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00:00:15here are the elements to a large lonely house comes the heroine the house is exotic and isolated
00:00:26she forms a bond with an older man a dark magnetic powerful or brooding man the woman is attracted to
00:00:35him and usually just as vehemently repelled or frightened she is never sure of her feelings
00:00:43the man is not the heroine's only worry there is an emotionally tangled and darkly mysterious
00:00:49family in the house and also the hint of another woman who is at the same time the heroine's double
00:00:56and her opposite she becomes aware that somewhere in this tangle of oppressive relationships there
00:01:03exists a buried and ominous secret her life is threatened minor characters are killed
00:01:10storms take place finally the secret is revealed sometimes it is immoral but usually it is criminal
00:01:20activity centered around money or another woman coincidental with the revelation of this secret
00:01:27is the final untangling of the heroine's emotions another way to sort of think of the erotic thriller
00:01:34is to see the two cinematic strands that created it film noir and female gothic or romance and those two
00:01:47strands are essentially the male strand the film noir where you have a guy filled with desire but menaced
00:01:56by a femme fatale and the gothic or romance strand where you have a desiring woman wanting to escape some
00:02:08kind of
00:02:08confinement falling maybe for a dark stranger who's exciting but potentially threatening those two strands all depend on the
00:02:18perspective and each erotic thriller presents something of both perspectives you can go all the way
00:02:26back to rebecca hitchcock's rebecca in 1940 to see a combination of film noir and female gothic
00:02:36there's a sense in the gothic film that these women are naive but also curious that they want to
00:02:45investigate the world and its mysteries and yet they're punished often for doing so they're looking for
00:02:53love they're looking for romance but they've found it in the wrong person
00:03:00so the focus on finding love and finding your place in the gothic of the 40s shifts to focusing
00:03:08on finding sexual fulfillment in the 90s and what happens is inevitably it's not going to be found with
00:03:17that guy with that guy that you married the gothic home actually becomes more of a prison
00:03:24for the female protagonist it's this kind of haunted place that the heroine must escape
00:03:38the quintessential gothic erotic thriller is illicit dreams
00:03:53illicit dreams has weird supernatural moments it has a spooky house it has these kind of fantasy elements
00:04:07it has an incredibly abusive husband who treats his wife very badly
00:04:16maura oh daniel hi you seem nervous did i frighten you no i just didn't expect you to be here
00:04:28that's all
00:04:32you're late where were you well i i met mindy for lunch and then we took in a new exhibit
00:04:40at the fourth street gallery
00:04:43did you like it it's not really my cup of tea i was if you're gonna lie maura you better
00:04:49learn to do a better job
00:04:51melinda melinda called here asking for you you know if i didn't know any better i would think that you
00:04:56were seeing someone
00:04:57pick up the fucking mail
00:05:00a woman has to solve the problem through more like emotional and even psychological discovery through dreams
00:05:10through investigation and that's the reason that the erotic thriller is usually better is because it's dealing with emotions and
00:05:17sexuality
00:05:25i wanted to find uh you know a house that you were not totally sure is it going to fall
00:05:30down
00:05:31you know it's but it's interesting there's all this level and complications and i thought it i wanted something
00:05:39that i felt that went with the story over again of sexuality there's a lot of hidden parts and and
00:05:46it has a certain
00:05:47gothic feel to it and so we were lucky to find that house yeah a gothic castle in los angeles
00:06:07june 1st ivy's philosophy number 21 never fall in love
00:06:15as long as i can break somebody's heart that's love enough for me
00:06:19you only keep a diary to tell secrets to yourself things that you can't really share with anybody else
00:06:27and i think that that was very appealing to people on a voyeuristic level and on a personal
00:06:34i would love to be that woman this evening i would love to be that brave that daring that bold
00:06:40that beautiful
00:06:41in this case she's an artist and i really believe as an artist if you are an artist you have
00:06:48to try things
00:06:49you can't be a nice little girl who just goes by the book and try to please your mother and
00:06:56the church
00:06:56that's what being an artist is about you know freedom what is freedom what do you try
00:07:14it's a critical moment where is she going to actually experiment and go to the other side of her sexuality
00:07:23i think for women there is this conflict in a young girl i don't know if it's still true today
00:07:30um but i bet you it is
00:07:32do you remember me
00:07:42take me with you
00:07:46i can
00:07:48when you've been a good girl
00:07:52and then suddenly you want to you know put your sexy clothes and go you know do something different with
00:07:58you with your sexuality and with yourself be like oh you know maybe pick up somebody
00:08:04that's like a you know a revolution for a young you know a girl that has been raised with certain
00:08:09ideas
00:08:11to be an artist
00:08:15you know to be a serious artist
00:08:19you have to be willing to sacrifice everything
00:08:22you have to confront your demons
00:08:25go into battle with them
00:08:29that's what i want
00:08:32i think that i actually started thinking about this when i was an undergraduate
00:08:37i was working in a lingerie store believe it or not
00:08:40and i was really interested in
00:08:44erotic representations and erotic stories from a woman's perspective
00:08:48you've taken a hell of a lot for granted
00:08:51am i?
00:08:55my very first zalman king reference was nine and a half weeks
00:09:00nine and a half weeks brought this this raw primal power to the erotic scenes
00:09:07that was something that we hadn't really seen before
00:09:10and i think it really was
00:09:14the first time there was really sexy for women
00:09:18we could kind of put ourselves into her high heels
00:09:24when i saw nine and a half weeks
00:09:26i thought it was much more graphic than it actually was
00:09:29and when i saw it again years later i realized
00:09:32oh that was actually pretty tame
00:09:33but i liked the impression of something much more graphic
00:09:36and that means i was being stimulated psychologically intellectually
00:09:40rather than just being fed nudity and carnal humping
00:09:45the eroticism was central to the story
00:09:48it wasn't just something that was thrown in or added on
00:09:52it was absolutely integral to the plot and how the story unfolded
00:09:57and that's what really started to be thinking about
00:10:00a love scene has to be more than just an interlude
00:10:06nine and a half weeks is not an erotic thriller
00:10:08but there are aspects of the erotic thriller in nine and a half weeks
00:10:15i remember the first screening of nine and a half weeks
00:10:21literally 75 percent of the audience walked out of the movie theater
00:10:27and the reviews were horrific just horrific
00:10:32europe had a much more open mindset to human sexuality
00:10:39thank goodness because it went on to gross over a hundred million dollars
00:10:43after completely bombing domestically
00:10:46i think we're still puritans at heart in this country you know
00:10:49and uh and so zelman was i think had a personal mission of some kind
00:10:55to help us become more european in our views of sexuality maybe
00:11:00what i like about zelman king's work
00:11:03i love everything i just love everything
00:11:33thank you
00:11:33my pleasure
00:11:33thank you
00:11:33thank you
00:11:41I think Zalman King is very misunderstood.
00:11:45I think he's made really good erotic dramas that probably influence the aesthetic of erotic
00:11:52thrillers as well.
00:11:53And they are very surprising because they really, really put women in the center.
00:12:02Zalman King took things that Bradley Metzger had done, that Joe Sarno had done, that Just
00:12:08Jaikin had done, and he put it into a new, much more feminized, and I would say post-feminist
00:12:13format that was really respecting the female protagonist.
00:12:18What are a woman's thoughts?
00:12:19What are her feelings?
00:12:21What are her fantasies?
00:12:23What is she looking at?
