Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
by Rob King

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.

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.

About the Author

Rob King is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. ng is a film historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. His recent follow-up, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (University of California Press 2017), challenges the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition.

About the Speakers

Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, with emphases on film and theater; literary, media, and cultural theory; and the intersections of gender, sexuality and race. She is particularly interested in combining theory with historical perspectives, and cultural studies approaches with aesthetic inquiries and close reading practices. Her more recent An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative, Ohio State University Press, 2012) seeks to reconcile the fields of narratology and performance studies in order to conceptualize contemporary worldmaking practices in different media.

Racquel Gates is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. Her research focuses on blackness and popular culture, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018), where she argues that some of the most disreputable representations in black popular culture can strategically pose questions about blackness, black culture, and American society. In 2020, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the fellowship will support her next book, Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness.

Jack Lechner is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Film at Columbia University School of the Arts. His credits as executive producer, supervising producer, or producer include the reboot of National Geographic's "Explorer"; the acclaimed Amazon series "The New Yorker Presents"; the Oscar-winning documentary "The Fog Of War"; the Oscar-nominated film "Blue Valentine"; the Emmy-nominated "Left Of The Dial" for HBO; "Tru Inside" for TruTV; "Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys" for Sundance; the PBS documentaries "The New Public" and "Playwright: From Page to Stage"; the Showtime documentaries "Very Young Girls" and "Naked on the Inside"; and the pilot of the Emmy-winning AMC series "Mad Men."

Ashley West hosts The Rialto Report is a series of podcasts and articles dedicated to expanding the historical record on the adult entertainment industry between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s. He has been interviewing directors, actors, theater owners, distributors, and anyone connected with the golden age of adult film since the 1990s. Along the way, he has served as a consultant for HBO’s The Deuce, written articles for The Daily Beast, and is developing a film documentary detailing the birth of the adult film industry in New York.

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