Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Hollywood Babylon, the book by filmmaker Kenneth Anger, was banned shortly after it was first published in the U.S. in 1965. It wasn’t reprinted for ten years and when it came back, it was filled with photos of Jayne Mansfield’s car crash, Carole Landis and uncensored images of the Black Dahlia’s destroyed body.

I read it a hundred times in my teens and twenties, a book that taught me the Crowley quote “Every man and every woman is a star,” as well as so many urban legends that probably weren’t true, but who cares? Clara Bow never slept with the entire USC football team, including John Wayne. Mansfield wasn’t decapitated. It finally led to a sequel and a 1992 syndicated series hosted by Tony Curtis.

But before that, there was this, an unauthorized film.

Directed by Van Guylder (The Bang Bang Gang and a later sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, taken from the TV show) and written by L.K. Farbella, this plays just as loose with reality as its inspiration. Fatty Arbuckle was exonerated for the death of Virginia Rappe and paid for it with his career. Here, he gets away with assaulting her with a bottle of champagne. Rudolph Valentino inspired gay clubs and had a fondness for butch women. Erich von Stroheim got off watching women get whipped. And yes, Clara Bow wears out those Trojans. The football players. They all went in bareback.

Yes, Olive Thomas killed herself, but she died in a hospital instead of a hotel room. Wallace Reid was probably addicted to drugs before this movie claims that he was. Charlie Chaplin slept with Lita Grey when she was 15, but did he have other women give him fellatio while she watched, so that he could train her to never have actual sex with. him again? And why does no one look like the actors they’re supposed to be and while this mentions nearly everyone, it gets shy about William Randolph Hearst?

That said, Uschi Digard is in this and sometimes that’s enough to get past any issues with quality and the very judging narration. That’s Jane Ailyson from The Godson and A Clock Work Blue getting whipped. A party scene also has Suzanne Fields in it, Dale Ardor from Flesh Gordon.

That narration — listen to this prose: “This was Hollywood, once considered a suburb of sprawling Los Angeles – destined, perhaps doomed, to become it’s very heart. In 1916, however, it was just a junction of dirt roads and a scattering of orange groves. If there was sin, it was not to be seen. Scandalous sin that is, for what was going on at the studio on Sunset Boulevard was merely play-acting, a Babylonian orgy involving hundreds, nay thousands of actors and extras, portraying the doom Belshazzar. This passion play, D.W. Griffith’s most ambitious epic, was titled “Intolerance” and it set the tone for Tinseltown… something to live up to, something to live down. The shadow of Babylon had fallen over Hollywood. Scandal was waiting just out of camera range.”

There could be an amazing version of this book. Anger would probably be the right choice to have directed it. This ends up being that rare softcore movie that is boring despite having everything it needs to be so exciting.