Golden Goddesses: A Book Review by Mark Penny

I am very excited to share this recent Review of Golden Goddesses by fellow Canadian and writer Mark Penny of Montreal.  Mark is a graduate of film study at Concordia University and is a contributing writer for the publication Offscreen.com.  Mark's review and interview with me about the book can be found in the latest edition of the magazine (June/July).  To read our interview online, please visit this link: Offscreen.com

Golden Goddesses: A Book Review by Mark Penny

Hedonism 101; not only did the 1960’s give rise to sex, drugs and rock n roll, but it freed the young of their parents’ inhibitions, relating to pretty much everything with the human body and sex in particular.

The nude frolicking scenes in Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970) is one indication that something new was on the vanguard of contemporary culture in America. Sex as a taboo was being addressed by simply being re-claimed by the youth movement of the 1960’s and embraced as an open example of what was then known as Free-Love. With attitudes changing in the counter-culture, it was only a matter of time before enterprising film producers would capitalize on the new looser morality and exploit them for the paying public to admire (without prejudice).

Thus began an explosion of “adult” film productions which led to the inevitable attempt at a Hollywood mainstream type production, Deep Throat (Dir. Gerard Damiano, 1972). The film was talked about at every proverbial office water cooler. Famous Hollywood stars supported its exhibition, which gave a “legitimate” flavour to the Adult film world. From then on, the “industry”, as it is referred to today, thrived and grew beyond anyone’s expectations in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Now that time has passed since these humble beginnings, it was perhaps inevitable that a look back on those years would become a cottage industry of its own. Various books (some written as first-hand accounts), documentaries and mainstream Hollywood feature films have come out to humanize these taboo breaking porn players.

Some of the documentaries tend to chart the “seedy” side of porn, while others use porn footage to challenge the unsuspecting viewer by suggesting that it’s OK to watch people have sex if properly contextualized by cultural analysts and psychologists, akin to the thrills early 1960’s audiences experienced watching Mondo documentaries about African wild life; a ‘legitimate’ way to vicariously watch native naked flesh on display.

Thankfully other writers have approached the subject more openly and honestly; which brings us to an oral documentary of what life was like for 25 women who inhabited the celluloid of lust in those heady days of dark screening rooms that went by various sultry names familiar to anyone living in an urban environment; where my home town of Montreal is concerned, cinemas such as the “Eve” with its V designed as a woman with her legs spread high in the form of a V, or “Cinema L ’Amour”.

The documentary in question does not come in the form of a film, but a book: Golden Goddesses: 25 legendary women of classic erotic cinema 1968-1985 by Jill C. Nelson, (2012, BearManor Media) collects interviews with female adult film actresses, writers and directors that were active in the so-called “Golden” age of X-rated films. The book takes the form of a documentary on the page, and one cannot escape the image of these women telling their individual stories as if seeing them on screen (so vividly is it put together).

The book devotes a chapter to each of the 25 women and has an extra chapter covering lesser known, but just as important, performers. Ann Perry, Barbara Mills, Georgina Spelvin, Marilyn Chambers, Roberta Findlay, Jody Maxwell, Candida Royalle, Gloria Leonard, Rhonda Joe Petty, Serena, Annie Sprinkle, Sex “Kitten” Natividad, Sharon Mitchell, Kay Parker, Juliet Anderson, Seka, Kelly Nichols, Veronica Hart, Julia St. Vincent, Laurie Holmes, Ginger Lynn, Amber Lynn, Christy Canyon, Raven Touchstone, Nina Hartley are the key people assembled for this journey.

The subjects interviewed are not the type that I would characterize as “the poor girl who had nothing else to do with her life” that we are so often presented with in most mainstream coverage of the porn “Industry”. The women profiled come across as strong, compelling, and most importantly, sensitive and caring human beings; qualities not often associated with people who are seen as exploited and/or who “exploit” others in a soul destroying industry (as is often claimed by mainstream news media outlets).

