Somewhere in the catalog of great cosmic ironies, Russ Meyer being the first filmmaker to adapt John Cleland’s Fanny Hill to the big screen is one of the more twisted. The book, a bawdy, lusty tale of a young girl’s misadventures and blossoming sexual awareness, was published in ye olde England in 1748 and was one of the first examples of what we would consider “long-form” pornography. Though repeatedly banned in almost every country that contained a library, bookstore, or people, Denmark was one of the first countries wherein challenges to their censorship laws yielded groundbreaking results, and in 1964 the book was allowed to be sold there. This shift started a chain reaction that eventually led to Denmark allowing hard-core pornographic films, then a black market product mostly catering to the stag party crowd, to be sold over the counter and screened in movie houses. And THAT action led to a global chain reaction that, in 1979, pretty much put Russ Meyer, a stickler for action that was exclusively waist-up, right out of business.
Alex de Renzy, erstwhile documentarian of the shifting culture in the United States, smut peddler, adventurer, and owner of the Screening Room theater in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, had toiled in softcore loops for a few years before going to Denmark with Paul Gerber, Jack Kerpan, and Michael Martin in October of 1969 to document the Sex 69 Expo, a massive, multi-booth convention held at the K.B. Hallen sports arena that highlighted almost every single facet of the sex industry, all now legal to look at and enjoy in the newly liberated town of Copenhagen. The result of de Renzy and Co.’s trip was Pornography in Denmark: A New Approach, a documentary that ushered in the advent of the hardcore film in the United States.
To categorize the release of de Renzy’s film in 1970 as a sea change would be to completely undersell sea changes. It was a monster hit with audiences, and it was a new source of inspiration for other entrepreneurial pornographers who wanted to get into the action, causing them to create their own “documentaries” and instructional films that would show original sin in explicit detail, full color, and projected twenty feet high.
Pornography in Denmark begins by smartly framing porn as something beyond Playboy Magazine, the then-reflexive example of smut to the average American and personified in the film’s opening scenes by the two Valeries from Coalinga, California. For the rest of the film, de Renzy and his crew take the place of the wide-eyed Yankees as they wander around Denmark, completely agog at the freedom on display across Copenhagen. “All this could be yours,” de Renzy and company seem to be saying to America “if only you could get over yourselves.”
The film itself is a decent documentary, but an even more invaluable mark in time. With its multiple theaters, bookshops, sex clubs, and live sex shows, Copenhagen is presented as a sexual fantasia that de Renzy was able to reflect via the red light district in San Francisco with his narrative features in 1974. Most interestingly, in an interview with a porn shopkeeper in Copenhagen, de Renzy readily admits that he can’t get close to showing the same kind of material in the Screening Room that could be viewed within the storefronts in Denmark.
Despite its blockbuster status and recognition of a pioneering work in adult cinema, Pornography in Denmark is not great porn, but that’s hardly the point. And after all of the films and material that has been released in the fifty five years since it debuted, it can’t help but feel a little quaint. However, it remains a very good representation of the cross-section of attitudes about sex and pornography as they were in 1969. And despite having a clear agenda (not uncommon among most documentarians), Pornography in Denmark feels like it was made in relative good faith. Only when the film decides to camp out and document an underground porn shoot does it seem like it’s a real excuse to get hardcore on the big screen. But even here, de Renzy successfully communicates the wide gap between enjoying the sausage and watching the sausage get made. Stop/start boredom is certainly felt among both the audience and the participants on screen, but there is a lunch break with open-faced sandwiches.
Outside of its groundbreaking place in history, one of the most interesting and enduring things about Pornography in Denmark is the utopian headspace the filmmakers seemed to occupy as they stood on the brink of a new frontier. This means that some of the film’s predictions, given a voice by the narration, were a case study in wishful thinking (though, oddly enough, relevant again as our current culture lurches backward into a strange kind of Puritanism). The thesis that full legalization of pornography would usher in a demand for better quality product was certainly true, but only for a brief window of time. For the film also explicitly expresses a rather naive notion that the public would cease to buy bad pornography if there was good smut being offered up alongside it. Not only did not prove to be the case as the years went on, almost the exact opposite happened. If America had a junk food mentality about actual junk food and television, they had it in spades when it came to porn, and in the end, nuance and balance went out the window in favor of wall-to-wall sex in features with titles like Malibu Ass Blasters.
That, at the twilight of his career and under the pseudonym of Rex Borsky, Alex de Renzy would contribute almost two hundred examples of this very specific kind of dross is one of the other twisted cosmic ironies.
(C) Copyright 2025, Patrick Crain
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