00:12:25That kind of focus was something that wasn't really part of thrillers and sexual subjectivity
00:12:33films.
00:12:36He also created this aesthetic that mixes music and sound and imagery in this kind of very
00:12:44atmospheric and moody fashion.
00:12:54I loved Zalman.
00:12:55Zalman was a Venice guy, you know.
00:12:57I loved him.
00:12:57He was very driven.
00:12:58And he was just beginning to try to set up the Red Shoe Diaries.
00:13:04And we liked the idea, and I think he might have done one episode, but he was in trouble
00:13:10financially.
00:13:11Not big trouble, but he was making them for way too much money.
00:13:15And then he came to me to do another series for us, and it was a pretty good idea.
00:13:22And then he said, you know, by the way, does Playboy ever put money in?
00:13:28And I said, sure.
00:13:29What do you got?
00:13:44David Duchovny would collect these diary entries.
00:13:47He lost his love, who committed suicide.
00:13:51She couldn't choose which man to be with.
00:13:53He introduces these features through letters that women send him.
00:13:58And all of these are like fantasy features where a woman is basically looking for some
00:14:04kind of sexual fulfillment.
00:14:06Just the whole premise of reading a story or a letter that's written and then seeing how
00:14:11that, you know, gets played out.
00:14:13And because Zalman shot everything so beautifully, it's sensual, it's erotic, it's fantasies that
00:14:21people could relate to.
00:14:22Red Shoes just happened to be focused on the female prism.
00:14:27It was a woman's point of view.
00:14:29She is telling her story.
00:14:31You like rock and roll?
00:14:33I do.
00:14:35And bad boys and having my own way.
00:14:39It's all about the beauty and the story and the romance.
00:14:44And they really created a mood of sensuality.
00:14:51They shot really fast with multiple cameras from every angle.
00:14:55It was like a dance.
00:15:01Who do you love?
00:15:03You.
00:15:04Doing a Red Shoe Diaries episode, we would go through like eight pages of dialogue and
00:15:09they'd just let it run and see where it went.
00:15:11Now, I want you to hold that in both hands and bark like a dog.
00:15:23Ladder.
00:15:26Ladder.
00:15:26Woof.
00:15:27Woof.
00:15:28Woof.
00:15:29Woof.
00:15:30Ladder.
00:15:31Woof.
00:15:32Woof.
00:15:32Ladder.
00:15:32Woof.
00:15:32Woof.
00:15:33Woof.
00:15:33Woof.
00:15:33Woof.
00:15:34Woof.
00:15:36Woof.
00:15:39This character that they brought me, Rita, has two men.
00:15:43She's trying to choose between the two of them and she's, well, neither one of them are perfect,
00:15:48so she'll need two to make it work.
00:15:50You know, it's women playing by their own rules and it was just so fun.
00:15:57Got an idea.
00:15:59Monday, Wednesday, Friday are gonna be your days.
00:16:06Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday are gonna be your days.
00:16:12Sunday, I get to myself and my girlfriend.
00:16:16Unfortunately, we tend to think of just sex as being masculine and romance and emotion
00:16:22being feminine and that's not true.
00:16:26Men are capable of feeling romance and of having emotions.
00:16:30Women are capable of being totally sexual animals.
00:16:34And I think that one of the things that Zaman was able to pull together is the world in which
00:16:40everybody could feel everything.
00:16:44Red Shoe Diaries was an incredibly successful show by anybody's standards.
00:16:5066 episodes.
00:16:51It has played in every single country in the world.
00:16:56It is as popular, was as popular internationally as domestically.
00:17:02For a period with Red Shoe Diaries, you could say that Zaman King was basically helping Showtime
00:17:08become almost an equal to HBO.
00:17:12And so Zaman King was very important to the fortunes of Showtime.
00:17:16Zaman King took this genius moment and was like, I'm gonna make an erotic series about women's fantasies.
00:17:23And I think that he and his wife made sexual material that tried to address women's spectators.
00:17:30My mother's role was absolute collaborator.
00:17:34In fact, I mean, she really wrote Red Shoe Diaries, the pilot.
00:17:38My father would conceive of things and she would come in.
00:17:41And it was really almost page for page at times that they would go back and forth.
00:17:48And there were times when I would be there looking at work and reading work.
00:17:52And that would go from my mother's work would be seen by all of us.
00:17:55And so in that sense, it was a home of a lot of shifting pieces of paper going back and
00:18:00forth.
00:18:02Zaman King unlocked a Pandora's box in American cinema.
00:18:06And that box has stubbornly refused to remain shut.
00:18:10The cat and mouse sexual dynamics between men and women in his films fed directly into the erotic thriller.
00:18:16And into the many modern films which have followed on the sharp stiletto heels of his insatiable heroines.
00:18:28I lived in New York for about seven, eight years.
00:18:31And it was the time to go westward.
00:18:35All my friends were making the move because that's where you had to be.
00:18:39Hollywood.
00:18:40So we loaded up the truck and moved out here.
00:18:44Harlequin romance novels.
00:18:46I did a few of those covers.
00:18:48I guess I just evolved from my Harlequin romance novels to the erotic thriller genre.
00:18:55I enjoyed the genre.
00:18:57I mean, the guy, girl and the gun.
00:18:58I mean, you just, you know, you get to do all those things that you would never do in real
00:19:03life.
00:19:06Get out of the way!
00:19:07Get out of the way!
00:19:08Get out of the way!
00:19:09Get out of the way!
00:19:18Every time that I would be given a script, I'd put my own take on it.
00:19:24I was always doing these off-the-wall things.
00:19:26I'm in my apartment and I see this thing on the TV.
00:19:30And the director was just like, okay, just sit there.
00:19:33Okay, you're just waiting, you're watching.
00:19:34And I'm like, no, I don't want to do that.
00:19:36So I took a facial mask.
00:19:37I put a facial mask on.
00:19:38I'm like, I'm doing push-ups.
00:19:41And you can see my face, my green face coming off and out of the camera.
00:19:44Which, I mean, that's what I was always trying to flavor it with something that you would never see in
00:19:52these movies.
00:19:53Sometimes I got away with it, sometimes I didn't.
00:19:56I look back on some of them and go, wow, if I could do that again, would I change it?
00:20:01And Irresistible was one of the ones I did get a chance to watch again.
00:20:04And I still think it will hold a viewer's attention watching it with the characters and just how it plays
00:20:10out.
00:20:10Do you remember your last line in that movie?
00:20:19All set?
00:20:20Yeah.
00:20:27Let's blow this cops down.
00:20:34Checkmate.
00:20:36Checkmate.
00:20:44Playboy's reputation was based on beauty, you know, and a little bit of erotica and interesting stuff about sexuality that
00:20:53wasn't available to the public.
00:20:55And so when I got there, they had very little product.
00:20:57And the only film they had was old stuff.
00:21:00Go weighed down with that heavy shawl and all those petticoats.
00:21:04I'll take them off.
00:21:06And they had cut-down porns where they would cut the X out.
00:21:10Then you had all those bad actors.
00:21:17Yes, you wanted to see me, Mr. Severs?
00:21:19It just wasn't good filmmaking.
00:21:21When I met in subsequent meetings, they'd say, so what do you think of that product?
00:21:26I said, well, it's the worst thing I've ever seen.
00:21:28The channel is unbelievably bad.
00:21:32Playboys!
00:21:34Playmate!
