Before porn became mass-produced on San Fernando Valley factory lines and beamed directly into computer screens and hotel televisions for private consumption, it was a very public phenomenon, and nowhere more than in San Francisco.

In 1969, Baghdad-by-the-Bay became the first city in the United States to legalize films that explicitly depicted penetration.

“San Francisco birthed this entire industry,” says Michael Stabile, the director of a short documentary called “Smut Capital of America” that unearths the city’s forgotten role in the history of modern pornographic filmmaking.

This Thursday Stabile’s film kicks off a series (also titled “Smut Capital of America”) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts that will look back on the groundbreaking era of late ’60s and ’70s San Francisco porn. Part of Bay Area Now (YBCA’s triennial exhibition of local artists), the series will screen a selection of the pornographic feature films, shorts and documentaries from that time.

Much like marijuana today, pornography existed in legal limbo for much of the 1960s. Adult theaters showed hard-core pornography, but always with the understanding that the police could bust them at any moment.

San Francisco director Alex de Renzy’s explicit “Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach” catalyzed the legalization of porn. In 1969 the documentary, which examined Denmark’s decision not to censor pornography, became entangled in a high-profile court case.

Social value

A California judge decided that even though it depicted penetration, “Pornography in Denmark” had redeeming social value, in keeping with the Supreme Court edict that draws the line between what constitutes free speech and what constitutes obscenity.

“It was hard to write it off as smut because it was a serious documentary,” says Joe Rubin about “Pornography in Denmark,” which YBCA will screen on July 21. Rubin, a 22-year-old amateur expert on vintage San Francisco porn, conned his mother into buying an X-rated film for him when he was 8 years old.

“This really has been my life’s work,” says Rubin, who has amassed a huge collection of San Francisco porn circa 1969 to 1981. He’s curated a collection of shorts that YBCA will show on Aug. 4.

In the wake of the landmark decision in the People v. Alex de Renzy, “Pornography in Denmark” went into wide release, grossing $2 million on its minuscule $15,000 budget.

Other filmmakers quickly mined the moneymaking combination of coitus and celluloid. By 1971, pornography was so widespread in the city that the New York Times magazine decreed San Francisco “the porn capital of America.”

“It became like a Gold Rush,” says Stabile, who took his documentary to the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year. “I think that San Francisco in 1970 was probably sort of like how San Francisco was for tech in 1996.”

San Francisco was an ideal location for producing and peddling smut. “First and foremost, San Francisco has always had a sex culture, going back to the Barbary Coast. You had same-sex dancing in barrooms. You had bordellos. You had the burlesque dancers in North Beach.”

Aside from its history, San Francisco’s infrastructure facilitated the burgeoning porn industry. There were plenty of independent film labs willing to turn a blind eye as they developed legally questionable material. And neighborhoods like the Tenderloin were replete with adult theaters, ranging from big-screen cinemas to cramped storefront operations.

Love and porn

Then the countercultural revolution of the 1960s hit. “The Summer of Love meant that there was a huge model pool,” says Stabile, referencing the city’s influx of free-loving hippies and broke UC Berkeley students just across the bay. Typically men were paid $75, while women could hope to get $150 for a short feature, according to Rubin.

San Francisco authorities routinely busted theaters, but they often turned a blind eye to productions. Even though politicians like then-San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein lambasted the local explosion of porn, cops didn’t harass San Francisco shoots as frequently as the cops did in Los Angeles, Stabile says.

Unlike many of today’s bottom-line-obsessed porn moguls, San Francisco pioneers like De Renzy, the Mitchell brothers and Lowell Pickett made highbrow, artistically interesting films, Stabile and Rubin agree.

Some niche, boutique porn – specifically of the gay and kink varieties – is still being produced in San Francisco. But with the widespread adoption of cheap VHS technology in the 1980s, the bulk of porn production companies moved to Los Angeles suburbs, where real estate was cheaper. And when they got there, they promptly ditched any semblance of production values or story line to bolster profit margins.

Talking about San Francisco pornography’s golden era, Stabile says, “Because people were watching it in theaters, and were forced to sit and not fast-forward, there was a little more thought put into it. When it’s on VHS, everyone realizes that you’re just going fast-forward anyway, so let’s do as little as possible.”

They don’t make them the way they used to, Rubin concurs. “The point of these films wasn’t to simply be, as the Supreme Court would say, ‘an outlet for prurient interests.’ It was to make a work of art that incorporated explicit sex.”

E-mail David Wagner at dwagner@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/11/DD631K8B0V.DTL