Sex, Bombs and Burgers (13 page)

Having already established some notoriety in Europe by publishing magazines and writing erotic novels, Braun formed AB Beta Film in 1966 to produce porno movies. In 1971, with Braun as his primary film supplier, Sturman brought a new product—the peep booth, a coin-operated 16-millimetre projector, a small screen and a lockable door—to his adult bookstore customers. Braun linked his stag films together into longer loops, which customers watched for 25 cents per thirty-second to two-minute pop. The booths were extraordinarily successful and transformed the business of stag films. Not only were they rebranded as “loops,” the films also shed their regional boundaries through Sturman’s nation-wide distribution network. Sturman became exceptionally wealthy, raking in an estimated $2 billion in the seventies. By the late eighties, his personal fortune was estimated at between $200 million and $300 million while his magazine and video empire grossed about $1 million a day.
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Film historians refer to the sixties and seventies as the “Golden Age of Pornography,” a time when seemingly anything was allowed at the movies. But this golden age brewed powerful reactionary forces. In 1970 a Congressional panel set up by Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography’s social effects made some fairly liberal recommendations: that children should receive sex education and that no further restrictions should be placed on entertainment intended for adults. Incoming Republican president Richard Nixon, however, gave the report a hostile review, denouncing Johnson’s panel as “morally bankrupt” and vowing to fight pornography
in all its forms. “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life,” he said. “Pornography can corrupt a society and civilization ... The warped and brutal portrayal of sex in books, plays, magazines and movies, if not halted and reversed, could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization.”
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As the eighties neared, the Golden Age of Pornography faced a growing conservative enemy. The amateurs who had ushered in the era armed with war-seasoned technology were in for the biggest fight of their lives. Sturman, whom the U.S. Justice Department believed to be the largest distributor of hard-core pornography in the country, proved to be one of the biggest casualties. In 1989 authorities nailed him for failing to pay $29 million in taxes. Sturman was sentenced to hard time; he managed to escape from his California cell but was recaptured eight weeks later and ended up dying in a Kentucky prison in 1997.

The genie was out of the bottle, however. In less than thirty years, a large group of military-trained semi-professional filmmakers armed with new, high-tech cameras had lured pornographic movies out of insular men’s clubs and into downtown theatres in every major city. The same advances that produced Oscar-winning filmmakers such as Stanley Kramer also produced Russ Meyer,
Deep Throat
and the rest of the pornographic film business. And even better technology— the VCR and later, the internet—that would further lower the cost of filming and disseminating sex movies was on the way. Social attitudes toward sex in the media had also shifted away from conservatism and toward permissiveness. Just as men and women were experimenting with the new-found freedoms
brought on by the sexual revolution and its scientific advances like the birth control pill, they were also becoming more open to how they were entertained. To the dismay of Nixon and his fellow conservatives, pornography was here to stay.

Doing It Yourself

One of the reasons people made such naughty uses of film cameras is that they had been primed for decades with still photos. Before the forties, taking your own nude pictures was a risky proposition. If you tried to develop the film, chances were good you’d run afoul of obscenity laws and end up in jail. The only solution was to either invest in a darkroom or find a shop that offered discreet processing of such “special” photos. Luckily, two pieces of technology came along to cater to this need.

In 1932 American chemist Edwin Land founded a company based on a polarizing filter he had invented, which he used to make sunglasses and camera lens attachments. During the Second World War, Land’s company, which he named Polaroid in 1937, supplied Allied military forces with goggles, target finders and other optical equipment. His big breakthrough came in 1948 with the Land Camera, a device that could take a photo and instantly develop it, giving the picture taker a print within minutes. The device and its follow-up models proved to be huge hits. For the average consumer, the cameras—known simply as Polaroids—were the first easy way to take photos, without the additional expense and hassle of waiting for developing and processing. They also provided an easy and
safe
way to create homemade sexual content.

Consumers were, as porn historian Jonathan Coopersmith puts it, finally free from the “censoring eye of the local druggist
or the ogling leer of the film laboratory technician.”
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More to the point, Polaroid “was an enormous breakthrough for the amateur because anybody could shoot whatever they wanted,” according to
Playboy
’s current photo director Gary Cole. “If you shot pictures of your girlfriend, you didn’t have to worry about anybody else seeing them.”
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(The cameras also proved invaluable to professionals, like
Playboy
photographers. With nude shoots sometimes taking days to meet Hugh Hefner’s exacting standards, Polaroids helped photographers set up shots and save time and money. “A lot of the initial lighting and posing changes were made at the Polaroid stages before we shot the actual film,” Cole says. “It would save you a whole half day, shooting Polaroid.”)

Land’s company knew about the use of its cameras for sexual purposes, both by amateurs and professionals, and tacitly acknowledged as much. In 1966 the company released a new model called “the Swinger,” a term coined in the late fifties to describe a sexually liberated person. (By the seventies, the word had evolved to mean a person who was promiscuous and/or liked to swap sexual partners.) Television commercials for the camera showed good-looking, nearly nude couples frolicking on the beach, taking pictures of each other. With the sexual revolution in full swing, Polaroid was clearly looking to cash in on the new wave of liberation.

