Interview by Jay Kent Lorenz (Psychotronic Video)
Radley Metzger was born in the Bronx and raised in Washington Hts, but many people still think he’s European, simply because most of his features were made overseas. With the possible exception of (the very different) Russ Meyer, no other director of adult films had the same directing (and editing) skills. Metzger’s films are in the collection of the Museum Of Modem Art on the shelves of 42nd St. porno video stores. He started in the film business in the early 50s.
“I had a job as kind of a gofer on a Greek movie that was being made here in upper New York State. The mountains up here look like the mountains of Greece, so this Greek director made a movie about the Communist Revolution and very pro-government. After that I did censor cuts on (famous 1948 Italian film) Bitter Rice and whatever else needed censor cuts in New York. Then I joined the service (during the Korean war). I got into the motion picture unit of the Air Force doing propaganda. When I came back, I decided to make Dark Odyssey with a fellow (William Kyriakys) I had met on a picture named Guerilla Girl.” Metzger was a gofer for the feature (released by UA in 1953) which was shot in an upstate N.Y. convent.” Dark Odyssey was the ultimate, low budget, shoe string picture. I don’t want to sound boastful, but I still think that holds the lowest gross for any movie to ever play.” Metzger and Kyriakys shared all the major behind the scenes credits for the b/w cinema verite style drama about a young Greek immigrant confronting New York City while searching for the man who raped his sister. It was released in 1961.
“When we finished it, nobody would release it. There was a Greek motion picture theatre here in New York which played only ethnic movies, Russian and Greek. The owner said he would open the picture for us so we could get reviews. He said the only catch was that it had to be in Greek. So we went back, re-dubbed it and opened it in Greek. We played alternate English and Greek screenings. That is how we got it reviewed.” The New York Times called it “Thoughtful, unpretentious, creatively tuned, an A for effort, a B for solid execution.”
“Dark Odyssey was my introduction to Janus Films. I called and asked if they wanted to distribute the film. This is how I met Ava Leighton, who became the general sales manager for Audubon. I did all the trailers and whatever re-editing they had to do.” Leighton (who died in ‘87) and Metzger formed Audubon Films in I960. He was the president of the small NYC company, a major supplier to art houses of the 60s, breaking many censorship taboos by importing then daring features from Europe. “Those were then called art theatres, which were, at the time, in a period of transition from the dominance of the major distributors to that period after WWII when they became independent. A lot of theatres that couldn’t survive on strictly Hollywood product became art theatres.” Audubon features played drive-ins too. “The films showing at drive-ins were always dubbed and usually censored more than what we showed at the hard tops.”
“Our first foreign acquisition was Mademoiselle Striptease (a 1956 Brigitte Bardot feature by Marc Allegret). Actually, it first became ‘The Nude Set’, but the newspapers wouldn’t take that title. When it played first run in Los Angeles, where it opened, they refused ‘The Nude Set’, and we had to come up with a new title right away. So they came up with ‘The Undressed Set’. We couldn’t figure out why nude was considered objectionable but undressed was considered okay. So we decided we didn’t want to go with “The Undressed Set” and we called it The Fast Set.”
Audubon released exploitable “adult” films from Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark and even Japan. They released five movies directed by Max Pecas (two starred Elke Sommer), Buck on White (1969) by Tinto Brass (which received an early X rating) and Joe Samo’s Warm Nights and Hot Pleasures, a rare made in NYC feature. “We had about four per year. Our total output was probably in the mid 50s.” Metzger cut the films for America, sometimes filming whole new sequences while fighting off the censors. He also created and edited the trailers and worked on the ad campaigns. “One of the ways that I made trailers was to repeat the title many times. The best compliment I think I’ve ever had in my life occurred when Bergman saw one of my trailers and thought it was terrific.”
Metzger added 40 (!) minutes of footage (shot on the beach in Montauk) to ‘59 French feature Soft Skin on Black Silk and created Dictionary of Sex by editing scenes from various Euro features into a compilation film. “The most re-shooting we did was on the second picture that we bought. There was a film that had been done prior to The Fast Set called Les Collegiennes, the college girls. We called it The Twilight Girls. It featured a girl named Agnes Laurent who developed a kind of a cult following around people who went to exploitation films. She was going to do an AlP picture but she got involved in a scandal with some big executive in Hollywood and that sort of ended her career. We had her in three or four pictures that we bought. I wanted to make a picture with her, but we never did.”