00:21:35Playoffs!
00:21:36Okay, at the start of this event, the Blues ahead by one.
00:21:38Gina Tomasino loosening up.
00:21:40Kimberly McCarthy looking beautiful as well.
00:21:42It's not hard to do on this team.
00:21:44These girls are beautiful.
00:21:46All of these satellites were going up all over Europe.
00:21:50They were screaming for product.
00:21:51And so they came to me and said, do you have any product?
00:21:55And I said, it's coming up.
00:21:56I've got this great series, which we hadn't done any shooting on.
00:22:00It's called Eden.
00:22:03A woman inherits from her husband a wonderful escape place.
00:22:08It wasn't a film walk kind of thing.
00:22:12It was Fantasy Island.
00:22:13You can go there and have your fantasy take place.
00:22:16People come and go.
00:22:18It's almost like we're warriors.
00:22:21The location gave it a bigness that I needed.
00:22:24That was very important.
00:22:26And I needed good scripts.
00:22:28Because we could do all the naked bodies in the world, but we needed scripts.
00:22:33How about a toast?
00:22:35To forgetting the past and living for the future.
00:22:42I don't know about forgetting the past, but I'll turn to the future.
00:22:47Well, that's good enough for me.
00:22:50Now, at the same time I needed product, the Europeans wanted me to make film.
00:22:55And the channel needed film.
00:22:57So we created Cameo Studios so that we could go out and buy films.
00:23:02They would contract people to make their films.
00:23:07And they'd say, okay, here's $750,000, go make a movie.
00:23:13What are you working on?
00:23:15Oh, the CBC stuff.
00:23:17It's not urgent.
00:23:18Did you want me?
00:23:19I actually do.
00:23:23Oh, my God.
00:23:26Jail, hold my calls for a minute, would you?
00:23:35Well, cabin's rented.
00:23:40And so are you.
00:23:41You're talking about essentially a mouth that opened up.
00:23:45That was this kind of cable TV, the HBO's, the Showtime's.
00:23:51And that mouth got hungrier and wider.
00:23:54There was mainstream.
00:23:56And then there was this like erotic underbelly, but it was expanding.
00:24:04Playboy did understand production value.
00:24:06That was the paradox of them, which is what everybody was saying to them from the beginning.
00:24:10Man, if you just handle your own production, you can own it all.
00:24:14And own it they did.
00:24:16In 1995, Playboy formed the first of two clandestine production companies, Mystique Films.
00:24:24The second company, which took over production in the year 2000, was Indigo.
00:24:29Over a 10-year period, Mystique and Indigo combined produced over 70 films.
00:24:35Most were erotic thrillers.
00:24:38The intention was to make real movies, not just excuses for people to get naked.
00:24:45Not unlike a film like Basic Instinct.
00:24:49So right away, we had 15 or 20 directors who wanted to work for us, within months.
00:24:55And these were young students, you know, maybe they did a student film, you know.
00:25:00But that was good because they were not trained to spend a lot of money.
00:25:04You know what I mean?
00:25:05They were doing films on a low budget.
00:25:08This was a big budget, $500,000.
00:25:11A nine-day shoot was heaven for them.
00:25:14So right away, the Playboy channel was changing.
00:25:18We were starting to get product, and we moved very quickly.
00:25:22We made the films in ridiculously short amounts of time, 11 or 12 days.
00:25:29The producers knew their business.
00:25:31They knew what they were doing.
00:25:32So it was a real pleasure to work for them.
00:25:36By the time Mystique came around, we knew what to do.
00:25:42It kind of had been defined.
00:25:46The prices had been defined.
00:25:48The markets had been defined.
00:25:50The needs were defined.
00:25:52The parameters were defined.
00:25:54Everything was defined.
00:25:55And so Mystique represented kind of the apogee of, like, this is what we do.
00:26:03And you kind of went into this machine.
00:26:06The writers were told, just write the script and say they have sex now.
00:26:12And the writers would go, well, that's the best part.
00:26:15You know, why don't you let me do that?
00:26:16And I'd say, well, you can write it if you want.
00:26:18And a lot of the writers did.
00:26:20They wrote the sexing.
00:26:22And we used them.
00:26:22They were quite good.
00:26:23I met them through, of course, doing the Maui Heat movie.
00:26:28And then doing the Zelman King movies.
00:26:31And Mystique had the more panache and budget than some of the other houses making the erotic thrillers.
00:26:41They were union.
00:26:42We got health benefits.
00:26:44The scripts were great.
00:26:45They had wonderful directors.
00:26:47They just really cared about their product.
00:26:49And they were nice people.
00:26:51I did a bunch of Mystique movies.
00:26:54It was more of a family environment.
00:26:56Everyone knew everyone else.
00:26:58And they all kind of worked together.
00:27:00And they cared about one another.
00:27:03We worked with the same people over and over and over again.
00:27:06And you just got to know them.
00:27:08You just became friends with them.
00:27:10So it became this family of people.
00:27:13Really nice production quality.
00:27:15You were treated like a union actor.
00:27:17And you got residuals.
00:27:19They were the only ones who did it.
00:27:21And it was short-lived, unfortunately.
00:27:24That production company shut down.
00:27:26They were the last to ever do any of this genre as a union production.
00:27:51I felt so good in my skin.
00:27:54I loved working.
00:27:55My husband was coming to the set with me.
00:27:58And it was just a fierce time.
00:28:01Really, really fun.
00:28:03I was really in the flow.
00:28:05I was madly in love with my boyfriend.
00:28:08We got engaged.
00:28:09I got married.
00:28:11And I got pregnant.
00:28:12You know, in this period while I was doing all these films.
00:28:16You like her, don't you?
00:28:19The hell is that supposed to be?
00:28:20Admit it.
00:28:20You like her and you can't control yourself.
00:28:23You know what?
00:28:23I'm out of here.
00:28:24Where are you going?
00:28:25I'm watching TV.
00:28:26I'm not through talking to you yet.
00:28:27Yeah, well, I've heard it all before.
00:28:30Yeah, well, obviously it didn't sink in because you're still thinking with your dick.
00:28:34Yeah, and you're still loving it.
00:28:37Oh, don't fuck with me, Dawn.
00:28:39For a couple of them, Dead by Dawn and Sheer Passion, I was pregnant with my son Jack.
00:28:44And so I had the most wholesome, mommy kind of vibe going on for myself in my life.
00:28:54I guess really in sort of like a businesswoman sort of way, I was looking at these movies as a
00:29:01means to an end.
00:29:01I was looking to get my Screen Actors Guild insurance and I wanted to hit this threshold and have my
00:29:08pregnancy paid for and delivery and everything and I did that.
00:29:12And then I just looked at these as, you know, work.
00:29:17It's a really nice place, man.
00:29:20Yeah, lifestyles that are rich and famous.
00:29:23These films are undoubtedly aspirational in the sense that they're very beautiful.
00:29:27They look great, but it's not just that they look great in terms of, you know, their sort of production
00:29:33values.
00:29:33They are set in these dream worlds of wealth and power and gorgeousness.
00:29:42You know, I'm a Brit.
00:29:44We're obsessed with class and these are very classy films on a number of different levels.
00:29:48So these are about rich people having a great time.
00:29:52They're also about people completely unencumbered by the realities of life.
00:29:57They're quite wealthy.
00:29:58They don't seem to have kids.
00:30:00They don't seem to have messy pets.
