Get your own Free Home PageSince 1968, when that scene was filmed, audiences have "gotten a little peek" at a great many actors in the buff. It is a commonly held belief that most nudity in the movies is done by the girls, but as the Checklist's directory of male movie nude scenes shows, the guys have been doing their fair share, too! Some of these nude actors have been young unknowns desperate for any work, clothes on or off. But there have probably been more major male stars doing nude scenes in movies than major female stars, and the practice of using a "body double" to stand in for a nude scene is all but unknown among actors, although commonplace for actresses. Even in the one widely publicized case of a male nude body double, used recently for actor Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, the stand-in was not required because of the nudity, but because of the frigid water in which he had to go skinnydipping!
Much earlier, Muybridge had devised a cumbersome device involving a series of 24 cameras which took individual photos a fraction of a second apart. Originally he conceived the idea in order to settle a bet about whether race horses ever has all four feet off the ground at once. (In case you're curious, they do.) But the possibilities of the device to aid in the study of human and animal motion intrigued the elderly inventor. While lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, he began taking thousands of sequential photos of a wide range of human and animal movements.
His subjects, the human ones at least, were drawn from the classrooms and sports fields at the university and included many handsome and robust young athletes. In most of the pictures, the models are completely naked. This would be no big deal today, but in 1884, even models in life painting classes did not pose in the nude. One suspects that the iconoclastic old scholar was using his admittedly legitimate scientific inquiry to do a little nose-thumbing at society.
Muybridge reportedly used to entertain his guests with a little parlor magic by projecting glass slides of his photo sequences onto a screen in rapid order, simulating motion. Thus he toyed with the idea of movies a full decade before they were officially introduced, and his young students became in effect the first "movie stars," running, jumping and playing completely naked across the screen for the amusement of their professor's parlor guests.
Makers of the earliest movies were eager to photograph anything that moved, and in that more bucolic age, several of them found the "old swimming hole" an irresistible subject. Several film clips survive from the 1890s and the early 1900s of naked youngsters cavorting about a stream or pond in some long-forgotten village.
After the movies eventually learned to tell stories and settled down into something resembling our feature films of today (albeit without sound quite yet), nudity was still looked on as a legitimate element of screen entertainment.
In 1918, the character of Tarzan came to the screen for the first time, in the figure of a nude youngster cavorting through the jungle with his ape family. The boy Tarzan was played by Gordon Griffith, a child actor who had already had several films to his credit. He appeared throughout most of his scenes in Tarzan of the Apes completely without clothing. He did not discover the loincloth (finally stealing one from a couple of nude natives bathing in the river) until he was about ready to grow up into Elmo Lincoln, the first official movie Tarzan.
Tarzan has proven to be one of the most enduring fictional characters in the movies, in part, we suspect, because the movies provided an excuse for allowing a handsome and well-built actor to spend a couple of hours onscreen just about as close to nude as the movies were allowed to get. Indeed, the longest gap between new Tarzan films took place during the '70s, when total male nudity in films was commonplace, and the ruse was no longer needed.
By the 1920s, movies had grown from a novelty into the unchallenged entertainment giant they were to remain for the next half-century. But the silent screen was not always quite the coy Victorian storyteller that many people think of today. Silent movie fans today are sometimes surprised to see the naked male slave chained to the wall of the ship galley in 1925's epic production of Ben Hur, or to find Tom O'Brien and Karl Dane, major costars of the 1925 war drama The Big Parade, blithely bathing in the buff in the French countryside.
Naked youngsters were cute, and therefore popular, in the silents. In Peter Pan, 7-year-old Phillipe de Lacy can be seen getting his bath from his nurse-dog, Nana. De Lacy is seated in the tub throughout the scene, although he was actually naked during filming. A clever still photographer saw the chance for a cute picture, though, and got the young actor to stand up for a publicity photo which prominently featured his bare bottom.
Likewise, in the talkie Blonde Venus, 7-year-old Dickie Moore (later a member of the Our Gang kids) had his bottom put on display as his screen mother (Marlene Dietrich) bathed him.
But by 1932, when Blonde Venus was made, forces were in motion that would spell the end of movie nudity, at least in America, for over three decades.
Self-censorship seemed the lesser of two evils, and Hollywood set up the Motion Picture Association of America to oversee the content of their output. To head the new organization, an apparently saintly former Postmaster General named Will Hays was hired, and he forever bequeathed his name to the "Hays Office."
Over the next few years a code of acceptable conduct was developed, and in 1934 it was formalized. From that time on, no movie which flaunted any dictate of "the Code" could be granted a seal of approval, which meant that it could not play in the vast majority of movie theaters in America.
The Hays Office was intent on stamping out anything and everything that could be considered "immoral" in the movies, including violence, profanity, and sex. Among the many restrictions of the Code was nudity, real or suggested, even on the part of young children.
Despite a ban on it, there were many films produced under the rule of the Code containing suggested nudity (usually female nudity) but possibly the only instance in which outright exposure by either sex was allowed to reach the screen was in Frank Capra's highly acclaimed Lost Horizon. This film, surprisingly, contained both male and female nude scenes. At one point Ronald Colman catches Jane Wyatt bathing in a mountain lake and she rises from the water to reveal that she is nude. Actually the star was doubled by stunt-woman Mary Wiggins in the scene. Although seen from some distance, it is blatantly obvious in a good 35mm print of the film that Ms. Wiggins was truly nude during the scene. However, Capra encouraged several crew-members to write memos to the Hays Office assuring them that the stunt double wore a pink leotard, and the scene slipped by.
Another scene in the film, in which a number of young native boys throw off their clothing and go skinnydipping in the river, was also surprisingly passed by the Hays Office, although there is absolutely no question whatever that the boys were completely naked. It was decided that the innocence of the scene and the youthfulness of the boys made it acceptable.
Lost Horizon was an aberration, however. From the imposition of the Hays Office's Code, nudity disappeared from mainstream American films, for all practical purposes, for some three decades.
Those who could find such films as the Russian The Road to Life, or the classic German Kameradshaft, however, got a rare glimpse of numerous nude extras bathing in a camp for teenage delinquents and a coal mine, respectively.
Even in Europe, it was rare that an established actor would do a movie nude scene. One of the exceptions was an early French comedy entitled Drôle de Drame in which actor and mime artist Jean-Louis Barrault did, in fact, appear completely nude. (Barrault is best known to American audiences for Children of Paradise, a vast, three-hour historical epic in which he played a love-sick mime.) Drôle de Drame, directed by famed French filmmaker Marcel Carné, appeared in the United States and other English-speaking countries under the title Bizarre, Bizarre, and in this version, the nudity is conspicuous by its absence.
In the scene, the tipsy Barrault has discovered a fish pond in a private greenhouse, which he accidentally falls into. A few minutes later, the house's haughty grande dame (Françoise Rosay) returns to find Barrault, completely naked, diving into her pond.
Carné made several backup takes of the scene with Barrault wearing bikini briefs for fear of censorship. But Rosay was not warned that Barrault - who was a nudist in private life - would appear naked in the final take, which was also the final take of the production. Carné later recalled, "With the scene completed, I approached Rosay, who burst out with indignation, 'You could have spared me that sight!'"
Drôle de Drame was one of Carné's first films. He returned to male nudity again in his last, La Merveilleuse Visite (1974). In that gentle allegory, Gilles Kohler played an angel who has accidentally fallen to earth. The beautiful young actor played a number of scenes in all his angelic glory as the nude visitor from the heavens.
After World War II, "art theaters" began to become more common, and American audiences began to discover the greater freedom - not only for sex and nudity, but for challenging subject matter - enjoyed by the European films. Meanwhile, television was beginning to erode the habitual weekly movie attendance. As if this weren't enough, a damaging court decision forcing the movie studios to divest themselves of their theater chains made film distribution more competitive. Desperate producers began looking for something to titillate and excite the increasingly fickle audiences. The Code began to seem even more restrictive and detrimental to the box office.
