intersection,
media audiences exhibit “migratory behavior,” actively moving between different texts,
and combining and recycling material often to create entirely new fan-based material out
of media source material.
35
The importance of this argument is fundamentally predicated
on the theorization of the passivity of old media spectators, contrasted with the vibrant
activity of new media consumption and convergent culture. However, as we have seen
through 1970s paracinematic viewership, this binary is flawed, positing a passive
audience merely because they are sitting in a theater. Rodriguez and Tarantino are
justified in a resistance to convergence culture and their attempt to reclaim cinematic
212
specificity and theatrical experience for contemporary audiences. However, Grindhouse
too often conforms to this flawed binary with its own forced passivity of audiences
despite the potentiality of the paracinematic meanings.
According to the marketing campaign, the only way to experience Grindhouse is
in the social environment of a movie theatre. This cinematic specificity has been
confirmed in the film’s post-theatrical life as the films were initially released as separate
DVDs, dismantling the double feature format and eliminating the additional trailer and
advertisement material. In their commitment to cinematic exhibition, Tarantino and
Rodriguez oddly resemble venerable figures such as 1950s filmmaker-entrepreneur
William Castle who used elements of showmanship and the carnivalesque to attract
people away from their television sets in another moment of media crisis. The theatrical
specificity is marketed as a novelty, offering viewers the rare item that they cannot
receive in other venues. The irony of course is that they are marketing an older version of
theatricality that was once readily available, but whose status is defined by a lack of
mainstream appreciation.
In A.O. Scott’s extremely laudatory New York Times review, he remarks on these
contradictory elements of Grindhouse’s appeal. Regarding their aesthetic as “both
broadly populist and fussily esoteric,” Scott aptly contends, “The filmmakers are at once
bad boys and grumpy old men, effortlessly adept at manipulating new-fangled gadgets
even as they sigh over the way things were in the good old days.”
36
This opinion is
perhaps best encapsulated in the final climactic sequence of Tarantino’s film, Death
Proof, which is certainly one of the most visceral and powerful car chases ever
committed to cinema. Although Tarantino toys with missing prints and material decay,
213
his half of the double-bill has a more contemporary aesthetic and narrative tone, avoiding
the hyperbolic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach Rodriguez adopts. Tarantino’s
film is more contemplative, with its roots less in the 1970s grindhouse cinema than in a
modern aesthetic of displacement. The film consists of two horror stories focused on
groups of young women, disconnected from each other except for the fact that both
groups are terrorized by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), an aging movie stunt driver bent
on murdering women with his car. The first group is killed at the film’s halfway point;
the second group kills him in the conclusion. But up until this conclusion the main point
of interest is in the art direction and prop selection that belies any sense of the time period
in which the film takes place. Most clues indicate the 1970s judging by the fashion,
hairdos, music, and vintage muscle cars, but the characters use of cellular phones hints at
a chronological collapse. The elements of time travel in the exhibitory anachronisms take
on a textual component with the portrayal of this fantasy timescape. Through the figure
of Stuntman Mike, Death Proof manifests a vague sense of loss and negative classicism –
times have certainly changed for the worse, but it is not quite clear how, and Mike’s
homicidal fantasies seem to allay his anxiety.
This anachronistic environment resists all things contemporary, immersing itself
in nostalgia. The final car chase sequence even involves a car that the girls choose to
drive because it is an identical make and color of the car from Vanishing Point (1971), so
that the nostalgia within the film is diegetically rooted in a cinematic past. The
remarkable feature of the final car chase stands in stark contrast to Rodriguez’s
technological embrace by consciously avoiding digitally manipulated effects or CGI –
this car chase is produced using the same in-camera techniques employed in the 1970s
214
classic chase sequences like those in Bullitt (1968), The French Connection (1971) and of
course Vanishing Point.
37
Unlike the painstaking detail that framed Rodriguez’s
calculated manipulations, this car chase achieves the kinetic sense of a ride that was the
filmmakers’ stated intention, and it embodies the spontaneity associated with original
1970s car chase / car crash films. But Tarantino’s contemporary sense of panic does not
allow the moment of transcendence to last long. As the car chase winds along desolated
country roads with only the occasional vintage car appearing in the frame, the most
shocking moment of the double-feature occurs when the two cars burst onto a multilane
highway filled with 21st century sedans, SUVs, and minivans. This banal setting stands
in stark contrast to the 1970s muscle cars featured up to this point. As a stand-in for the
contemporary world (and contemporary media landscape), everything appears
homogenized and soulless in comparison to the past. The highway seems to somehow
lack the integrity of the other set pieces in Death Proof, positing an authenticity gap
between then and now.
This is the first moment in Death Proof that evokes a clear sense that the film
does not take place in the past, and breaks the illusion of timelessness that it has cast to
this point. This sequence serves as an apt metaphor for the ultimately doomed nature of
this project, embodying the contradictions of the collapse of past and present, and
perhaps existing as a moment of clarity in Tarantino’s oeuvre wherein he recognizes the
possible failures of nostalgia. The modern world as represented by the highway is boring
but inevitable, and the nostalgia of country roads leading up to it is positioned as merely a
temporary solution. In Tom Gunning’s canonical work addressing the “aesthetic of
astonishment,” “the experience of assault” in early cinematic depictions of locomotives
215
creates spectatorial pleasure in the audience’s vacillation between points of verisimilitude
and points of incredulity. He writes, “The spectator does not get lost in a fictional world
and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its
fulfillment.”
38
Like Gunning’s spectators of early cinema, the crucial moment in Death
Proof is this same crash between reality and fantasy, and the giving of oneself to the
fantasy. While Gunning’s early cinema texts and Grindhouse share this emphasis on
spectatorial experience, the crucial difference to note in the one hundred year gap is
cinema’s evolving status as a technology. In the early years of cinema, the medium was a
novelty, and engagement with the cinematic spectacle demonstrated a technophilic
society excited by the changes cinema introduced. By the time of Grindhouse, cinema is
the aging technology, a dinosaur in the landscape of new media. Thus to linger on the
specificity of film exhibition as a legitimate spectacle in the present moment is to shift
the terms to technophobia, and to demonstrate anxiety rather than excitement. In terms of
the experience of film viewers, science and technology are usurped by memory and
nostalgia, and the cinema of attractions becomes a cinema of regression.