00:30:02They don't seem to have messy houses.
00:30:04They're just there for the ride of a kind of consumer lifestyle that looks glorious and glossy and has lots
00:30:14of sex at the heart of it.
00:30:15There are these fantasy playgrounds where you can be whoever you want, but they also have very kind of strict
00:30:24gendered understandings of what a romantic kind of date night interlude might entail.
00:30:34There's going to be candles, tons of candles everywhere.
00:30:39This genre has so many candles, luxurious bedding, fireplace, billowing curtains.
00:30:48We weren't shooting films in pokey hotel rooms unless it was meant to be that kind of a look.
00:30:54There were some of those, but a lot of this stuff was aspirational.
00:30:57People would watch these films and move into a fantasy world.
00:31:01In many of the films, the people are privileged and they live a lavish lifestyle because it's really believed, and
00:31:09I believe it's true, that middle class America wants to see rich people suffer.
00:31:15I mean, that's why they love Falcon Crest and Dallas and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
00:31:19They want to see rich people, you know, have problems.
00:31:24It is the great American pastime, seeing the rich and famous humiliated and disgraced.
00:31:34I think baseball is the number two sport.
00:31:37Some of that aspirational stuff is really simple, basic instinct sort of stuff of wanting to push boundaries within yourself
00:31:47and dare yourself to feel things that you wouldn't otherwise do.
00:31:52And even if it makes you uncomfortable, it's exciting to see somebody daring to do perhaps what you can't dare
00:32:00to do or you used to dare to do but don't do anymore.
00:32:05And I don't think realism is really what's at play with the erotic thriller.
00:32:10We're not trying to create something that can be reality tested.
00:32:21Peek.
00:32:22What is that?
00:32:23It's leased.
00:32:24Gotta look like we can play with the big boys.
00:32:26Truman, we can't afford a new car.
00:32:28We're up for eight years in debt.
00:32:30You never needed an expensive car to do your job before.
00:32:33It's not just my job.
00:32:34It's my career.
00:32:35It's my life.
00:32:38You know what they say, if you wait till you can afford it, you're never gonna have it.
00:32:41Over the winding roads of US-1 or the high narrow streets of Beverly Hills, the red car glides through
00:32:49the byways of the erotic thriller, an alloy of female beauty and masculine virility.
00:32:58Red like lipstick or desire, the red car is a perennial symbol of wealth, independence, and sex appeal.
00:33:06For this reason, it is nearly always the preferred ride of criminals, thugs, gangsters, and douchebags.
00:33:13Look, Breezen, I'm tired of your fucking nonsense.
00:33:15You said you had to have this girl.
00:33:17Now you're telling me you can't sign her.
00:33:19What the hell's going on?
00:33:21Lick my phone.
00:33:23Do it!
00:33:27A reward and trophy of the good life, the symbol of attainment and freedom in a world where danger is
00:33:33always around the next bend, the red car might be the answer to your dreams.
00:33:38But if you're not just as careful, the end of them.
00:33:46Through a chain of associations, the red car suggests ownership of the female body.
00:33:51What a man can drive, he can also possess.
00:33:59Given the car itself becomes an extension of the male libido, it can serve as a makeshift bedroom.
00:34:06But furthering the erotic thriller's conflation of danger and desire, it might also be the scene of violent death.
00:34:18In their playing with fire, the red car and a beautiful woman are combined.
00:34:23A single vehicle which a boy, through the act of learning to drive, becomes a man.
00:34:33Literally handed the keys to his own manhood, car and woman officiate his passage from teen heartthrob to erotic thriller
00:34:41henchmen.
00:34:44The novelist Jack Kerouac once wrote,
00:34:47Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
00:34:52The erotic thriller knows.
00:35:01I grew up in the industry, growing up with my father on the set of The Virginian.
00:35:07The Virginian was filmed on the backlots of Universal Studios.
00:35:14That didn't hurt a bit, did it?
00:35:15Huh?
00:35:17Hey, you're a pretty girl.
00:35:20A lot of the actresses that I would see on the set in those days seemed like they had a
00:35:25lot of angst and like, you know, the industry was very tough and they, you know, it just, I didn't
00:35:31think I wanted to be an actress at first.
00:35:32I was singing.
00:35:33And I think when you're young, you're sort of like, well, dad, you're a big star.
00:35:37Well, I'm going to be a singer.
00:35:39And so I started getting offers to be an actress.
00:35:43And at the time, Sharon Stone was the rage.
00:35:49Sexy bombshells.
00:35:51Woo.
00:35:52And then the word came out on the street that Andrew Stevens was looking for the next Shannon Tweed.
00:36:01Hey, I can do that.
00:36:06So I told my manager at the time and I said, I can do that.
00:36:11I can do that.
00:36:12I'll be the next Shannon Tweed, Sharon Stone.
00:36:15You gotcha.
00:36:16And I really enjoyed it.
00:36:18I especially enjoyed my, probably my favorite movie was A Woman Scorned 2.
00:36:23My favorite scene was probably with John McCook and he's putting me under hypnosis.
00:36:29Your ex-husband.
00:36:31You mean?
00:36:31He's gone now.
00:36:33And there's these people.
00:36:35People?
00:36:36Who are the people in that movie?
00:36:37Who are they?
00:36:38I can see them, but I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't know who they are.
00:36:43This is Amanda Cressfield.
00:36:44Nice to meet you.
00:36:45She's going to be tutoring around me.
00:36:46Oh, sweetheart, you're trying somewhere.
00:36:48The people, I know them.
00:36:50There's a family.
00:36:53And a boy.
00:36:55Get up!
00:36:56Stop it!
00:36:56Look at you, you can't even stand up!
00:36:58Stop it!
00:37:00Amanda.
00:37:02Amanda, I'm speaking to you.
00:37:03I want you to hear me now.
00:37:05Amanda!
00:37:07He's dead!
00:37:08He's dead!
00:37:09He's dead!
00:37:11He's dead!
00:37:11He's dead!
00:37:13And then she, inevitably, kills John McCook's character.
00:37:18Which, you know, I don't like to be, yeah I do.
00:37:22It's fun to play killers, it really is.
00:37:26It's fun, you know?
00:37:31I think what appealed to people about the erotic thriller at the time was the easy access to VHS rentals.
00:37:40And a heightened sexuality in films that hadn't previously existed.
00:37:48You know, there were movies like Malibu Beach and stuff where girls would take their tops off and play volleyball
00:37:54or something.
00:37:55But this sort of, like, willingness to go somewhere that these films hadn't gone before, I think it drove a
00:38:04lot of curiosity.
00:38:19Because films are exploratory, they don't always know where they're going or what they're doing.
00:38:27And we don't always know what they mean until later.
00:38:32Films contain within them different viewing positions and different ways of understanding them.
00:38:37And we as a society bring certain ways out because we need them at the time.
00:38:43There was a real kind of dichotomy between, say, anti-porn feminism and pro-fantasy feminism that was hard to
00:38:55kind of get beyond.
00:38:57And one of the ways to get beyond it is to get away from a simple notion that male viewers
00:39:05identify with male characters who are looking voyeuristically at women and sexually objectifying them.
00:39:14That is definitely happening.
00:39:16But it's not all that's happening.
00:39:20You have male viewers identifying with female characters.
00:39:24You have female viewers identifying with male characters.
00:39:28And what we're doing now is we're looking at the rest of it.
