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Radley Metzger was one of the foremost directors of adult film in America, with credits including softcore titles like The Lickerish Quartet and the hardcore classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven. After getting his start making arthouse trailers for Janus Films, Metzger would go on to become among the most feted directors of the “porno chic” era of the 1970s, working under the pseudonym Henry Paris. In the process, he produced a body of work that exposed the porous boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from hardcore, and good taste from bad.
Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability. Man of Taste spans Metzger’s entire life: his early years in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, his attempt to bring arthouse aesthetics to adult film in the 1960s, his turn to pseudonymously directed hardcore movies in the 1970s, and his final years, which included making videos on homeopathic medicine. Metzger’s career, King argues, sheds light on how the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, and it offers an uncanny reflection of the ways American film culture transformed during these decades.
Lavishly illustrated with rare photos and publicity images, this book paints a vivid picture of a filmmaker who channeled his artistic aspirations into some of the most disreputable movie genres of his day.
— Elena Gorfinkel, author of Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s
Finally a book worthy of the master himself: Radley Metzger’s life, career, and preoccupations are elegantly explored and intelligently analyzed in Rob King’s excellent, long-awaited, and much-needed biography, Man of Taste.
— Ashley West, The Rialto Report
Cinephiles typically know director Radley Metzger only for his "porno chic" classic The Lickerish Quartet (1970). But as Rob King's revealing Man of Taste demonstrates, Metzger's decades-long career as a filmmaker shadowed the cultural conflations of "high" and "low" that so defined independent filmmaking across the post-code era. Detailing Metzger's work across the eras of sixties exploitation, seventies hardcore, and the video/cable market of the eighties, King makes a compelling argument for Metzger's importance, not necessarily as a consecrated auteur but as a filmmaker who consistently renegotiated this period's shifting line between cinematic sophistication and sleaze.
— Jeffrey Sconce, author of The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity
Comprehensive, impressive, and ambitious, King’s text is well-written, compelling, and thought provoking.
King brings erudition to sexploitation, grounding this work in film theory and exploring the subjectivity of taste.
A necessary read for anyone concerned with eros on film and the erotic film industry.
Rob King’s illuminating book helps us understand how the films of Radley Metzger helped make an erotic world that finally had no place for him.
By engaging with what might in the past have been dismissed as trash or filth, we might learn something new about both the art of film and our own desirous selves.
An exhaustive and edifying study of an auteur who has only recently begun to receive his due.
Introduction: Radley Metzger, Man of Taste
1. “To Create the Kind of Films He Had Formerly Only Purchased:”: The Distributor as Auteur
2. “The Next Step Will Be to Show ‘It:’ ”: A Media Ontology of Eroticism
3. “That’s Not His Real Name:”: Pseudonymity and the Porn Auteur
4. “Metzger’s Futuristic Society:”: Pornotopia and the Public Sphere
5. “Cult Porn Idol Gone Straight?”: The Return(s) of Radley Metzger
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index