“We shot scenes for The Twilight Girls that involved reconstruction of sets and costumes.” New scenes (including future porn star Georgina Spelvin) were added to Andre Hunebelle’s 57 French feature. “ One of the real precedent setting cases that didn’t get a lot of publicity was for The Twilight Girls. It was one of the films that helped put the censor board in New York out of business. We fought that one up to the New York Supreme Court. I did that specifically because I felt minor movies deserved the same consideration that the majors got. We fought it and won. Right after that, they disbanded. At that time, every state had its own censor board. All of them were knocked down with Maryland and New York being the last holdouts. They had to be carried out of the ring. Maryland went down fighting.” (The Maryland censor board was finally dissolved in 1981!).
“I, a Woman (1965) was done as a flashback and it was very confusing to audiences. It was also a little slow for American audiences. So we trimmed it up, and it was considered a great task to change these films. Actually, at the time, there were no distributors with a background in film editing. They were usually front office people. Probably the biggest money maker was I, a Woman. By the way, I, a Woman, was photographed by a very fine Danish director, Mac Ahlberg.” The Danish/Swedish production I, a Woman starred Essy Persson, later in Vibration from Audubon, Mission Stardust and Cry of the Banshee.
“There was another picture that we re-edited, rather severely, called I Spit On Your Grave. That was the original French title, J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. It was written by a rather famous French author/musician/actor/drug addict of the 50s called Boris Vian. He wrote this book without ever having been to the States! It’s about a black man that passes for white. It’s about what happens when this man’s brother is lynched for dating a white woman. The characters are supposed to be in Ohio, but there were palm trees everywhere and all these ridiculous things in it. It was shot in Nice, at Cinecitta. Everybody looked at it and they just laughed. Somebody bought the film, took it to the states and it folded because everybody just laughed. Again, if they had been film editors they would have seen the possibilities. The film was absolutely sensational and had a terrific cast. One of the actors in it is Claude Berri who made Manon of the Spring and Jean de Florette.” Star Christian Marquand later directed Candy.
“Anyway, we dubbed it with Southern accents. Instead of taking place in the North, it was taking place in the South. That’s where the book is set. We cut out all the stupid references and the bad geography and it really became a John Wayne movie for black audiences. It appealed to both black and white audiences and did terrific business. That film was our first really big success. Funnily enough, I think that the guy who did that horror film (of the same name) wanted to buy into the original French film. We had met him, and he was mad about the title. Several years later, he went out and made another film with that title.” Metzger also did editing and sound work for Jack Curtis’ cult horror movie The Flesh Eaters (!).
The Dirty Girls (filmed in 1963) was Metzger’s first feature as producer/director. He also edited his own features. “I was the editor on all my pictures. Well, on a couple of films, I worked with somebody, but, basically, I was it. The idea was to make a picture about three levels of girls who favored men for commercial purposes. We wanted to do a very low kind of street girl, a more middle class type hooker and a very top flight call girl. We went to France and did the street girl sequence which ran about 25 minutes. We finished it and came back to the states. For financial reasons, we decided to put the second two stories together. The final picture is two unrelated stories, although related by the same subject, prostitution. It was done in Cinemascope and black and white. The second sequence was shot in Munich, and I developed a very good relationship with the crew there. I went back the following year and did The Alley Cats (1966). It was the first time anybody did a serious film about a female homosexual, a lesbian. It had been done before, but with a leer as a dirty picture, never as a serious attempt at thoughtfully studying the subject. It was also black and white.” Anne Arthur, Karen Field and Uta Levka starred.