00:39:31Because we were looking at the objectification before, and now we're looking at different ways of looking, different people who
00:39:39are doing the looking.
00:39:40We're really opening up what looking means.
00:39:45They are very self-reflexive, self-referential.
00:39:48They are thinking about the people who are watching them.
00:39:53So they're often dramas about couples and their sexual problems that might be speaking directly to the couples who are
00:40:02watching them.
00:40:03They're also quite sort of psychoanalytically canny.
00:40:07They're very knowing, and they understand the power of the look and the gaze.
00:40:11And they are having fun with that, and they're playing with that.
00:40:19Afraid you missed something, Ray?
00:40:20We can't bust in until they've done the dirty, right?
00:40:23Thought some visuals would be good.
00:40:25Want action, Ray?
00:40:27Want some late night cable TV?
00:40:31Acutely aware of their half-life on late night television and their role as a sexualized home video product.
00:40:38Erotic thrillers often dramatize their conflicted relationship with video pornography.
00:40:44Oh my god, that's Gwen.
00:40:47We can't, I mean, I can't watch this.
00:40:49Why not?
00:40:53Does she know?
00:40:54Of course.
00:40:56She knows we're watching.
00:40:58She loves it.
00:41:11I make adult videos.
00:41:13Solo girls, dancing, stripping, that kind of thing.
00:41:17Kind of sleazy, isn't it?
00:41:20What do you mean?
00:41:21Well, that's not exactly family entertainment, is it?
00:41:25Well, there's a market for it.
00:41:28In this scene from The Finishing Touch,
00:41:31three police detectives review the erotic video art of a murder suspect named Michael Gant.
00:41:37He likes to do all sorts of stuff, but mainly he's famous for his video art.
00:41:42What the hell is that?
00:41:44That's someone's rear end.
00:41:46Yeah, that is a butt.
00:41:48Looks like this stuff is made to get off on.
00:41:51As far as I can tell, Gant likes to show images of people screwing without actually showing it.
00:42:01The End
00:42:02When later Detective Sam Stone hauls Gant into police headquarters for questioning, it's as if the erotic thriller itself is
00:42:09being put on trial.
00:42:11Tell me something.
00:42:13Why are you obsessed with making nudie films?
00:42:18I do not make nudie films.
00:42:21I explore sexual icons as a means to make your society understand what it holds sacred.
00:42:29I think you make these films and whack after them.
00:42:36Yes.
00:42:37You would.
00:42:39It's a powerful response, because now Detective Stone and the audience are forced to confront the same question.
00:42:47What separates pornography and art?
00:42:50Erotic thrillers have equal billing between a man and a woman.
00:42:54And what makes them so special is that those posters have a man and a woman, and they share equal
00:43:03screen time generally.
00:43:04And the whole point of that audience member going to that movie is because you want to see those two
00:43:11people sharing equal billing fuck.
00:43:25The camera's on your feet.
00:43:27Let's see you do something with your feet.
00:43:29Okay, the camera's now panning up.
00:43:31It's coming up your leg.
00:43:32Let's see a hand stroking on the leg.
00:43:35Now the camera's up.
00:43:36It's at your hips.
00:43:37I want to see a hand on the hips.
00:43:38I said, you know, my husband's an actor.
00:43:41Can we get him down to the set?
00:43:43I love that I have smooching around with my husband on tape.
00:43:47We were the stars of our little era.
00:43:50I'd be parking my car on Hollywood Boulevard, and someone would go, oh my God, you're Kira Reid.
00:43:55I'd be in my sweats.
00:43:57I'm like, how do they even recognize me?
00:43:59I can remember going to Blockbuster and, hey, that's mine.
00:44:01Hey, that's mine.
00:44:02That's mine.
00:44:03Hey, isn't that you on that shelf right there?
00:44:06Do I know you from somewhere?
00:44:07Where do I know you from?
00:44:09I've seen you on TV.
00:44:11Didn't I see you at the convention in Dallas?
00:44:15Yeah, that's where it was.
00:44:18No, you're just watching a lot of late night TV.
00:44:22These films were stories attached to very steamy sex scenes.
00:44:28It translated internationally.
00:44:30Sex works.
00:44:32More interesting, you know, story that still had an erotic component to it.
00:44:38Even better.
00:44:39In film noir, you are fucked.
00:44:42In the erotic thriller, you get to fuck.
00:44:44I fucked you. I fucked Andrew. I fucked Frank. That's what I do. I fuck.
00:44:49I'm in one of the movies as a piano player.
00:44:52And while I was sitting there waiting for my scene, I met this woman who was a butt double.
00:44:57I'd never met a butt double.
00:44:59But any time they cut to the actress's naked butt, if the actress didn't want to show her naked butt,
00:45:07this was the woman in town that you called.
00:45:10I never grabbed the blanket. We always call it that playboy grab.
00:45:14Where you grab the sheets and they get a close-up of your hand grabbing the sheets.
00:45:17It's supposed to be all passionate and stuff.
00:45:19I have never done that in real life.
00:45:21And I don't know anybody else who has.
00:45:23I mean, some of the places that they try and put you in order to do this, you just don't
00:45:28do it.
00:45:29You know, it's like, oh, that looks great. That's different. Let's try that.
00:45:34I have limits. I have things. I mean, it's like, you will not pinch these, you will not bite this,
00:45:39you will not lick that.
00:45:41I think sometimes it was harder for the guys.
00:45:43I felt like I had shock therapy. I was literally thinking, I will never be able to become sexually excited
00:45:49again in my life.
00:45:50I mean, I've been damaged permanently from this experience.
00:45:53When you've done them enough, you know what the directors want, how to put a hand under a breast,
00:45:58how to move your hands around and open them or close them a certain way.
00:46:02Most of us wear like a patch. In other words, there's no body contact down there.
00:46:10I always wore a patch. And some of us started doing this trick where we would get those kids' band
00:46:16-aids that had cartoons on them or something.
00:46:18And we put that on there because it was like, if you get a shot of that, you can't use
00:46:21it.
00:46:21But I think nudity is the great equalizer. It's the raw, real part of us.
00:46:28In Erotic Twillers, the bed, the bedroom is a battlefield of the battle of the war of the sexes.
00:46:35You want it to be dragged out and as tense and as exhaustive and as thrilling as it can possibly
00:46:44be.
00:46:45And what are the stakes going to be? And what are the consequences going to be?
00:46:49And do you have to die for it? Let's hope so.
00:46:53I'm thinking about the ways in which they're separate crises.
00:46:56They come together over this kind of moment of erotic sexuality.
00:47:00In a sense, what the erotic thriller does is it literally physically unites the man in crisis and the female
00:47:05in crisis.
00:47:06And apparently that makes for some really steamy sex.
00:47:09They need an adventure. They need to lose themselves. They need to challenge themselves.
00:47:14They need to see if they can go through this, this, this and this and still come back to just
00:47:18them.
00:47:19You know, there's just that moment when two people are really being real with each other and you're like,
00:47:23going, fuck, that's it. Jesus, God, they, they captured it. It's so good.
00:47:36I love the relationships and the twistedness of the relationships within movies.
00:47:42But it's also the mind games that are going on that are really what's exciting.
00:47:49I think there's something very powerful about the erotic thriller's interest in the id, right?
00:47:55In sort of primal drives.
00:47:57And so you have to see those primal drives in action, right?
00:48:01You have to see the violence. You have to see the longing.
