Ever since the archaic Production Code crumbled 40 years ago, and screen sex and nudity became staples of the American cinema, audiences have taken enormous pleasure in watching movie stars disrobe. In the Internet age, the nude bodies viewed most frequently belong to ordinary people. These different acts of voyeurism trigger dissimilar fantasies, raising a question: What do amateurs have that stars don’t?
This rumination on the implications of on-camera sex is inspired by the return of Jack Stevenson, a collector, curator and writer (Land of a Thousand Balconies) who launched his career in San Francisco before moving to Denmark in the ’90s. His biannual visit to Yerba Beuna Center For the Arts this weekend includes three programs of vintage skin and salaciousness under the banner The Superstars Next Door: A Celebration of San Francisco Amateur Sex Cinema From the ’60s. For all the lust and lasciviousness on display, though, it’s Peoria-innocent compared to the stuff you can watch today with the right URL and a couple of mouse clicks.
The first half of tonight’s double bill is entitled “Home Movies,” and comprises four short 16mm films made in 1968 with nonprofessionals. (In every sense of the word, presumably, though one wonders.) The one previewed for the press, the playful, awkward His Father’s Call-Girl, unspools inside the long-gone Green Door Books on Sixth Street, a no-frills shop that sold a variety of porn mags. Larry and his hot date Lola drop in to browse and, in short order, the dirty old man behind the counter is filming them having sex in the back room.
The tawdriness of His Father’s Call-Girl has been diluted by the passage of time, or perhaps we are charmed at the thought that this otherwise unremarkable movie immortalizes the firmness and flexibility of its now-septuagenarian stars. Lola’s big hair, frosted to a fare-thee-well, provides another time-stamp, as well as a useful historical corrective to the perception that every San Francisco gal in those days was an Herbal Essence-scented hippie.