SEXPLOITATION FILM SLICKS 1963–1973
This genre of mags––the underground adult sexploitation film slicks––acted as the trade magazines for the sexploitation film industry. They were something I had no idea existed until I stumbled upon some on eBay in 1999. At first I thought there were probably only a few titles, and I became increasingly surprised each time I discovered a new title. Now, over five years later, I’m still finding new titles, and there seems to be no end in sight. I never really thought about it, but had always figured that the sex film mags had started in the early ‘70s after the popularization of hardcore porn with Deep Throat et al––that was obviously not the case!
I had seen a few of these softcore sexploitation flicks right at the very end of their era in the early ‘70s when I was 17 or so, but don’t remember anything about them other than it was the first time I had seen full nudity on the screen with simulated sex.
There were a few of these mags coming out as early as 1963 from various adult slick publishers such as Bonanza Publishing, Selbee Associates, Publisher’s Export Company (PEC) and Sari Publishing, but for the most part they focused on foreign films, racy B-movies, and art house flicks. The sexploitation genre of mags didn’t really get swinging until the explosion of sexploitation movies hit the screens in the mid-sixties.
In 1965 Marv Lincoln started to package mags for Golden State News (GSN) as New Link Publications which published Wildest Films v1 #1 and the deluge started as other New Link mags soon followed with the titles Torrid Film Reviews, Daring Films & Books, Cine Femmes, and Fiery Films which all appeared in 1966. Lincoln says that the New Link name was a combo of the last name of his photographer partner at the time, Bill New, and an abbreviated version of his last name, Link.
These titles kept the GSN logo––early on a bucking bronco with rider and later simply the letters GSN––on the covers throughout all the subsequent changes of publishers listed below, starting with the change in 1967 to Spectrum Publications, another packager/publisher outfit run by Marv Lincoln, who also added the title Cinema Scorchers to their growing line-up of sexploitation mags.
The next publisher to take over these titles was Orbit Publications in 1968 and Cinema Keyhole, Cinerotic, and Adult Movies Illustrated were added to the sexploitation titles.
The last, and probably the most prolific, of the publishers to take over these titles was Classic Publications which seems to have started in late 1968 to take over the sexploitation titles from all the previous GSN distributed publishers. By that time the titles Cinema Close-Up, Wild Screen Reviews and The Erotic Cinema had also been added to their stable of sexploitation mags.
So, with the publishers listed above and others like Health Knowledge, Acme, Pendulum, Dominion, Press Arts, and Seven Seventy who all had their own sexploitation mags, many of these offbeat movies got a lot of coverage. There were also one-shots by some of these publishers as well as the more obscure companies putting out titles like Cinemacuties, “Savage” Screen, Underground Movies, Sex Scenes, and so on.
Adam magazine started their Adam Film Quarterly in 1966 which changed to Adam Film World around 1970 and went monthly with it. Adam Film World has chronicled the ever growing adult movie/video/DVD scene to the present.
Certain sexploitation films apparently warranted their own magazines such as The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood, The Lustful Turk, The Head Mistress, The Initiation, Marquesa De Sade, Mondo Freudo, etc. And the film Love Camp 7 had “Special Issues” of mags like Torrid Film Reviews and Cinema Close-Up devoted to it, while stills from it were used on some men’s adventure mags.
By 1971 newsstand mags and special issues of girlie mags started to cover the new X-rated flicks and the sexploitation slicks died soon thereafter. New titles like Cinema-X and Movie X could be found on the newsstands. Many stills from the sexploitation films had been used in certain sex tabloids in the late sixties and early seventies. Namely Candid Press in particular used lots of stills in either reviews of the movies themselves or in their multitudes of articles on lesbianism, homosexuality, sadism/masochism, etc. Stills from some of the sexploitation flicks also ended up on the covers of, and inside, various detective mags in the early seventies.
By 1973 hardcore porn had become chic and could be seen in most any big city. Both men and women, usually together, went to see the breakthrough porn films Deep Throat and Behind The Green Door and while it was at once shocking to some, arousing to others––and funny––to see genitals and sexual activity on the big screen for the first time. It was a cheap thrill at the time and something to do back then if you wanted to consider yourself hip.
There are some gems listed here, some for their coverage of obscure films that have recently gained in retro-interest and others just for the fact that they were published at the time that these films hit the grindhouses across the country, which is reflected in the lingo of the text and blurbs, as well as the clip-art. Nowadays with so much of the labor of producing magazines being done on the computer, it’s refreshing to see these “hands on” produced mags.