00:48:04And you have to see the sex because that really speaks to the, again, the carnal nature of this genre.
00:48:11Even now, as you're saying this, like, I don't really think of it as a genre.
00:48:16I know it's a genre because you're here interviewing me about it, right?
00:48:20But, but in my brain, I was like, I am a filmmaker charged with up-leveling erotica.
00:48:31I could see very quickly that the, the creative palette was unlimited as long as I delivered naked girls.
00:48:41My mandate to myself was, can I make material that my girlfriend and I could watch?
00:48:48And she wouldn't need to take a shower after.
00:48:50You know, like, could I show this to a female viewer?
00:48:55And she would be like, Whoa, that's hot.
00:48:59You're going to set up a camera.
00:49:01You got to cast it anyway.
00:49:03And you got to pick locations.
00:49:05Like that combo is what be, was the beginning of like creating erotica.
00:49:10And that is really what, what I took super seriously.
00:49:13I'm like, if I deliver you what you need, then leave me alone with how I make decisions on those
00:49:20three things.
00:49:25Yeah.
00:49:31Oh.
00:49:32Oh, oh, oh.
00:49:34Oh.
00:49:35Temptress is a really beautifully complicated love story.
00:49:42And it's really just looking at like the social structures that women are constantly confined by.
00:49:54You're right, you're right.
00:49:56what the hell were you thinking i wasn't thinking i was feeling and what were you feeling
00:50:05it was an act of surrender to my spiritual teacher surrender i mean surrender what did
00:50:13you have sex with your teacher oh i didn't have sex why do you have to reduce everything to sex
00:50:18we expect women to behave in this box this is something like i'm sitting here
00:50:25you know being interviewed by you and the difference between my shirt being buttoned here
00:50:30or if i you know have it buttoned there or it's you know unbuttoned here like here you might go
00:50:36like
00:50:36oh where's the gold chain right it's a little like just like oh you're a little being a little sleazy
00:50:41with the hair you know right but but it's not like i'm a slut and a whore because my button
00:50:48is here
00:50:48right we don't men just aren't used to dealing with this but women are dealing with this all the time
00:50:54are you a member here don't i look like a member well it's mostly lawyers here you don't look much
00:51:04like a lawyer really so temptress is really about a woman who's been constrained her entire life
00:51:12sexually emotionally just everything about her and just living in her little box
00:51:18and what happens when a woman starts to connect with her like raw raw sexual raw female raw animal
00:51:28and tries to make more space for that
00:51:45if i make a distinction about what porn is porn is what you can see everywhere which is
00:51:50bright lights and point a inside of slot b and that has become de facto what sex is
00:51:57but in the 90s i knew that if we unleashed the common denominator the common denominator would be
00:52:06point a slot b go home and everybody would be happy everybody'd be like go we did our job and
00:52:13i'm like
00:52:13well we didn't do our job because we didn't help anybody evolve their idea of sex or pleasure or
00:52:20communication or connection or eye contact or slowing touch or any of these other things that are on the
00:52:27menu easy is i want nudity you know just get me the boobs you know like that's the easy the
00:52:37harder work
00:52:38is how you get there and that is the erotic thriller genre
00:52:47in an erotic thriller the first thing that is important i think is that the eroticism is linked
00:52:54to the intrigue the erotic scene participates to create suspense it gives you information on the
00:53:05characters and he also as a spectator makes you wait for that moment where the hero and the femme fatale
00:53:14are going to have intercourse but the intercourse is not necessarily going to happen or is not necessarily
00:53:21going to be fully showed to you because this is not a pornographic film
00:53:33the way the director is going to conjure up eroticism is not just through showing naked actors and
00:53:42actresses and that's a very reductive way to look at sexuality so in erotic thriller you have a lot of
00:53:49work but into creating a mood the thing that bothered me the most about the erotic thriller
00:54:04overall was the lack of motivation for most of the sex scenes especially in the ones that i was being
00:54:10offered and so when we went to do possessed by the night i said i want a reason why people
00:54:17would do
00:54:18things that they wouldn't normally do so i said i'm going to introduce a supernatural element that
00:54:24makes them do these things can i help you find something in particular well yeah you see i'm a
00:54:29writer and i'm just looking for something um what the hell is that in the jar we finally settled on
00:54:37a sideshow blob that had this hypnotic power honey what do you want for dinner
00:54:48it didn't look all that frightening so they cut it open and stuck an eyeball in it they stuck a
00:54:53glass
00:54:53eye in it and we went with that but it was just because i just couldn't face another movie where
00:54:59people were having sex at the drop of a hat for no reason i said let's give them a reason
00:55:04that they
00:55:05can't control themselves i don't know how other filmmakers have handled it but i've always found
00:55:20the nude love scenes to be the most difficult things to do especially when you're working with just
00:55:26regular actors like sandal bergman or tanya roberts or people who don't do this every day
00:55:33and but i always thought those were the most uncomfortable scenes uh for me because you know
00:55:40you're in a room with people who have their clothes off and they're carrying on and you know you have
00:55:44a whole crew and everything but it's uh that was the toughest part the standard movie making thriller
00:55:49part you know that's kind of what i like to do i pay a tribute to other films i would
00:55:55try to assemble a
00:55:55cast that i thought was exciting to work with that i looked forward to working with every day
00:56:01and um the the erotic part of it was the part that always just sort of stumped me
00:56:10pornography is about sexual excitement it's about a sort of matching of sexual excitement on screen
00:56:17with sexual excitement in the audience even if that's you know someone sitting on the sofa or
00:56:22sitting in their bed or watching on their phone so that you know that aim of exciting the audience
00:56:29in a particular way is absolutely at the heart of films that have sex in them whether or not you
00:56:34want
00:56:34to use the word porn attached to that kind of representation so okay um if you've got a film which
00:56:42has a narrative is about infidelity or couples or crime or all sorts of you know stories around
00:56:52relationships but it's got a sex scene every 10 to 12 minutes and that sex scene is is as explicit
00:56:59as
00:57:00um you can allow it to be given where you want to sort of place your film
00:57:06what's wrong with calling that a porn film there's something used to be called penthouse letters and
00:57:12there was something interesting about penthouse letters because it appeared to be real and for me
00:57:20the sense of reality the the revealing of people's personal nature in the penthouse letter was very sexy because it
00:57:31seemed real
00:57:33what playboy was doing was anything but real and so my approach to playboy to become a director was
00:57:42let me do things differently let me do things
00:57:47things that deal more with reality a more reality base that no dissolves and sex with
00:57:54non-objective sex and non-linear sex and music and bubbles and smoke and no dialogue and i was into
00:58:02like
00:58:02grunts and groans dialogue real well what gets me most excited about having sex um is having people watch me
00:58:14while having sex what i was looking for as a filmmaker was the language of film can you articulate
00:58:23what you mean by showing yourself i want people preferably people i don't know to see me
00:58:33see my naked body watch me having sex i mean i for a while was shooting with eight millimeter film
00:58:43to get a sense of reality because the audience feels that home movies eight millimeter movies handheld there
00:58:51is a sense more of a sense of the real
00:58:56i mean i don't know how everyone's brain works i know how my brain works and my brain works is
00:59:03that i have
00:59:04a series of images sexual images in my head from my life times i've seen moments of
00:59:15abreast the first time i saw abreast i have that image from fifth grade or sixth grade
00:59:22and i use i use those images you know i know they're real and so a lot of the movies
00:59:28i made for playboy