There is a common thread that runs through the majority of the interviewees’ comments: the idea that the porn that they were a part of in the 1960’s and 1970’s was not as exploitative as it seems to most of them today, especially compared to what is currently seen on computer screens in “everywhere” land. Take Seka’s comment: “To me, violence and sex don’t go together. If you like a little S&M, if you like a little B&D, okay, no big deal. Climaxing in some girl’s eye to give her pink eye or choking her with your cock until she pukes or passes out? That’s sexy? I don’t think so. What is sexy about that? It’s violence. If anybody should feel violated, it`s the people of today. I think we’ve just become so desensitized to everything that there’s no passion anymore. I don’t watch porn because it’s disgusting to watch” (p.560).

The book does reveal some pretty hard truths about most of what these women went through in their respective careers, and of course not all stories are positive, but what you do get out of them is the strength they found within themselves to accept their path and rise above the negativity associated with this “industry”. The wife of the late John Holmes, Laurie Holmes, had this to say about it: “I consider myself a very strong person. Even so, there were times that I thought about suicide…There are three reasons why I didn`t ever follow it through. My two sons…and not wanting to give the industry that much satisfaction was the third. We are worth more dead to the industry than we are alive. Our content is worth more money to the production companies after we are gone. You are a dime a dozen alive to them otherwise” p 687).

No work on pornography would be complete without the input and opinions of Nina Hartley, who represents a more cerebral approach to the genre than most other performers, writers or directors: “I have a mission to get to talk about sex and sexuality, and sexual expression out there in the world from my own experience…..Most people who write about pornography have a tendency to impugn all kinds of motives that introduce hostility to pornography. Their paranoid conspiracy theories drive me insane……There are identity politics and victim politics, but there needs to be some relaxation. My childhood does affect how I act today. However, that being said, and I am liberal, there is that personal responsibility” (p. 866).

In a way Hartley is a cross-over from the last of the (celluloid) film productions into the (analog) video productions and has a less “nostalgic” look at the transition phase: “People call the 1970s “The Golden Age of Porn,” but I call it a dark and dreary place. The grooming and the lighting got much better in the eighties with video. The cameras were smaller and required less light. The girls started shaving their lips so that you could at least see “it”. The early porn isn’t always so sexy when the grooming left a lot to be desired. People were very, very furry…” (p. 881).

P.T. Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) (in which Nina plays the porn-star wife to William H. Macy’s character) is described by Hartley as being a “Hollywood version of the industry. He got some of the details right, but it’s the Hollywood version of an industry of which he is not a member, so many grains of salt” (p. 894).

The point made by Hartley is very telling indeed: “who” can truly be a “member” of an “industry” that trades on fantasy and sex in an imagined landscape that all people have their own imprint on? What truly defines this industry? What defined it then, in those cold New York sets and warm San Francisco summers? More importantly what defines it now, in todays’ mouse click happy culture that barely has memories of anything beyond yesterday’s Facebook post?

Pornography is quickly becoming the “new” child of serious Academia with its newly acquired moniker, Porn Studies; various academic journals are sprouting up (on-line as well as in-print), that are examining Porn and its cultural impact. Of course a simple search on Google will point the way to a lot of those available on the web. Undoubtedly, we will be inundated with jargon filled porn studies for years to come, but Jill Nelson’s book at least brings us “closer” to the people who made it happen in a more humane way than a “distanced” academic study that would relegate these women to the status of “lab rats.” If one is to “study” porn (and yes it is as valid a genre of cinema by the standards of what critics define as GENRE), let us not forget these women who have shared their life experiences of those early days of porn. There can be no study of this genre without having the input of those actors, writers, producers and directors who were there and saw it all happen; if anything of that “cultural milieu” is to be accessed, it requires that these first-account stories come to light in as clear a fashion as possible, unmediated by psychobabble or cultural theory jargon. A “proper” empirical history of porn should come first and then be used to formulate whatever ‘hip’ theories should follow.

Proud author with book

For photos, video clips, and more, visit author Jill C. Nelson’s blogspot.
All relevant photos are taken from Nelson’s blog.

About Mark Penny: Mark Penny is a Concordia University Cinema Graduate who is presently employed in Instructional Technology at a Canadian University, and is a Hammer films scholar extraordinaire.

