Ask anyone “what they did during the pandemic” and they will most likely rattle off a few hobbies or newly acquired interests. Maybe they got really into making their own kombucha, or learned a new instrument. Or maybe, if they’re like me, they collected several vintage pornography posters.
My fascination with Golden Age pornography pre-dates the pandemic. I read The Other Hollywood a couple of years ago, and have been a fan of The Rialto Report podcast for at least that long, but it would be untrue to say that my interest is purely academic. The history of Golden Age pornography is fascinating, but it’s also the porn I prefer to watch.
If you listen to the Rialto Report, you’ll notice a common theme: A lot of the actors started out as aspiring stage, TV, or film talent, and began performing in live sex shows, loops, and—eventually—full-length pornographic features to make quick cash. Many of the performers truly believed that smut and “straight” cinema would eventually merge into one industry, but that (obviously) never came to pass. (This is tragic for multiple reasons, one of which is that merging the two would have made it much easier to unionize porn—something Andrea True and Harry Reems attempted—an industry that would greatly benefit from worker protections.)
Not all Golden Age stars were capital-A Actors—Platinum Princess Seka admits freely to being more of a “performer” than a thespian—but they all took their work seriously. This, coupled with the legal requirement that pornography have “artistic merit,” resulted in a boom of blue movies with plot and production value.
I have a lot of thoughts and opinions about these skin flicks, which means I also have recommendations. You won’t find Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas, Barbara Broadcast, or Behind the Green Door on this list. Not only do most people already know about these, I also think Behind the Green Door is boring, and I cannot get past the salad dressing moment in Barbara Broadcast (I love both food and sex, but I do not appreciate the mixing of the two).
If you decide you want to watch any of these fine films, check out Vinegar Syndrome for lovingly restored Blu-Rays. You can find a lot of these movies on various porn-streaming sites (especially tubepornclassic.com), but they’re rarely hosted on one site for very long, and rarely listed by name. (Sometimes you can find them by searching for the actors in the film, but it is not a guarantee.) The quality on streaming sites can also be quite poor, which is a shame, because these movies were shot on film, which gives them a slick sheen you won’t find on Bang Bros.