Sex, Bombs and Burgers (12 page)

The military also faced a shortage of people to produce war footage. Experienced Hollywood hands were generally too old to draft, so the task of training new camera operators and technicians fell to the army. In 1941 the Signal Corps opened the Training Film Production Laboratory in New Jersey to train recruits in movie filming and editing, effectively teaching them to shoot cameras as well as guns. Hollywood professionals were brought in to teach intensive six-week courses, even though they were more skilled at filming interior scenes than the exterior shoots that would become the norm during the war. The courses marked the first time the American Society of Cinematographers offered formal training of any kind. Like the equipment itself, soldiers’ skills had to be standardized and interchangeable. The result was the mass production of semi-professional moviemakers. “Today, a motion picture is an integral part of every military unit,” the ASC reported at the time. “This country has a great untapped reserve of capable cinematographic talent among amateurs and semi-professionals—men who though they may not have made a career out of photography, have yet attained great skill with their 16-millimetre and 8-millimetre cameras.”
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The Signal Corps was at its peak in the fall of 1944 when more than 350,000 officers and men served, six times as many as in the First World War. The Corps trained more than 432,000 soldiers over the course of the war and more than 34,000 officers graduated from fifty courses. By the time the war ended, the Signal Corps had produced more than 1,300 films.
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In 1945 the military capitalized on all that footage by setting up the
Academy War Film Library, which rented and sold original war reels to movie studios.

With the conflict over, the stage was set for a revolution in moviemaking. Better mobile cameras meant that location-based shooting of feature films became much more commonplace. Film-making became decentralized and freed from the confines of studio lots. The war had also matured and standardized film technology, which meant that, as of the late forties, cameras intended for the amateur market were actually affordable to those users. Sixteen- and 8-millimetre cameras were much simpler because they all worked in more or less the same way and used the same parts. Moreover, a generation of war veterans returned to their normal lives as semi-professional, trained camera operators. They had not been trained to shoot movies with big, expensive equipment on large studio sets, but rather with small cameras in on-the-go situations. Many of these veterans parlayed their new skills into simple home moviemaking (shooting backyard barbecues, children’s birthday parties or family vacations), while others sought to go professional.

The amateur camera equipment market boomed and manufacturers reaped the benefits. Bell & Howell, for one, saw its sales increase by 125 percent between 1947 and 1956, with profit tripling over the same time frame. By 1956 professional motion picture equipment accounted for only 3 percent of the company’s sales while amateur gear had risen to 27 percent (military, industrial and educational products made up the bulk of the rest).
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The lucrative market attracted foreign competitors such as Bolex from Switzerland and sales swelled even more. By 1961 the photographic leisure market was valued at $700 million
per year, driven largely by the amateur segment, which more than doubled from 1950 to 1958. Eight-millimetre camera sales also boomed, more than tripling over the same period.
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Some of this explosive growth was directly driven by amateurs creating their own stag films. A core of small businesses emerged to produce and sell these films through mail order, while camera stores quietly stocked them for rent and purchase.
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By 1960 the market had shifted to the point where consumers bought more stag films than they rented.
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A United States government inquest into pornography in the late sixties found that stag films sold at camera stores also “served as a catalyst for the rental or purchase of movie projectors, screens, cameras and other equipment.”
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All the Boobs That Are Fit to Print

The explosion in the amateur camera market coincided with the beginnings of the sexual revolution. The groundwork was laid by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist at Indiana University, with the publication of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948), followed by
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953). The reports were hugely controversial because they touted statistics that challenged the contemporary, mostly puritanical views regarding sex. Among the most sensational assertions made by the reports were that there were gradations of homosexuality (i.e., you can, in fact, be only partly gay), that more than half of all males cheated on their wives and that nearly a quarter of all men found sadomasochism a turn-on.

The reports were a huge influence on Hugh Hefner, a Chicago native and former copywriter for
Esquire
magazine. Hefner, who had grown up in a puritanical family and harboured
an ambitious desire to redefine sexuality, found great inspiration and affirmation in Kinsey’s reports. The budding journalist was overjoyed to find that he was not alone in possessing a voracious and non-traditional sexual appetite, and that perhaps such drives were commonplace.

In 1953 Hefner launched
Playboy
, a magazine ostensibly intended to act as a guide to the evolving post-war consumerist culture, but which really hinged on the nude pictures of women it featured. Hefner originally wanted to call his magazine “Stag Party,” which would probably have been a more honest title, but he was forced to change it after an outdoors publication called
Stag
objected. (Its editors obviously didn’t want any confusion between a magazine that featured nude women and one that featured nude deer.) Hefner was himself a connoisseur of stag films and hosted viewing parties in his Chicago apartment, where he would try to vent any embarrassment among guests by adding funny quips to his narration. He had even made his own stag film,
After the Masquerade
, in which he had sex with a female acquaintance while the two wore masks.
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The first issue of
Playboy
, which Hefner had not put his name on for fear of obscenity charges, sold 54,000 copies, 80 percent of its print run, an astonishing feat for a new magazine.
Playboy
’s circulation rose dramatically over the next two years, hitting half a million by the end of 1955 and one million in 1956, at which point it surpassed Hefner’s old employer, the twenty-year-old
Esquire
.
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Playboy
’s success mirrored the rise of consumerism—both were the product of a prolonged period of public denial. Consumers had suffered long and hard, first through the Great Depression, then through the war. As the good times came, so
too did conspicuous consumption of all manner of goods: cars, ovens, fridges, television, stereos, plastic goods, toys, processed foods, alcohol and, of course, film equipment. Sex had also been repressed and some of those traditional puritanical forces targeted Hefner, only to be rebuffed by authorities who backed the emerging era of permissiveness. In 1955 Hefner sued the U.S. Post Office for denying
Playboy
a mailing permit, and won a total victory. The federal court issued an injunction preventing the Post Office from interfering with the magazine’s distribution and awarded
Playboy
$100,000 in damages. Hefner was effectively given the green light to continue his quest to redefine sexuality.

