NSFW: Film Based on Obscenity and Pornography Report: Where?

Cafe Society
1

It’s unbelievable. A publicly-shown film I remember fairly clearly seems to have slid off this space-time continuum.

Back in 1969 we had the release of a document called the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. It largely dismissed the claims of harmfulness of pornography. The real problem, it concluded, was that American society had a lack of good sex education. (President Nixon and other pols stridently opposed the conclusions. There was soon a dissenting document, called the Hill-Link Minority Report.)

Some time between 1970 and 1973 a sexploitation documentary film was released and I saw it in a downtown Rochester, New York theater. The film had a title that was identical or at least very similar to the report. I also clearly remember discussing it with a girlfriend I had in 1976. (She and I remained in touch for 15 years or so after that, so the conversation may have been toward the end of the '70’s. Whatever.)

The film itself was mostly soft-core, with perhaps some brief hard-core scenes. It opened with a scene of lovelies cavorting on a beach, wearing cross-weaved swimsuits that were more gap than substance. There was a scene with a stripper, who teased a man by elevating a breast or two to close to his face, with a voice-over saying that the expectation was that the man would enjoy the tease but not try to make contact. Another scene showed a whole room full of topless women with a male photographer making either porno shots or porno film parts from each of them. He encouraged one woman to kiss her own nipples to make them erect. When the results were disappointing, he offered to service her himself. She was willing, but insisted that it would cost him more.

My girlfriend pointed out that in one scene two men seemed to be penetrating one woman. Somehow I had missed that.

Neither imdb nor Allmovies has anything. I’ve used wikipedia and various search engines.

The only thing I have found so far is some printed material. It has survived and is available on Amazon.

2

I don’t doubt that someone tried to make a movie out of the report, hopefully at least in the spirit of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

However, it’s possible you’re thinking of the report’s author, Berl Kutchinsky. He did a similar study in Denmark. Sure enough, soon there was a porn film called Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach. That scholarly title didn’t stop the movie from being released under the title Bucky Beaver’s Stag Loops and Peeps Volume 72.

3

I was thinking about this the other day. I don’t remember anything about a movie being filmed, but I am certain that an annotated version of the report was published with the annotations being pornographic pictures.

Bob

4

Yup, released in 1970 by Greenleaf Classics. Cecil mentioned it in a followup to the “do pigs have corkscrewed penises?” question.

5

I saw that movie - or one with the same name. This was 1974 or 1975 in Champaign Illinois. The last “episode” starred a guy dressed in a diaper in a crib. It had something to do with sex, but my brain had frozen by that point.

It could easily have been made earlier. The son of the owner of the theater made some extra money by showing movies like this at midnight.

Neither good nor interesting. The world is not a worse place for it having vanished.

6

At least I now know I’m not suffering from some weird false memory syndrome. The only other film production that seems to have vanished from all radar is 1985. (I viewed it at a Zero Population Growth meeting in spring of 1971.) But that ZPG production was never shown in movie theaters, AFIAK.

It still seems strange that a fairly early hardcore (in parts) film would not be catalogued somewhere by some devoted fan of all things taboo-breaking or that the list would never be placed online. Maybe production values were absent. Perhaps I should factor in that truly hardcore (all the way through) films had certainly multiplied by then. But even so…

7

It came out just before the beginning of the relatively high quality porn movie, like Debbie Does Dallas. It was much worse in every way. I saw it when my girlfriend was hundreds of miles away, and I remember nothing stimulating in that movie. So, I suspect it is one of many which got lost, or which is sitting in a garage somewhere.

I searched for it, and found only the actual report and this thread.

8

There was this “documentary,” that included behind-the-scenes softcore material, which although imdb identifies it as not rated, actually did get an official X rating in 1971:

Red, White and Blue

9

http://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w342/zSIDUCEtwFpq2xlX3QHibDkHeOQ.jpg

10

Trans Fat Og writes:

> The only other film production that seems to have vanished from all radar is 1985.
> (I viewed it at a Zero Population Growth meeting in spring of 1971.)

Is it possible that you’re thinking of this film?:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.P.G.

11

The Bucky Beaver compilations are put together by the curators of exploitation and ephemera at Something Weird Video.

During the 60’s, the legal status of porn in the US was very ambiguous and varied from place to place. There had been some favorable court cases and some restrictions were eased, but it was before movies like Deep Throat brought in the current “anything goes” era. They still had to at least pretend there was some sort of non-prurient justification to their smut, and one of the most common tactics was presenting them as “educational” films. “Pornography in Denmark” is definitely one of those “white lab coat specials,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if the movie the OP is thinking of is one too.

To the OP, it looks like google doesn’t index the NSFW parts of the Something Weird site, but you might want to browse through the Bucky Beaver portions of their site to see if you can find that movie. Hey, worst case you spend the afternoon browsing through hilarious descriptions of vintage pornography!

12

Whew! Not to put a snark on it, but you couldn’t have made a stab with more distance from the truth! That film was loudly protested by the Z.P.G. organization because it portrayed outlawing all births as the only viable solution to overpopulation. A court case ensued but the organization lost and the movie was allowed exposure. Needless to say, countless idiots thought that “no more babies” was the official goal. Hence a deluge of hate mail.

I even recall the delighted reaction encapsulated by a review from N.C.O.M.P. (The successor of Legion of Decency) in my local R.C. rag, “The Catholic Courier-Journal” which said something to the effect that the organization was having fits over the movie.

The N.C.O.M.P. was never above getting cutesy in its often brief descriptions of movies to avoid, just before assigning a rating. Their reaction to “Heavy Traffic”? “Crumb-less, but still crumby!” (That movie had fairly soon followed “Fritz the Cat” which was also an “X-rated” animation.)

1985 (circa 1970) was a dystopian screed, showing mostly disaster scenes out of context. It implied that by 1985 famines and other crises would be EVERYWHERE. It was so heavy in its presentation that a blurb appeared assuring viewers that the events depicted were not actually occurring AT THIS TIME! After what happened with “War of the Worlds” everybody understood that such a disclaimer was necessary.

BUT… every 5 minutes?!

And that reminds me… Any made-for-TV film fans here? it seems to me that roughly at the same time as Z.P.G. there was a similar piece on TV. I can’t recall the title. But I recall a scene with woman carrying a young child. The folks in charge suspected her of a certain kind of crime. They used a night-stick or whatever to gently open her bulky coat, and sure enough, she showed sufficient evidence of pregnancy for an arrest.

it seems that one child was the limit and perhaps the expectation was that after a first birth women would turn themselves in for a hysterectomy.

Another couple was made nervous by viewing the scene. I recall that the husband tried to make a purchase or withdrawal and the cashier or teller announced loudly that his card had been “red-lighted” by Population Control. (By this time the authorities already had reason to start a pursuit of this couple, and now the heat was really on.) BTW, this kind of scene seems right out of many “rapture” movies, except that refusing to take the Mark was the offense that made for the sweaty palms in long lines scenes.

The wife’s brother seemed through most of the film to be the ultimate compromising coward, and did nothing at first to help his sister and her family. At the very end, realizing what was a stake, he finally turned hero, and provided the family with a remote shelter. The movie ended with all of them hoping that world would soon return to sanity. The brother, when asked, denied that he has suddenly gained courage, meekly saying that he simply “got tired of always being afraid!”

– Does that ring any bells?

13

If Red, White & Blue isn’t the film you’re looking for, I don’t know what is BUT I wanted to say that while I don’t own either the 1969 report or the Hill-Link Report, I do own the sequel, 1986’s Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, also known as the Meese Report. I consider it an important historical document. :smiley: