Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Book Excerpt of the Day

“By selling sin in the guise of seemingly well-intentioned sex hygiene scare films and vice racket exposes, the legendary ‘Forty Thieves’ and their progenitors managed to show audiences a bit of thigh, breast or bottom before hastily packing up and high-tailing it to the next town. When the raincoat crowd got their fill of one type of exploitation flick – such as the natives-gone-wild ‘goona-goona’ pictures – the skin-dependent filmmakers produced pasty and g-string burlesque shorts or not-so-naughty nudist camp docudramas. Needless to say, such skid row cinema was too low-profile to warrant legitimate soundtrack releases, not to mention an actual score. In fact, most striptease and stag films of the period featured canned recordings of generic jazz, nameless lounge exotica and incognito big band blues… by long-forgotten groups with cheeky names like the Genteels, the Lushes and the Whips who cut 45s of stroll, jive and slop for seedy joints with names like Louie’s Limbo Lounge and the little films they subsidized.

– from Chapter 3: Sexploitation Serenade of Kristopher Spencer’s Film and Television Scores, 1950-1979

No comments:

Post a Comment