That's Sexploitation!
Before the advent of modern-day pornography, a vast and rapidly-paced underground world of smut peddling was the norm, complete with its own secret history. This documentary reveals the untold story of American cinema's gloriously sordid cinematic past. Starting in the early 1920s and lasting until the early 1970s, expert exploiter/producer David F. Friedman and filmmaker Frank Henenlotter navigate us through an era of more than five salacious decades of skin flicks. It's the true story of dirty movies, exploitation films known as 'sexploitation' due to their highly sexual themes, traced in elegant detail from the bizarre locations where these nudie shorts and feature films were screened to the ongoing legal battles fought by their promoters. And of course there are the stories of the innovators themselves, people who often risked their own security and livelihood to make these films, believing in some way that what they were doing wasn't a 'bad' thing - and that it could rake in some dough.
- 2013
- 2 Hrs 16 Mins
- Documentary
Before the advent of modern-day pornography, a vast and rapidly-paced underground world of smut peddling was the norm, complete with its own secret history. This documentary reveals the untold story of American cinema's gloriously sordid cinematic past. Starting in the early 1920s and lasting until the early 1970s, expert exploiter/producer David F. Friedman and filmmaker Frank Henenlotter navigate us through an era of more than five salacious decades of skin flicks. It's the true story of dirty movies, exploitation films known as 'sexploitation' due to their highly sexual themes, traced in elegant detail from the bizarre locations where these nudie shorts and feature films were screened to the ongoing legal battles fought by their promoters. And of course there are the stories of the innovators themselves, people who often risked their own security and livelihood to make these films, believing in some way that what they were doing wasn't a 'bad' thing - and that it could rake in some dough.
