Man of Taste
The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger
Published on 25. March 2025
Book
Hardback
264 pages
978-0-231-21404-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
Finally, a book on Radley Metzger! Positioning the director both as auteur and impresario of the sex film, Rob King insightfully explores how Metzger's insistence on "high class eroticism" paradoxically at once secured and siloed his legacy. Man of Taste is an acutely perceptive tribute to the uniqueness of this long-overlooked filmmaker who profoundly influenced American film culture and sex scenes in the 1960s and 1970s. Metzger's sly, cinephilic, and lively work is in gifted hands, imbued by the wry and self-conscious persona of Metzger himself. A true pleasure to read. -- Elena Gorfinkel, author of <i>Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s</i> 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, <i>The Rialto Report</i> 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 <i>The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity</i> Comprehensive, impressive, and ambitious, King's text is well-written, compelling, and thought provoking. * George Bidwell * King brings erudition to sexploitation, grounding this work in film theory and exploring the subjectivity of taste. * Library Journal * A necessary read for anyone concerned with eros on film and the erotic film industry. * Journal of Popular Culture * 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. * Film Quarterly * 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. * Times Literary Supplement * An exhaustive and edifying study of an auteur who has only recently begun to receive his due. * Velvet Light Trap *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Trade binding
Illustrations
60 black-and-white images; 34 color images
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-231-21404-9 (9780231214049)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
04/2025
1st Edition
Columbia University Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
Rob King is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017) and The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009).
Content
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
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