Conclusion
Given the initial emphasis on Grindhouse as an anti-convergence text marketing
theatrical experience as the only proper viewing strategy, it is not surprising that in the
fallout from its immense box office disappointment, the studio needed to rethink its
strategy. It was already slated for international release as two separate films (because
other nations do not have a double-feature tradition), and this seemed even more
desirable following its commercial failure, which was largely blamed on the extensive
216
running time. The films went on to play at the Cannes Film Festival in extended cuts as
stand-alone films, and were initially released on DVD in separate packages. Aside from
the trailer directed by Rodriguez, the three other trailers remained officially unavailable
as the studio distanced itself from the double-feature concept. (The studio did eventually
release a version of the Grindhouse on DVD as a double feature and with all of the
additional material re-inserted.) The films’ separate existence on DVD (though
temporary) epitomizes the paradoxical nature of the digitalization of film aesthetic so that
viewers now see film burns and scratches off their DVD players and onto their
televisions. But perhaps this distance from theatrical exhibition is just what the film
needed to escort it into the realm of camp, and begin inviting alternate readings and third
meanings. Through the displaced digital format, the DVDs exaggerate the inexplicability
of the “live” film effects and finally extracts some ambiguity out of the ridiculous. Indeed
it seems possible that these side effects along with the film’s box office failure give
Grindhouse its elusive credibility, and offer it the best opportunity for generating interest
from future generations of film cultists.
Given Sconce’s binaristic juxtaposition of art cinema and paracinema, he raises
many salient points, but he does not address a fundamental concern. He discusses art
cinema over time, and it is clear that artistic unity can be intentionally conceived and
successfully executed regardless of the window of reception. On the other hand
paracinema can only be reclaimed from the past, with no contemporary examples
provided by Sconce. This raises the question, is it possible for a film to be immediately
embraced as paracinema upon its release? Or is paracinema a necessarily retroactive
determination, a label that requires an account of the viewing strategies a film has
217
actually produced before positioning it as such? In Grindhouse Tarantino and Rodriguez
attempted to create a contemporary example of paracinema, but perhaps they learned that
the grindhouse is no longer located in the movie theater.
* * *
While Grindhouse remains the most high-profile pseudo-paracinematic text, there
have been a number of entries into this growing subgenre of contemporary films that
negotiate the boundaries between parody and homage with respect to older exploitation
subgenres, including blaxploitation in Black Dynamite (2009), biker movies in Dear God
No! (2011), and suburban sexploitation in Anna Biller’s Viva (2008).
39
Much can be said
about these films, especially about their relationships with film history and adaptation,
technology and medium specificity, and the transformation (and non-transformation) of
offensive racial and sexual stereotypes for new audiences. However, I would posit that
these kinds of films (and Grindhouse in particular) provide an instructive concluding note
for this dissertation on the basis of their nostalgia for the death of a particular cinema,
what Gorfinkel calls the “melancholia of obsolescence.”
40
All of the chapters in this
dissertation have been implicitly concerned with the continual, “small” deaths that
characterize the development of exploitation genres and cycles. However, although there
are moments of nostalgia in, for instance, the overtly regressive childbirth footage in
Cinemation’s Teenage Mother, most of these exploitation filmmakers had no interest in
nostalgia. Like the nomadic forty thieves admired by Dave Friedman, their business
model moved constantly forward, seeking out new taboos to exploit and new ways to
exploit them. Like the excessive credits for Tarantino and Rodriguez’s assistants on
218
Grindhouse, contemporary nostalgia for the exploitation film is a privileged position that
was rarely available for the film objects of their affection.
Although the limitations, misguided decisions, and production exorbitances have
been the focus of my treatment of Grindhouse, it does surprisingly fit with another theme
that has been visible throughout the main chapters of this project, exploitation as a site for
inadvertent education. Grindhouse, especially in its marketing campaign, appeals to
viewers as a lesson in film history – the film aspires to be a “ride” for the audience to
experience a theatrical exhibition practice that is no longer available to them. The fact
that it fails to do so certainly puts it in good company with the bad educations we’ve seen
throughout exploitation history. The white coater producers mobilized medical
knowledge and anatomical lessons as an educational ruse to smuggle in hardcore sexual
content; the savvy viewer finds pleasure as much in the deceit as in the eroticism on
screen. LSD films relocated youthful promiscuity and sexual experimentation onto the
bodies of students (and dean’s wives) and into the spaces of the college campus,
undermining the educative context of the exploitation mode of address, but still
remaining allied with the conservative attitude of moral panic and depictions of LSD as a
weapon (or, at best, a touristic diversion). And the industrial history of Cinemation
Industries, as well as the other independent distributors of exploitation in the late 1960s
and early 1970s, provided the template for content and release patterns that would be
adopted by the New Hollywood, educating the major studios on their future and
guaranteeing their own demises.
Finally, this project has been concerned since its inception with the role of
contradiction in exploitation films, polyvalence and deceit, the equivocal mode of
219
address. From Jerry Gross’ bombastic language, and his guarantees that an auction of
Cinemation’s assets would not take place the day before it occurred; to Matt Cimber’s
disambiguation about his role making white coaters in his 2011 interview with me,
despite all evidence to the contrary – as we have seen throughout this project, the
pleasure of exploitation lies in its multiplicity of meanings, and the consequent elevation
of the critic (over the author) in the absence of monolithic textual meanings. It is for this
reason that Grindhouse is such a resounding failure – it is a closed text enamored with
open texts. I have tried throughout this project to avoid their mistake and leave all of the
texts I have encountered open, the same way I found them.

