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By Root 857 0

Chambers, the all-American model on the cover of the Ivory soap box, a Warholian conceit that probably flipped the master’s silver wig—was sacrificed to an African native in tribal war paint and necklace, a solemn traducing of taboo. Fiona on Fire, which took Otto Preminger’s Laura and tarted it up, starred Amber Hunt, whose baby-cheeked appeal and scarves were visually echoed by Nancy Allen’s in Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. (De Palma knew his porn, wanting to cast the porn ice princess Annette Haven in Body Double.) One of the more interesting cross-mirrorings transpired between the more deluxe pornos and the sullen parables of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Similarities: the oppressive furnishings that obstacle-coursed the bourgeois rooms like Douglas Sirk props, the wallpaper patterns and colors that looked like jaundice visiting for tea, the drag-queen soap-opera wigs and eyelashes that might have been daubed on with Magic Markers—and Fassbinder reciprocated the favor from Munich. “His strategies often indicate a study of porn movies, how to get an expanse of flesh across the screen with the bluntest impact and the least footage,” wrote the critic Manny Farber in an essay from 1975, citing the scene in The Merchant of Four Seasons in which a “woman who had heretofore been all tightness is suddenly exposed in all her white length, being serviced from the rear by a stranger whose tiny smirk is hung on until its meaning is in your brain.” The seventies were big on tiny smirks, which complemented the swinger mustaches.

If classic erotica from the Olympia Press and mortifications of the flesh such as Story of O gave off the ruby flicker of Catholicism gone bad, seventies porn had a more Jewish smack. Its profaneness was unfermented with metaphysical properties, allowing it to get much quicker to the beefy point. It wasn’t simply the preponderance of Jewish performers in porn, especially on the protruding side (Gillis, Ron Jeremy, and mustachioed Harry Reems), that lent this impression, but the amplifying impact of cable-access TV in New York, where the two biggest porn hosts were Robin Byrd and Al Goldstein, the latter especially bloating up every Jewish stereotype into larger-than-life self-caricature that made the cartooniness of Portnoy’s Complaint look like Victorian lithography. The editor of Screw magazine had no illusions about porn or its audience—they weren’t ascoted gentlemen who read Aldous Huxley and appreciated a fine Chianti with their hand job, but losers who couldn’t get laid unless they left money on the dressing table, or begged. Goldstein belittled and berated his readers with the zeal of an insult comic, not wrapping his editorials in some larger Playboy philosophy of epicurean wisdom (his weekly rag, Screw, looked like something to line a sex offender’s litter box), even though his commitment to free speech and expression was as staunch as Hugh Hefner’s and Larry Flynt’s. Like Flynt, the publisher of Hustler, Goldstein maintained an unshakable conviction that First Amendment protections covered filth as well as artistic merit and feints at redeeming social value; censorship should have no part to play in quality control. The inadvertent comedy of Goldstein’s interviews with porn actors and directors was that his questions could gross out even these veterans of the trenches, so crudely were they formulated, so porcine his presence; his interrogatory mode not even aerated with the aging-dirty-boy glee that Howard Stern would bring to his radio interviews with silicone starlets and their suitcase pimps. Where Stern still sends the impression that two strippers spanking each other is a bar mitzvah special, porn for Goldstein was more of a wallow in the larger mess hall of Manhattan, where connoisseurship consisted in being able to spot and appreciate the better-quality slop. At one point Goldstein tried to platform Screw into something more upscale and slick, launching a spin-off magazine called National Screw (he was never one for ornate package-labels), which mated porn and punk on the masthead,