Golden Goddesses Book Review by John Harrison

I'd like to thank Australian pop culture writer John Harrison (the author of the Headpress published book, Hip Pocket Sleaze: The Lurid World of Vintage Adult Paperbacks) for composing the following review of Golden Goddesses. John's next project, a biography titled Rene Bond: America's Tragic Teen Fantasy, is due out later this year. Please also visit John Harrison's blog:  Sin Street Sleaze. 

Golden Goddesses: 25 Legendary Women of Classic Erotic Cinema, 1968-1985

"I made it a rule, an absolute rule for all of the films that no women were allowed on the crew except for make-up. The technical crew: cameraman, gaffer, grip and sound — I never hired a woman. I don’t like women." (Roberta Findlay)



There is a continuing, undeniably voyeuristic fascination with people who were involved in the golden age of adult cinema (both in front of and behind the camera). Perhaps it’s the fact that they were both pioneers in a field of phenomenally popular (and perennially profitable) entertainment, yet also looked down upon as outcasts by the majority of mainstream society, who were happy to inwardly look but outwardly condemned. Or perhaps it’s partly because the people then had definitive personalities, looks and styles, unlike the mostly cookie-cutter, fake blonde and siliconed boobed porn starlets of today.

The co-author of the definitive John Holmes bio, Inches, Jill Nelson returns with Golden Goddesses: 25 Legendary Women of Classic Erotic Cinema 1968 - 1985. Told in an oral history format, Nelson has selected a diverse range of names to interview - including not just performers but also screenwriters, directors and costumers - which not only give us a terrific insight into the adult film industry during this rapidly evolving outlaw period, but allows us to know them as women, individuals and human beings. The bulk of the credit for this, of course, belongs to Nelson herself, who has obviously been able to win the trust of her subjects enough for them to open up a lot more than they would have in the pages of publications like Adam Film World back in the day.

Picking out highlights is a tough ask. The interviews conducted with actors who have since passed on (Marilyn Chambers, Juliette Anderson, Barbara Caron Mills) resonate with a certain sadness, but also serve as fitting epitaphs. Likewise, the chapter on actor/director Ann Perry (House on Bare Mountain, The Toy Box, Sweet Savage) also has an emotional timbre to it, since Perry’s battle with Alzheimer’s meant that her son had to do most of the talking for her. Elsewhere, Jody Maxwell (often billed as ‘The Missouri Stick Licker’) talks about losing her film virginity to Jamie Gillis and her unique talent for being able to sing while performing oral sex, and Laurie Holmes remembers her life with John and her disdain at the current state of the porn industry.

If I had to pick a favourite chapter, however, it would have to be Nelson’s interview with the normally publicity-shy Roberta Findlay. Along with her husband Michael, Roberta Findlay was responsible for some of the more notorious of the sexploitation black & white ‘roughies’ that emerged from the New York underground of the mid-to-late 1960s, including Satan’s Bed (1965, starring a pre-Lennon Yoko Ono), Take Me Naked (1966, written by and starring Roberta) and the infamous Flesh trilogy (The Touch of Her Flesh, The Curse of Her Flesh and The Kiss of Her Flesh). They later turned to the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, producing the 1971 Manson-inspired filmSlaughter, which had footage added to it by Allan Shackleton and re-released in 1976 as the notorious Snuff (‘The film that could only be made in South America...where Life is CHEAP!’). After Michael Findlay was killed in a 1977 helicopter crash, Roberta went on to direct hardcore features such as Mystique (1979) and Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy (1985, a tribute to Shauna Grant, who had committed suicide a year earlier), as well as returning to exploitation and horror with the likes of the grimy Tenement (1985) and Blood Sisters(1987). An impressive oeuvre indeed, and Findlay relays a lot of great anecdotes and memories, from hiding film reels at the bottom of a well to avoid the authorities, getting a cyst in her breast removed (a result of years of filming with a 40 pound Panaflex camera) , and her love for dialogue and disdain at actually having to shoot hardcore sex ("I was always disgusted by the sex scenes so I’d say "Okay, everybody screw". That would be it").

Other names covered in Golden Goddesses include such well-known names (at least within the industry and it’s supporters) as Seka, Kay Parker, Georgina Spelvin, Christy Canyon, Nina Hartley, Annie Sprinkle, Ginger Lynn (whose chapter touches on the industry-changing Traci Lords underage scandal), Veronica Hart, Kitten Natividad and Serena.