Carmen Baby (1967) was his first in color (Eastmancolor) and Ultrascope. It was filmed in Yugoslavia and in studios in Munich. Carmen is a waitress/hooker who seduces a policeman (Claude Ringer) to avoid a murder rap. She also manages to get her husband out of jail and has an affair with a rock singer. Uta Levka, who stars as Carmen, went on to appear in De Sade, The Oblong Box and Scream and Scream Again. Barbara Valentin (Horrors of Spider Island) was also in it. “The most successful one that I made (for Audubon) was Carmen Baby.”
Therese and Isabelle (1968) was an adaptation of Violette Leduc’s memoir filmed in France in b/w and Ultrascope. Essy Persson from I, a Woman stars as Therese, who remembers her schoolgirl affair with Isabelle (Anna Gael). “I met Leduc and the only thing she made me promise was not to make a dirty movie. I think I kept my promise. Loneliness is a theme very much in my earlier films. I think that the thing I knew most was loneliness. I was the only one who travelled to Europe to make these pictures. I didn’t bring a crew or anything with me. Everybody around me was a stranger and I was a foreigner. I think that Therese has part of my own isolation and loneliness in it.“ An alternate version has Therese happy in the arms of her fiance at the end. “That scene was shot and that version was released in some areas. When we were doing the film, in the middle of shooting, I thought that we were spending a lot of money on this movie, a lot of effort. There might have been a chance that no one would play the movie, because The Fox had not come out, and here we were with a glossy film about two girls involved in a lesbian affair. I thought that we should hedge our bets and do something with a happy ending. I called Ava in New York and asked her what she thought. She wanted to know how long it would take, how much it would cost. So we got a friend of ours to do this shot. It ended up in what we called the drive-in version. That was the version without the character stuff, the stuff that’s considered slow for a drive-in movie. In an art house… it was fine. That has plagued me ever since. A certain number of ‘happy ending’ prints got into release, and they lost track of which ones were which. Every time we had an important screening, one of those prints would show up. I think that I have them all back or destroyed at this point.”
Therese and Isabelle. Cinematography by Hans Jura director of photography
“The dubbed version was released to drive-ins and home video, but you get into a little problem with terminology there. Portions of Therese were actually shot in English and then dubbed into French. It’s like La Strada People would claim to hate dubbed pictures and insist on seeing the film in it’s original language. I saw the Italian language version of La Strada. Now the actors were American and actually spoke English during the shoot. So the Italian version was the dubbed version.” Reviews at the time were often very negative. “A pattern developed that was really distressing. We would open a picture and get terrible reviews. Then, about a year later, someone would make a picture on a similar subject, and these same reviewers would write how much better my film had been! Every time I was confused as to why they just didn’t say that in the first place. It would always be about a year later. Visconti had loved Therese, but that wasn’t printed until the movie had been out six months.” Therese was also involved in legal battles at the time and was banned in Pittsburgh. “That one went to the Supreme Court.”
Camille 2000 (1969) was filmed in Rome in Technicolor and Panavision and was based on Alexandre Dumas’ “La Dame Aux Camelias.” Daniele Gaubert stars as the rich, drug addicted Rome party giver Marguerite (or Camille), who has “already ruined many men.” Nino Castelnuovo (The Cavern, Five Man Army) co-stars as Armand Duval with Silvana Venturelli as Olympe, the model and Eleonora Rossi-Drago (also in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dorian Gray) as Prudence. Camille opens with a visible clapboard. The sex in Camille is discreet, but erotic and the look of the film is incredible, with all white rooms and inflatable couches in lush villas. Many viewers remember the prison theme party with women in chains and handcuffs and couples in cells. “Camille has an original Technicolor with the three strips. We shot it at a time when they no longer were shooting the three strips. Technicolor has become a printing process, not a photographic process. They had given up shooting the Technicolor print after The Wizard of Oz was made. I heard that Daniele Gaubert, the lead in Camille 2000, died of cancer. Camille had been her comeback film.”
Danièle Gaubert as Marguerite Gautier and Nino Castelnuovo as Armand Duval in Camille 2000
Critics have often tried to pin down Metzger’s influences. “There were only two people that I felt consciously had an influence, people that I actively tried to steal from when we got started. One, of course, was Orson Welles. I was 13 years old when Citizen Kane came out. Max Ophuls was certainly an influence. Lola Montes is one of my favorite movies. I never consciously stole from Resnais.”