00:59:29search for ways to make it seem real or if it's surveillance cameras or if it's black and white or
00:59:36if it's adding grain or all those things add to the sense of stolen images and it allows you to
00:59:44do a
00:59:45lot of things as a filmmaker mostly a lot of documentary footage that i don't have to do big setups
00:59:52and i can
00:59:52do improv and it can be real and it can be video and it can be video cameras and video
00:59:57monitors so it
00:59:58fulfills all the things and it gives me a lot of film time
01:00:11i'm ready for my close-up mr de mill
01:00:16anna miller who is casting house of love uh called me about a role that was one page and i
01:00:25was like
01:00:25i don't do one page roles or two page roles what why is she calling me about this
01:00:31and they said well it's for a street junkie hooker and i was like oh let me see that
01:00:40and i was like oh yeah this is great i can get really grungy and not wash my hair and
01:00:45just like
01:00:45get really like messed out and oh my god i so i loved doing that and i i really threw
01:00:53myself into that role
01:00:57you know whatever that's what i say there's been plenty of girls out here whoring you know before me
01:01:04and there'll be lots more whoring after my sorry ass that's for sure
01:01:10but now it don't mean nothing you know i i used to feel real shitty but um
01:01:20now i don't know i don't feel nothing
01:01:26i had a t-shirt made for the crew and it said this ain't porn it's art
01:01:34and that's how i approached it i didn't approach it and go to the crew and say look we're gonna
01:01:39make some stupid dirty movie and it's not gonna make any sense and the bubbles and mirrors and
01:01:44smoke and girls with big plastic tits yeah and we'll get it over with and we'll get some money and
01:01:48we'll walk no no no no i was into this is going to be the best fucking movie i ever
01:01:54made and the best
01:01:54movie you ever made these men have these weird fantasies and my job is to play them out with them
01:02:06how can i stretch myself as a filmmaker how can i make it realer how can i get really good
01:02:12performances
01:02:13how can i get as much film in a 12-day schedule as i can it's all a production issue
01:02:19so when you have
01:02:20sex with them is it good for you sometimes that's why i was there that's what i was doing it
01:02:28was my
01:02:28justification for being there i mean i've gone back and looked at some of this stuff later and i'm
01:02:35horrified about how dirty it is you know believe it or not darryl i enjoy my work do you have
01:02:42orgasms
01:02:46sometimes i write from the inside all this is inside me in some way so that's what i tap and
01:02:52is it porn
01:03:13i would love to say that there was one particular event that made me go that's it this business is
01:03:21done there was no singular event hey guys i got some wine might as well take the edge off the
01:03:29day
01:03:30john's not here he got delayed an hour a whole hour
01:03:44they got schlockier they wanted to shoot lower budget longer days not as good stories because
01:03:52they're churning them out because they made a buck there was a shift within the genre of going from
01:03:58you know the bigger budgets let's tell this beautiful story and let's give them a great film
01:04:04so you know what we can still sell these as long as we get our quotas within the film
01:04:10i'm working so much i don't even know if i'm tired anymore
01:04:19you ready for lunch yeah just a sec
01:04:27this is really terrific
01:04:34as it started sort of waning a little bit people stopped putting money into
01:04:39them mind twister had an 800 000 budget you know and then a few years later you'd be making four
01:04:46of
01:04:46these for 800 000 total the budgets kept getting smaller and then when the budgets were smaller the tv
01:04:53channels were paying less and it was like chasing a falling knife where it just kept getting worse
01:04:58and worse and the quality kept getting worse you see this man this is the director
01:05:04at least that's what we call him now i want you to stand right next to him and if you
01:05:09hear him say
01:05:10things like artistic integrity or creativity you run and you get me quick okay good the producers the
01:05:19money people are going we need more sex we need more sex and you've got your directors going no i
01:05:23need
01:05:23more art more sex more art more sex more art and there's this fight and it
01:05:29the money always wins the people who are putting the money up always win and gradually it just became
01:05:38like there has to be a sex scene every 10 minutes will you do nudity what the nudity
01:05:50uh possibly if it's done tastefully of course they started bringing in the triple x actors because
01:06:00they have now take the clothes off you know no problem here so that just sped up production they
01:06:05didn't have to do a lot of dialogue they just had to have simulated sex and then when there was
01:06:11just
01:06:11called for a simulated sex scene sometimes they'd bring in male porn stars they'd have these two porn stars
01:06:18doing these things it was in my contract that a movie that i was in sounds a little snotty no
01:06:25actual
01:06:25porno actresses could be in the film with me i know the industry who well and if i do that
01:06:33nobody's gonna
01:06:34hire me your reputation is kind of all you have and if it starts getting out there that you were
01:06:43in a porno
01:06:44well you might not get any more work and and what about that commercial those commercials those are
01:06:50paying your bills i didn't want anyone to find me i didn't want anyone to track me down i wanted
01:06:55to
01:06:55make money i wanted to learn i wanted to have a good time i wanted to be an actress and
01:07:00i didn't want
01:07:00anyone to notice that didn't work out very well as ted cruz preps for today's faith and family
01:07:06presidential forum in greenville his campaign is facing a bit of a moral values question of its own they had
01:07:12to
01:07:12pull this campaign ad after just a couple of hours it turns out the woman who delivers the key
01:07:19line in the spot is a former adult film actress maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty
01:07:24face next time now that actress's name is amy lindsey and while she has been in films such as
01:07:29insatiable obsession and bikini airways and of course timegate tales of the saddle tramps she has
01:07:35also been in star trek voyager and she sees herself as a middle-class working woman with conservative
01:07:39values to be called a porn star it's not that it's derogatory it's not that it's just it's not the
01:07:45truth and so i personally was offended because i have never had sex on camera and it was called
01:07:51erotica when i first started then it probably became soft core then it's you know soft core pornography
01:07:57and then it's pornography and now it's porn i was doing a show for nbc called age of love a
01:08:04reality show
01:08:05uh dating show and there was this very egregious word that started appearing next to my name on some
01:08:12of these websites jody fisher porn star what i ended up doing is i finally became willing to face all
01:08:18of
01:08:18it and i thought wait a minute this is my life it's my name it's my reputation and i hired
01:08:24a company to go
01:08:26after these particular websites and take down that word those type of movies kind of hurt me a little bit
01:08:33because then people were like oh is she porno actress and i'm like oh my god no i don't do
01:08:41porn
01:08:41i've done nudity in films but there's no real sex so i started saying to myself what is soft porn
01:08:49and what is you know like a major motion picture there were big hollywood actresses
01:08:58wanting to get into the erotic for a moment just to be seen a little bit differently
01:09:07you know i didn't want to think i was some kind of princess
01:09:21but if you were in there trying to get out that was not happening it was not two directional
01:09:30when i was writing the erotic thriller in contemporary cinema one of my sort of problems was
01:09:35a lot of material about these films was already lost and even some of the films themselves were
01:09:40really hard to get hold of by that point they just came and went it was fast and furious and
01:09:46then
01:09:46they were gone the thing it really taught me above all things was how ephemeral film history is
01:09:54many have speculated on the sudden disappearance of the erotic thriller in the late 1990s
01:10:00some blame the expansion of cable television others the rise of the internet the truth is hidden under
01:10:07the rubble of the home video industry when a perfect storm of four interrelated market forces collided in
01:10:14the early 2000s the home video industry of the era collapsed when the dust settled the erotic thriller
