(Going to use euphemisms as much as possible here.)
Last weekend I saw “Behind the Green Door,” the famous 1973 porn film starring Marilyn Chambers. I know it’s famous (which is why I watched it, of course), but I don’t really see what was so great about it. A couple of guesses:
The interracial sex (with the black guy in the hilarious crotchless tights). In 1973, I suppose this would have been really shocking?
The “money shot” sequence toward the end. I’m guessing this is what the big deal was about, with the psychedelic colors and the ultra-slo-mo, um, “squirting” accompanied by those sound effects going “BONNNNNNGGGGGG! BONNNNNNGGGGGG!” Frankly, I found this part pretty darn funny, and whenever I want to get a laugh out of the jillelope (with whom I watched it) now, all I have to do is go, “BONNNGGGG!”
The film’s entire premise, with the assembled club in formal dress (at first anyway) watching the sex acts and indulging in wild self-gratification, including up-close-and-personal shots of many people who were not of the physical type one typically sees in a porn film. Honestly, this aspect of it reminded me of nothing so much as some of the more laughably solemnized bits from Eyes Wide Shut.
Anyway, I’m sure there are Dopers more knowledgeable on such matters than I am; enlighten me? What’s the big deal about this movie?
Until this movie was made and shown, Marilyn Chambers was far more widely recognized for a “legitimate” reason. She, holding a baby, appeared on the boxes of Ivory Snow laundry soap. See the connection now? Soap=clean=nice=sales. She kinda’ changed all that when the movie came out. Porn star=nasty=vile=public censure[almost]=loss of sales The Ivory Snow box illustration was changed, and the remaining boxes became collector’s items.
The big deal about it was that Marilyn Chambers, the star of the film, had been a model – a real model – earlier in her career, and her face adorned a popular brand of detergent sold in grocery stores across the country – Ivory Snow. The Mitchell Brothers capitalized on it. I saw the movie once many years ago, but don’t remember a heck of a lot about it.
Also, back in the 70s, porn was flirting withh respectability and had a different cachet than it does now that porn films are basically a ho in a ho-tel room with a cameraman and a couple of guys. There were several movies that showed in mainstream theaters that you might take a date to if she was venturesome enough: Green Door, Devil in Miss Jones, Deep Throat, Story of O, etc. So a film like Green Door could make more of a splash than it would nowadays.
There was Behind the Green Door II, starring Missy Manners aka Eliza Flores, who had been an intern for Senator Orrin Hatch (legitimately L) and was one of the earlier safe-sex/condom & dental dam galore pornos.
To elaborate on what EvilCaptor said, right up until VCR’s killed them off in the 1980s, there were still “porn theaters” that specialized in the cheap, down and dirty, no-storyline flicks we all know and love.
But several films like Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris showed that you could actually produce a moive with plot, characters, a decent script AND sex, get it into regular theaters, have the critics take it seriously, and make money.
Suddenly a lot of porn producers decided they’d take a shot at making movies with hard-core sex and some pretense of quality, or at least the trappings of a mainstream movie.
Then you had Marilyn Chambers, a wholesome, clean, girl-next-door type, who not only was willing to participate in such a movie, but was also willing to use her real name.
The result was Behind the Green Door and the others EvilCaptor mentioned. They weren’t “great films” – in retrospect they weren’t even particularly good. But they did have an aura of legitimacy around them that the “ho in a hotel room” rooms didn’t. It was sort of like the difference between Marlon Brando in The Wild One vs. a hack teen-motorcycle flick that filled out the bottom half of a drive-in movie double feature.
I am so embarrassed that I can asnwer these questions…
A few years ago, some friends and I decided that none of us had seen enough porn, since nobody could figure out what to choose in the video store. We couldn’t judge what would make good porn vs. bad porn. Some of us didn’t know what we liked or didn’t like in porn. So we formed a porn club. We took turns hosting and choosing movies and met once a month, ordered pizza, drank beer and watched porn. I feel it necessary to assure anyone reading this thread: NOTHING beyond that ever went on. This was NOT an orgy or anything like it. Pizza, beer and porn. If the porn turned you on, you were supposed to deal with that when you went home – not right there in front of all of us. The idea was to create a safe environment in which to judge porn.
Point being, I’ve seen a lot of porn from different decades. Yes, the standards were clearly diffferent back then. For one reason, plastic surgery wasn’t as perfected and inexpensive back in the day. Women did not shave their pubic hair into little topiaries back then. You could see the warts, moles, c-section scars, fat rolls and tan lines. (Piercings and tattoos were hardly common at all then as well.) Whomever was hired to star, hey you got what you got. Many were junkies anyway and you can see in some films how completely wasted some of the actresses are.
That said, we reviewed Behind the Green Door, and short of it being extremely entertaining and hysterically funny… I couldn’t tell you why it’s so famously “classic” either. Perhaps the bi-racial scenes, although I couldn’t verify that was the first porn film with a bi-racial scenes. (That was a lot more common than you might think. Midget scenes too, for some reason. :eek:)
You might be interested to know that, after participating in the porn-on-demand club for about three years, it turns out that I happen to prefer 70’s porn over any other era of porn simply because the people are the most real looking in porn. The fake-ness of the 80’s and 90’s is a turn off. For me. Go figure. Also, being female, I happen to prefer a plot, but YMMV.
According to its IMDB listing, it’s famous mostly for being one of three artsy “porn chic” films released in short order in the early 70s, the other two being The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat (all of which were “artsy” and “chic” only in the sense that they had more production values than the stag reels they replaced in the culture). Of the three, Green Door was the least erotic but had the most solid cinematic values.
