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"America is
passionate about business, abashed about sex. Passions
and abashment can be inadvertently hilarious, and that
makes Grindhouse one engrossing belly laugh from
cover to cover."
—MovieMaker
"Breezy, authoritative, gaudily illustrated."
—Richard Corliss, TIME
"A fascinating, though at times grotesque look at
a world that everyone knows about, but one that is rarely
acknowledged."
—Austin Chronicle
"Just the right mix of scholarship, reverance, and
wit."
—Bright Lights Film Journal
Read
an in-depth interview with Eddie about the history of
dirty movies |
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GRINDHOUSE:
The Forbidden World of Adults Only Cinema
St. Martin's Griffin
November 1996
It's Shocking! It's Sinful!
It's the Movies Hollywood Didn't Want You to See!
From the 1920s through the 1970s, America's most fearless
entrepreneurs created thousands of "adults only"
features— exploitation films that promised "Sinsational!"
treatments of the day's hottest topics. These films played
red light district theaters and roadshows for almost half
a century, until hardcore pornography and the advent of
VCRs rang the death knell for this distinctive form of
"art."
Grindhouse traces the ribald history of these "adults
only" films, down Poverty Row through the Scandinavian
Invasion, past the nudie-cuites, and into the swinging
days of free love. Along the way we get the most sordid,
sleazy, and shameless cinema imaginable-Vice Rackets!
Narcotics! Nazis! Nudists! Cults! Wrestling Women! And
So Much More Than You Can Ever Imagine!
Adding yet more color to this history of blue movies are
revealing portraits of the artists and auteurs behind
the films, including Dwain Esper, Kroger Babb, Russ Meyer,
Doris Wishman, David Friedman, Radley Metzger, and the
Mitchell Brothers.
Grindhouse was named one of the 25 best art books
of 1997 by legendary Village Voice art critic Guy
Trebay. Dig his evocative capsule critique:
"Back when the cuddle toy of Times Square was Kitten
Natividad and not Minnie Mouse, New York was a wonderland
for the depraved. The austerities of a body-hating Puritan
culture have always necessitated good sources for smut—hence
the grindhouse or, more prosaically, the adults-only theater.
Let the mullahs of Islam and Gracie Mansion rail, there
will remain a place in our hearts (and elsewhere) for
Hotel Confidential, Olga's House of Shame, The Degenerates,
Deep Throat and Come Ride the Wild Pink Horse.
Auteurs like Russ Meyer and supercheesy Harry H. Novak
will still be born.
"Sloppy, tossed-together, and deliriously improvisational,
this book still frankly celebrates what the introduction
calls 'an alternate country co-existing within the boundaries
of the official America.' Coexistence isn't what it used
to be as grindhouses are legislated away. All the more
reason then to make this book a holiday gift for that
lonely friend who celebrates Christmas in the flickering
light of a VCR, besides a tinseled, half-dead ficus."
SAYS EDDIE
"This one is now
sadly out-of-print, but it's crying for a revised edition.
It was born out of a dumpster excavation behind an old
grindhouse in downtown San Francisco, which unearthed
the rare sexploitation material from the 1930s that appeared
in the book. How perfect. The book was really one of the
first of a wave of volumes exploring America's "shadow
cinema," and it also served as the inspiration for
the film Mau Mau Sex Sex,
which I co-produced and co-wrote with Ted Bonnitt."
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