Finally, in 1954, United Artists dared to release a major film without a Code seal. The film was The Moon is Blue, and its offense was the use of the word "virgin" to refer to the leading lady's condition. Of course the concept of virginity was fine with the Hays Office, but the word was nothing short of pornographic. Even without a Code seal - or more likely because of its absence - The Moon is Blue was a huge success and encouraged other producers to delve into subject matter that was taboo under the Code.
Nudity was still a decade away, however, at least for the mainstream films. It had always been here in the little-known "underground" exploitation films and artistic works.
During its lifetime, Traffic in Souls grossed some 80 times its original production cost, an enviable track record for a film of any nature!
The exploitation film movement did not really get started, though, until the 1930s, when the Production Code tamed down mainstream Hollywood product. Exploitation pictures about drugs and "fallen women" also often included some cautious glimpses of skin along with great amounts of innuendo. This had virtually all been female nudity, however. Nudist camp films were the first to make extensive use of nudity, and it was in the nudist camp pictures that the male nude made his exploitation film debut.
The films all had virtually the same plot - a dedicated nudist takes a doubting friend or relative to a camp, they watch naked people swimming and playing volleyball, and the friend or relative is 100% sold on the healthful benefits of nudism.
Occasionally one would have a novel twist. For instance, Hideout in the Sun had a gangster on the lam taking refuge in a nudist camp, where he met a beautiful nudist girl and we'll let you fill in the plot from there.
Nudity in these films was top-heavy in favor of the girls - after all, they were being made for the raincoat crowd. Still, they did have more male nudity than any other exploitation genre until the '70s. On the other hand, if the producers were the least bit afraid of possible trouble, the male nudity was the first to go. Some of the men in the "nudist" camps never even removed their bathing suits!
This flood of films in the mid '50s was the nudist camp's finest hour, for as nudity finally became more acceptable in the following few years the genre died out quickly and completely.
Most of the underground filmmakers were not in the least concerned with commerciality, let alone exploitation. However, by virtue of their obsession with sexual subject matter and their frequent use of full nudity for both its esthetic and its shock value, the underground films were highly exploitable properties, and they also frequently came under the close scrutiny of the various censorship boards.
The underground film movement, based as it was in the New York "bisexual chic" demi-monde, utilized male nudity almost as extensively as female. A film like Flaming Creatures, a particularly notorious underground film depicting the gay/transvestite lifestyle, came in for frequent censorship problems because of its combined nudity and eroticism. There was a time when virtually any attempt to screen Flaming Creatures would bring on a full-scale police raid (at a cost to the taxpayers of tens of thousands of dollars). Today the film looks almost tame beside commercial ventures that exploit transvestitism, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Priscilla Queen of the Desert or To Wong Foo.
The underground film movement did more than outrage the prudes. It provided the starting point for such directors as Curtis Harrington and John Cassavetes, and for actors like Telly Savalas and Delphine Seyrig. The biggest name that the general public still identifies with it, however, is that of Andy Warhol. Warhol's films developed through an early fascination with oddball people in oddball situations to a more commercial period in which his films (by then actually being made by his protégé, Paul Morrissey) met the Hollywood product almost halfway.
By far the most interesting figure to emerge from the Warhol "film factory" is Joe Dallesandro. A personable male prostitute from New York whose only claim to a film credit was an 8mm masturbation film he had once made, Dallesandro appeared (playing a New York hustler, appropriately enough) in several of Warhol's films and suddenly found himself a major celebrity.
Besides being both handsome and well-built, as his many full-nude scenes in the Warhol films showed to the world, Dallesandro had the stuff of which authentic movie stars are made - a magnetic personality that projected powerfully from the screen and enough interest in acting to at least make an energetic attempt at it. Unfortunately, because of his background, no one in Hollywood took him seriously. And so after his Warhol stint, Dallesandro had to look to European films such as Louis Malle's Black Moon for serious work. Recently an older and decidedly more corpulent Dallesandro has been turning up in American films and television in small roles.
The pace picked up in the fifties as movies became less a family activity and more a teenage pastime. Drive-in "passion pits" flourished and were widely patronized by dating teenage couples. Suddenly there came a succession of youthful "pretty boy" heroes, assembly-line manufactured to appeal to the adolescent girl. In their publicity pictures, actors like Tab Hunter, John Derek, Rod Lauren and others never seemed to miss an opportunity to show off in a bathing suit.
This eventually led, in the early '60s, to the "beach party" movie, featuring an attractive cast of young actors and actresses, all decked out in bathing suits and enacting an endless series of innocently risqué tableaux. The late '60s also saw a cycle of "cave man" films starting with One Million Years, B.C., in which a parade of attractive actors wore increasingly more revealing loincloths. But these movies were all promise and no deliver, and soon even the least jaded audiences were getting tired of the endless tease.
Tongue-in-cheek tease also prompted a humorous press release in connection with a small science fiction movie of 1964 entitled Robinson Crusoe on Mars. For some time press agents had been doing their patriotic duty alerting the public whenever a leading lady did a pseudo-nude scene by "leaking" details of how the set had had to be cleared of all unnecessary men when so-and-so filmed her "nude" bathtub scene. And so a clever press agent released the news that during the shooting of Robinson Crusoe, when star Paul Mantee had filmed a "nude" bathing scene, all unnecessary women had had to be cleared from the set - except for a female chimpanzee who was in the scene.
Whether Mantee was naked for the big moment is something only the chimp knows for sure. There was certainly nothing to be seen in the film itself. But at least someone in Hollywood seemed to think that maybe, just maybe, there might be an audience out there who would want to see the leading man take it off.
Such an audience had to wait until 1966, however. Almost predictably, the first onscreen nudity of any note in an American film since the silent days was in a clean and wholesome Biblical epic. Cecil B. deMille had long since demonstrated the viability of the high-toned Biblical epic as a vehicle for erotic subtext. This film was The Bible - In The Beginning, and the director was the respected veteran, John Huston. The original idea was to film the entire Bible, but as reality set in, the concept shrank to a retelling of the first few chapters of Genesis - including the story of Adam and Eve.
The character of Adam had been used in a number of previous films, usually wearing his famous fig leaf loincloth. Johnny Weissmuller's first film appearance, before Tarzan, was as Adam (in fig leaf) in a musical number in a film called Glorifying the American Girl. (He almost lost the role because he was contracted to the BVD swim suit company, who disapproved of his appearing anywhere without his BVDs!) Adam had also turned up in a number of comedy films. A picture called The Private Lives of Adam and Eve had cast the youthful Martin Milner in the role, and Jeffrey Hunter had sported a particularly large fig leaf loincloth in a fantasy scene in The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Ferrell, opposite no less a sex symbol than Phyllis Diller as Eve!
A more serious rendering of the character appeared in a Mexican release called Adam and Eve. This Adam was a Mexican muscleman called Carlos Baena, and although he played peekaboo through the bushes throughout most of the film, he could actually be glimpsed au naturel in extreme long shots.
More recently, another Mexican film called The Sins of Adam and Eve gave us a less frustrating look at a much sexier Adam, Jorge Rivero, a Mexican matinee idol and former titled bodybuilder who put his entire physique into the role. And there was an Australian fantasy called First Time Lucky, in which American actor Roger Wilson (of the first two Porky's films) baredhis all as Adam.
John Huston's Adam and Eve were played by newcomers to the screen, Michael Parks and a young Swedish actress named Ulla Bergryd. Both appeared in tasteful but uncompromised nude scenes in the film. But interestingly, it was Parks who received all of the publicity. A photo of the nude actor rising from the dust of creation was used extensively to publicize the film. It appeared on the posters, the print ads, the souvenir book, the soundtrack album, and even on a block-long billboard overlooking Times Square in New York! It was published in Life, and on the cover of Boxoffice. Never before or since has the image of a naked man been used so extensively to advertise anything.
The film was only a moderate success, but Michael Parks proved popular with the public. He was promptly dubbed "Hollywood's best undressed actor," and a feverish press release promised that in his next movie the actor would appear in the nude throughout the film. At the time the title was difficult to challenge and the promise impossible to keep, but clearly a fad was born.
The same year as The Bible, 1966, audiences got their first look at a familiar and established "name" actor in the buff. He was 14-year-old Jay North, formerly television's Dennis the Menace. The film was called Maya. In one scene the adolescent North is fished half-drowned from a river by an Indian boy. He is next seen completely naked, drying off by the fire. A joke is made about his bare bottom, which is shown uncamouflaged in several shots throughout the scene. The scene is humorous and innocent, but it would have been unheard of only a year or two earlier.
These films proved that it was possible to include nudity in a mainstream film without horrendous repercussions, and audience reaction suggested that there might be an untapped market for such things. And so, having tested the waters and found them inviting, Hollywood took the plunge.
As the chart [in the book] shows, the number of male movie nude scenes rose from a tiny handful, mostly in foreign imports, in 1966 when The Bible was released, to a peak of around a hundred scenes in 1971, just fiveyears later. This number of nude scenes was not again equaled for another decade and a half, in the late 1980s.
Naturally, there was a concurrent rise in the number of female nude scenes, but male nudity was every bit as prevalent as female - probably more so. Apparently the "double standard" was working in reverse for a change - since the male nude is not considered as "sexy" as the female nude, its use was less troublesome. When a scene logically called for an actor to disrobe, it was "no big deal," whereas asking an actress to undress was something to be approached more cautiously.
The nudity fad was fueled by the fact that during the late '60s and early '70s Hollywood was openly courting the youthful counterculture audience. Dissatisfaction with traditional values was at the boiling point, and rebellion was "in." One popular form of rebellion was public nudity, since it felt so pleasant anyway and it seemed to especially horrify the elders. At the legendary Woodstock Music Festival nudity was common, as it was in a number of other smaller hippie "happenings." In the early '70s one of the most popular campus fads was "streaking," in which students (primarily men) ran through public gatherings completely naked.
Onscreen, it seemed that no true film about "today's youth" was complete without a nude scene and actors like Peter Fonda and Christopher Jones, who were especially associated with the youth cult films, can be found in the Checklist with some frequency.
A favorite type of character in movies has been the amorous teenager who is continually frustrated in his attempts at sexual release. This character seems to lend himself admirably to the nudity-as-humiliation scene.
In The Wild McCullochs, the family's teenage son (Chip Hand) plots with three of his buddies to lure their girlfriends into a strip poker game in order to relieve the girls of their clothes. In the end, naturally, it is the four boys who wind up naked as the four fully-clothed girls laugh merrily at their embarrassment. Mischief featured Doug McKeon as a young would-be lothario who winds up dangling from the porch roof of his girlfriend's home with his pants around his ankles, and Some Girls gives us a stark naked Patrick Dempsey pursuing his girlfriend through the house and nearly running into a surprise birthday party.
Other typical embarrassment scenarios include Once Before I Die, in which Richard Jaeckle is observed bathing in a mountain stream by Ursula Andress (a reversal of a popular movie tradition); Born to Win, in which George Segal is stripped by gangsters; The Squeeze, in which it is Stacy Keach's turn to be stripped by gangsters; The Todd Killings, in which Billy Bowles is depantsed by several girls in a public swimming pool; The Mercenary, with Jack Palance denuded by the band of heroes; The Legend of Frenchie King, in which Brigitte Bardot forces the four comic villains to undress and dodge her bullets; Performance, with James Fox being whipped on the bare buttocks by gangsters; The Devil's Brigade, in which a number of German soldiers are captured while naked in the showers; and Terminal Island, with Clyde Ventura being subjected to an attack of stinging bees after a vengeful girl coats his buttocks and genitals with royal jelly, which attracts and excites the bees.
Jim Carrey has used humiliation as the motivation for several of his almost obligatory nude scenes, such as the one in Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls, in which his character emerges naked from a mechanical rhino in a parody of childbirth, to the horror of an onlooking family.
Humiliation is often used in more serious settings, also. Horror movies have been known to use scenes of nude humiliation to explain why nebbish characters so often turn into homicidal monsters - Marc Price is thrown naked into the gym during girls' basketball practice in Trick or Treat, and Simon Scuddamore is the object of a nude prank in Slaughter High, for instance. In the recent Disney release, Powder, school bullies are in for divine retribution after they forcibly strip Sean Patrick Flanery, an albino teen with superhuman powers.
Embarrassment is an acceptable technique for getting youngsters, particularly adolescents, undressed on screen. In Now and Then, for instance, the four teenage heroines encounter the boys who have been bullying them as the boys go skinnydipping in the lake. After getting a good look, the girls steal the boys' clothing and force them to race naked through the woods to retrieve their modesty. The classic French allegory, War of the Buttons, was recently remade in an Irish setting, retaining the well-known set piece of the boys stripping naked for battle to avoid having their buttons taken as spoils of war should they lose.
Cute and cuddly TV child star Fred Savage came of age in a made-for-TV movie called When You Remember Me, as a teenage MS patient who at once point is wheeled naked through the hospital corridors to the shower (although his nudity was more talked-about in pre-publicity than actually seen in the broadcast network program itself).
The list could go on and on. Suffice to say that comedy and humiliation are very much a part of male movie nudity, probably because they seem to neutralize the "dirtiness" of the nudity and justify its existence for something other than purely sexual reasons. It was a joke in burlesque that if a comic could get a laugh no other way, he was sure to bring down the house by dropping his pants. Today, actors often strip to the skin for the same purpose.
On the other hand, when the purpose of a scene is more frankly erotic, movies often return to the old double standard and concern themselves almost exclusively with exposing the girl. An example is The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, which publicized itself widely for its steamy love scenes between Sarah Miles and Kris Kristofferson. Throughout the several sequences, director Lewis John Carlino displayed an almost obsessive interest in Ms. Miles' breasts, but kept Kristofferson hidden except for a single brief glimpse of buttock lasting only a fraction of a second.
When Mulberry Bush was released in America, a press release announced that Evans' nude swimming scene with costar Judy Geeson had been shot expressly for American audiences and was not included in the British release. Director Clive Donner later admitted, however, that the scene was intended for all versions of the film, but had been excised by England's still fairly provincial censorship office.
In any case, nobody saw as much of Barry Evans as the advance publicity would have led them to believe. In both America and England, a publicity still was widely used which showed Evans standing nude in a bathtub looking embarrassed as his screen mother looked on. The scene had been deleted from all release versions of the film, even though it was freely used to promote the picture.
The following year Barry Evans added an interesting footnote to his work in the film. Mulberry Bush had been responsible for making him a star, and he was now featured in his own television series, Doctor at Large. In an interview in the Daily Express, one of England's largest newspapers, he was quoted as saying, "I don't want to get to the top by being fashionably dirty. ... If I was offered even the greatest part where I had to take my clothes off I'd turn it down!" An odd quote, coming only a year after Evans struck paydirt in a "fashionably dirty" film in which he had repeatedly taken his clothes off! And it was repudiated further after Doctor at Large ended its run and Evans returned to the big screen in a long series of other "fashionably dirty" films which almost inevitably called for him to take his clothes off over and over again.