Also, the plotline played to a very specific female fantasy–having wild (forced, in a contrivedly gentle and nonviolent way) sexual escapades that they’re neither responsible for nor can remember clearly afterwards. Possibly, this film had a strong female following (although, IIRC, I Am Curious (Yellow) had more of one).
I also remember this film (a group of us cut out of work early to go to the local sticky-floor theatre), and will echo what’s been said earlier. The movie actually had a plot, other than just scene after sex scene. I also don’t remember that many movies around that time that had real orgy scenes, so that might have been part of the appeal also.
I did lead somewhat of a sheltered life until the VCR was invented, so I could be wrong about the orgy.
Man! Now I have that Green Door song stuck in my head (heh, head, get it?)
“Hey there,
what’s that secret you’re keeping…”
The song goes way back. Nothin’ to do with the movie, except that the movie is sort of taken from the song.
Anyway, I had a friend who was a still photographer for the Mitchell Bros, legendary San Fran porn producers. Worked many of their famous movies, including “Green Door”. The memorable final scene with all the cum shots from every direction???
All Jergins Lotion baby. Right out of the squirt bottle.
…and you guys have brought up another trivial memory.
After “Green Door” made her infamous, each Marilyn Chambers films would have a Hitchcock moment.
Somewhere in the film, sitting on a counter, there would be a quick product placement. But I doubt Ivory Snow paid for it.
“Artsy” may be what I mean when I say that at the time, it was a sort of porn-that’s-better-than-porn. I.e., a hip, with-it sort of fellow could take a date to see it. It had a plot (as compared to porn), and a certain “film-ness” (as if editing had occurred)–the production values were much better than the vast majority of porn. With Deep Throat (and, to a certain extent, The Devil in Miss Jones), it set a very different standard for later porn.
Undoubtedly it would be pretty funny to watch today, but then so is almost every film once it’s a few decades old.
Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were among the first hard core porn features to be exhibited in 35mm theatrical release. Before then, most hard core porn was shot in 16mm, and then reduced to 8mm for sales or porn shop booths. There were many sex features exhibited in 35mm before then (for example, 1971’s Ginger), but they were soft core, without visible penetration or ejaculation.
I was tempted to write “filmed in 35mm” above, but I think Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door were 16mm to 35mm blowups. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Well, Ginger wasn’t exactly a softcore flick like modern softcore flicks are softcore. It’s kinda hard to explain, in that it involves Stephen Gould’s book on evolutionary theory as exemplified by the animals of the Burgess Shales and Ediacara, Australia fossil formations. These were pre-Cambrian animals that were, to be frank, fucking weird. Their body plans were so different from modern animals that scientists put them together upside down or in one case confused one animal for three different animals. Hallucigenia is a nice example.
Many evolutonary theorists believe that the reason all these weird-ass examples could survive and compete was that they got in on the ground floor on the “multicellular organism” niche and evolved before they could get out-competed by more eifficient creatures. Which is why we have whole orders, kingdoms and genera of creatures from the pre-Cambrian that are present in no succeeding fauna.
I think the Ginger movies (there were three of them) which were bad attempts of hard-boiled noir combined with soft-core sexual bondage imagery, were the same kinda thing. In fact, a lot of 70s porn was that kinda thing – strictly a product of the relaxation of censorship codes in America. In his book “Bottom Feeders” John Hubner describes how early porn filmmakers were able to produce anything they wanted to as long as a naked woman was somewhere in it – he describes one film that was made strictly because the volunteer star wanted to sit naked on her husband’s gravestone and recite poetry – so that’s what the film was – her sitting naked, etc.
My point is that it’s hard to view movies like “Behind the Green Door” in a modern context because nowadays softcore and hardcore porn have evolved into fairly specific kinds of movies. Things weren’t nearly so settled out back in the 70s.
Last Tango In Paris does have sex in it, but IMO it’s pretty tame by today’s standards. What makes it obscene is the idea that anyone would want to have sex with pasty, bloated Marlon Brando. Even more horrifying is that anyone would use butter as a lube. Eeek! How unhygenic.
…and the award for Illustration Mixing Most Disparate Fields of Intellectual Endeavour goes to Evil Captor, and the fact that I knew what he was talking about insofar as both precambrian paleontology AND popular porn tells me I had absolutely too much time in my hands in the last 3 decades.
But, yes – the 70s were a fascinating period for these kinds of productions. The “Ginger” flicks were, indeed, more like a version of crime stories with nudity thrown in. They were, in a way, a more overt version of the already well-established “exploitation film”, which would flower in the 1970s to include the “blaxploitation” genre and, on the more extreme side, things like Deodato’s “cannibal” movies.
There was a huge overlap with “art porn” and “adult film” in that period. On the “legit art, but raunchy” side of the equation, along with LTIP, you can add also Passolini’s trilogy of the Decameron/Canterbury Tales/Arabian Nights (his more extreme piece, Salo: 120 Days of Sodom, was NOT titillating material. Unless you DO share DeSade’s tastes) On the “obvious wank material, but very well made” side you have the likes of The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Then you have things like the original Sylvia Kristel Emmanuelle movies, or Story of O, which clearly were meant to titillate but insisted in claiming artistic legitimacy. And you could have a situation where there would be one “artsy porn” flick, and then another that would be very similar but more overtly lewd (Story of O/Story of Joanna)
Back to the OP the brief so far is:
Right time, right place (the “art porn” pseudo-boom)
lol, I happen to have Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat and Devil in Miss Jones, as well as Ribald Tales of Canterbury…
All things consideredm I like Ribald Tales…but then again, I have been in the Society for Creative Anachronism since 1978…and some of the costuming in the flick is actually fairly close to correct, and it seemed to have been shot at some sort of living history museum site…or on a really good set from some program or movie=)