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Hollywood does porn the way Debbie does Dallas—with an exuberant appetite. In fact, since the mid 1990s, Hollywood seemingly cannot get enough of films about porn and the porn industry. The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996), Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997), and 8MM (Joel Schumacher, 1999) all deal with current porn ranging from Hustler magazine, to the golden age of 35mm theatrical porn and the rise of video porn, to snuff movies. Strange Days (1995) is a futuristic film that depicts a world with black market, virtual reality porn run amok. Not surprisingly, within this climate the Marquis de Sade, the original bad boy of porn, is the main character in Quills (2000). Nor is it surprising that this porn fervor has crossed over into television with such made-for-TV movies as Showtime’s film about the Mitchell brothers, Rated X (2000), and Showtime’s Dirty Pictures (2000), about the allegedly obscene, sexually controversial photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Even documentary is not immune. In 2001, Pornstar : The Legend of Ron Jeremy received a great deal of critical attention and made the art house circuits. Something about a documentary on Jeremy playing the art house circuit (and even Jeremy himself who made personal appearances with the film in cities such as Tempe, Arizona) summarizes one of the many bizarre riddles with regard to this wave of fascination with porn: Why are people who (at C H A P T E R F I V E Bad, Worse, Worst: 8MM and Hollywood’s Bad Boys of Porn PETER LEHMAN 79 least in polite society) shun porn in the name of art rushing to see and praise a documentary on an actor who works in a form they despise? If anyone thinks he knows the difference between art and pornography, it is the patron of the art cinema. Why does Ron Jeremy’s name announcing a personal appearance on an art house marquee draw patrons who would run the other way if his appearance were tied in with one of his porn films? A local reviewer inadvertently pointed to this strange state of affairs when he praised Pornstar, faulting the movie however for concentrating on its charming central figure without representing the sleazy side of porn. But reviewers of documentaries about famous athletes, for example, do not demand inclusion of the sleazy side of professional sports. Nor do they presume that with the exception of the star of the film, all other athletes are sleazy. Why should Jeremy be such a startling exception with regard to the sleaze factor? All industries, including Hollywood (one is tempted to say, especially Hollywood), have their sleazy side. Why should we clamor to see porn’s sleazy side with more zeal than, say, that of Hollywood or any other industry? When watching a documentary about Steven Spielberg, critics are unlikely to clamor for seeing the sleazy side of Hollywood. Why are porn’s bad boys presumed to be worse, for example, than the CEOs of “respectable” (but obviously, in some way, sleazy) businesses? Obviously, there is a fascination both in Hollywood and among moviegoers in general with what lies on the other side of that presumably clear-cut line between art and pornography or entertainment and pornography. But Jon Lewis (2000) reminds us that the line has not always been so clear-cut. A brief account of this history is vital to understanding what is happening in this recent spate of movies about the porn industry. Indeed, the title of Lewis’s book, Hollywood v. Hard Core, would serve equally well for this chapter because all the films under consideration are in part the result of this adversarial relationship and how Hollywood represents porn cannot be separated from its actual historical encounter with that industry. The rise of theatrical hard-core porn coincided with the new freedom in Hollywood that resulted from the end of the Hays Code and the adoption of a rating system that included X-rated movies by 1968. Precisely when Hollywood decided it was going to make sexually explicit films, it found itself in unexpected competition with the porn industry. Few people remember or know that for a brief period of time in the early 1970s porn films were being reviewed by Variety, among other publications, and that they were top-grossing films at the box office. As Lewis documents, porn films were regularly listed among the Variety top 50 box-office grossing films for the year in...

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