A number of films, particularly big studio releases, have felt free to promise a lot more nudity than they delivered. The posters, newspaper ads and soundtrack album of The Grasshopper all featured a picture of Christopher Stone in the shower which was more revealing than either of the actor's two brief peekaboo nude scenes in the film itself. Also, posters for Fortune and Men's Eyes depict a nude scene involving Michael Greer that was deleted from the film, and publicity for Zachariah utilized a picture of a rock musician, clearly meant to be naked behind his guitar, who does not appear in the film. Recently, posters for the Pauly Shore/Steven Baldwin comedy Bio-Dome pictured both guys apparently nude behind large globes held in front of them. Indeed, Baldwin did have a "mooning" scene in which the camera lingered for some time on his beefy bottom pressed against a window, but Shore had no nudity at all in the film.
The producers of an Elliot Gould vehicle called I Will, I Will ... For Now got a lot of publicity mileage out of a search for the Hollywood actor and actress with the "most photogenic bottoms" in town to supposedly play the bride and groom in a nudist wedding scene in the movie. The only problem was that no such scene ever existed, and despite its almost obsessive "naughtiness," the finished film failed to deliver any nudity, even on the part of the often-exposed Gould!
Extensive pre-publicity emphasizing nudity was also given to the 1976 film, Embryo. It contained, so the publicists repeatedly announced, the first nude scene ever filmed by Rock Hudson, who was then enjoying a resurgence of popularity in his television series, MacMillan and Wife. Virtually every advance press release on the film mentioned the scene. One ecstatic story told of how Hudson was undergoing a vigorous workout schedule to get into shape for the big unveiling. Another reassured anxious fans that the scene was purely in the interest of art and not exploitation, as evidenced by the fact that Hudson's contract expressly forbade any publicity stills of the historic moment. In short, the Rock Hudson nude scene was the most widely pre-publicized male nude scene in the ten years since Michael Parks' exposure in The Bible.
Then came the film and countless patrons, lured in by the extensive publicity, were undoubtedly surprised to discover that the notorious nude scene lasted all of two or three seconds and showed Hudson as a dark, formless silhouette cloaked in pitch-black shadows!
This didn't sit well with some people. In many communities in the late '60s, state and local censorship of movies was an accepted way of life and the threat of national governmental control was becoming almost a certainty. Once more, as in the '20s, the industry decided to beat government to the punch by doing something about the situation themselves. This time, however, they decided that rather than try to control the content of the movies they would try to control the content of the audiences.
The result was the movie rating system, which went into effect in late 1968. The idea was that every film be given a rating symbol based upon the film's suitability for children. Thus parents have some supposedly objective standard by which to gauge the film's content and so its advisability for their children.
The original ratings were as follows: Grated films ("general") are suitable for all audiences, while M-rated ("mature") are comparatively wholesome but contain some elements that certain parents might find objectionable for their own children, and should be forewarned about. R-rated films ("Restricted") are only acceptable for young people (usually under 18) if they appear at the boxoffice with their parents in tow, and X-rated films are theoretically not to be shown to young people under any circumstances. The M rating caused considerable confusion among those parents who were looking for black-and-white answers to gray questions, and for clarification it was changed to a GP rating ("general, with parental guidance") which was later inverted to PG ("parental guidance"). This still didn't satisfy some, though, and so the newer PG-13 rating ("somewhat kind of okay maybe for older - but not that old - kids, but a definite no-no for anyone under 13") was added to clarify everything.
In theory, all this is an improvement over the old Hays office concept, since it allows the filmmaker to include whatever he cares to and only attempts to instruct potential audiences as to what the filmmaker cared to include; however, in actual practice it has trod a rocky road. Most of its troubles have sprung from the simple fact that it is an attempt to impose objective standards of measurement on what is basically a matter of taste.
The first impulse was to rate films stiffly, probably to stave off those who were still calling for a government censorship board. There are two or three films that lay claim to being the first X-rated movie, but it is safe to say that the first important one was Midnight Cowboy. Just how this film merited an X is and always was a mystery. There is little nudity in it - only an occasional fleeting glimpse of Jon Voight's backside or the breast of one of his several leading ladies. The story concerns the sexual affairs of the title character with partners both male and female, but they were all handled with a greater restraint than was exercised by some other films of the day.
Presumably the anonymous administrators of the ratings board thought they would make an example out of it because it was a much-anticipated major release from a "name" director, John Schlessinger. In any case the film was enormously successful, both critically and financially. It eventually won an Academy Award as best picture of the year, prevailing over such contenders as the John Wayne vehicle True Grit, to the astonishment of one and all.
It was obvious that Midnight Cowboy had been rated too stiffly (the rating was later quietly reduced to an R with no alteration to the film) and so for the next year or so the ratings board fumbled around trying to find its footing, not knowing exactly what criteria to use in its job. Each film came to be regarded on its own merits, or lack thereof, with less regard to precedent than to emotion. This did nothing but add to the confusion. Parents complained bitterly that the code was not working, and many of their complaints were justified, assuming a need for such a code in the first place.
Nudity was an area of particular concern to parents who seemed to feel that the sight of God's greatest creation undisguised is the most vile thing imaginable and would warp young minds. Yet, so long as it was not in an overtly sexual context, nudity by itself was generally passed with an M rating, with the result that many films that were supposedly rated for a general audience (which to many parents automatically means a children's audience) contained substantial amounts of bare skin.
Typical of the ratings problems in those days was an Alan Arkin vehicle called Popi. In synopsis form it was the wholesome and heartwarming story of a Puerto Rican father's attempts to better the lot of his two young sons, and it was given a G rating in keeping with that concept. However, the film contained frequent profanity. Entire scenes were built around the use by children of the words "whorehouse" and "son-of-a-bitch." Furthermore, both youngsters (Miguel Alejandro and Ruben Figueroa) had several full-nude scenes. It was all tastefully done and totally in keeping with the film's milieu, but it was also clearly out of keeping with the spirit of the G rating.
After several such misjudgments, the ratings system was pronounced a failure by its critics and the threat of outside censorship loomed larger than ever before.
This new chairman was Dr. Aaron Stern, a practicing psychiatrist. His plan was to map out clear, objective criteria for the rating of films and to stick to them through thick and thin. He decided to relegate all nudity automatically to the R category and to use the M (by now GP) category for films with mature subject matter, handled with sufficient visual restraint. The X category, he said, would be strictly for the unregenerate exploiters and the trash, determined for the most part by the display of frontal nudity.
To be sure, Dr. Stern's approach, accompanied by a major public relations effort, did virtually eliminate the countless local censorship groups that had flourished until then. However, ultimately it was just one more attempt to apply objective standards to a purely subjective matter and it, too, ran into problems.
Now most of the problems concerned the X rating. It was, according to Dr. Stern, allocated strictly for the trash, but the objective standard of frontal nudity to denote trash landed such prestigious pictures as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in the X grouping along with hardcore porn. Kubrick later made one or two minuscule and utterly unnoticeable trims from the film as nominal justification for an R instead of an X, and it was situations such as this that brought some of the most serious charges against the board from that time forward. Producers will be pressured into eliminating things from a film that should really be included, so the argument goes, in order to qualify for a better rating, which supposedly assures better boxoffice returns and which is usually demanded contractually by the studios. This comprises prior censorship and makes the ratings board in effect a censoring body.
For his part, Stern argued that it was entirely the producer's prerogative to add or delete anything he chose at any stage of production, and that the board did not demand cuts, they only suggested what should be done if a specific rating was desired. The final cut was up to the producer commensurate with what ever rating he or his studio were willing to accept for the film.
Both arguments have some merit. Quite a number of nude scenes planned and often even shot over the years have been scrapped, recut, or even re-photographed in order to improve the film's rating, to be sure. On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that the movies would have been able to include as much nudity as they have done were it not for the ratings system and its laying to rest of the local censorship boards.
