1972: marilyn chambers, barbara bryan, barbara parker, bernice mayo, bunny brody, kandi johnson and rabin dranthra in “behind the green door”

title: behind the green door, scene 1

performers: marilyn chambers, barbara bryan, barbara parker, bernice mayo, bunny brody, kandi johnson, rabin dranthra
production credits: artie mitchell, jim mitchell (dir.), billy boyer, mike bradford (scr.), jon fontana (ed.)
studio: mitchell brothers | running time: 27:21
release date: 1972 | purchase

marilyn chambers et al.

welcome to the new start of this blog, which will go year by year through the girl/girl porn scenes that have intrigued, fascinated, amused or even on occasion aroused me. i initially began it at 1977, because that was when i was born and i figured it was early enough that the industry was still in its infancy, but i soon learned that five years has always been a lifetime in porn. so i'm starting over again with 1972, the year that porn broke.

the legacy of deep throat is secure: the movie that broke box office records for x-rated cinema and ushered in the golden age of theatrical porn. but fifty years later it's cheap and trashy, and linda lovelace was coerced into making it — plus, not for nothing, it contains no girl/girl. but the other major landmark of porn filmmaking in 1972, the one that meant deep throat wasn't just a fluke but the beginning of an avalanche, was behind the green door, a more stylized, even a more pretentious, piece of filmmaking in every way. it made marilyn chambers a star in both x-rated and mainstream film, and its first explicit sequence is girl/girl.

first, the frame story: two guys meet in a diner, where the chef urges them to tell him the story of the green door. cut to marilyn chambers driving in a convertible; she checks into a hotel, and the sinister desk clerk calls someone sleazy to tell him that "she's here." she has a drink on the hotel patio, empty except for the two guys from the diner, telling bullshit stories. the younger one catches her eye. at night, she's in an evening gown heading to the street when a car pulls up, and several thugs (including the directors of the movie) drag her away. we cut to a fancy private club where those same two guys, in evening wear, are granted admission to the exclusive show, and are given masks to wear alongside the other degenerates, decadents, drag queens and ambiguously ethnic fashionistas in attendance. marilyn is hustled in backstage, where she is greeted by lisa grant doing a motherly british accent, who reassures her, massages her, and gives a spiel about awakening her senses. a legitimate mime act opens the show, and then marilyn is brought out in a white gown, attended by six dark-robed women (few of whom have any further industry credits). a voiceover instructs the audience to remain silent while this abducted woman is made to experience every kind of pleasure, and then the six women disrobe her and begin to caress her and take turns going through the motions of eating her out.

all of which is quite obviously only the first chapter to a much longer text, but since that text is otherwise entirely boy/girl, it doesn't concern us here. if i were grading this as a standalone scene by the standards of pornography in 2022, it would — well, the instinct is to say it would be an abject failure, but that's not entirely true, for a couple of reasons. first of all, it simply couldn't get made today. coercion is off the table entirely where the credit card processors are concerned, and the multiple filming locations, detailed set dressing, and host of extras are beyond the reach of even the most ambitious porn producer today. and while the scenario itself is horrific — abduction, nonconsensual sex as public performance — it's so clearly signalled as fantastical that there's a dreamlike quality to the storytelling that literal-minded modern porn consumers simply wouldn't know what to do with.

but also, although the sex is hardly believable according to the girl/girl-only dogma of internet forums and comment sections (genital contact is obscured by plentiful pubic hair, and marilyn never does anything but breathe heavily in reaction to her attendants), it is shot spectacularly: there are images in this sequence that are unrivaled by even the artiest porn producers working over the past fifty years.

a lot of that is due, of course, to a lack of precedent. one of the stories i expect this blog to tell will be the narrowing of the pornographic imagination, as industrial standardization, repetitive niches, and exhaustive overproduction leads to a deadening of the creative impulse and the norm becomes to just do what worked last time, but cheaper and quicker. good cinematography takes time, which means money, and interesting scripts require performers who can pull them off; neither will remain in the budget for long. marilyn chambers is not yet an actor: the blankness of her youthful face (especially when compared to her later work) throughout these opening scenes is almost terrifying. in fact, of the women in these opening thirty minutes, only lisa grant, whose sexual contact is limited to a few rubs of marilyn's breasts, delivers any dialogue.

