Film Screenings / Programs / Series
THAT’S SEXPLOITATION!
August 21 – August 29
ALL FILMS SCREENING ON 35MM!
As entertainment media are transformed in the 21st century, sex is, as ever, omnipresent, a perennial part of popular culture. Before the advent of modern-day pornography, a vast and rapidly-paced world of smut peddling was the norm, complete with its own secret history. Produced by Something Weird Video, Frank Henenlotter’s epic new documentary THAT’S SEXPLOITATION! reveals the untold story of American cinema’s gloriously sordid cinematic past. Starting in the 1920s, expert exploiteer David F. Friedman and Henenlotter navigate us through more than five salacious decades of skin flicks. It’s the true story of dirty movies, traced in elegant detail from the bizarre locations where these nudie shorts were screened to the ongoing legal battles fought by their promoters. And of course there are the stories of the innovators themselves, people who often risked their own security and livelihood to make these films, believing in some way that what they were doing wasn’t a ‘bad’ thing – and that it could rake in some dough. Wall-to-wall clips, most of which are as whacked-out as they are astoundingly unseen, provide the lush backdrop for the definitive cinematic chronicle of skin-on-celluloid, THAT’S SEXPLOITATION!
To celebrate the premiere of Henenlotter’s THAT’S SEXPLOITATION!, Anthology Film Archives and Something Weird Video are proud to present a mind-bending assortment of the classick and the uber-obscure, straight from the vault at Something Weird Video World Headquarters! Many of these films haven’t played NYC since their original release, if ever – and all are being screened in glorious 35mm (supplemented by a selection of Sexploitation trailers)!
Individual film descriptions written by Frank Henenlotter, Luther Heggs, Lisa Petrucci, Charles Kilgore, Eric Schaefer, Handsome Harry Archer, and Mike Hunchback.
Special thanks to Mike Hunchback and to Mike Vraney (Something Weird Video).
FOR MORE SEXPLOITATION, SEE OUR RUSS MEYER RETROSPECTIVE (August 15-25).
