I've been fascinated by the legend of this film for quite some time. Not that gay porn is my bag, but this is one of those mysterious, elusive, undergroundy things that one stumbles across on the net from time to time that is just so fascinatingly bizarre. A gay Jesus porn movie!? Surely one of the most blasphemous films ever made (if indeed it
was made), and as such it is a potential lost piece of cinematic history (regardless of how badly made the movie might have been). It's sort of like the legend of snuff movies, only far less well-known, in that a some people claim to have seen it, others deny it ever existed, and occasional pieces of circumstantial evidence surface without ever actually leading to anything.
I think the Screw article is the strongest piece of evidence for the existence of the film. It's a citable reference, if you can call a sex magazine citable, so I wonder if anyone has actually made inquiries by going through back issues of the mag, instead of just giving it the old
copypasta and taking the original poster's word for it. Screw is not the sort of publication you'd find indexed in the Bodlean library, but I'm sure it must be somehow possible to track down the issue cited above and confirm the existence of the original review. I believe the magazine is still being published (although no longer by Goldstein), so I would imagine the publishers would be the place to start.
Al Goldstein himself is still very much alive, and according to Wikipedia he hosts his own blog on "Booble" (an adult search engine). So it may be possible to contact him and ask him directly about what he remembers.
The article also makes note of a second witness; one Marcia Bronstein, editor of Bitch. Now, this is interesting - at first, I though "Bitch" was the same as the current feminist periodical, but a bit of quick Googling turned up the fact that Bitch was founded in 1996. "Aha!" I thought, "The dastard internet prankster has slipped up and exposed his article as a phony!" But, no, the plot thickens: Googling the terms "Bitch" + "Martha Bronstein" turns up just one or two references to a hyper-obscure womens-interest sex magazine that spun off from Screw in early 1974 and only lasted for a few issues, and Bronstein was indeed one of the editors:
http://books.google.com/books?id=3ugCAA ... &ct=result
So did Bitch also run a review of Him? Another review in a separate publication would further strengthen the argument for this films existence. The problem with Bitch is that it was not very successful and old copies of it are EXTREMELY rare. Moreover, I'm not sure exactly how many issues the mag survived for - it may only have run for two or three - and it may have gone bust before the April 29th issue (hence no review). Nonetheless, if any of you know any New York women who were a bit kinky in the early 70s, ask them to check their attics for old issues of Bitch - you never know, there could be a whole feature with colour stills and cast interviews for all we know!! :lol:
I have a hunch about this movie. It not really based on anything, so it's not really worth crap, but here it is: I think the film did exist, and the real name behind the synonymous "Ed D. Louie" was one better known to filmgoers than we might expect (some have said it sounds like one of Ed Wood's pseudonyms, citing that he DID turn to directing porn in his later days, but I think that's a little too Urban Legend-y to be true). Whoever it was, they set out to make the most offensive film they could, and possibly succeeded. Around the time the film was supposed to be released, there was a major movement against adult entertainment and porn theatres in New York city (most of which were run by the mob), and the local government were making lists of "obscene" films for prosecution in their attempts to "clean up" the city. Mr. "Louie", or his distributors, aware of the inflammatory nature of the film, decided to only give the film a tiny release in just one theatre with minimal promotion in order to recoup their expenses and then deliberately made it disappear, not just for fear of prosecution but because, whoever "Ed D. Louie" was, he couldn't afford to have his career destroyed and his (real) name dragged through the dirt over a dirty little film.
I have a suspicion that the one and only print of
Him probably ascended from this world by way of a blazing bonfire or landfill bulldozer sometime in mid-1974.