the mitchell brothers are sometimes advertised as (unusually for the era) making porn from a woman's point of view, but they still frame the story as a social encounter between men, and the girl/girl here is very obviously just an advanced, possibly nonconsensual, form of masturbation — the warm-up to the main event, in which men will be involved. in that regard, although almost exclusively in that regard, it's not a very promising start to my journey through the past fifty years of girl/girl. but there's a long way to go. let's see what else we find along the way.

1972 runners up:

roshell rush and suzanne fields in a clockwork blue, scene 3

xerxes (dir. eric j. haims), 10:48

roshell, suzanne

early porn contains all kinds of sports and freaks: the broad sketch comedy energy of a clockwork blue, which takes a looney tunes approach to history and literature, would scarcely ever be replicated in later years, as the meathead hardcore audience made its loathing for book-learnin' clear. the zany sketch of a plot has some nebbish (joe e. tata, per imdb) popping through history: in this scene he's the scarlet pimpernel, and is mostly stuck behind a curtain while marie antoinette, madame dubarry, louis xvi, and robespierre scheme on the eve of the fall of the bastille. the extremely brief, but surprisingly non-softcore, sex sequence is between a randy marie a. and a duplicitous dubarry before hijinks resume ensuing. it's goofy as all hell, but i'm a sucker for any kind of period dress, and the campy script has occasional genuine wit.

clair dia, kandi johnson, et al. in little sisters, scene 9

sherpix (dir. alex derenzy), 13:37

clair

another key early ingredient in porn was the ash-end of hippie burnout culture, represented here by alex derenzy, one of the major auteurs of the first generation of adult filmmakers. the plot is shaggy and strains unconvincingly toward the mythic: two young women go missing, so their mother sets out to find them.  they pass through a gang of male louts, a "dyke" commune, and a cultic gay male enclave before, finally, the dykes steal the girls away from the louts and have their way with them in a frenzied double gangbang that turns into tender pairings-off before their mother, with a little person dressed as the spirit of the woods, finds them again. the filmmaking is gripping and verité, but few of the performances are equal to it, and only the women playing the two naïfs, clair dia and kandi johnson, would leave enough of a mark on porn to be identified later.

lynn harris and uschi digart in the pleasures of a woman, scene 3

national leisure (dir. nick millard), 13:56

lynn, uschi

finally, it wouldn't be an accurate assessment of porn's earliest years if it didn't include at least one entirely softcore film, since that's what the bulk of the x-rated industry had been before deep throat made hardcore respectable, and softcore would linger into the internet era as the video equivalent of magazine pictorials. uschi digart, the voluptuous centerfold model, was a mainstay of the softcore side, and her (non-speaking) role here as the seductive older woman enticing eager college student lynn harris into lesbian lovemaking is as good as she ever was. the girl/girl sex represented on screen is only slightly less believable than its hardcore counterpart of the period, and the jazzy soundtrack and overheated voiceover narration does a lot to make up for the lack of explicit action. this blog will almost exclusively be covering hardcore from here on out, but i wanted to include this as an acknowledgment of the roots of girl/girl erotica.

also noteworthy:

scenes

• nancy martin and rene bond in bad, bad gang, scene 1 | something weird (donn greer)
• chlorine stillwater and rebecca in the erotic boutique, scene 7 | something weird (t. parker)
• bea moore and nona potter in high fashion models, scene 3 | after hours
• carol connors and lynn nelson in cousin betty, scene 6 | tga
• candy samples and chlorine stillwater in sex as you like it, scene 3 | charisma
• eve orlon and lynn harris in wendy's naughty night, scene 4 | after hours (nick millard)