Sacred Profane Spaces/(un)Holy Relics

For anyone who’s watched more than a casual sampling of early 1970’s Southern California smut you would be forgiven for, from time to time, feeling like you’ve been smacked in the face with a major case of deja vu. And not just because you start seeing the same performers in every other film (you do), or because there’s really only so many positions that the act of sexual congress can be filmed (at least effectively), it’s also because many of the locations and props, and even the furniture and bedspreads (yeah…) are used over and over. Some of these even take on a kind of mythical quality, with certain locations becoming almost Sacred-Profane Spaces (or would they be Profane-Sacred Spaces?) and the props taking on an (un)Holy Relic type of mythos.
And just like archeologists and anthropologist sift through the rubble of history for clues as to where El Dorado or the Fountain of Youth might have been, or where the Ark of the Covenant or even The Holy Grail might be deposited, some of us use these clues as fingerprints or DNA strands that are spread across dozens, even hundreds of films, to try to piece together a clearer picture of who and what and when and where all this smut occurred a half century ago…said another way, we watch a lot of old porn, but pay more attention to the furniture and pictures on the walls than the smut.

And there are a few of us who of course take things perhaps a bit to far (guilty), but we only do it so you don’t have to (or at least that’s what I tell my therapist…). But I’m by no means alone in this, in fact there are at least two massive threads on the Vinegar Syndrome Facebook group dedicated to documenting where props and locations are reused (the first one grew so enormous that it nearly collapsed under its own weight, and its successor is getting a bit creaky itself…). And over on the Ed Wood Wednesday site Greg Dziawer and Joe Blevins have scores of articles (The Wood Set Decoration Odyssey) devoted to the shared locations and props just within the Ed Wood Universe (although many are also shared among the broader early So Cal smut world).

Thus begins a set of featured articles exploring these Sacred Profane Spaces/(un)Holy Relics