Lickerish Quartet was Metzger’s first feature to receive an X. It features a b/w stag film in a the film, altered reality and personality switches. It was filmed in a real castle in Italy. Blonde Silvana Venturelli stars as “the girl,” found performing a wall of death motorcycle act at a carnival. She goes home with “the man” (Frank Wolff, “the woman” (Erika Remberg) and “the boy” (Paolo Turco). “There is a film (Pasolini’s Teorema – 1968) with a similar synopsis. I never wanted to see it for fear that someone would say I stole the idea for Lickerish I think that Terence Stamp mysteriously appears and changes the lives of all the members of this family. Eventually, I think that everybody who works in film must make a movie about film. It must be genetic. I noticed that film screenings changed depending on the audience. I became fascinated because you could run a picture for one audience and it played one way. The actual film seemed to change depending on the atmosphere in the audience. With Lickerish, I wanted to communicate the flexibility of something that was as fixed as film. Theoretically, film doesn’t change. It is recorded and it is going to last that way for a million years. But if you truly look at a movie, it is different every time you see it. Believe it or not, I don’t really like movies about movies. One very powerful film on the subject was Juliet of the Spirits. At some point MOMA shows Lickerish as a part of a series that they call self-referential film. I am not sure I really liked self -referential film.” The screenplay was published by Grove Press.
The costumes and art direction for Quartet (and Camille) were by Enrico Sabbatini (The Tenth Victim!) who was later nominated for an Oscar. ‘‘Michael DeForrest, the gentleman that I wrote Lickerish with became a film editor. We wrote Lickerish, isolated in the castle that was used for the film. For some reason it was never sold in Italy. Three of four years after it was made, a distributor came and said, well give you X number of dollars for it. It became the biggest grossing film in Italy that year with a new title, Erotica, Exotica, Psychotica, Fab! ‘‘Sylvana Venturelli is married and lives in L.A. Erica Remberg (Cave of the Living Dead) was a very popular German actress, after the war. She, I think immediately preceded Romy Schneider at the top. She had retired and turned down everything until Lickerish. She’s married and lives in Los Angeles now.”
‘‘Frank Wolff was an American actor who didn’t do too much in the 50s (he was in Beast from Haunted Cave and The Wasp Woman). Roger Corman was shooting a picture in Italy and told Frank that if he happened to be in Italy, he had a part for him. Corman couldn’t afford to bring him over. After that, Wolff went on to what became the biggest film in Italy. It was about the life of famous bandit hero, Salvatore Giuliano. Francesco Rossi directed it. Michael Cimino remade it (The Sicilian) a couple of years ago with the fellow who played Tarzan . After that and other successes, Wolff decided he only wanted to do art movies. When he was offered a part in Fistful of Dollars, he turned it down! (ed: he was in Once Upon a Time in the West though). Two years after The Lickerish Quartet, Frank Wolff look his own life. He took a razor and slit his throat in the Hilton in Rome. We were all on location in Yugoslavia for Little Mother when we read this in the Times. We kind of had to stop work for a few days. Frank was somebody that you got close to very quickly.”
The Lickerish Quartet. Cinematography by Hans Jura
While Lickerish Quartet is probably Metzger’s best known feature, his next feature, although technically brilliant, remains obscure to most. Vincent Canby liked it, but the film was a commercial flop. Little Mother or Blood Queen (1972) is based on the rise and fall of Eva Peron, told in on/off flashbacks. It’s set in Argentina but was filmed in Yugoslavia. Little Mother shows how the media can effectively manipulate the population using altered news footage. It also features torture scenes and some very erotic (but not explicit) sex scenes. Chrisliane Kruger stars as the manipulating Marina Pinares. Siegfried Rauch is Carlo Pinares. With Mark Damon, Ivan Desny and Anton Diffring as the Cardinal. A letterboxed video version is available (with Finnish subtitles). ‘‘The whole world changed with the release of Deep Throat and Beyond the Green Door. I think that audiences expected Little Mother to be along the lines of Therese and Isabelle, but it was a movie about corruption. There is very little sexual content in the film. You know, Chrisliane Kruger is the daughter of Hardy Kruger. The male lead in the film, Mark Damon was in that great Roger Corman version of House of Usher. He’s now a pretty successful producer. I think he did that Mickey Rourke movie, Wild Orchid.”