Dr. Stern's criteria for the assignment of ratings was a valiant attempt, but it soon became obvious even to the ratings board that some relaxation of the arbitrary standards was necessary from time to time, particularly with regard to nudity.
The film most directly responsible for the new relaxation was Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a sumptuous retelling of the life of St. Francis of Assisi. One celebrated incident in the life of Francis is his disrobing in the town square and returning all his worldly possessions, including his clothes, to his father before going forth on his ministry to the world's impoverished in 1207 A.D.
Zeffirelli, already known for his staging of Leonard Whiting's beautifully photographed nude scene in
Romeo and Juliet
, approached this new sequence without compromise, and it contained several shots of the bare backside of handsome Graham Faulkner, who played Francis. So tasteful was the scene, however, and so reverent the subject matter that the ratings board let it slip by with a PG rating contrary to their own supposedly hard-and-fast rule on nudity. One reviewer commented that given the context of the film, even that restrictive a rating was positively blasphemous.(It is interesting to note that a reissue of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet at about the same time, with Leonard Whiting's equally innocent nude scene intact, was re-rated PG also. That film had originally been given an even more lenient G rating on its initial release withing raising an eyebrow.)
Among the more publicized battles was one waged in a Federal Court in Tennessee in which several distributors of the film Deep Throat, together with its male star, Harry Reems, were tried under Federal conspiracy laws. Many charges of obscenity had been brought against the highly publicized and extremely popular explicit sex film in the several years since its production. While almost all had failed, the film had been found obscene in a few sporadic communities. The Federal conspiracy charge was brought on the theory that since the film had been found obscene in some communities, everyone who had ever been involved in the production, distribution or exhibition of the film in any community could be held retroactively liable for his part in the crime-to-be.
Had the Deep Throat case been successful, it would have been entirely possible for every actor, technician, studio executive, distributor, theater owner, projectionist, usher and cashier who ever came in contact with Carnal Knowledge, Paper Moon or Bad News Bears to be tried and convicted on Federal conspiracy charges, even though they could have had no conceivable hint that someone somewhere someday would take sufficient offense at those innocuous films to adjudge them obscene.
Eventually, however, after much legal wrangling on both sides, charges in the Deep Throat case were dropped, and no official evaluation of the case's convoluted logic was forthcoming.
Once again the crux of the controversy was the X rating.
The very letter "X" was loaded down with connotations in a way that none of the other ratings were - "X" carries with it images of poison, evil, the unknown, the illiterate. Why would any serious filmmaker want his film branded with an "X"? Also, like the earlier phrase "art film," the X rating was taken over proudly by the hardcore porno industry. The term "X-rated movie" became synonymous with "hardcore sex movie." Virtually every Hollywood studio contract specifically forbade producers and directors from delivering a finished film with an X rating. Many newspapers would not advertise any X-rated film, no matter how noble and non-pornographic its content. Numerous theater chains would not run them.
The X rating provided the ratings board with its only true censorship tool. For the ratings board to impose an X rating on a film was for them to insure that the film would not survive commercially. The only alternative for the filmmaker was to accede to the implicit demand that the film be altered to the specifications of the board in order to assure leniency in re-rating.
In 1990 the ratings board wielded the power of the X as never before. In the first six months of the year, eight films were rated X, many more than in any full year in recent history. Seen objectively, it was hard to understand how any of these films could be considered an "X-rated movie." They were all sexual in theme (except for one film X-rated for violence) but none of them were any more explicit than scores of films routinely granted R ratings.
The controversy did have the side effect of drawing attention to a Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar, whose several films have explored the relationship between sex and violence. Almodóvar's film, Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, went to court to fight its X rating. Although it was not successful in getting the rating overturned, there immediately came a flood of video releases of Almodóvar's older films, most of which had been considered too esoteric to be released on video previously.
There was a great deal of negative reaction from the production community over the new activism of the board. Many respected producers and directors suggested the need for another new "in-between" rating, not unlike the PG-13. This would be an "A" rating for "Adult" but non-pornographic entertainment. However longtime MPAA president Jack Valenti was adamant - some said fanatic - about preserving the ratings lineup as it stood. He alluded to the top-secret results of an MPAA poll which purportedly showed parents satisfied with the ratings system as an aid in choosing films for their children. Valenti ignored all suggestions that such a poll was skewed because respondents were parents who were concerned only with the "G/PG" end of the scale and cared nothing about the "R/X/A" controversy in the first place.
In the face of Valenti's stubborn refusal to recognize the existence of non-pornographic adult movies, a number of industry people began to lobby in earnest for the scrapping of the entire ratings system. There were also threats of further court contests from filmmakers whose quality adult entertainment was being branded with the "X" label.
Eventually, the MPAA gave in and acted. Late in 1991 the X rating was scrapped entirely and replaced with a new rating - NC-17. This was not at all what the industry had been pleading for. There was still only a single rating into which all serious adult movies and all hardcore pornography were jumbled up together like a tossed salad. True, it no longer carried the onus of the connotations as sociated with the symbol "X", but most commercial barriers to the old X rating still apply to the new NC-17, and it is still being used to force modifications to films that only a couple of years earlier would probably have been routinely granted an "R".
The majority of films having been given the NC-17 rating have been video reissues of hardcore movies, although the porn industry generally prefers the connotations of the old "X" rating, and continues to use it for themselves.
The NC-17 has also been used a number of times to force producers of sexy but perfectly serious movies to make alterations, just as the old "X" was often used. There also seems to be an almost choreographed effort on the part of many, even within the film industry, to characterize NC-17 films as not worthy of serious consideration. Almost as soon as the big-budget film Showgirls, with its big-name staff and high-quality production values, announced that it would be released with an NC-17 rating, it became the target of incessant sniping, much of it based on nothing more than the rating, designed to convince the public that it was an utterly worthless bomb. The finished film was perfectly good on its own terms, but it didn't stand a chance against the propaganda campaign its rating had brought on.
Among the earliest frontal nude scenes was Haskell Wexler's film Medium Cool, in which Robert Forster was seen capering with girlfriend Marianne Hartley in an uninhibited bedroom romp. It was played in very dim light and photographed through distorting wide-angle lenses, but it left no doubt that Forster was not a eunuch. (Forster was no stranger to onscreen nudity, having had much rear exposure a couple of years earlier in Reflections in a Golden Eye.)
Meanwhile, in England, Lindsey Anderson's film If... was making waves with its frontal nudity. The showerroom scene, in which Malcolm McDowell and his friends were made to stand under a cold shower as punishment, had been filmed in two versions. In one, the dozen or more boys in the room wore towels and those who did not tried to keep their backs to the camera. In the other, they disposed of the towels and made no attempt at all to hide themselves from the camera - frontal nudity was obvious. The more cautious version was used in some areas, including the United States, the freer one in others, and in still other areas the scene was necessarily deleted altogether.
At about the same time, Alan Bates and Oliver Reed gained notoriety for a sequence in Ken Russell's Women in Love. Both actors had frontal nudity in the scene, in which the characters sublimated their sexual attraction to each other by engaging in a nude wrestling match. Photographed in long shots and flickering half-light, the film actually contained a good deal less explicit frontal nudity than it seemed to, but it made a considerable impression on audiences.
In America in 1970, Michael Margotta, a dependable second lead in many youth pictures of the '60s, gave the screen its first really unflinching look at the male sex organ in director Jack Nicholson's film, Drive, He Said. Margotta, playing a campus rebel, suffers a nervous breakdown, strips, races naked across campus, and is finally captured in a biology laboratory where he has been freeing the snakes and spiders. Frequently during the five-minute nude scene he is shown from the front, undisguised.
