MarketBehind the Green Door
Company Profile

Behind the Green Door

Behind the Green Door is a 1972 American pornographic film, widely considered one of the genre's "classic" pictures and one of the films that ushered in the Golden Age of Porn (1969–1984). Featuring Marilyn Chambers, who became a mainstream celebrity, it was one of the first hardcore films widely released in the United States and the feature-length directorial debut of the Mitchell brothers.

Plot
The manager of a diner asks two of his regular customers to tell him a supposedly true story that they had previously mentioned to him, involving a "green door". The rest of the movie appears to be a dramatization of the story's events, although no off-screen narration is heard. After arriving at a North Beach hotel for an apparent vacation, a wealthy San Francisco socialite, Gloria Saunders (Chambers), is taken against her will to an elite sex club and "loved as she's never been loved before". She has sex with a group of six women, all dressed in black, after being brought out wearing a white dress on stage through the green door. The silent, largely masked audience become increasingly aroused He gives her more cunnilingus, and then they have vaginal intercourse, while Gloria continues to be stroked by the other women. When she has an orgasm, the sex stops, and he is not shown to ejaculate. Gloria then mounts a trapeze contraption suspended from the ceiling and then engages in vaginal intercourse with one man as she performs oral sex on another and manual sex on two others. The audience become further aroused and begin having sex with each other in what becomes an orgy. In a psychedelic key sequence, an ejaculation is shown with semen flying through the air for almost seven minutes. The film features several multicolored, optically printed, slow-motion close-ups of money shots. This is the only ejaculation sequence in the film. The narrator then runs from the audience, onto the stage, and carries Gloria off, through the green door. The film ends with him and Gloria making love alone. ==Impact==
Impact
Three years after Andy Warhol seminal Blue Movie in 1969, and along with Deep Throat, also released in 1972, Behind the Green Door helped launch the "Golden Age of Porn" (1969–1984), and somewhat later, the "porno chic" boom. Made with a budget of $60,000, it achieved a nationwide theatrical release which earned more than $1 million. including its video release, which was controlled exclusively by the Mitchells out of their headquarters in the O'Farrell Theatre, San Francisco. It was one of the biggest box office pornographic successes of the 1970s, alongside Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. Immediately prior to the movie's release she had been the "Ivory soap girl", After the release of the movie, the advertising industry was scandalized, ==Critical reception==
Critical reception
Upon its release, the film received some positive reviews in mainstream media. According to writer Peter Michelson, there is "a relatively small corpus of pornographic films – e.g., Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, and Behind the Green Door – that have a minimal but still sufficient artistic interest to distinguish themselves from the rest of the genre", and the film is "more artful than most smut films". It was the second film to be inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame, following Deep Throat. ==Legal troubles==
Legal troubles
The Supreme Court's 1973 Miller v. California decision adversely affected the mainstream release of porn films, including Behind the Green Door. The Miller decision redefined obscenity from that of “utterly without socially redeeming value” to that which lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" and substituted contemporary community standards for national standards, as some prior tests required. Miller continued to hold that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment, which gave leeway to local judges to seize and destroy prints of films adjudged to violate local community standards. When Behind the Green Door opened in Suffolk County, New York in 1973, it – along with the porn film The New Comers – was successfully prosecuted. In addition to New York, Behind the Green Door was banned in California, Colorado, and Georgia. ==Later films==
Later films
In 1986, the Mitchells made a sequel, Behind the Green Door: the Sequel, directed by cabaret singer Sharon McNight. The movie featured no famous performers, and starred Elisa Florez, billed as Missy Manners. (Florez was Artie Mitchell's girlfriend at the time, and she reportedly demanded the role from him.) It was one of the first "safe sex"-themed porn films, following the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, It was a critical and commercial disaster, and the Mitchells lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The O'Farrell Theatre, which closed in 2020, contained a "Green Door Room" named for the two movies and was the principal set of the sequel. In 2012, adult film company Vivid Entertainment produced a loose remake titled The New Behind the Green Door. This film stars Brooklyn Lee as the main character Hope, a wealthy young woman drawn into a seedy underworld while on an erotic journey to find her birth mother. The movie includes footage of the original Behind the Green Door, as Hope describes a sexual fantasy that recalls the plot of the 1972 film. Other cast members include Dana DeArmond, Penny Pax, Bailey Blue, Steven St. Croix, and James Deen, with appearances by original cast member Johnnie Keyes and Marilyn Chambers's daughter McKenna Taylor. ==In popular culture==
In popular culture
• In the 1981 road-race comedy The Cannonball Run, the driver of the Japanese team (played by Jackie Chan) attempts to watch a VHS tape of Behind the Green Door on an in-dash monitor while driving on a rural highway. After several near-collisions due to his distracted driving, his partner in the back seat wakes up and forces him to shut it off. • One of the "Coming Attractions" previewed in The Kentucky Fried Movie is Catholic High School Girls in Trouble, which is described as "more shocking than Behind the Green Door." • The production of the movie is dramatized in the 2000 film Rated X, starring brothers Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez as Artie and Jim Mitchell. • In 2024, when promoting Ricky Stanicky, John Cena jokingly cited Behind the Green Door as his favorite guilty pleasure movie of all time. ==See also==
tickerdossier.comtickerdossier.substack.com