Adult Cinema

Description by OLDIES.com:

The films that society has termed pornographic have been with us for over a century now, since the first flickering kinetoscopes stumbled into life in 1889. Yet beyond a handful of scholarly tracts, and a few glancing references in certain Hollywood histories, there is no modern history of the subject available.

Black and White and Blue fills that void. Taking as its cut-off point the late 1970s, when the advent of the home VCR irrevocably changed the face of the adult film industry, this book celebrates a world of anonymously masked women and curiously black-sock-clad men, whose movie immortality was attained in the time it took to exhaust a roll a film. There were no artificial breasts when the first stags were made, no tattooed and pierced members, and no concept of trick photography.

We revisit a time when dingy backstreet cinemas aired their wares beneath a "members only" sign, and a climate in which the police waited as patiently to bust the participants as audiences lined up to watched them, while "polite society" looked on in (often hypocritical) disgust, unable to believe that filth like this even existed.

With exclusive interviews, descriptions of over 300 films, and a conversational style, author Dave Thompson presents a book which is a complete and in depth survey of the adult film, from shaky, flickering black-and-white silents to the first flowering of the lavish modern-day production.