Week 7 (Aug 2 – 8) – Muscle Distribution Catalog
Muscle Distribution is an exciting new venture that’s hard to sum up with words alone, but if you dig into the catalog you find a shape that’s more well defined than any mission statement. Liz is keeping it hot for us. From Muscle’s website: Muscle is a new film distribution company with a heavy repertory slant from historian, programmer, and filmmaker Elizabeth Purchell. Borne out of an understanding of the role that accessibility plays in shaping cultural histories, we’re dedicated to complicating and expanding the canon by shining a light on works that either never received their proper due or that have unjustly faded into obscurity, and championing uncompromising new works by some of today’s most exciting underground filmmakers. We love scrappy, misfit films that don’t fit into any particular box.
Radley Metzger is probably the best regarded director of the Golden Age of adult. Once he moved from softcore to hardcore, he started to use the name Henry Paris. What he didn’t change was that he was able to shoot his films in some great locations, including the Olympia ballroom and the lobby of the Royal Manhattan Hotel, which was made to look like a restaurant.
Barbara Broadcast (Annette Haven, who was a consultant for Brian De Palma and Melanie Griffith’s coach for Body Double) is a best-selling author and celebrated liberated woman. As she dines in a fancy restaurant, she gives an interview with Roberta (C. J. Laing, bestill my heart), a journalist who wants to know her story.
As they talk about life and, well, sex, fans come up to meet Barbara and outright couplings — Sharon Mitchell is a waitress, after all — happen all around them. There are also asides, such as Barbara meeting an executive (Michael Gaunt) who can’t meet with higher ups without being with her first and Roberta being inspired enough to have an encounter in the kitchen with a dish washer (Wade Nichols). Depending on the edit you get of that scene, you may get more than you expected.
Finally, Barbara and Roberta consummate their interview and meet Curley (Jamie Gillis) who tells them of his slave (Constance Money). This scene was intended for The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Metzger edited it into this movie. Money sued him and was paid for this movie, as she’d only agreed to be in his earlier film and not this one.
Where so many of the Metzger/Paris films are high class — not that this isn’t — this honestly is a move toward an honest to goodness no apologies dirty movie. Most odd is the fact that one of the songs in this film, “The Big One,” is the theme to The People’s Court.
