Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger

Radley Metzger was one of the foremost directors of adult film in America, with credits including softcore titles like The Lickerish Quartet and the hardcore classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven. After getting his start making arthouse trailers for Janus Films, Metzger would go on to become among the most feted directors of the “porno chic” era of the 1970s, working under the pseudonym Henry Paris. In the process, he produced a body of work that exposed the porous boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from hardcore, and good taste from bad.

In his book, Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger, Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability. Man of Taste spans Metzger’s entire life: his early years in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, his attempt to bring arthouse aesthetics to adult film in the 1960s, his turn to pseudonymously directed hardcore movies in the 1970s, and his final years, which included making videos on homeopathic medicine. Metzger’s career, King argues, sheds light on how the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, and it offers an uncanny reflection of the ways American film culture transformed during these decades.

Eric Veillette, freelance journalist for The Globe and Mail, and Kate J. Russell, PhD, will be the respondents for this talk. A Q&A will follow. 

Rob King is a film historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. His recent follow-up, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2017), challenges the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition. He has published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of anthologies and journals, and is the co-editor of three anthologies: Early Cinema and the “National” (John Libbey & Co., 2008), Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, 2010), and Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (John Libbey & Co., 2012). He is also working as co-editor of the Oxford University Press’s Oxford Handbook of Early Cinema, which is scheduled for publication in 2019.