Score (1973), based on an off Broadway play, also had a hard lime finding an audience. A bi-sexual swinger couple in a European ‘‘village of leisure” successfully “score” with a younger couple. Score has characters smoking pot and using amyl nitrate and male/male scenes that would send many fans of earlier Metzger features running for the exit, but is often very funny and has a comical narration. Clare Wilbur, who had also been in the play, stars as Elvira with Lynn Lowiey as the naive Catholic Betsy, Calvin Culver and Gerald Grant. It was filmed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. “In Score, for all the frivolity and so forth, the older couple have feelings for each other. Even the younger couple have feelings for each other. These feelings are just on the rocks at the moment.” Two versions of Score exist, one part hardcore. “They really are not that much different. It is only one little scene with the two men with a few extra shots. I don’t think the hardcore version was shown all that much. Perhaps just in New York and other major cities. Did you know that Sylvester Stallone had played the telephone repairman in the play? He was really awful. He’s actually very good now. I mean compared to what he does now, he was an amateur.”
Wilbur went on to win Oscars for her documentary work. She shared a 1975 Oscar for documentary short subject (“End Of The Game”) . Fans of Lynn Lowry from Athens, GA., (also in They Came from Within, Sugar Cookies and I Drink Your Blood) will want to see Score for her eye popping lesbian scenes. Calvin Culver, had achieved notoriety before Score in Boys in the Sand, the breakthrough, Deep Throat of gay hardcore. “I thought that Calvin Culver was right for the part. I liked him and I really didn’t think than anybody would know he was a gay porn star. He had used another name, Casey Donovan. He died, by the way, two weeks before Ava.”
Lynn Lowry, Casey Donovan, Claire Wilbur and Gerald Grant in Score (1973)
The Punishment of Anne or The Image (1973, released 1976 by Audubon) is an S+M movie based on the French novel “The Image” by “Jean de Berg.” Marilyn Roberts stars as Claire, a dominatrix. and Mary Mendum is Anne, a masochist, also involved with jean, a male writer in Paris. ‘‘We started filming but in the middle of shooting, the Supreme Court came down saying that you couldn’t shoot erotic movies. We were nervous because this was a film that was dealing with subject matter far more controversial than the typical erotic film. Nothing came from the decision, but we were held up. It took a little longer than the other films. In the mean time, we shot Pamela Mann. We had to come back and finish The Image.” It was based on a book by Alain Robbe-Grillet. “Actually, he and his wife. In France, his reputation as a novelist and director is so established that he was able to halt the film version from being released there. Between our acquisition of his book and the making of the film The Story of O was released. It was very successful at the box office, and he asked us for more money. We had a contract, and I said we couldn’t do that. I didn’t appreciate the pressure, so we said. Fuck You.”’ The screenplay was published by Grove Press.
“Claire draws Jean into her world because she desires to play Anne’s role. There is a very effective scene near the end of the movie. After being bested by jean, Claire asks Anne, ‘Where will I go? What will I do?’ Anne shines a harsh light on her own face and the two actresses, although separated by a 20 year difference, suddenly appear very similar. That is also in the book and I think we adapted that scene well for the picture. Marilyn Roberts was in the original cast of ‘Futz,’ the Tom Horgan play about the man in love with a pig. It was kind of important in the 70s.” The Image was shot in France but interiors were done in NYC. “You can’t tell at all. Believe it or not, the interiors were shot at Roy Cohn’s house. He really was one of the biggest scumbags of all time.”
