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Channel 4 is to broadcast some of the most controversial sex scenes on television with a new commission from ITN-owned production arm Visual Voodoo. The 90-minute programme, X-rated: The Sex Films They Tried to Ban, is being lined up for a Sunday night slot in the spring. It will look at sex films and pornography from early French films through to 1970s films to the ?hardcore revolution?. The programme will be directed by Simon George and produced by Toby Dye. It was commissioned by C4 editor, factual entertainment, Andrew MacKenzie, and follows on from the Visual Voodoo commission X Rated: the Pop Vidoes They Tried to Ban.
TV producer Toby Dye gives an R-rated look at the history of sex on film.
Barrister and author John Mortimer: "I think the British attitude to sex is to see it, goggle at it, and then condemn it."
Sexpert Tracey Cox: "Most people won't see real people have sex in the whole of their lives."
Ben Dover: "It's a car crash thing. You just have to look at it."
Retired FBI agent Bill Kelly: "Pornographers are like vermin. We will always have them with us. It's a question of prosecuting the worst offenders."
Marilyn Chambers: "I was arrested. I was taken to jail naked. I was allowed to put my fur coat on. Then, when I got there, in the holding tank, all of the cops came in and wanted a Polaroid picture of me."
Jack Osbourne, son of Ozzy, makes a lot of comments.
Narrator: "A few months after the movie camera was invented, the sex film was born, and unsurprisingly it was the randy old French..."
There's 1896 footage of a topless woman brushing her hair.
Jessica Stevenson, actress: "One of the main pleasures of pornography is just looking at the female form."
Porn film historian David McGillivray on the first stag films: "There were no taboos at all.... Men with animals."
Footage from Le Canard plays. A man sits down with wild fowl. "So shocking is this film is that it can't be screened legally anywhere in the Western world.
"French stag film makers went out of their way to offend as many authority figures as possible [particularly the Roman Catholic church]."
Jack: "We're not only going to have sex on film, but we're going to get the Devil involved."
Footage plays of Black Mass (1923).
Footage plays of Apple, Knockers and Coke. The model looks like Marilyn Monroe.
Narrator: "The studios attempted to bury any evidence that it existed."
Al Goldstein: "Marilyn Monroe f----- her way to the top. The casting couch."
John Landis: "That was not Marilyn Monroe. It was a stripper. It's a lovely film with the Coke bottle. It's quite sweet but it's not Marilyn Monroe."
The discussion moves to the nudist films of 1950s. "They [theaters] would be packed with men looking at naked women playing volleyball. These were not aficionados of volleyball. They wanted to look at tits and ass."
David: "People realized that if you made films about naturism, which was healthy, you could give men pictures of naked women."
Garden of Eden was the first (1955).
Narrator: "Garden of Eden was an innocent tale of one woman's introduction to the wonderful carefree world of nudism, where, after witnessing such sights as semi-naked buffets, the joys of unencumbered water sports, and the bond between God's creatures at one with nature, she would come to the Eureka realization that..."
Nudists Jane and Andrew Flux: "Naturism is a way of life in harmony with nature. It's a feeling of being liberated, open and free with yourself."
Narrator: "After being reassured that there was nothing remotely immoral with nudism, she sheds the unnecessary burden of clothing in a scene the filmmakers milked for all its worth.
"Granting the moral fury that nudity would immediately cause, the filmmakers introduced a father figure who would have the same moral concerns that any upstanding American would when he unwittingly realizes that his daughter is hanging out in a nudist colony."
Jack: "There's this guy hanging out in the dock and he's like, 'Hey Frank, isn't it a wonderful morning?' Then he walks past the guy and you see this old ass. Ehhh."
That's when the father first realizes he is in a nudist colony.
Kevin Blatt: "Everybody is jumping and frolicking in the water. It's not every day you get to see these chubby old guys smoking pipes on boats."
Sexpert Tracey Cox: "The father-in-law accepts nudity and suddenly all of Britain accepts it."
The floodgates opened. But no pubic hair was allowed until 1966 in mainstream films.
Tracey: "To get sex on screen, we would have to look to the Europeans."
Footage plays of the black-and-white I Am Curious Yellow (1968).
Narrator: "Filled with casual sex and bizarre topless carrot-munching scenes...it shot to worldwide notoriety.
"It had lofty politicals aspirations with the young heroine Lena protesting about anything she could think of. However, she was easily distracted when it came to sex. In this scene, the conversation meanders from politics to preferred methods of self-abuse."
Luke F-rd: "It's not erotic. It's got all this political mumbo-jumbo which makes no sense."
Nevertheless, after sitting through 39-minutes of cold political theorizing, [simulated sex]... The film's truly controversial scene of oral sex was shot in daring close-up.
It couldn't get through customs in Britain.
Ben Dover, at 14, sat through an edited version. "We stuck through it thinking we were going to see a bit of naughtiness, but sadly not."
Footage plays of W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971) about pioneering sex researcher Wilheim Reich. "Come lovers. For health's sake, f--- freely." It reached British cinema screens uncut.
