An adult conversation about adult films is under way as a new generation is appreciating the films and history of the golden age and a newfound audience has returned to the cinema to watch the films of the era.Aidan Martin/Handout
There’s a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) where adult filmmaker Jack Horner is warned of the looming threat of video. Minutes before the clock rings in the 1980s, an adult-cinema magnate explains to him that the days of 35 mm are numbered: “Videotape is the truth.” Seemingly overnight, the industry changed.
In reality, a more gradual shift occurred, and 1984 – four decades ago this year – was the “last hurrah” of the so-called golden age of porn, a period of filmmaking which lasted roughly 15 years and arguably peaked with the success of the film Deep Throat in 1972. Expert directors, cinematographers, screenwriters and actors pioneered a new, countercultural film industry operating in parallel to Hollywood, and critics reviewed films by Gerard Damiano and Radley Metzger alongside their mainstream counterparts.
Forty years later, an adult conversation about adult films is under way as a new generation is appreciating the films and history of the golden age. After launching The Rialto Report podcast and website in 2013, adult-film historian Ashley West thought that a wider reappraisal would only occur “once you moved beyond the films themselves, once you started looking at them by interviewing the people who made them, looking at their locations, the music, or examining the nature of the companies that released them.”
New Blu-ray restorations released by such labels as Vinegar Syndrome and AGFA mean they can be enjoyed with a new level of critical appraisal – far from the purview of the local censorship boards that once cut these films to bits – presented with audio commentaries that revere their stars and filmmakers. Letterboxd, the cinephile’s favourite social-media app, allows the logging and reviewing of adult films alongside the classic film canon.
A newfound audience has also returned to the cinema to watch the films of the golden age. In 2023, the L’Amour à Minuit program was launched at the Cinéma L’Amour in Montreal, Canada’s oldest surviving adult cinema, screening films such as Gary Graver’s The Ecstasy Girls (1979). Graver, a prolific filmmaker, used the pseudonym Robert McCallum in the adult world, and was Orson Welles’s final cinematographer, lensing The Other Side of the Wind and F is for Fake.
Aidan Martin is one of L’Amour à Minuit’s programmers, and said the series’ focus is to bring the golden age of adult films back into the conversation. “It’s significant and revolutionary to be able to screen porn for a willing audience. And the really cool thing about it is that there is a huge audience that wants to watch.” Having worked at the cinema for a few years, Martin had noticed a younger generation’s interest in vintage erotica.
On Feb. 1, the ticket-buying audience, who, Martin said, are mainly in their 20s and 30s, will view the star-studded, golden-age extravaganza Dracula Sucks (1978), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, at the 110-year-old Cinéma L’Amour. The screening is a partnership with Vinegar Syndrome’s new sub-label Mélusine, which released a 4K restoration of the film in 2022.
Film historian Casey Scott has been producing audio commentaries for Vinegar Syndrome since 2016 and says the films of adult’s golden age are important because they are an unsung part of American film history.
“There was a time when I watched these films and would fast-forward through the sex scenes,” said Scott, with a laugh. “Eventually I realized it was like watching a musical and fast-forwarding through the musical numbers. You can’t do that. You’re not going to appreciate what the directors were doing. The sex means something in these movies.”
“I would never be one of those people who thinks all pornography is valid and all pornography needs to be restored, but I think the cream rises to the top.”
Scott added that films released at the end of the golden age, such as Ron Sullivan’s Getting Personal, or Roger Watkins’s Corruption, “have finally found their intended audience.”
During the transitional period of the mid-1980s, as theatres like Cinéma L’Amour were dwindling in numbers, video stores were lining their shelves with an abundance of new adult releases. West said the switch to video caused a “flight from quality” in the films being produced. “You stopped seeing people willing to put the money into 35-millimetre features, because they could now make it for a fraction of the money using new video camera technology.” At an average retail cost of $100 per videocassette, the studios were making more money than ever before.
“By that period, the industry had moved over from its spiritual home, which was New York City, into a more permanent home, which was California,” explained West. New production companies reflecting an MTV sensibility, such as Vivid, were founded, and favoured the new technology. By 1985, the “video vixen” era was in full swing, with names such as Ginger Lynn earning top billing on posters and oversized video box covers.
“The films became about quantity over quality,” said film historian Elizabeth Purchell. “But on the gay side of the industry, you see the opposite happening with a lot of producers who were actually spending more money on their movies and putting more craft into them.”
Purchell, who directed the 2023 documentary The Naked Eye: Sex and the Mondo Film, an examination of the mondo genre of sexploitation films of the sixties and seventies, added that the rise of adult-video production was democratizing and empowering to those who were suddenly able to make videos.
“It’s not until video that you start seeing titles that predominantly feature people of colour, bisexual-themed things, or trans people,” she added. “And a lot of it is fetishized. But at the same time I think those representations are important. A lot of people look at trans porn from the eighties and think: this is clearly problematic and marketed at cis, heterosexual men. But the people who were making those videos were people who were either from the trans community, or had ties to that community.”
Film historian West added that a move toward social conservatism in the 1980s played as significant a role in the twilight of the golden age as the technological shift to videotape. “I always think of the 1970s as being the hangover of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, where people were very willing to experiment, push the envelope and try new things. Then you get the inevitable backlash with Reaganism in the 1980s, with the rise of the Moral Majority, the religious right, and the forces that try to fight back against the overpermissiveness of what they saw in the 1970s.” New powers acquired by law enforcement attempted to cripple the industry, added West.
The mainstream film industry was also wary of porn’s influence on the marketplace. A Billboard item from 1983 noted the Video Software Dealers Association’s concerns about the adult industry’s presence at an approaching convention, taking steps to “ensure that adult suppliers’ booths don’t overwhelm or otherwise embarrass other exhibitors and delegates.”
The adult industry’s preference of the VHS format over Sony’s Betamax played a significant role in VHS winning the video-format wars of the 1980s. “Porn still won the day,” added West, but what emerged after the golden age was a “corporatized product, a homogenized industry that was much less interesting.”
West co-produces The Rialto Report with April Hall, and the duo have interviewed hundreds of the golden age’s stars, directors, writers and exhibitors, including luminaries of the genre who’d never publicly discussed their past. Many people worked under pseudonyms, or were never credited at all. It’s part journalism, part archaeology. “You’re uncovering pieces of a past civilization where people belong to the past yet you’re discovering things about their lives from that period that you never thought you’d have access to. It gives you the ability to understand a secret history in that detail.”
Putting these golden-age films in a historical perspective lets them be seen in a new light, says West.
“I’m an athletics fan, mostly track and field, and there’s nothing more boring than just watching somebody run around a track 20 times,” added West. “But as soon as you know the background of that person, their history, and know what their strengths are, suddenly it becomes a compelling soap opera that you can’t take your eyes off. It’s the same for these films.”
Special to The Globe and Mail