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They are replete with the contradictions of a time in which shame jostled liberally with pleasure, and “tease” was the code word of a popular culture teetering at the precipice between prohibition and release.ĭoris Wishman, Indecent Desires, 1968, 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 75 minutes.
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In her work, Ahwesh finds “a seedy underlying resonance of the fear and hostility toward women in our world, which Doris describes in her own profound and tawdry way.” The pleasures of watching Wishman’s bawdy, crass, absurd, and kitschy skin flicks heighten across their proliferative form, as the gimmicks, stiletto heels, polyester curtains, ashtrays, vases, and black lace panties pile up from reel to reel.
Before long, she was the biggest producer of nudist camp pictures, releasing eight in the early ’60s before shifting into black-and-white sex melodramas, or “roughies,” as the sexploitation mode adjusted to darker, more violent subjects and a grittier aesthetic inflected by noir, art cinema, and variants of realism. Entirely self-taught, she came to moviemaking as a widow in middle age, producing her first film, the nudist escapade Hideout in the Sun, with $20,000 borrowed from her sister Pearl.
Wishman was one of few female directors working in this burgeoning independent market. Wishman, Ahwesh wrote, “had a feel for the newly exposed tawdry human body of the early ’60s.” In that decade, a cottage industry of sexploitation films emerged due to the recent legalization of onscreen nudity following a court battle over Max Nosseck’s 1954 Garden of Eden. Jeff Huntley and Cathy (Lester Brown and Marietta). Her devotees include trash royalty John Waters and avant-garde film and video artist Peggy Ahwesh, who once documented an encounter with the filmmaker in a sex shop in Miami’s Coconut Grove-where Wishman worked in the 1990s-for her Wishman fanzine in 1995.ĭoris Wishman, Nude on the Moon, 1961, 35 mm, color, sound, 83 minutes. Her films overflow with the strangeness and plasticity of sexed and gendered bodies, simmering with promises of corporeal liberation and its attendant dangers. In Wishman’s audacious films, breasts avenge crimes and kill their oglers ( Deadly Weapons) a transplanted penis bestows on its host sociopathic intent rather than sexual prowess ( The Amazing Transplant, 1970) a stalker controls a young woman by manipulating a found doll ( Indecent Desires, 1968) an all-woman nudist colony inhabits a lunar landscape ( Nude on the Moon, 1961) and viewers are shown explicitly graphic gender-affirmation surgery as part of a queasily sensationalizing yet oft sympathetic quasi-documentary on trans people ( Let Me Die a Woman, 1978). By the time of the Conan interview, which aired five months before her death, she had titillated and bewildered adult and cult film audiences for many decades with idiosyncratic movies rife with sexual degradation, grotesque and preposterous bodily perfidy, and, as one of her advertisements blared, “Girls without Restraint!” Among the most prolific American women directors of the postwar period, her vastly eccentric body of work, counting thirty features, remains unknown to many film connoisseurs. Asking Ebert why he didn’t put Dildo Heaven on his “Best Of” list, the filmmaker is met with the critic’s blanching reply-of course he likes to see films first before reviewing them! Wishman scoffs: “Ugh, how ordinary!”īorn in 1912, a Jewish New Yorker and child of Ukrainian émigrés, Wishman was hardly ordinary. Is there anything I can do?” Reframing male cinephilic desire as pitiful erotic disappointment, Wishman’s bait and switch is both the work of a cunning “exploiteer” in the old-school tradition, with some Borscht Belt thrown in, as well as a testament to the blurring of contraries she and her films embody: feigned prudery and ribald provocation, sincerity and self-consciousness. Wishman cannily replies: “Well Roger, I’m sorry you’re frustrated. Ebert states that the only reason to watch these films, in his view, is to see Morgan entirely nude, and yet she remains mostly clothed. Sensing discomfort, Wishman asks, “Conan, are you afraid of me?” The other guest, Roger Ebert, enters the fray to discuss Wishman’s work, announcing his familiarity with Deadly Weapons (1973) and Double Agent 73 (1974), which stars Chesty Morgan and her seventy-three-inch bustline. Affecting sheepishness when asked for the name of her latest (penultimate) film, she finally discloses the title: Dildo Heaven. Conan is flummoxed by Wishman’s spiky retorts and willfully evasive manner. HAVING RESURFACED late in life due to a revival of her sex films, an eighty-nine-year-old Doris Wishman, clad in leopard print and wedge sandals, appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2002.
Doris Wishman, Bad Girls Go to Hell, 1965, 35 mm, black-and-white, sound, 71 minutes.
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