Jessica Stevenson, actress: "There doesn't seem to be any apparent reason why they're having orgasms. You just see these women in sixties bikinis having orgasms while doctors stand over them."
More on Jessica.
The film showed the first erection -- an old hippie woman takes a plaster cast of a guy's woody.
Robin Askwith: "'Oh. That's an erection,' my girlfriend said."
Narrator: "Throw in some long words, and some documentary footage about an obscure scientist, and the censors would be baffled into submission."
British censor Peter Johnson: "It was a film about ideas which was challenging the audience to think about various things including sex and it was felt at the time that using a shot of the erect penis was suitable way to do that."
N: Lasse Braun gave his loops elaborate sets and costumes. While technically advanced for the time, Lasse's grasp of the plot line left a lot to be desired.
Ed Byrne comedian: "A man sees two lesbians, he goes, ah, two lesbians, they'd like a bit of cock, then."
N: With perfect porn logic, a graphically filmed gangbang ensues.
Liz Bonnin, film critic and TV presenter (and dyke?): "How totally and utterly offensive was that piece of film."
N: "Whilst no cinema in their right mind would dare screen Lasse's utterly obscene but beautifully shot fantasies, he would come up with a new invention that would bypass the cinemas for good [peep shows].
"For many, their first glimpse of Denmark's sexual revolution was hairy Vikings in a dirty old booth."
Luke: "To me, it was the first time, in one of those filthy... Gives me the whilies to remember how disgusting it was."
Bill Kelly: "In January 1972, there was a negligible amount of commercial obscenity in the United States. All we had were those little 8mm films.
"Suddenly the avalance descends as a result of Deep Throat hitting the streets."
Liz Bonnin: "In Europe, politics and idealism drove the development of sex in film while in America it was all about money."
N: David Friedman's film Starlet showed both the disgraceful behavior and the disastrous consequences of disgraceful behavior.
David Friedman: "The funny thing about it was that it worked. In a lot of towns, the censorship board would say, oh, these people are serious. They're on a crusade. This picture's ok."
By the late 1960s, Friedman's pictures were playing in over 300 drive-in theaters.
Russ Meyer's 1968 film Vixen the most controversial sex film of all.
Erica Gavin: "It was incest, infidelity..."
It features America's first explicit lesbian film. In previous films, lesbianism was treated as a borderline mental illness. Meyer showed it as fun.
Vixen had a notorious incest scene.
Sister: "I believe baby brother is all excited and he's afraid to do anything about it."
Brother: "I know what to do if I wanted to."
Sister: "I dare you, baby."
The brother attacks her and they consumate their love.
The incest scene is extended to epic proportions, going from the bathroom to the bedroom.
Sister: "Come on baby brother, show me how good you are."
Erica Gavin says she was never naked from the waist down. Yet it is still banned in Ohio.
Bill Kelly about Linda Lovelace: "She did worse than Deep Throat. I have seen the film involved and sent it to the FBI laboratory. It involved dogs."
N: "Unable to witness such suffering [Linda Lovelace having her clitoris in her throat], Dr. Young [Harry Reems] relieves himself of his trousers and every ethic he was taught at medical school."
Bill: "That's a ridiculous message to give in any society."
Describing her decision to star in Behind the Green Door, Marilyn Chambers says: "I decided to sign my life away.
"The whole time [she's filming], I'm thinking, what are my parents going to say? They're going to kill me."
British 1970s censor John Trevelyan: "While simulation will be accepted, actuality will not."
In 1974, America's Columbia Pictures spotted a gap in the sex-starved UK market and produced Confessions of a Window Cleaner [rated X but contained no actual sex], starring Robin Askwith.
Liz Bonnin: "Window Cleaner is a harmless bit of fun. It was bad comedy with a couple of boobs thrown in."
Actress Sue Longhurst: "I always had my knickers on. And the shot of Robin's bum? I wasn't under that."
David: "If you wanted to take your kids to the pictures in the 1970s, it was hard to find anything that didn't have Robin Asquith dropping his pants."
August 17, 1979, British porn star Mary Millington committed suicide. The sex shops of her boyfriend David Sullivan, porn baron, closed for a few hours in her memory.
British anti-porn crusader Mary Whitehouse dies.
Veronica Hart on the Traci Lords underage bust: "They only way that everybody [in porn] didn't fry for it was that she fooled the government. She had a passport with a fake age on it."
Jessica: "Caught From Behind 2 is about a doctor [played by Eric Edwards] who tries to cure his female patients from a fear of anal sex by having anal sex with them. He is actually a very good actor."
N: But the LAPD didn't think so...and took everyone to the county jail.
Ron Jeremy: "They were trying arrest me at the same time they were watching the World Series."
Ginger Lynn: "It's gone from magical to big business. It's cold, hard and dirty. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy."
In 2000, Britain legalized hardcore.
Rick Salomon: "Home-made tape. Boring. I'd been hitting the same girl for a while. Wanted to do something to spice it up."