In honor of the Supreme Court striking down COPA, an overly-broad piece of legislation that would have made it difficult or impossible to publish any "adult" material online (including this site), we present a brief history of pornography in America.
Pornography had a long and uneasy relationship with American culture well before Linda Lovelace's unlikely debut as a media darling shoved it down everyone's throat. Titillation was one of the first uses of the movie camera, but the Comstock laws kept the trade decidedly underground. Cheap, grainy "reels" played for all-male groups at bachelor parties and Elks lodges or in grimy, coin-operated peep-show booths tucked away in the bad part of town. Other filmmakers produced more innocent-seeming "nudist" movies featuring bosomy women playing volleyball or young boys skinny-dipping. Another way of skirting the censors was to make the film funny, instead of sexy: the hapless protagonist of Russ Meyer's 1959 The Immoral Mr. Teas never gets to bed any of the film's parade of bare-bosomed beauties.
Documentaries about the burgeoning European pornography industry, such as Alex deRenzy's 1969 Censorship in Denmark, circumvented the American reluctance to show actual sex on screen — and racked up a tidy profit. Meanwhile, as obscenity laws loosened, porn emerged into the open. In the same year that deRenzy's documentary debuted, two brothers named Artie and Jim Mitchell began showing hardcore reels at the O'Farrell Theater in San Francisco.
promotion
(The City by the Bay already boasted the first topless go-go bar, Davey Rosenberg's Condor Club, which spawned hundreds of imitators when Carol Doda danced on a white baby grand piano in 1964.)
At the same time, magazine publishing — always more vulnerable to censorship due to mail regulations — was also becoming more daring. Thirty-four-year old Robert Guccione, a Brooklyn-born sometime artist and actor living in London, bucked British censors to found Penthouse magazine in 1965. Four years later, after a great deal of difficulty in finding funding and a distributor, Guccione launched the U.S. edition of his magazine as a conscious rival to Playboy, which was already taking on a tone of old-boy respectability.
The market was already saturated with girlie magazines, but Guccione had an ace up his sleeve: In April of 1970, Penthouse became the first "men's magazine" to show pubic hair — and the censors didn't care. For years, "nudist" magazines like the countercultural Jaybird had been going far further than Guccione dared to, while homoerotic "physique" magazine publishers such as MANual Enterprises had been winning court cases since the 1950s. The real outlaws, the hippies and the homosexuals, had paved the way for the respectable smut peddlers to take over.
Though Comstock's obscenity laws were still on the books (even if their enforcement was, at best, irregular), the majority of censorship was exercised by publishers and distributors themselves, since having a shipment of magazines or books impounded or refused by wary booksellers could be a financial disaster. Nonetheless, by the time that Penthouse began showing pubic hair in 1970, the freedom to put nudity on newsstands and in bookstores was practically assured. Businessmen, after all, had more money to fight court battles than hippies did.
If the market wanted smut, the regulatory forces would have to adapt.
The real outlaws, the hippies and the homosexuals, had paved the way for the respectable smut peddlers to take over.
The acceptability of sex in arthouse movies had slowly increased through the late 1960s, and the Motion Picture Association of America's rating system (which replaced the old Hays Code from the 1930s) was introduced in 1968. This new system legitimized the distribution of films that otherwise would not have been shown. The Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), seized by U.S. Customs in 1968, was released in theaters the following year with an X rating. If anything, the X helped the movie's box office receipts: I Am Curious grossed over $20 million in the United States alone, a huge take for a self-consciously arty foreign film featuring endless discussion of Swedish politics interspersed with some simulated intercourse.
The stag reel and the art-house film finally intersected in Deep Throat, a full-length movie, shot on thirty-five millimeter film, that had not only a plot and characters (though the latter were as scanty as the costumes), but also explicit sex. Throat was shot in six days in Miami on a budget of about $25,000; editing it took another three months. Though not the first such production, it was by far the most profitable. In terms of the return on the initial investment, Throat was one of the most profitable films of the '70s, grossing $3.2 million by the end of 1972, and, reportedly, more than $600 million in total revenue by the thirtieth anniversary of its release.
For a while, it seemed the success of Deep Throat and "porno chic" would create new possibilities for mainstream movies. In 1972, the New York Film Festival premiered Bernardo Bertolucci's X-rated Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando and the openly bisexual, barely twenty-year-old Maria Schneider. "The movie breakthrough has finally come. Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form," the legendary film critic Pauline Kael enthused in The New Yorker.