Probably the most influential frontal nude scene, however, was in Buster and Billie, starring Jan-Michael Vincent as a "good ole boy" discovering his more sensitive side. Vincent was aware of criticism by women's groups about men having little or no frontal nudity while women tended to have to do much more, and he himself suggested that nothing should remain hidden during his skinnydipping scene with costar Joan Goodfellow. And so nothing was. Vincent seemed only dimly aware of his status at the time as the screen's preeminent male sex symbol, and he was truly surprised at the attention the scene drew. When Playboy reproduced the scene in their "Sex in the Cinema" series the magazine sold thousands of extra copies, and grainy black and white blowups of the scene earned huge sums of money for black market entrepreneurs.
Frontal nudity was "legitimized" by the willingness of an actor of the stature of Jan-Michael Vincent to do it, but there was never a mad rush toward it as there had been to do rear nudity after The Bible and the few other pioneer films. Perry King took the plunge in Mandingo, and Don Johnson in The Harrad Experiment, Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now, Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and Peter Firth in Equus. It is still used occasionally, as in the clear and obviously intentional frontal exposure of Eric Stoltz in Haunted Summer, Patrick Dempsey in Some Girls, and Viggo Mortensen in The Indian Runner. But caution still often prevails. Jeff Bridges' frontal shot from Hearts of the West was relegated to the cutting room floor by a cautious distributor, as was Robert Romanus' explicit exposure in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
In Europe there has perhaps been more frontal exposure. Rutger Hauer can been seen frontally nude in several scenes from Turkish Delight and other films. Helmut Berger has a lengthy full-frontal scene in Madame Kitty, and briefer ones in other films. Even international sex symbol Alain Delon showed no reluctance to "let it all hang out" in Shock Treatment.
A few actors have become known for allowing frontal exposure in their films - Harvey Keitel, for instance, or Eric Stoltz. The film Color of Night became something of a cause célèbre when frontal nudity of Bruce Willis was almost all removed to avoid an NC-17 rating. And in Europe, stars like Gerard Depardieu and Rutger Hauer did so many frontal nude scenes in their earlier careers that it became almost a trademark for them. Depardieu's film The Last Woman, in fact, may have set a record for the greatest amount of on-screen nudity by an actor. The star, at his portliest, probably spent half or more of the movie on-screen nude, including a significant amount of full-frontal exposure.
Still, far more actors are willing to allow themselves to be seen from behind than from the front. And given the concerns of the distributors and the vehemence of the censors, it will probably always be so.
The nudity in Hair was actually quite tame, although feverish reports both praising and condemning it managed to blow its reputation far out of proportion to its reality. At the climax of the first act most of the cast emerged nude from beneath a huge dropcloth. No one on stage moved during the scene, since at least one court had decided that a nude figure could only be obscene if it was moving. The whole scene was played in dim light and lasted only a few seconds, but the notoriety it achieved caused Hair to become one of Broadway's all-time successes. Immediately the race was on to get the clothes off Broadway's actors and actresses.
By 1969, Hair was not only still going strong in New York, but it had been joined by Oh, Calcutta!, Geese, Che, Dionysus in 69, Fortune and Men's Eyes, And Puppy Dogs' Tails, and several other productions. Stage nudity was quickly joining screen nudity as a common and expected element in many shows.
Several of the first shows to include nudity were actually reworked versions of more inhibited scripts. Even the famous nude scene in Hair was added for Broadway after the show was first performed without it in a small off-Broadway theater. Likewise, Geese, the blanket title for a pair of innocuous one-act comedies, was spiced up with both male and female nudity after initially failing without it. The traditional nude scene in the staging of the rock opera Tommy was the result of a dress rehearsal prank in which a playful costumier stranded star Teddy Neeley backstage naked during a quick change and he called her bluff by playing the next scene without his costume.
In 1970, nudity was also injected into an off-Broadway revival of Dark of the Moon, the folk-tale play about a witchboy's love for a mortal, featured handsome Chandler Hill as the witchboy, in a nude scene together with several female witches.
At about the same time, at San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater, Scott Hylands had the dubious distinction of becoming probably the first actor ever arrested for nudity in a legitimate stage production when he accepted a backstage dare to appear in the title role of Albee's The American Dream without the skintight trousers that were his official costume.
Things had changed a good deal five or six years later when Tim Matheson stepped nude onto the stage of San Diego's prestigious Old Globe Theater in a reworked scene from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II, James Farentino played a new nude scene in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and Ed Harris was seen emerging from the shower naked as the doomed gigolo in a Los Angeles production of Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. None of these rewrites caused any appreciable discussion or dissension.
In 1968, shortly after things first began to open up on Broadway, Los Angeles theatergoers were given their first look at a naked man in the flesh in a production of Fortune and Men's Eyes staged by the late Sal Mineo, who also played the role of a homosexual hustler in the play. A brutal prison rape scene took place offstage in the original script. Mineo reasoned that this limited its impact, and so he brought it out onto the stage, showing the naive young convict roughly stripped and forced to submit to anal intercourse. As the young convict, Mineo cast a youthful newcomer, Don Johnson. As word spread, particularly among the huge gay audience, of Johnson's boyish charm, beauty, and nudity, the play quickly became a huge success, and it catapulted Johnson on a career that is still going strong today, over a quarter of a century later.
Probably the single most notorious use of stage nudity is in the musical review, Oh, Calcutta!, a collection of skits, songs and blackouts, many with nudity and all with sexual subject matter. Oh, Calcutta! came in for more than its share of hard knocks, being banned in many cities and closed after only one performance by Los Angeles vice police. But in its wake came several other nude reviews such as The Dirtiest Show in Town, Let My People Come, and What Do You Say To A Naked Waiter? Some of them were better than Oh, Calcutta! and some worse, but certainly none more famous.
The first play to be prosecuted in New York on sexual grounds (consensual sodomy, public lewdness and obscenity) was also the first to make a serious effort to utilize nudity and sexual metaphor for a political purpose. It was called Che, and as described by Time, it was "a kind of genital love-hate profile of United States relations with revolutionary regimes." Perhaps the play's downfall was the widely circulated rumor that the actors engaged in actual sexual intercourse during the show. Although the stories were not true, the play was prosecuted on those grounds and shut down by police.
In later seasons, nudity was also put to serious dramatic use in such shows as The Changing Room, a slice-of-life drama taking place in a men's locker room, and Equus, the award-winning drama about a young stablehand's religious and sexual fantasies. Equus has actually become a staple for regional, community and college theater groups, and many a hopeful young actor has received his first taste of theatrical nudity in the play's lengthy climatic nude scene.
Stage nudity, however, never became as commonplace as movie nudity, even at its peak. Psychologically, seeing a real actor really naked on a stage just a few feet away tends to make the average viewer slightly uneasy, whereas a photographed image of that same naked actor twenty times life size on a movie screen can be enjoyed in comfort. The mechanics of the motion picture medium lend distance and fantasy. The stage shows that were able to utilize nudity most successfully were either the self-consciously naughty, "you show me yours and I'll show you mine" shows like Oh, Calcutta! or plays like Fortune and Men's Eyes or Equus in which the nudity was meant to express humiliation, and thus exploited any uneasiness the audience might have felt for the naked actor.
As the fad passed, on-stage nudity all but disappeared. Probably the only play designed for nudity that still gets much use is Equus - TV star Jack Noseworthy stepped out of his clothes for a recent revival in Hollywood, and the play still routinely gives collegiate drama students a "little peek" at one of their number in school productions. However, most recent productions of Fortune and Men's Eyes have moved the rape scene back off-stage, where it was originally written to take place. One of the few plays designed to incorporate nudity lately is called Party. It utilizes a Boys in the Band type storyline in which a gay party turns serious as the party-goers engage in a "truth or dare" game which ultimately finds them all dared to strip nude. The play recently entertained audiences in major New York and Los Angeles productions.