Kinsey and Hefner paved the way for moviemakers to extend the new sexual liberation to the silver screen. The authorities’ implicit go-ahead to
Playboy
was extended to director Russ Meyer, whose film
The Immoral Mr. Teas
(1959) became the first soft-core pornographic movie to pass censors and make it to mainstream theatres. Meyer had spent his childhood in Oakland, California, playing with cameras. His parents had divorced in 1922, shortly after he was born, and his mother pawned her wedding ring to buy Russ an early 8-millimetre camera for his fourteenth birthday. By the time the United States joined the war in 1941, Meyer was nineteen and already a self-taught cinematographer. He enlisted and was assigned as a combat photographer to the 166th Signal Photo Company, the photo unit of General George Patton’s Third Army, where he served alongside New York native Stanley Kramer. After the war, the two men took distinctly different career paths: Kramer went on to direct Oscar-nominated films such as
Ship of Fools
(1965) and
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
(1967) while Meyer shot pictorials for Hefner’s
Playboy
, then redefined
what was permissible in mainstream movies with
The Immoral
Mr. Teas
.

The film, which starred Meyer’s army buddy Bill Teas as a door-to-door salesman who had the uncanny knack of running into nude, buxom women, was made for only $24,000 but reaped more than $1 million through independent cinemas.
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As
Time
magazine noted, the movie’s success “opened up the floodgates of permissiveness as we know it in these United States.”
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It also kicked off a soft-core pornographic movie gold rush. Meyer, for his part, gave credit where credit was due. “The real driving force behind the increasing permissiveness of our society is Hugh Hefner. I simply put his illustrations to movement.”
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Attack of the Killer B’s

Meyer was a direct product of the post-war boom in amateur film that spawned an entirely new category of alternative, semi-professional productions: the “B” movie. While the term was initially used in the twenties and thirties to identify bonus attractions tacked on to feature films, in the fifties it became synonymous with low-budget releases made by Hollywood outsiders, many of whom were military trained or used war-seasoned technology. The first genres to gain popularity were science fiction and horror, with films such as
Creature from the
Black Lagoon
(1954),
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) and
The Curse of Frankenstein
(1957). Heading into the sixties, B movies splintered into sub-genres that were collectively known as exploitation films, since they often “exploited” lurid subject matter, particularly sex and violence. “Grindhouse” cinemas, so named because the first ones were housed in former “bump-and-grind” burlesque theatres, sprang up in urban
areas to accommodate the growing number of exploitation films.

Meyer carved out his own sub-genre of exploitation films— “sexploitation,” essentially soft-core pornography—through a string of follow-up hits to
The Immoral Mr. Teas
that included
Wild Gals of the Naked West
(1962),
Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
(1965)and
Vixen!
(1968). At one point, he had four films in
Variety
magazine’s top 100 grossing movies of all time.
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Grindhouse cinemas followed the trend and many converted to showing only adult movies. Before Meyer’s breakthrough, only about 60 theatres in the United States showed films that were considered sexploitation. By 1970 that number had climbed to 750, helped largely by the establishment of the Pussycat theatre chain.
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By the sixties, mainstream Hollywood was feeling the influence of B movies in general and sexploitation movies in particular; the studios were watching how Meyer and the copycat directors he spawned were experimenting with smaller camera technology. “Even Walt Disney was curiously interested in what would happen,” Meyer said.
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They were also watching the steadily increasing box-office returns: Vixen, which had been made for just $72,000, raked in an astonishing $15 million.
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The studios moved to attract this growing audience with more sexually daring mainstream movies, culminating in 1969 with
Easy Rider
and
Midnight Cowboy
. Meyer also made the full jump to the mainstream when 20th Century Fox picked up his
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
(1972) for distribution. With B-movie sexploitation directors and Hollywood studios depicting increasingly graphic sex, the stage was set for a film that pushed the envelope by bringing the hard-core action of stag films to the mainstream.

That film was
Deep Throat
(1972), the story of a sexually frustrated woman who is unable to achieve an orgasm until she discovers that her clitoris is in her throat.
Deep Throat
featured explicit oral and anal sex and was given an X rating by the Motion Picture Association of America. The hour-long film also produced massive box-office numbers. Shot over six days in Miami at a cost of only $25,000, it ended up grossing an estimated $100 million in combined box-office and video receipts.
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Deep
Throat
established the porno formula of low-budget, star-driven films that has been followed ever since.

Sexploitation and the mainstream porno blitz didn’t kill off stag films, however. In fact, short, amateur-produced films found an entirely new and bigger market in the early seventies when two self-styled “kings of pornography” teamed up to bring peep shows to the United States. Reuben Sturman, a Cleveland native and Second World War veteran of the Army Air Corps, had started out in the fifties selling comic books from his car. He expanded his business until he was a major magazine wholesaler with operations in several American cities. In the early sixties he moved into the burgeoning field of adult magazines, riding
Playboy
’s success, and by the end of the decade he was the biggest distributor of such publications to a growing number of specialty stores in the United States.

Algerian-born Italian Lasse Braun, a law school graduate living in Sweden, was building his Stockholm-based sex empire at the same time. Braun had filmed his first short sex movie,
Golden
Butterfly
, in 1965 using Kodak’s new Super 8 camera, an improved version of the traditional 8-millimetre. The ten-minute colour film starred Braun himself as a naval officer and a girlfriend dressed up as a Japanese geisha girl. As the director put it, the
characters in his film “made love in her boudoir without hiding anything of what makes sex so luscious and irresistible.”
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