01:10:22was nowhere to be found the erotic thriller like any other genre like the military hardware films
01:10:29was basically cannibalized and killed by all the producers saturating the market with more movies than
01:10:36the market could bear i'm going around i'm getting i'm going to studios you know first you're jazzed going
01:10:42through the paramount lot and and you're meeting with uh all these producers but after your your 10th meeting
01:10:47and your free coke and you kind of go yes no no yes what what you know what do i
01:10:51got to do to you
01:10:52know get you guys to hire me i guess i got frustrated and i just i said okay fine if
01:10:56they
01:10:56don't want to help me i'm gonna make my little sexy thriller and then start from there i wanted
01:11:01to make something very titillating something that people would see on the blockbuster shelf or something
01:11:06like that and something you'd see on cinemax at you know 11 30 at night on a saturday what i
01:11:11didn't
01:11:12know what the time was there were a lot of filmmakers out trying to do what i did your husband
01:11:18had no
01:11:19sex drive no he had a sex drive this wasn't the one he was driving we had a lot of
01:11:28pre-sales i mean
01:11:29we sold it to a lot of countries and i looked like i was about to make my money back
01:11:33and and then some
01:11:34and then then country after country just started defaulting and so we were wondering we asked our
01:11:42distributor what what's going on because well the market is crashing in approximately the mid 1990s
01:11:50studios decided to compete with independence they would have a studio brand a studio logo often sequels or
01:12:01remakes of branded studio content titles and they would put them into the major chains like blockbuster
01:12:10and hollywood at the time take over shelf space and reduce the unit price which killed the independent
01:12:18straight home video market so mom-and-pop video stores started going out of business mom-and-pop home video
01:12:26distributors the companies like apex and unipix and republic and vestron they all started dropping
01:12:32like flies and going by the wayside blockbuster and hollywood and the other big chains that emerged
01:12:37they made the first big mistake which was we'll focus on the hits and we'll bring in more copies of
01:12:42the hits well pretty soon the consumer who used to go into the mom-and-pop video store and couldn't
01:12:47find the hit went to blockbuster and found the hit the problem was he was only writing that hit and
01:12:53nothing else because he was satisfied the first time he came into the store then dvd came in
01:12:59consumers were crazy about dvd because they could build movie collections for 20 bucks a pop 15 bucks
01:13:05a pop what a great deal you can collect movies and they stopped renting because if a consumer had
01:13:1240 bucks a week set aside for entertainment they used to rent 15 movies now they're just buying two and
01:13:20the writing was on the wall for the erotic thrillers for five years that's why they kept getting cheaper
01:13:27and cheaper and more and more blatant because they were trying to become novelties to fill the reduced
01:13:37slots that may still be left
01:13:58erotic thrillers haven't necessarily disappeared to a specific place so much as it's just been the
01:14:04changing morals of society it's a sort of strange doubling of um society becoming both more puritanical
01:14:12and more dirty i think on the one hand a lot of erotic thrillers kind of disappearing or being less
01:14:18relevant has to do with the increasing availability of pornography but then i also think that among liberal
01:14:25circles there's a lot more moralism and political correctness it was a different time people didn't
01:14:32weren't so judgmental people now i find incredibly judgmental about everything all the time everybody's
01:14:39constantly looking for offense and finding it how could you make a sort of straightforward romantic
01:14:45thriller given the difficulties of sexual politics right now and the difficulty of sex period and men
01:14:52hitting on women or it's too complicated who'd want to go near that i don't think men can seduce women
01:15:01anymore to ask someone may i kiss you that's wonderful but it's called a thriller because you don't know
01:15:07what's going to happen it's not called erotic consent what is it to be seduced it blurs consent
01:15:18it blurs the sense of what you want and what you don't want it enters a gray area and i
01:15:25think that
01:15:25that gray area is what a lot of these movies are exploring although my book came out in 2005 and
01:15:35on some level the genre in its sort of cheap and cheerful format had already gone i'm still asked
01:15:43to talk about this people are still doing interesting work they're doing new interesting work about new
01:15:49formations of these stories that have developed in other ways when we think of the erotic thriller we
01:15:56think of men and women but now we think of a lot of other things as well we think of
01:16:01race we think of
01:16:02class we think of different sexual orientations and what's interesting is that those things are coming
01:16:09in in unpredictable ways so it's not simply that race is being added to fatal attraction because when you
01:16:18add the african-american experience to fatal attraction you change it because race and gender
01:16:24are two different things and so this is happening over and over and over again as different kinds of
01:16:31sexuality come into the erotic thriller it changes the dynamic i think the erotic thriller is alive and
01:16:37well and living on lifetime if you look at lifetime that is the erotic thriller network how many times have
01:16:45they made mother may i sleep with danger um a face to kill for a face to die for erotic
01:16:52thrills are
01:16:52alive and well they're not extinct i don't think they ever went away you can still unearth it if you're
01:16:58really into it it's more of a hidden thing and it was a little old-fashioned and a little romantic
01:17:04maybe it's our feel-good special mystery place that takes us back to an era when things were
01:17:14simpler simpler when sexy was simpler this was never just about sex it was about passion
01:17:23i should have the mind
01:17:31what a place this is all these rooms filled with people acting out their dreams
01:17:40the ed or the individual will always in a sense desire everything but social order and personal
01:17:51stability necessitate that most of those desires will never get to be acted on so what do we do with
01:18:01those desires we act them out vicariously in film there'll always be you know an appetite for just
01:18:10straight out porn but at some point people are going to want to go back to the psychology of it
01:18:15it's the psychology of it which will bring them back i think we were just a little bit misplaced you
01:18:23know there is a there are things in life that are misplaced erotica is one of those things i would
01:18:29hope
01:18:30but i don't think there will be but i would hope that there maybe are a few people in the
01:18:33future who
01:18:34would somehow some way come upon one of these films and look at it and think god this is so
01:18:41weird but it's sort of fascinating because it's so weird it's so unlike today and who were these people
01:18:47who made this thing i mean who were they what happened to them where did they come from where did
01:18:55they go
01:19:11where did they go upon this the archivist can only speculate what we finally have are the films
01:19:21like a genie in a magic bottle the lost world of the erotic thriller may be trapped forever in the
01:19:28two televisions of our past preserved on long strips of magnetic tape each year time and static devours
01:19:37them each year a handful are found but just as many more forgotten yet the sirens and seducers of
01:19:45this lost world still beckoned to us from afar forever calling us back to their aquatic world
01:19:52of lusty romance and dangerous desire
01:19:58for today our study has come to an end
01:20:21you're a celebrity now it's incredible isn't it are you going to put all this behind you
01:20:28no i think it'll be kept alive for a long time why
01:20:34because i think it fulfills a need i think a lot of people would like to experience my story
01:20:39firsthand but they can't or they won't well if you had a chance to do it all over again would
01:20:48you do it
01:20:52i'd leave out a few things but overall sure i got what i always wanted didn't i which was
01:21:03love
01:21:08well i guess that sums it up is there anything else you wanted to say yeah hi mom and dad
01:21:16if you're
01:21:17watching
01:21:17you
01:21:22yeah
01:21:23yeah
01:21:23yeah
01:21:26yeah
01:21:27yeah
01:21:29yeah
01:21:33yeah
01:21:36yeah
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