At 950 pages, Golden Goddesses is an expansive and exhaustive tome, heavily illustrated with over 300 black & white photos (including many candid and childhood snaps), and an essential addition to the library of anyone with more than a passing interest in its subject matter. I only hope that Nelson returns to the adult genre in the near future, as her two works on the subject so far have provided welcome breaths of fresh air in a field filled with uninspiring, sensationalistic and inaccurate studies.

Review Copyright 2013 John Harrison

Spotlight on Roberta Findlay

    

Roberta Findlay claims that her life has consisted of a series of random acts – and that she moved whichever way the wind happened to blow, without a specific direction in mind.  It would be a challenge to attempt to contradict the dogged and refreshingly blunt Findlay, who happens to be the first female cinematographer in America – and maneuvered a 20 lb, 35 millimeter camera on her small frame to boot.  Around age four, Roberta began to play classical piano which she continued to do over the next twelve years.  Her father and mother had presumed their believed prodigy would surely gain fame and fortune as a world class concert pianist, but at age sixteen while attending New York City College in the mid-late 1960s, Roberta met her first husband, Michael Findlay, an avid movie buff and budding filmmaker.  He was ten years her senior.  After becoming Michael’s arranger and accompanist for his silent film screenings, the two soon took their act to local coffee houses in the East Village.  Michael began directing cult sexploitation films that centered around rape, torture and bondage, and often featured Roberta in small acting roles.  When Roberta left Michael in the mid-seventies for another man, she was considered a virtuoso camera operator with a flair for lighting technique, and accepted the capital offered to produce, direct and shoot her own films. Unflinchingly, Findlay speaks her mind with a sparkle in her eyes.

     "Unfortunately, I was about fifteen when I finished high school, so at fifteen I entered The City College of New York, which, at that time, was a very good school -- not its Music Department, but it was considered a fine Engineering school.  So I went to College and graduated from City at age nineteen – nineteen and a half." 

     "I met my husband [Michael Findlay] when I was at school, but I was too young to get married at sixteen, and then finally, we were married when I was eighteen.  I was unconscious.  I didn’t think.  I’m not very emotionally grounded.  I just do what comes along and I was sort of in love for a few weeks and he wanted to get married.  His parents insisted and my parents thought the world had ended – that marriage would end my career.  My career had ended long before that.  So we got married and I was a teenage bride." 

     "I thought he was the only one who was that demented.  He made about a dozen titles of that nature, but he was generally the director/cameraman.  Somehow, through osmosis I learned how to shoot.  I don’t know.  He didn’t teach me and I wasn’t particularly interested, but when I started making really cheap movies in New York for distributors that were hardcore – actually they were soft core in the beginning – somehow I learned how to shoot and edit.  I don’t know how.  It was for money.  I had no skills.  I didn’t know what to do with myself.  I should have gone to a normal type of job or something but I never did."

    "As I said, he made a series of demented – crazy – they’re psychotic movies.  I mean, they should have been locked up.  He took out his frustrations or whatever in the films.  He was a sweet gentle soul.  I grew to hate him but it had nothing to do with the work.  We were together for about seven years, I guess." 

     "I had no moral compunctions about any of this stuff, but I just found the whole thing disgusting – shooting sex scenes!  I probably shot fifty hardcore films and we owned twenty six of them, but I was always disgusted by the sex scenes.  So I’d say, ‘Okay, everybody screw.’ And that would be it.  I directed the scenes through the camera. I wandered around holding a thirty-five millimeter camera. New York City Woman (1980) was my idea.  It’s a free film.  We’d shot Holmes probably in five pictures so we had a fair amount of outtakes, so I took all the outtakes -- there are a thousand cuts in that film, which is a lot.  And we shot Holmes reading his memoirs in New York City Woman.  Anyone but My Husband Tony Perez had been in which got busted, and I took all of the outtakes and put them in [New York City Woman]." 

     "Eric Edwards got incensed because we had a habit of saving money to shoot two or three films at the same time with different scripts, of course, but the location and the actors were there.  So we’d use those actors in the same location for different films.  Anyone but My Husband was busted all over the country."