The Image. Cinematography by Robert Lefebvre, director of photography
At this point Metzger started using the pseudonym Harry Paris for hard core X rated movies (from Catalyst Productions). Today many of them are better known than the earlier Metzger features. Most of the Paris features received publicity, good reviews and were boxoffice hits. They’re still considered the best of the theatrical release porno movies and are still popular on tape. Some consider them the only porno movies, worthy of serious criticism. “I would like to say something really in defense of all the people who were making pictures at the time. If you look at the people who were making hardcore, they generally came from other fields. There were no people who had done feature films prior to that, so I never thought that it was fair to compare other X rated movies to mine. It wasn’t fair to the other people. For instance, I saw a picture called The Devil in Miss Jones. This is Gerard Damiano’s second movie. Compared to my second movie, it was genius. This guy was a hairdresser, had made one movie, and his second picture was this good. I had studied film at City College, worked as a schlepper, made movies. It took a long time for me to learn the craft.”
“I think that any eroticism is dependent on the preparation. Most hardcore means that you can only see two bodies. They can be humans, they can be monkeys, they could be dogs. There is merely a physical, biological act and there isn’t much socialization to it. What we did was to take the eroticism that we had done previously and simply extend it to hardcore. As far as the choreography, the stuff was usually planned around some central idea, and it became an extension of the character that we were working with. Also, the other ingredient that might make a difference is the magic element of time. We spent more time making the films because we controlled the distribution, the production, the writing, everything. We had that flexibility.”
In Naked Came the Stranger (1974), based on the best selling novel. Darby Lloyd Rains stars as NYC radio talk show hostess Gillian Blake. In one scene she enjoys sex on a 5th Ave. bus and a clip from Camille 2000 is shown. With Levi Richards, Mary Stuart and Helen Madigan. “I definitely thought she (Rains) had something. She had a very pretty face but was very short, very short legs. We had to photograph her very carefully. Did you know that she had played a stripper in The French Connection? A few years ago, I thought I saw her on the street, but was uncertain and reluctant to approach her. My theory is that Stranger never made as much as the other pictures because it is the less perverse of the bunch. We also had quite a limited budget on it too because it was a tax write off for the fictitious Penelope Ashe. About 17 writers and editors at (Long Island) Newsday got together and wrote ‘Naked Came The Stranger.’ It was promoted heavily as being the work of a Long Island housewife. When the book became big, a sister-in-law of one of the authors posed as Penelope Ash and appeared on the talk show circuit. When the whole thing was revealed to be a hoax, the book did even better business.”
Naked Came the Stranger. Cinematography by Paul Glickman as Robert Rochester
In The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1975) Barbara Bourbon stars as a housewife being tracked by a PI hired by her wealthy husband. The all-star porn cast includes Darby Lloyd Raines as a maid, Georgina Spelvin (Police Academy III) as a hooker. Sonny Landham (48 Hours, Predators…), Jamie Gillis (Night of the Zombies), Eric Edwards and the late Marc (“10 ½”) Stevens. Variety (which was reviewing porn features at the time) said “Hardcore features of the caliber of this film are rare.” The New York Times coined the phrase ‘porno chic’ to describe the trendy popularity of the new hardcore features. “Pamela Mann was released just as ‘porno chic’ hit. It was colossal timing. Perfect timing.” It was also a time of many court battles over porn movies. “That was really the reason for changing my name. We were really terrified. When Addison Verrill wanted to reveal that I had made Stranger… and Pamela Mann,I begged him not to. I told him that he would be taking bread out of the mouths of my employees and their families. The problem was not so much on the local level. The big fear that everyone had were the Federal regulations about crossing state lines. If your print crossed the state line, you could be in a great deal of difficulty. There was a very big test case that took place in New Orleans (concerning) Deep Throat. They arrested theatre owners, theatre bookers, actors, people who were very far removed from the film. So the legal aspect of it forced me to change my name. The other reason was that I felt the name Radley Metzger was identified with a kind of picture. It was a kind of brand name that we weren’t creating anymore. I didn’t want people to get confused.
