Viewing My First Porn Movie

[Movie review with possible spoilers.]

The future has arrived

2019 is the setting of the original 1982 Blade Runner. While don't have replicants or flying cars yet, we do have something that Deckard probably didn't: unlimited access to every kind of pornography imaginable. If I'm in the mood for it, I could sit in Bryant Park on a sunny afternoon and link to categories like Ballerinas, Prostate Massage, and Uncensored (isn't that redundant?). While I would be well-advised to wear ear-buds during a public viewing, porn has become a commodity. It fact, it's gone beyond that. As was once predicted for electricity, a lot of it has become too cheap to meter.

Back in the day, which for me means the 1970s, explicit images were hard to obtain - or at least they were for an introverted young guy like me. The Sexual Revolution may have been underway for a while, but I didn't have the nerve to enter a porn theater or bookstore. I thought, the clerks will know I'm going to masturbate with this material. It didn't occur to me that they must have used plenty of free samples for themselves.

Perhaps not surprisingly my closest friends were equally diffident. We found out about the more subtle aspects of human sexuality in accidental bits and pieces. At one point my mom left a paperback copy of John Updike's Rabbit Redux lying around and I got some new information from reading that. (After going through the "good parts" I decided it was worth reading the whole book.)

Around the same time a guy in my gym class sold me a copy of Terry Southern's Candy for a few bucks. But I still entered my college years lacking quite a bit of knowledge. The first time I really I knew that BDSM could be part of erotic life was when I saw the cover of National Lampoon's September, 1975 "Back To College" issue. It was openly displayed at a newsstand in Penn Station, but of course I couldn't bring myself to buy it. Today anybody can do a Google image search and find at least a half-dozen places to look at the drawing and then download the file.

School spirit

The Sexual evolution did affect the City College of New York in at least one notable way. The Student Senate allocated a portion of the eighty bucks per year activity fee for movie nights. About once per month during the academic year one could go to the student center building and see a film like Walkabout.

About once every year they went erotic with their offerings. In my freshman year I missed their selection of samples from the New York Erotic Film Festival. In 1974, I forgot if it was the spring or fall, I did get there to see The Devil in Miss Jones.

Perhaps we have regressed in that I couldn't imagine a public university, or in fact any university, having porn films on their list of officially sanctioned (or at least tolerated) student activities. There was some irony in that the student center building, Finley Hall, had been built in the 19th Century as the main building of a Catholic women's school called Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart. Once nuns and the (presumably) chaste young ladies they taught - including Ethel Skakel, later Kennedy - had occupied the place.

On the evening for erotic cinema the Grand Ballroom was filled to its capacity of several hundred. A cross-section of our very diverse school was present, males and females including representatives of every race, creed and ethnicity. As or myself, I was in my last year of a rather long-persisting virginity. About three or four of my friends from one of the college newspapers filled a row. All of us, I guess, expected to be both enlightened and entertained what we were going to see.

The opening act was an erotic cartoon that I think was in German with English subtitles. A few people in the audience did laugh a little but for the most part it was less funny than the average Merrie Melodies product. During the showing of the main feature a respectful silence fell on the audience as if we were watching The Grand Illusion. I think now that although we didn't know what was coming in the manner of a Rocky Horror Picture Show event, some loud audience feedback would have made the whole thing more fun.

I did know something about The Devil in Miss Jones, including the ending, from reading about it somewhere - perhaps in The Village Voice. In the intervening forty-four years I've forgotten a lot of what was in it and I've had to do some research to fill in the gaps in my memory. Here I'll to give my impressions of the movie as I saw it while annotating that with details I've found out more recently.

I was pleased to see that the opening shot was in my hometown; it was of some unremarkable avenue in Manhattan. One could image Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck walking down the sidewalk. If the filmmakers had more wit they might have including some sight gags of that nature but none were forthcoming.

The suicide of Justine Jones (Georgina Spelvin, actually thirty-six year old Shelley Bob Graham) in her bathtub was convincingly filmed but got the story off to a downbeat start. I now know that the filmmakers wanted "Bridge Over Troubled Water" to be on the soundtrack during this bloody spectacle but they couldn't get the rights to the song. Perhaps I wish they had, because it seems like an idea that's so bad it's good.

Immediately following this Justine was shown talking to an ordinary looking middle-aged man in a very nice suburban house. My recollection was that this guy was either Satan himself or one of his minions and the house was the antechamber to Hell. No attempt had been made to build sets or provide costumes, but I soon understood that it wasn't worth the bother. Anyway, during this conversation Justine reveals that she is a virgin.

My memory must be somewhat unreliable because Mr. Acaba was actually some kind of celestial personnel flunky (I thought St. Peter had that job) and the scene was in that nebulous place called Limbo. Even the Pope probably doesn't know exactly what Limbo is supposed to look like (the Church has downgraded the concept recently) but it must be fairly pleasant if it's like Harrison, NY in Westchester County.

From what I've also read recently Acaba gave Justine a choice of either staying in Limbo or going to Hell after getting her fill of all the sexual experiences she missed. That went against the Catholic beliefs I grew up with, namely that suicide is a mortal sin and unconfessed souls have no choice about the outcome. (The get all-you-want sex card can be accepted to get the plot moving.)

