That was the beginning of ‘Sweet Savage.’Ĭarol Connors (adult film actress – speaking in 1978): It hadn’t been done properly before, and so I knew it would be hit, especially internationally. It was Joe who got the court injunction to stop the cops from seizing copies of Behind the Green Door from the theaters back in 1973.Īround 1977/78, I became interested in making a western movie. He was the attorney for the Mitchell Brothers, Timothy Leary, Black Panthers, and every porno store and strip club in San Francisco. As well as eventually becoming as my fourth husband.Īnn was stubborn: she would fight for us to be treated equally with regular movies, and in Joe she had a great ally. That lawsuit was essential to our future.Īnd it was also where Ann became involved with Joe Rhine. Advertising is an important means by which customers learn which movies are playing and where, he said.
The Adult Film Association of America Wednesday filed a $44.3 million suit against the Los Angeles Times over the newspaper’s decision to ban X-rated movie advertisements.Īttorney Joseph Rhine said the adult film producers’ livelihood relies on the exhibition of their movies. ‘Newspaper hit with suit by adult film unit’, Valley News, October 20th 1977:
They persuaded all the other local newspapers to do the same – and without ads… we had no business. In 1977, we sued the Los Angeles Times because they stopped taking our ads. She saw a future in which there would be no distinction between X-rated films and the rest. There were some people who were resigned to the fact that our films would always be in a ghetto. Jack Genero (adult film director and AFAA board member):Īnn was forceful in not accepting that adult movies should be marginalized. I treated it just like it was a regular Hollywood movie. I did almost everything myself: I produced it, wrote it, directed it, and then I went on tour and appeared on stage taking questions from the audiences to promote it. It featured people who I knew from the scene – Joey Silvera, Tyler Reynolds, Desiree West and her boyfriend Dashile – so it wasn’t intimidating. My first big film was Count The Ways (1975). So I was intrigued when Ann started making her own films. I had been acting in sex films since the early 1970s, and I don’t remember seeing many women behind the camera. I’d done everything in the business by that point: I did commercial modeling, pin-up shots, appeared in nudie films, been a go-go dancer, appeared in hardcore sex films (although I didn’t have sex in them)… and I’d gone through two husbands too. In fact, one of her company names was called Superbitch Productions. She wanted to prove to men that a woman could do a man’s job, and that’s what she did, which was near impossible to do at that time. She kept a lot of feelings to herself because she thought displaying emotions was a weakness. She was a tough, determined, sometimes difficult character. My mother started making her own films in the mid 1970s. He was training to be a minister, but we got together and both gave up that path! But I did go to a convent, and I was heading in that direction when I met my first husband. Which was ironic because I’d started in the business way back in the early 1960s – before anyone else! Except Dave Friedman.ĭavid Friedman (AFAA board chairman – speaking in 1977):Īnn is as competent and tough-minded as any adult film producer in the business. When I was elected to be the first woman president of the Adult Film Association of America (AFAA) in 1977, that was the first time many people had heard of me. How did it happen? Why did it happen? We tracked down the people involved to tell the story.Īll interviews were conducted by The Rialto Report unless noted. Or rather, he starred in Sweet Savage, a film made by Ann Perry, a rare female director woman working in the X-rated business. Then, in 1978, Aldo Ray, a Hollywood star who had appeared with the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and Rita Hayworth, made a porn film. Each pushed the boundaries of how sex was portrayed on the screen in the wake of the sexual revolution.īut seriously, was Hollywood ever going to really make a pornographic movie in the 1970s? Take Andy Warhol’s sex-as-artistic statement, Blue Movie (1969), Marlon Brando and his butter in Last Tango in Paris (1972), or Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie and their are-they-really-doing-it scene in Don’t Look Now (1973).