The same held true for photo booths, which were essentially giant, immobile Polaroid cameras. By the thirties, fully self-sufficient booths were popping up in public places such as amusement parks and stores. By the fifties, proprietors were encountering an unexpected problem. According to one historian, “Complaints started coming in from Woolworth’s
and other stores that people, particularly women, were stripping off their clothes for the private photo booth camera. Couples started being a little more adventurous in the privacy of the curtained booth.” As a result, many Woolworth’s stores removed their curtains to discourage “naughty encounters.”
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There just seemed to be something about the booths that brought out the exhibitionist in people, a phenomenon that continues to hold true. Brett Ratner, director of such mainstream movies as
Rush Hour
and
Red Dragon
, installed a black-and-white booth in his house and had his celebrity friends take pictures whenever they stopped by. He published the results in a 2003 book,
Hillhaven Lodge: The Photo Booth Pictures
, with some glaring omissions. “There were a lot of middle fingers, a lot of people with their tongues out,” Ratner says. “There was also a lot of flashing ... I didn’t publish those.”
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Booth manufacturers have always known what buttered their bread, and they quietly encouraged such uses. One American manufacturer, Auto Photo, handed out programs at a mid-fifties industry convention that featured a drawing of a woman exposing herself with the caption, “Make sure he remembers you! Send a foto to your boyfriend.”
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Technology makers were happy to reap the benefits of the public’s evolving sexual liberation, but it wasn’t something they were willing to tout openly. “The fact that this was in the sales material says, okay, these guys know about it, they just aren’t talking about it in public,” says Coopersmith, who has written several papers on the role of pornography in technological development. “Even now, many of the firms producing the technology and who benefited do not like to publicly talk about it. You still can’t tell people what you’re doing that openly.”
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Participatory porn took a huge step forward with the advent of camcorders in the early eighties. While the 16- and 8-millimetre cameras developed during the Second World War were great for amateur pornographers with an interest and knowledge of film, it wasn’t until the camcorder that the mass market finally had a viable, easy-to-use video option. The camcorder made filming idiot-proof—just point and shoot, no need to set lighting levels or focus, and no need to get film developed. While the technology obviously had many non-pornographic uses, science-fiction author Isaac Asimov was right when he stated in 1981 that “the age of home video will fundamentally alter our approach to sex.”
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The camcorder took the do-it-yourself porn started by Polaroids, photo booths and smaller film cameras to the next level. As had happened with stag films, a market for amateur porn movies sprung up in the eighties, with the back pages of every adult magazine full of ads for homemade videos. The trend further evolved with the advent of digitalization, with amateur porn websites springing up in huge numbers.

The continually evolving ability for amateurs to create their own sexual media, coupled with an ever-increasing amount of purchasable porn, has dramatically transformed our views on sex over the past half century. On the supply side, technology manufacturers—who once refused to publicly acknowledge the role sexual content played in the success of their products— are starting to come around, especially smaller companies that are desperate for customers of any sort. Spatial View, a small Toronto-based company that is developing software to view three-dimensional photos on digital devices, is just one example. In early 2009 the company gave the honour of announcing the
availability of its new Wazabee 3DeeShell, which slips onto an iPhone and allows the user to view specially coded photos and movies in 3-D, to adult producer Pink Visual. The adult company put out a press release touting itself as one of the first content suppliers for the shell days before Spatial View itself announced the product. “They wanted to show that they were on the cutting edge of technology,” says Brad Casemore, Spatial View’s vice-president of business development. “They came right after us. They read about it and said, ‘We’d like to give it a try.’ It’s not really a target market for us for a variety of reasons, but when a customer comes to you, there’s not much you can do.”
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The sand of the desert is sodden red,— Red
with the wreck of a square that broke;—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with the dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

—HENRY JOHN NEWBOLT, “VITAÏ LAMPADA”

When I was a kid, playtime consisted of one of two activities. Either I’d be running around outside playing “army” or I’d be indoors acting out battles between G.I. Joe troops and their sworn enemy, the evil terrorist organization Cobra. In the outdoor scenario, my friends and I would form teams and “fight” each other with plastic guns on the forested hillside across the street from my house. When it was too cold to go outside, I’d build Cobra fortresses in my basement out of couch cushions and boxes that the G.I. Joe troops would have to overrun.

What was the result of all this war-themed play? Well, I can safely say I’m a master of weapon sound effects. There isn’t a variation of “pow-pow-pow,” “budda-budda-budda” or “vooooosh” that I can’t mimic. But I wasn’t a particularly violent child, nor were my parents warmongers who encouraged such military-oriented leisure. No, I was just like millions of children—mainly boys—who happen to like playing war.

For as long as there have been weapons, children have fashioned their own makeshift versions from sticks and other found materials to play at being soldiers, pirates or policemen. Toy soldiers have been around almost as long; wooden carvings
have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, while tin versions were first manufactured in Europe during the Middle Ages. The first plastic toy soldiers, or “army men,” were produced in the United States in the thirties and took off in the fifties after polyethylene became available. Toymaker Hasbro further capitalized on boys’ fascination with war-themed toys in 1963 when it introduced G.I. Joe, a thirty-centimetre-tall “action figure” influenced by the Second World War. The line sold millions of units while a newer, 9.5-centimetre iteration of G.I. Joe troops—the ones I loved so much—became the biggest-selling toy line of the eighties.
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