The accompanying articles repeatedly referred to After Dark as "a gay magazine," suggested that the actors were tricked into appearing in such perverted surroundings, and detailed the "shame" and "horror" of the actors at discovering that they were to become (GASP!) gay pinups!
What was this vile and degenerate "gay" magazine that lured poor, innocent, starving actors into becoming the unwilling objects of desire for legions of slavering faggots?
In reality, After Dark could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a "gay magazine" at all. It was a respected arts-and-entertainment magazine which began publishing in May 1968, and was designed to appeal to the ultrachic urban reader interested in theater and the arts. This market was predominately gay, to be sure, but After Dark addressed only legitimate arts and entertainment subjects. It never featured overt sexuality, nor tried to limit its audience to gay men.
From the very first issue, it reported on any and all instances of nudity in the arts, and its pages were filled with classy and tasteful nude studies of New York actors, dancers, models and artists - those "shocking pictures" that the tabloids have found so horrifying. After Dark featured nudes of men and women both, although there was a greater emphasis on the men.
After Dark's chief photographer was Kenn Duncan, a New York fashion and ballet photographer who specialized in cool and classically-inspired studio nudes. Soon the "Kenn Duncan style" of artistic nudity became so fashionable that an official of Actors Equity Association reported that many young actors were having such nudes done of themselves for their portfolios.
After Dark's concentration on artistic nudity quickly triggered an interesting phenomenon. Many theatrical and movie producers - and individual actors as well - wished to get into the magazine because of its taste and quality, and precisely because it was not a "gay magazine." Even shows that contained no nudity at all set up photos of their more attractive actors in the buff specifically for After Dark. Actor Harvey Evans, for instance, once graced the cover naked but for a discreetly placed sailor's cap to advertise the wholesome and fully attired thirties-style musical, Dames at Sea, in which he was starring. Later the entire male chorus of another nostalgic musical revival, Good News, posed virtually nude for an After Dark cover. In Los Angeles, actor Richard Hatch stripped down for publicity pictures from a play called The Woyzeck Follies, although he remained fully dressed in the play itself.
This concentration on nudity in After Dark made the amount of actual nude entertainment in New York seem far greater than it really was, and thus helped to encourage its spread to other areas. After Dark was probably more responsible than any other single influence for the proliferation of nude entertainment in the '70s. It was also undoubtedly a major inspiration for the subsequent women's magazines like Foxylady, Viva, and of course the grand-mommy of them all, Playgirl.
After a decade of successfully reporting on the New York theatrical scene, After Dark went through a series of disastrous overhauls. At first a new editor eliminated the nudity entirely, disdainfully calling it "pornography." Sales plummeted. Then the skin returned, but no longer in the classy Kenn Duncan style. The new chief photographer was Michael Rock, whose Rockshots Studio had set the style for kitschy greeting card sexiness in the '70s. Rock's work was excellent for what it tried to be, but for the first time in its history, After Dark really did look like a "gay magazine." Mercifully, it folded soon after.
Most heterosexual publishers couldn't quite comprehend that there might also be a larger, heterosexual female, audience for male nudes as well. Indeed, in the early '70s it was widely believed that women simply had no interest in men as sex objects - only as status symbols. One publisher who did feel that there was some interest among female readers in male nudes was Helen Gurley Brown, whose magazine, Cosmopolitan was geared toward the upscale, "liberated" woman of the day. And so she talked to Burt Reynolds.
Reynolds was what movie industry insiders call a "semi-star." He had appeared in a couple of TV roles and numerous very forgettable "B" movies, but his career was stuck in neutral. He was liked by his peers and kind-of-known by moviegoers, but no one would ever predict anything much more from him than he had already achieved. Then, in association with Helen Gurley Brown, he pulled off one of the most famous and most successful publicity stunts of all time.
Burt Reynolds, announced Cosmopolitan, would become the first male nude centerfold in history. It's possible to quibble with the claim, but not with the reaction. When Reynold's centerfold appeared on the stands, the magazine sold out almost instantly, and overnight became a collector's classic. Never mind that the pose was entirely tongue-in-cheek, and that Reynolds' crotch was well and modestly covered. It was a male centerfold, and see him or not, he was clearly naked!
The fans spoke with their dollars, and the producers listened. Reynolds' stock as an actor skyrocketed, and soon he was among the highest paid stars in Hollywood. And the concept of the male centerfold was legitimized.
Almost immediately a seemingly endless string of male nude calendars, male nude magazines, male nude posters, male nude drinking glasses, and male nude anything-that-would-hold-a-picture items began appearing, all self-consciously aimed at a women's audience - none of that sissy stuff here, thank you very much!
The problem remained that many of the very heterosexual male entrepreneurs who were putting this stuff out still didn't have a clue what could conceivably interest women about a naked man. Women were only interested in men for two things - money and security. There was nothing sexy about a naked man. He's all hair and muscles. Rather comical looking, maybe, but not sexy. No, it was power that women admired in men. And so many of the first male nude calendars featured surprisingly dumpy, middle-aged business executive types who really had no business taking off their clothes for the camera.
In the midst of all this male flesh, publishing history was made in Indianapolis, Indiana, when an enterprising publisher began to put out a magazine called Playgirl. The magazine featured articles of interest to women, and a few male nude photos as well. One early centerfold featured the country music stars, the Hager Twins, wearing only their grins (but hiding behind very large guitars).
Unfortunately, the magazine was published on a dwindling shoestring of a budget, and soon folded. However, the concept and the name were snatched up by a much larger and more secure publisher in California, and soon Playgirl rose, phoenix-like from her own ashes, into a magazine phenomenon. According to the publishers, the magazine's first few months showed a faster rise in circulation than any other magazine ever published.
For a time, Playgirl went after star power for their centerfold nudes, and actors like Lyle Waggoner, Gary Conway, Don Stroud and Fabian were among those to bare it all for the magazine. A couple of them, notably Stroud, even allowed frontal exposure, but many actors were having second thoughts about what a Playgirl appearance might do to their careers. Although most actors could easily justify doing a nude scene in the context of a movie, many had a harder time convincing themselves that appearing in the buff in a magazine centerfold was important to them. Soon the supply of "name" actors willing to bare their all for Playgirl began to dwindle.
However, their place was quickly taken by a legion of struggling unknown actors, as well as other professional and amateur models. A couple of Playgirl models went on to bigger success after their layouts, which the editors were quick to capitalize on with "retrospective" reprints. Sam Jones starred as Flash Gordon in an expensive sci-fi failure, but has enjoyed a semi-successful acting career since. He can always count on his early Playgirl photos resurfacing from time to time. And former child actor Steve Bond entertained Playgirl readers with a set of candid full-frontal pictures before resurfacing on TV's General Hospital and a series of movie roles.
Naturally, the success of Playgirl spawned a number of imitators, such as Foxylady and California Girl. The only one which showed any real promise was Viva, published by Penthouse Publications, rival to Playboy in the girlie business. But the notoriously heterosexual bunch at Penthouse were clearly not terribly interested in their pseudo-feminist stepchild. Many of the layouts were rejects from Penthouse itself, and while the male models were often strikingly attractive, the emphasis was always on the accompanying female nudes - in an eight or ten page photo spread, the man might only be nude in one or two shots, while the girl was nude throughout.
About the only magazine that did not jump on the bandwagon launched by Cosmopolitan was Cosmopolitan itself. Long after the furor had peaked, the magazine printed a few more nudes - John Davidson, Jim Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and David Hasselhoff - all self-consciously parodying the original Burt Reynolds picture, and none even attempting to project eroticism or humor, either.