1
For a definition of paracinema, see Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste,
Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36.4 (Winter 1995), 371-
393.

2
The term “grindhouse” actually derives from the mainstream Hollywood commercial
press in the frequently interesting jargon of Variety. It referred to theaters as
“grindhouses” because the double or triple features would run continuously so the (often
sleazy) films would “grind together.” For more on this etymology, see David S. Cohen,
“Back to the Old Grind,” Variety (May 30, 2005).

3
The four trailers, one by Rodriguez, and the other three by industry director buddies of
Tarantino and Rodriguez, collectively establish this group as a decidedly masculine
cohort embodying overt fan-boy enthusiasm and veiled technological and political dread.
The four trailers and directors are: “Machete” (Robert Rodriguez), “Werewolf Women of
the SS” (Rob Zombie), “Don’t” (Edgar Wright), and “Thanksgiving” (Eli Roth).

4
As a colleague reminded me, Grindhouse is not the first attempt at a free-standing film
that consists of a double feature and short elements to imitate a complete theatrical
experience, although it is the first to do so specifically with the trash cinema experience.
In Stanley Donen’s Movie Movie (1978), the director uses a similarly nostalgic approach
to recreate the Classical Hollywood theatrical exhibition of a musical double feature.

220

5
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, Grindhouse: The Sleaze-filled Saga of an
Exploitation Double Feature (New York: Weinstein Books, 2007), 12 (my italics).

6
For more on these aspects of Pulp Fiction, see Dana Polan, Pulp Fiction (BFI: London,
2000).

7
For more on these positivist claims on nostalgia as a response to Jameson’s critique, see
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989).

