This one was new for me. Did you know there was a German sex comedy made in 1958 called "Mit Eva Fing die Sunde an" which was shot entirely in black and white and featured some very light nudity. Then in 1962 they decided to recut the film and so they hired Francis Ford Coppola to shoot some sexier scenes on color film, and then they re-issued the film in adult cinemas in the USA under a new title "The Bellboy and the Playgirls". Coppola's 1962 recut of the film contained racier topless footage for the adult market.

One of the color segments of the film is a scene in a beauty parlor where everyone gets into a cold cream fight, lobbing globs of cream at each other. I attach a screen cap of that scene.

It's a curio item because in 1962 Coppola was making adult films with messy fetish scenes, and in 10 short years his career took off and he made the greatest blockbuster trilogy of all time...The Godfather films. I wonder if any of the current wam producers will become famous in the future !

MK

Interestingly, a woman got a decent pie in the face in Coppola's segment in the anthology film New York Stories, but the shot was ultimately cut from the film. I remember seeing pics of both the impact and the why-you-I-oughta removal of the pie tin in Premiere magazine at the time, and a blurb by the director explaining that he cut it becaue it ruined the blitheness of the scene, or something. You can see it in the trailer, though, at about the :53 mark.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPADo5eKn9I

I'm thinking if any WAM producer is going to make it rich it will be, well, Rich. He seems to have a good business acumen and delivers what his customers like. He's also pretty fucking hysterical.

True, Rich has a lot of creativity in his productions. But these days even a small budget mainstream production costs $250K + to produce something for the mainstream streaming market, so Rich would have to launch a GoFundMe page and raise several hundred thousands dollars from fans and investors in order to get a mainstream project off the ground.

The WAM Producer who is in the best position to launch into the mainstream world is somebody like Leon and his Mostwam Productions. Leon has the talent and has so much content in his archive he could easily launch his own cable tv and internet tv channel.

Anything is possible...e.g. Quentin Tarantino started his life in the Film Industry working as a teenager as an usher at an Adult Movie Theater, and then later developed an interest in making movies while working as a clerk at a video rental store. Stephen Spielberg made amateur 8mm films while he was a teenager too.

Thanks for the kind words, but here's the difference:
My goal (and probably Leon's too, but maybe not) is to make WAM content. Now, do I want it to be shot well, and lit well, and have the scripts halfway decent and the acting not terrible? Sure. But that's a means to an end. (You can tell how little I care about some things based on the same identical, flat backdrops. Shooting in actual locations would be WAY more authentic but would also be a nightmare in terms of time and logistics so I never do that.)

Coppola (and also Scorsece and others) were making "adult films" because that was their only opportunity to have access to equipment and sets and learn their craft while someone else was handling the budget. TBH most of these were low-rent Roger Corman productions (who was also giving folks like Jack Nicholson their first gigs) and weren't straight porn as much as "cheap films with sex, nudity, violence, and titilation to make their money back." But their end game wasn't to make adult content forever. It was to transition into "mainstream" Hollywood movies.... albeit with stories and themes (and actors/characters) that were personal to them.

By the '90s, adult films were a dead end and no porn director (to my knowledge) ever successfully transitioned out of them. (Traci Lords was the rare porn actress to have a mainstream career.) So Tarantino did work-for-hire scripts until he had the money (and cred) to parlay that into a cheap film production (Reservoir Dogs). These days, he'd probably shoot something designed for the film circuits or VOD and raise money via GoFund Me. (From Dusk Til Dawn would've been ideal for this.) But I guarantee a Tarantino who's 21 years old in 1965 is directing a Corman film. (Hell, the Grindhouse movie he did with Rodriguez basically IS a Corman double feature!)

ANYWAY. If I'd been using WAM shoots as my way to build my directing chops, I probably would've made the transition LONG ago. Just imagine an alternate universe where my latest film starring Pitt and DeCaprio opens wide and gets serious Oscar buzz. (And also features a random scene where Margot Robbie gets pummeled with pies for no good reason. )

BTW, that NY Stories film (apart from the disappointing editing out of the quick pie scene - which was reshot at least twice, as there were two versions of this trailer, if memory serves.)...was prety good and contains a few other 'fetishistic' scenes in it (though not wam-related)

Rich / MK:

I am certain MANY known and/or IMDB-credited directors have prior experience doing porn, or 'fetish erotica'/softcore, and/or cheapo sexploitation (rated R or X) films....they simply did so under pseudonyms (and produced with very small crews)...many did so in Europe or elsewhere (besides the puritan US)...

How do I know this....?