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In 1981, the prolific Knight Publishing company started to publish a series of trade-publications for the adult film industry. Intended to be guides for the retailer and consumer alike, they provided detailed guides of the availability of adult films. The publications were issued under the banner of the long-standing Adam Film World magazine, and had a variety of names – including XXX Movie Illustrated, Directory of Adult Films, Porn Star Annual, Annual Guide to X-Rated Movies and Video, and X-Rated Movie Handbook.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the the Adult Film Guides I had spend months working on have been fully digitized, and available to the public. It was a fascinating time before the internet, before Google. Everything was analog–shot on film, photos were all film, mostly chromes (slides), audio was recorded on tape. And if you wanted to read a review or get information on anything, you had to actually look at a magazine or newspaper. And publishing anything about porn was not widely done at that point in time.
Famous for having one of the , Paul Schrader’s 1979 Neo-noir sees a religious, middle-class father (played by the incomparable George C. Scott) grapple with the disappearance of his daughter Kristen and the subsequent revelation that she is making porn in Los Angeles. He enlists sometime porn actress and prostitute Niki (Season Hubley) to help him find Kristen, working under the assumption she has been forced into the adult film industry. But to Kristen, porn is an escape from her conservative upbringing, and she finds liberation in being able to decide what she wants to do with her body. Schrader is no stranger to films about sex work, having written the script for ’s Taxi Driver, and Hardcore remains a bracing take on “every father’s worst nightmare” that simultaneously posits it’s possible to be a porn star and liberated – a pretty bold idea for 1979.
Paul Thomas Anderson grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the heart of the Los Angeles porn scene, and his 1997 dramedy about an up-and-coming porn star named Dirk Diggler (played by ) is rightfully heralded as a modern classic. Loosely based on the life of porn star John Holmes, Boogie Nights presents the Golden Age of Porn in all its scuzzy glory, as Diggler’s meteoric rise to fame – and inevitable fall from grace – is flanked by roller girls, drug deals, and one very memorable scene involving Ricky Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl”. Anderson does a great job at capturing the glamorous aspects of the adult film industry during its zenith, but the highest highs come with the lowest lows, and the balance between the two is what makes Boogie Nights so memorable.
This “romantic comedy” about a high school student who discovers his hot next-door neighbour used to be a porn actress is considered something of a cult film now, but its “porn stars are people too!” rhetoric feels dated and insulting, and the character of Daniella (played by Elisha Cuthbert) is so thinly-sketched it’s as if her only character trait is that she’s starred in adult films. The film is much more interested in its male lead, an ambitious and objectionable sort with questionable views about women. The second he realises Daniella is a porn actress, Matthew (Emile Hirsch) treats her as a sex object, setting in motion the events of the film, and even then sees her as someone who needs rescuing rather than a grown woman who can make her own damn life choices.
