The term “Porno Chic” is rarely, if ever, used these days, and it seems almost impossible in today’s icky, PornHub-clip-dominated adult entertainment world. But whether you believe it or not, there was a short time when “fuck films” were talked about a lot in both mainstream and highbrow society.
“Adult entertainment” came out of the closet with the porno Deep Throat in 1972. The reason was a matter of real estate. In the early 1970s, it wasn’t clear if it was legal to show pornographic movies in legitimate theaters. That all changed when Arthur Morowitz, a real estate mogul and investor in adult films, and Sam Lake, a grindhouse quickie producer, booked Throat at the World Theater in New York City. The novelty movie, in which Linda Lovelace played a woman whose sexual joy center was in an odd place (see title), was a hit almost right away. On The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson made a joke about it. Nora Ephron wrote an article about how she went to a movie theater. For a short time, the World Theater was like Studio 54—everyone important had to go there at least once.
Deep Throat was a movie that you only needed to see once, if at all, but it was a little different from other pornographic movies of the time. In was a bit above the zombiefied norm of porn acting in terms of story, humor, and acting, especially from Lovelace and the energetic, mustachioed Harry Reems. It gave rise to the term “aspirational smut.” Debbie Does Dallas rode the wave it made and went into screens all over the country in 1978. This was 45 years ago.
This was the rare hard-core porno that Siskel and Ebert actually watched and wrote about. Not at all. Even though it was one of their “Dogs of the Week” in March 1979, that’s not nothing. Roger Ebert said that one of the things that made the movie famous was that the Dallas Cowboys sued the people who made it for copyright theft. Because the movie’s hook was that the main character, Debbie, did sex work to make money so she could fly to Dallas and try out for a spot in the famous Cowboys cheerleader group. Even though the Dallas Cowboy dancers were pretty, the team took pride in having a good, clean image. Ebert said, “Copyright is the least of the things that this movie breaks.” But the debate and the title, which became a very adaptable catchphrase (there was once a video game called “Debbie Does Donuts,” in which the player slashes flying donuts; someone also opened a short-lived “topless donut shop” with the same name), made it a hit.
It had no right to be. I can’t find the exact quote, but I think Ebert (or another popular critic) said that the main thing he noticed about the movie was that the lead actress, Bambi Woods, could have cleaned under her fingernails before coming to work.
Debbie didn’t try to be a sophisticated story like 1973’s “The Devil in Miss Jones” or 1976’s “The Opening of Misty Beethoven” (Miss Jones ends with a reference to Sartre’s “No Exit,” and “Misty Beethoven” is a play on Shaw’s “Pygmalion” or “My Fair Lady,” with sex work standing in for speech and manners). Debbie wasn’t shot with high-end cameras like A Girl’s Best Friend (1981) and a bunch of other “ambitious” adult movies made before the whole industry moved to the San Fernando Valley (more or less; pockets of production activity and gonzo talent scouting continued in Florida; see also Boogie Nights). (As a production helper on the movie Best Friend, which starred sleazebag Ron Jeremy, the late mature-woman porn pioneer Juliet Anderson, and Veronica Hart, who appeared as a judge in Boogie Nights, I can say that the equipment used was Panavision.) It’s just a dirty porno that was mostly filmed in New York and has more story and conversation than a loop.
But, like Deep Throat, which led to a few sequels, Debbie turned out to be a successful porn series. Studio/distributor Vivid Video got the rights to the intellectual property and started making different versions in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Many of them were directed by former performer Paul Thomas, who, like many porn stars of the late ’70s, was a trained actor who had done some work in a professional production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. Near the end of the DVD boom of the 2000s, Thomas became known for his self-hating porn. Movies like Layout and Throat, which was sort of a remake of Deep Throat and starred Sasha Grey (with whom I’ve worked), were set in the worlds of porn and sex work and showed how bad the people in those worlds became because of what they did for a living. A good strategy. The 2007 movie Debbie Does…Again, the story takes place in the world of cheerleading. In a plot similar to Heaven Can Wait, Debbie dies right before a cheerleading competition, but she can come back in the body of another girl to help her team win. Think about the options.
Read More – Is ‘Cobweb’ available to watch on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video?