Playgirl has survived now for well over two decades, and although rivals come and go, it seems to have cornered the market in male nude centerfolds for audiences other than the purely and openly gay trade. Once or twice, the magazine has consciously attempted to attain wider distribution by toning down and covering up their nudes, but plunging interest from readers has always gotten the guys stripped clear to the skin and facing full-front to the cameras once again.
A couple of magazines have even tried doing nude-as-art photo layouts similar to the old After Dark. Rolling Stone can be counted on to feature a rock group in the raw on their cover from time to time - John Lennon, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blind Melon and actor Jim Carrey are some stars who have graced the cover of Rolling Stone sans clothing (or in Carrey's case, in a parody of the famous Coppertone ad of the girl whose bathing suit is being pulled down by her puppy). The arts-and-entertainment magazine Detour occasionally features nude layouts of young stars like Brandon Fraser, Keanu Reeves, or Stephen Dorff, although the magazine's emphasis on ultra-chic grunge has them often placing their nudes in decadent and unattractive settings. And for the snob in search of nude art, Provocateur is a high-gloss, high-ticket-price magazine filled with male nudes and attitude.
Rock musicians, on the other hand, frequently use nudity - in their acts or in their semi-private lives - to demonstrate their rebellion. Billy Idol, for instance, is famous for appearing in the nude to fans after his concerts.
Then there are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who in their early career often played encores at punk rock clubs wearing only gravity-defying stockings to cover their so-called "privates." Like Burt Reynold's Cosmo centerfold, the gimmick bought the group more attention than any amount of less daring publicity could have achieved. They were able to ride it to rock superstardom. In the summer of 1992 they appeared nude once more—on the coveted cover of Rolling Stone.
Nudity, or at least the promise of it, was also used by Marky Mark, a husky adolescent white rap star whose trademark was his underwear - he often appeared in underwear in publicity photos and frequently stripped to his jockey shorts (or, more accurately, his Calvin Kleins) in concert. In one concert, televised on Pay-per-View, Marky's brother, Donnie Wahlberg (of New Kids on the Block fame), gave his little brother's shorts a tug to briefly reveal a bit of cleavage and one shapely cheek. Although Marky appeared to be anticipating having his shorts hauled clear to the floor in that incident, his big brother apparently got cold feet and viewers were denied anything more than a very little peek. To our knowledge, Marky's famous shorts have always remained in place, publicly.
Not so with the tight trousers of Axl Rose, lead singer of Guns and Roses, whose public persona is that of a hate-mongering rebel redneck who despises "bitches" and "faggots" equally. Rose often expresses his disdain in the classic way - mooning his audience during concerts. In fact, a good many rockers have become known for mooning - some, like Rose, to express contempt, others to express sexual playfulness. In either case, today's rock fans are getting a good look at a lot of bare male bottoms, and we don't hear too many complaints about it!
Although MTV is fairly conservative on the subject of nudity in their video clips, at least two of their popular male personalities have nudity in their backgrounds. Eric Neis, a hunky young athlete featured in Real World, can be seen in full-frontal nude photos in a book by famed photographer Bruce Weber, and Simon Rex, another MTV spokesman, has actually worked his way up through the ranks of pornography - his old masturbation videos are currently enjoying a revival riding on the coattails of his television success.
One of the first celebrities to be transformed at the hands of a computer artist was Marky Mark, the rap star turned actor who was famous for appearing in his underwear at concerts and other public events. Some clever artist scanned a picture of Mark from an old issue of People magazine, in which he was shirtless but wearing blue jeans. Using common computer technology, he covered over the jeans, drew in a bare abdomen, and added a raging erect cock standing up at attention. The forged picture was then distributed by way of the Internet, where it was passed off as a genuine photograph of Mark, supposedly taken during a routine modeling session. It caused a sensation and was obtained by tens of thousands of eager Internetters, many of whom will swear to this day that the photograph is authentic.
Some of the more sophisticated computerists caught on, however, and soon a race was on to produce similar "nude" celebrity photos of just about every attractive young actor (and actress, of course) in movies. There are literally scores of different composite pictures of Marky Mark, probably because there are so many real pictures of him available wearing little to begin with which can be used as the basis of the phony pictures. But there are also poses floating around of "Tom Cruise," "Keanu Reeves," "Kevin Bacon," "Kurt Russell," and countless other celebrities. Almost without exception, the distributors swear passionately that the composites are entirely genuine. Those without the skill or patience to get in on the compositing still play the game by distributing pictures from porno movies of models who look vaguely like some celebrity, and claiming that the picture is actually of the celebrity himself.
What is most surprising is not that there is so much photographic fakery going on in the Internet, but that so many supposedly knowledgeable computer users honestly believe these frauds to be authentic. There seems to be an absolutely unshakable belief among many otherwise intelligent people that many, if not all, attractive actors are veterans of numerous early porno movies which are just lying around waiting to be rediscovered, and that almost any major star will strip to the skin during any professional photo session, pump up an erection, and pose for the same kind of pictures you can find in the latest issue of Studs.
One of the most widely known scandals of recent vintage was the notorious Rob Lowe tape. In Atlanta, Georgia in 1989, an enterprising teenage girl whom actor Rob Lowe picked up in a bar undertook an abortive blackmail scheme by stealing a home video tape from Lowe on which he had photographed himself and a pal having sex with a young woman in a hotel room in Paris a few weeks earlier. When the thief failed to extort money from Lowe for the tape, her m other took over and tried to get the money through legal channels by suing him for corrupting her innocent little Girl Scout. Meanwhile, inferior umpteenth-generation copies of the tape were immediately commanding prices of up to $2,000 on the underground market. Heavily censored portions of the tape were played over and over again on Entertainment Tonight and numerous other television news programs. Uncensored versions were circulated far and wide. Ultimately, some version of Lowe's private home movies may well have been seen by more people than have seen his commercial films!
The tabloid newspapers, particularly in Europe, have been known to turn their photographers into peeping toms in their effort to respond to the public's "need to know" about nude celebrities. In a famous instance recently a photographer was able to capture a number of pictures of film star Brad Pitt and his girlfriend, Gwyneth Paltrow, playing in the nude on a private patio during a vacation. The pictures, which included several clear full-frontal views of the sexy Pitt, caused an international sensation and created a stampede among collectors for the several European magazines in which they were eventually published. Similarly, photos of Richard Gere on a European nude beach saw wide distribution. Even an extremely corpulent Marlon Brando and an indiscreet Prince Charles have been the victims of photographers peeping through their windows.
Interest in Rob Lowe's sexual indiscretions and Brad Pitt's vacation fun is merely symptomatic of a general interest in seeing "beautiful people" nude, an interest which has turned a fad of the '60s into a staple element in movies ever since. The commercial motion picture has discovered, used, exploited, and ultimately assimilated the nude figure. After the first mad rush to cash in on the novelty of nudity in the movies, we have gone through periods in which its use has waxed and waned. Contrary to the predictions of some, however, interest in movie nudity has shown no signs of dying out. Indeed, we have documented more male nude scenes in movies of the past five or six years than at any time in history. Its use continues, in some films tastefully for legitimate effect, and in other films purely to exploit the desire to see attractive young people in the altogether. In their own ways, each use is legitimate, despite the natural concerns of some actors about the quality of the material with which they associate themselves.
It's difficult today to remember that just a generation ago the possibility of seeing a movie star like Richard Gere or Mel Gibson in the buff was virtually nonexistent. Indeed, many women - and even a number of men - had never seen any naked man, other than a husband or brother. The movies have filled an obvious need on the part of many and satisfied a great curiosity. Like any freedom, the freedom to depict nudity is used to numerous and sometimes conflicting ends. But together with the excesses - which can themselves be entertaining - has come a greater freedom of expression which has brought us some exciting and stimulating entertainment.
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