Four Things I Found in an Adult Filmmaker’s Storage Unit
(#4 Left Me Shook)
Rob King
Radley Metzger wasn’t just any adult filmmaker. His career blurred the lines between European art cinema and American exploitation, softcore erotica and hardcore pornography, good taste and bad. Researching Metzger for my book Man of Taste, I found myself crossing somewhat different boundaries, from archives and finding aids to the clutter of an abandoned storage unit, from researching the past to inheriting it.
The time: the fall of 2020 (the start of the first lockdown-era “Zoom semester” at Columbia University, where I teach). The place: my apartment (naturally). The cause: eBay. I was mindlessly browsing the site when I noticed a number of Metzger’s personal effects for sale. Metzger had died in 2017, and it seemed his New Jersey storage space had just been auctioned off, its contents now listed online at $10 per item.
Reader, I bought it all.
I then contacted the seller to see if there was anything left. For a flat fee of $300, he agreed to send me a box of the remaining odds and ends. Several deliveries later, I found myself the custodian of my own modest “Radley Metzger Collection”—a random assemblage of low-level ephemera from his films, a handful of photos and framed pictures (including posters from his movies), and dozens upon dozens of videotapes and MiniDV tapes onto which Metzger had transferred his films (as well as outtakes, alternate scenes, home movies, and behind-the-scenes footage).
For now, these items are contained in two hefty boxes at the top of my bedroom closet – although I plan to donate them to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, which, fortuitously, was also Metzger’s alma mater.
Until then, here’s a teaser in listicle form:
1. Tortura (audiotape): We’ll start with the basics. Any adult filmmaker worth their salt is going to need a quite specific array of sound effects for postproduction, and I’m guessing this sixty-minute tape might have served that purpose for Metzger. Its entire running time consists of nothing but the sound of a whip cracking, each time followed by a human groan. Sometimes the groan is a man’s, sometimes a woman’s. Sometimes the groan seems genuinely pained, sometimes you can all but hear the stifled laughter.
As to why the tape has the Italian title “tortura” (as opposed to just the English “torture”), who knows? Two of Metzger’s most lavishly produced softcore films were shot in Italy—Camille 2000 (1969) and The Lickerish Quartet (1970)—so he might have felt that everything sounds more artistic à l’italienne.
2. Photos of dogs: Metzger was the owner of a beautiful Afghan hound, Lady Sultana, shown here on the left in a contact sheet of photos taken at the dog groomer’s. But Lady Sultana also pops up in Metzger’s filmography in a couple of surprising ways. “L. Sultana” is credited as a producer of the five hardcore films he released between 1974 and 1978, one of the welter of pseudonyms Metzger adopted for his hardcore work (the most famous being “Henry Paris,” the name he directed under). Lady Sultana also has a cameo in his 1976 S&M film The Image, in which she appears as the pet of an icy dominatrix. The scenes in which Lady Sultana appears, incidentally, were filmed at the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse, which is the setting for the film’s bondage sequences among other things.
Metzger’s film-producing dog.
Lady credited in Barbara Broadcast (1977).
It’s worth adding that Metzger’s dog was also the punchline of one of Metzger’s favorite quips about his career. He would explain how he’d often been asked if he ever slept with any of his performers, which he would deny . . . but then single out Lady Sultana as the exception. (A nice anecdote, to be sure, but one that comes at the cost of the truth. One of the stars of The Image, Mary Mendum, was his girlfriend at the time of filming.)
3. A pair of framed erotic drawings: Hanging on my office wall are two framed pieces of erotica, originally listed as “vintage French erotic drawing prints,” from the Metzger storage unit. I have no idea of their provenance. Each has a number (seven and eleven), which implies that they are part of a series. They remain a total mystery to me.
Two framed erotic artworks from Metzger’s storage unit.
One of which is visible (circled) on the wall in The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974).
Or, at least, a near total mystery. About a year after I acquired them, I spotted one of the drawings in the background of a scene in The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974), his first “Henry Paris” film. It turns out the scene in question was filmed in Metzger’s own apartment. Like some time-binding umbilical cord, then, those pictures now link my home office to Metzger’s apartment, via the intermediary of a fictive scene in a film that Al Goldstein at Screw magazine selected as the best porn movie of 1974.
4. The Sins of Ilsa (VHS tape): This one is the treasure of the bunch. It’s a videotape of Metzger’s last, lost feature, here titled Sins of Ilsa, which was given a brief, perfunctory release on cable television in March 1987 under the title Love Standing Up before seeming to disappear forever. The below image – photographed on my kitchen table – shows one of perhaps only two or three remaining copies of Metzger’s adult-film swansong.
One of the only surviving copies of The Sins of Ilsa/Love Standing Up (1987).
Why is this the entry that “left me shook”? In great part because of its rarity. But also because of the content of the film itself. What I found when I watched it was a funhouse mirror reflection of . . . well, me. Love Standing Up is a film about a New York–based writer (check) who decides to research a former adult filmmaker (check)—here, the titular Ilsa—who has since retired into a kind of self-created obscurity (check, again). The film traces the evolving relation between Ilsa and the writer, but ends when the writer, Sue, decides not to publish her research. The porn filmmaker’s anonymity, she realizes, has to be respected. “There’s no story,” Sue tells her editor. “You said that you knew her!” the editor shouts back. “You know how the modern world is,” Sue replies. “Does anyone know anybody any more?”
So how does anyone know anybody any more, especially when said person has passed? One obvious possibility is through the researching and writing of their history, which is what Man of Taste tries to do for Metzger. But there are other means of accessing the past, ones that have less to do with written records and instead open out onto more tactile or haptic dimensions of understanding. The scholar Elizabeth Freeman has called this erotohistoriography—an appropriate term given my book’s topic—by which she means to evoke the possibility of a “fully sensual rather than merely verbal or narrative relationship to the past.” And that’s what these objects have become for me. They’re not the kind of materials that usually make it into footnotes, but they ask to be handled, stored, spoken of, even puzzled over. They impose a duty of care that goes beyond any empirical value as “evidence” of something. Call it erotohistoriography, call it research, or just call it a lucky eBay haul.
Rob King is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the author of Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger.
