These days, people can speak openly of adult actors and actresses, the utility of OnlyFans, and all that it offers those on both sides of the screen. Some titillating viewing. A way to indulge exhibitionist tendencies. A side-hustle. A means to procure extra cash, finance a vacation, or even find and build community. There was once a time, however, when you had to all but don a trench coat and fake mustache and duck into a dark theater to see explicit sex on screen.
Let us return to an era when a number of filmmakers made a daring push to bring porn to mainstream America. Behind the Green Door, released in 1972, hails from the Golden Age of Porn, spanning 1969 to 1984. Movie-wise, those first few years stand out. You had filmmakers who were consciously trying to make artistic statements beyond the bounds of the money shot. Among these pictures were the likes of Debbie Does Dallas, Deep Throat, and The Devil in Miss Jones, titles that became a part of the cultural conversation.
As an adult, I’ve returned at intervals to Behind the Green Door, which was directed by a couple of brothers named Artie and Jim Mitchell, who were in the striptease club business and knew their way around the porn world. They remained at it, in some form or other, until 1991, when Jim, in response to complaints about Artie’s rampant drug use from their friends, went to the house of his younger brother and killed him with a .22 rifle, receiving only six years behind bars (serving three).
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I’m not sure what to make of any of that. America, in 1972, didn’t know what to make of the film’s breakout star Marilyn Chambers—real name Marilyn Briggs—who became a sensation unto herself. She was born in 1952 in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in a middle-class family in Westport, Connecticut. Her brother was Bill Briggs, keyboardist of the fine Boston rock band The Remains, who opened for the Beatles on their final U.S. tour in 1966. Chambers worked as a model selling Ivory Soap, and had a small role in the 1970 film The Owl and the Pussycat, where she was credited as Evelyn Lang. Her film-publicity travels for that project brought her to California, and into the orbit of the Mitchell brothers, who thought she resembled the very-big-at-the-time actress Cybill Shepherd.
The idea for Behind the Green Door came from an anonymous short story—some smut prose, as it were—which circulated in the area at the time, one of those things that every person in the know seemed to have a copy of. Said story was itself inspired by a 1956 pop song called “Green Door,” which is about being unable to gain entry to a steamy nightclub with an emerald-colored entranceway. Perhaps it was a reference to jealousy, too. But that green door will have some staying power.
Chambers plays a well-heeled San Franciscan socialite named Gloria Saunders, who is taken, sans consent, to a North Beach sex club, where she has a change of heart, mind, and erogenous zones, and commits to an evening of sensual pleasure unlike any she’s known, which opens its own doors.
A lot of the sex acts—of the lesbian and heterosexual variety—take place on a stage, and Chambers is akin to this oracle-type figure, while the audience feeds off her energy, entering into their own extracurriculars. They’re like us, in a way—these watchers who become enthused, aroused, satiated. It’s a pervy Greek chorus set-up; an intense sensual dialogue. One of the nicest things you can say about this film is that you can watch it. That may come off as a limited compliment, but it’s not. Think about the porn you knew before the internet era, and certainly before the days of OnlyFans and the like. It’s a lot of dodgy guys exclaiming lines like, “Open your mouth and close your eyes!” before blanketing some woman’s face.
Behind the Green Door had various uses, but one of them is as a viable viewing experience. We also get the first interracial sex scene in mainstream porn, when Black boxer Johnnie Keyes partners with Chambers. Yes, the funk soundtrack feels inevitable and needless, but we are talking half a century ago, and progress doesn’t always unfurl like we’d prefer.
They move in an appealing rhythm, and there’s this unexpected feminist moment when Chambers’ character has her orgasm—everything stops. One has the expectation that Keyes himself will ejaculate, but he doesn’t; it’s the woman’s moment, and it’s surprisingly tender. The sequence is less about sex and more about new experiences. The rock band the Doors had their doors of perception, courtesy of Aldous Huxley, which they were always seeking to go beyond, plumbing other depths of human experience and consciousness, and that’s what Chambers’ character does here.
It's also why we’re going to get a mad, strobing, psychedelic overlay of effects lasting seven minutes when it’s officially money-shot time, but I’m not sure the term fits. Semen flies through the air, Halley’s Comet-style, for the better part of 10 minutes. We’re watching a film, yes, but it also feels akin to social commentary. The action is captioned—or leads you, the viewer, to provide your own captions. It’s never just banging, licking, stroking.
It was also deemed less than legal. The following year, in Miller v. California, the Supreme Court redefined obscenity as a work “utterly without socially redeeming value,” and said that Behind the Green Door qualified as such. Local judges could seize and destroy the film. During that same year of 1973, the movie was successfully prosecuted in New York, and was banned outright in California, Colorado, and Georgia.
Watch it, though—do it on Blu-ray, and take notes and study the thing—and you’ll quickly see that it does have value beyond what one expects with porn (or expected back then). I won’t pretend that the Mitchell brothers and Chambers were channeling Renee Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, but both actresses do yeoman’s work via facial expression. Chambers’ eyes are haunting, alluring, yearning, and ultimately imbued with what I think is a hue of peace and satisfaction. In the parlance of the time, it’s a rather heavy film. But good heavy.
Less heavy, but still amusing, is what came after, when actor and producer Idris Elba hit a few snags whilst trying to name his production company Green Door Productions, on account of its association with the legendary Chambers vehicle. Upon learning about the seven-minute ejaculation sequence, he apparently wanted the name even more, so that he could tell people it took a long time to come.
