THE HISTORY OF PORNOGRAPHY (1970)

“What is pornography to one man is the laughter of Venus to another.” – D.H. Lawrence For a quickly produced feature that was constructed out of almost nothing but stills, magazines with a mini-raid on Art Burnham’s personal collection stag films, Bob Chinn’s The History of Pornography (credited to Hons Wegmunsen) is a surprisingly insightful, […]

LIPPS & MCCAIN (1978)

With a handful of noirs, a couple of comedies, a sexploitation horror film, and a weed/musical/road picture, Bob Chinn really cut through the genres in the 70’s like no other filmmaker in the adult world (and only like a precious few in the mainstream world). Perhaps outdoing them all, Chinn served up an honest-to-goodness western […]

EXHAUSTED: JOHN C. HOLMES, THE REAL STORY (1981)

“Everything in life is an act,” says John Holmes in the opening moments of Julia St. Vincent’s Exhausted: John C. Holmes, the Real Story, and, boy howdy, does Holmes put one on for its entire running time. A ludicrous hagiography and ode to the adult film world’s biggest superstar, Exhausted is a heaping helping of […]

NICE N’ TIGHT (1985)

An effervescent rush of otherworldly decency runs through the center of Bob Chinn’s Nice N’ Tight, the second feature in his two picture deal for Tara Video in 1985. Like Blondie, the other film Chinn made for Tara and likewise released the same year, Nice N’ Tight was shot on 16mm for the still-functioning European […]

BABY CAKES (1980)

In Bob Chinn’s Baby Cakes, a group of female bicyclists begin a 500 mile coastal trip to participate in a race in Los Angeles which they slowly forget about as they get wrapped up in their own romantic entanglements with a group of surfers they meet along the way (kinds like Breaking Away meets L’Avventura […]

A PASSAGE TO ECSTASY (1985)

Taking a slight title inspiration from A Passage to India, David Lean’s final film which had been a critical and box office success the year before, Bob Chinn’s A Passage to Ecstasy is a bedroom-hopping drama from 1985 that is set amid an anniversary party in a sprawling mansion in Bombay (now Mumbai). Chinn directs […]

BLONDIE (1985)

Despite expressing a willingness to be finished with the adult film business and moving his family from California to Hawaii after wrapping production on 1984’s All the Way In!, director Bob Chinn showed that he still had a lot of gas left in the tank before he closed the door on the adult film world […]

SADIE (1980)

If 1980 started out ominously for Bob Chinn with the troubled stateside portion of the Prisoner of Paradise shoot, an experience that more or less ensured that Chinn was all done with John Holmes, things didn’t get much better for him as the year rolled along. For then there was Sadie, a whole other headache […]

THE MARRIED WOMAN {aka, MY WIFE, THE HOOKER} (1974)

After wandering in the wilderness of softcore and general release pictures for a couple of years, west coast filmmaker Bob Chinn was given the opportunity to shoot a hardcore feature in San Francisco, which, in then-1974, was a geographic location that had been untouched by Chinn’s own productions but much more lax in enforcement of […]

CANDY STRIPERS (1977)

Describing the plot of Bob Chinn’s Candy Stripers pretty much boils down to its elevator pitch: “in the course of an eight-hour day shift, a bunch of horny doctors, nurses, and patients fuck the hospital thirty five degrees off its foundation. That’s it. That’s the movie.” But if that explanation sounds like some thin, porn-ready […]