I might have chosen Limbo with its lush lawns and all but I'm sixty-three now and probably can't imagine my younger self properly. So, to quote George Carlin on fiction, "I hate reading about clouds. I'm not interested in them. I think, let's get to the fucking already."

The following scenes were supposedly back on Earth, but I didn't grasp that fact at the time. Missed plot points of that nature don't matter too much in such movies. Justine was assigned to The Teacher, played by Harry Reems (formerly Herbert Streicher) who was going to tutor her in the basics. (Was that a full-time occupation?) This was where I saw close ups of penetration for the first time, a necessity of real hard-core to prove that the sex wasn't simulated. There was one truly informative bit; I found out what a Reverse Cowgirl was although I couldn't name it yet and of course I had no one to try it with.

I couldn't say that there were money shots although there had to be at least one. I do know that I was aroused during this sequence in the sense that I was sitting there with an erection. I didn't ask my colleagues about how they were reacting.

My memory grows even dimmer further in and I've had to do research recently to confirm the content of the middle scenes. There was Justine in a lesbian tryst, then threesomes of her with a woman and a man and, just to mix it up, two men. I lost my hard-on and was simply wondering what the filmmakers would present next. Many years later, when writing a fan-fiction screenplay, I had one of the female characters say about porn, "When you're seen one blowjob, you've seen them all." The germ of that idea probably started that night at Finley Hall.

The late scenes of Justine pleasuring herself offered a bit of variety. Watching her masturbate with a banana and then an orange was intriguing. The latter fruit gave me an inspiration and I whispered to my friend next to me, "If it isn't Sunkist, you don't know what you're getting." He seemed to find that very funny and he passed my line along to the rest of our group.

Saving the best for last, the filmmakers presented Justine getting involved in reptilian bestiality by doing some, well, stuff with a live snake. I found out recently that this had been improvised on set at the last moment. One of the secondary actors had brought his pet Herman along and the rest is sexual movie history. I can't imagine what Herman thought of it (I've always wondered about his gender) but perhaps he didn't care. I know he hasn't gotten his own page on IMDb.com, unlike Terry who played Toto in The Wizard of Oz, Moose, who was Eddie on Frasier, and various other animal performers

The dreary and depressing ending is either well known to all or can be easily researched. Over the years the whole film has struck me - except for the nudity and graphic sex of course - as something the Catholic Legion of Decency could have supported. Commit a mortal sin and go to hell. Deathbed confessions are allowed, but once the brain shuts down and the soul departs, the contract for salvation has expired.

When the lights came up I don't think any of us commented about what we had seen. Maybe we didn't want to refer to each other's sexual experience or rather, for the most part, lack of it. Over the next several days it remained outside of our topics of conversation. I never saw the movie again and I never sought to find it

Looking backwards

I had long known that there had been a sequel or two for The Devil in Miss Jones but I was surprised during my recent Internet investigations to find out that there have been seven sequels and remakes and another one is due out by next year. The first sequel released in 1982 is described as a satirical take on the original and that seems like a work worth viewing. In addition it features the inspiring Ron Jeremy, a guy who proves that almost any man can become a porn star if he works hard and has enough persistence.

I was also interested in Gerard Damiano, the late writer and director of the version I saw. He was also a Bronx native like me although his age placed him in my father's generation. He likely had a Catholic upbringing too and even if he renounced it later (I don't really know for sure) his movie certainly has a strong sense of Catholic guilt running through it. Harry Reems, yet another boy from the Bronx, owned the big house in Harrison used for a set, showing that one can make good money screwing for a living, at least when young.

Georgina Spelvin failed to move me no matter had much bouncing around she did on stiff cocks and confused snakes. Other actresses have made much deeper impressions through my views of them on both the large and small screen. Any minute with a fully-clothed Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity has more impact than anything that Spelvin does in her most famous film. Maybe I shouldn't criticize her; rather I've had the insight that watching other people have sex, especially professional sex, is interesting but only up to a point.

The movie itself and the various scenes in it never became part of my fantasy repertoire. Despite the supposed importance of plot and dialogue it mostly looked like a string of sex scenes that happen to star the same person.

Between 1954 and 1974 we went from an era of clandestine stag films in fraternity basements to open full-length porn screenings financed by student fees. Now that has all become moot because of advancing technology.

Joseph Smith wouldn't approve

A year later, in July 1975, I was in downtown Salt Lake City with three friends, two of whom had been there the previous year for The Devil in Miss Jones. We were taking a break from a month-long Greyhound bus tour of America. Our idea was to go to a porn theater, not knowing how scarce, indeed unknown, such things were in that Mormon stronghold.

The closest we could get to one was a place showing Linda Lovelace for President, which was at best (or worst?) R-rated. It was like a porn film with the most explicit parts cut out, and thus something of a chore to watch. The audience, including a few couples, was quite sedate. No one was trying what Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) later got busted for, which was an activity that was part of the reason for going to such theaters in the first place.

I can see now that the film must have been a carnival of political incorrectness, with characters like the Polish bowler, Chow Ming, Abdul Ali Umagooma and the underrated Scatman Crothers as Super Black. Maybe this is the movie I should check out again.

P.S.: Linda Lovelace, originally Linda Boreman, is yet another Bronx native. Who knew that the borough of apartment houses was also the borough of porn stars?