The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann. Cinematography by Paul Glickman as Marcel Hall (photography)
The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976) is often called the ‘‘best sex film ever made.” Constance Money stars as Misty, a Paris hooker in a sex version of “Pygmalion” set in Paris and NYC. Jamie Gillis is wealthy sex researcher Seymour Love. With Terri Hall (Gums), Gloria Leonard and Ras Kean. Misty won the first annual AFAA Erotic Film award in 1977. The award was presented by actress Liz Renay. “I never wanted to use people that I had known in the field. Even in the Paris pictures, I tried to use new faces. I was in a very big conflict over using Jamie Gillis for Misty Beethoven. I told him so. I said, you know, this part was written for you, but I don’t want to use you because you are so typecast as a porn actor. It came about because there was no one else. When we made Misty Beethoven, Gloria Leonard was a legal secretary who was interested in starring in an erotic film. Jamie Gillis brought her to my attention. She was a little older than mist women in the business. I think we became friends because we were the only two on the set close in age. She became such a spokesperson for the counterculture that I once thought my tombstone would be inscribed, ‘Here lies the man who discovered Gloria Leonard.'”
The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Cinematography by Paul Glickman as Robert Rochester
A reporter (C. J. Laing) interviews an infamous prostitute (Annette Haven) in a NYC sex restaurant in Barbara Broadcast (1977). With Suzanne McBain, Jamie Gillis, Bobby Astyr, Wade Nichols and Constance Money outtakes from Misty Beethoven. “You can go down and see the restaurant. It was the Manhattan Hotel on 44th St. and 8th Ave. It’s being advertised on TV all the time under a different name. They had gone bankrupt. We made the deal to shoot there and then they decided to auction off everything in the place. The auctioneer came in and said no shooting would be allowed until night. So, the whole film had to be shot from eight at night until about six A.M. We made the restaurant in the middle of the marble lobby. I walked past the other day and cut through the hotel. They have made a restaurant in the lobby and put the tables almost in the same place as we did!” Gloria Leonard stars as a NYC madame teaching her younger sister (Jenny Baxter) everything (including S+M techniques) she knows in Maraschino Cherry (1978), the last of the official Paris features. With Leslie Bovee, Annette Haven, C. J. Laing, Suzanne McBain, Wade Nichols, Eric Edwards and more outtakes with Constance Money, who was featured in the timely July 1978 Playboy.
“We did the five Harry Paris films and I didn’t think that any more were needed. There were a lot of films around, and I think that exhibition had changed. There was a shift in taste to more generic eroticism.” The cat and the Canary (1978), the 4th version of the famous 1922 stage play, was a complete departure for Metzger. The comic mystery was produced by Richard Gordon in England and starred Carol Lynley, Honor Blackman, Michael Callan, Edward Fox, Wendy Hiller, Olivia Hussey, Daniel Massey and Wilfreid Hyde-White. “I think it was a fun picture, but the litigation involved was horrendous. The distributor chose not to honor the contract. We sued, and it is very difficult to be the aggressor in a law suit. After all those years of defending myself in censorship cases in which we never lost one, there I was trying to create a case on the other side. It took a very long time. We won the suit because it was an obvious breach. The picture was finally released in 1981, but the timing was off. The haunted house aspect helped when it came to ancillary rights. Outside of theatres, Cat has done tremendous business. It was the leader in all those syndication packages. It has never stopped playing. We actually have been living off that picture for eight or nine years.”
Metzger was producer (and uncredited co-director) of The Tales of Tiffany Lust (1981), by French porn specialist Gerard Kikoine (who later made Buried Alive and Edge of Sanity). Arlene Manhattan stars as a woman who goes to a sex therapist. Many other porn stars of the day were in the cast: Vanessa Del Rio as a radio talk show hostess, Desireé Cousteau, Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart (later aka Jane Hamilton), Misty, Merle Michaels and Ron Jeremy. “After Cat, it was a question of going into video production or TV production. I did one picture for Playboy, for their cable show.I just think that things had changed to the point that the audience wasn’t there. The couples market was gone and everything had shifted.” The Playboy cable movie The Princess and the call girl (1984) was a softcore feature with a socialite and a high price prostitute changing places for two days. It was also released theatrically by Manly. The World of Henry Paris (1986) was an unauthorized 1986 porno compilation tape with a female narrator that even included scenes from Carmen, Baby. Drive-in Follies is an authorized Metzger trailer compilation. Source
The Forbidden Book of Beauty 
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