8
Christopher Sharrett, “End of Story: The Collapse of Myth in Postmodern Narrative
Film,” in The End of Cinema As We Know It, ed. Jon Lewis (New York: New York
University Press, 2001), 328. Sharrett is also drawing on ideas here from Peter Sloterdijk
who argues for a Marxist approach to postmodernism.

9
Sharrett, 328.

10
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Film
Theory and Criticism Fifth Edition, eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 731-751.

11
Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia,” in Globalization, ed.
Arjun Appadurai (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 67.

12
Marks, Laura, “Loving a Disappearing Image,” Cinémas, Vol. 8, No. 1-2 (Autumn
1997), 97.

13
Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23 (Spring 2006), 7.

14
Geoff Boucher, “L.A., Tarantino Style,” Los Angeles Times (March 1, 2007).

15
Sconce, 384. This hesitation to see political potential in ideologically problematic
paracinema is also given voice in Tania Modleski, “Women’s Cinema as Counterphobic
Cinema: Doris Wishman as the Last Auteur,” in Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of
Taste, Style, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 47-70.

16
Sconce, 385.

17
Sconce, 387.

18
Sconce, 372.

19
Tarantino and Rodriguez, 142-143. Rodriguez, who served as both director and
cinematographer on Planet Terror, details the painstaking process of creating the film-
decay effects, and the choices he made as to where in the narrative they were employed.

221

20
Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 42.

21
Barthes, 42.

22
Dana Polan, “Roland Barthes and the Moving Image,” October, Vol. 18 (Autumn
1981), 43.

23
Barthes, 44.

24
Barthes, 58.

25
Kristen Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Film Theory and Criticism
Sixth Edition, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), 496.

26
Todd McCarthy, “Review: ‘Grindhouse,’” Variety (April 2, 2007).

27
Nathan Lee, “Zombie Slasher Love,” Village Voice (April 10, 2007).

28
Michael Goodwin, “Velvet Vampires and Hot Mamas: Why Exploitation Films Get to
Us,” Voice Arts (July 7, 1975). Goodwin does however defend the expensive Russ Meyer
film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970).

29
Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press, 1994), 7.

30
Stephen Zeitchik, “Double Dose of New Pulp,” Variety (February 12, 2007).

31
The New Beverly theater in Los Angeles has curated monthly “grindhouse” nights for
the past several years. In the weeks leading up to the release of Grindhouse, Tarantino
was invited to program his own grindhouse festival at the theater and showcase some of
his favorite, and presumably the most influential, paracinematic films. Interestingly the
theater was only granted one screening of Grindhouse, a fact that evinces the clear
distance the film kept from its target audience.

32
Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 15.

33
Tarantino and Rodriguez, 6.

34
The anxiety is also, I believe, rooted in a crisis of masculinity. The idea for Grindhouse
supposedly emerged out of the group dynamic of male filmmakers gathering at
Tarantino’s house for boy’s nights consisting of watching movies, smoking pot, and
expressing their mutual love for cinema.

222

35
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York:
New York University Press, 2006), 2.

36
A.O. Scott, “Back to the Double Feature,” New York Times (April 6, 2007).

37
Dennis Lim calls the car chase sequence ““the most convincing old-school gesture in
all the “Grindhouse” package – an implicit rebuke to the cheesy effects in Rodriguez’s
splatter fest.” See Dennis Lim, “Review: ‘Grindhouse,’” Los Angeles Times (April 6,
2007).

38
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing
Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 121.

39
Viva and its relationship with the past is the subject of an extended article by Elena
Gorfinkel; see Elena Gorfinkel, “‘Dated Sexuality’: Anna Biller’s Viva and the
Retrospective Life of Sexploitation Cinema,” Camera Obscura 78, 26.3 (2011), 95-135.

40
Gorfinkel, 97.
223
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Animating documentary

Asset Metadata

Creator Lerner, David (author)

Core Title A taste for trash: the persistence of exploitation in American cinema, 1960-1975

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)

Publication Date 10/08/2012

Defense Date 08/20/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinemation,exploitation,grindhouse,OAI-PMH Harvest,obscenity,psychedelic,trash

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jewell, Richard B. (committee chair), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member), Modleski, Tania (committee member)

Creator Email dlerner@usc.edu,lernerd2003@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-102360

Unique identifier UC11288712

Identifier usctheses-c3-102360 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LernerDavi-1234.pdf

Dmrecord 102360

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lerner, David

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA