Film Homage Hard Core 1979 Porn Theater The Combat Zone Boston Massachusetts 1977 #3 Canvas Print

The technology here hasn't advanced much beyond Edison's 1890's film loops. Instead of 35mm it is Super 8mm, or a large step backward. (But the "performers" then were fully clothed.) DVD's have made such businesses largely obsolete.

Our stroller can now keep his raincoat and umbrella in the clothes closet and use them when it actually rains. "Hard Core" (1979) would be a neo-film noir.

10 years later the envelope would be pushed even further in "8mm" where private investigator Nicholas Cage is hired to find a young woman killed on camera in a so called "snuff film."

A wealthy man commissioned the film for one million dollars. His widow is Cage's employer.

The "perverts and pornographers" eventually have a falling out, among them James Gandolfini. I wonder if his role as the sleazy Eddie helped get the part of Tony in HBO's "The Sopranos?"

The late Gandolfini (1961-2013) will be sorely missed

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...