Rob King returns to the podcast. He is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He is the author of “Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture” (2017) and “The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture” (2009). And now Rob has a new book “Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger” (Columbia University Press, 2025). We are joined by novelist Cathy Brown who has some background behind the camera in the adult film industry.
Radley Metzger was one of the foremost directors of adult film in America, with credits including softcore titles like “The Lickerish Quartet” and the hardcore classic “The Opening of Misty Beethoven“. After getting his start making arthouse trailers for Janus Films, Metzger would go on to become among the most feted directors of the porno chic ‘era of the 1970s, working under the pseudonym Henry Paris. In the process, he produced a body of work that exposed the porous boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from hardcore, and good taste from bad.
Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing frontiers of cultural acceptability. “Man of Taste” spans Metzger’s entire life: his early years in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, his attempt to bring arthouse aesthetics to adult film in the 1960s, his turn to pseudonymously directed hardcore movies in the 1970s, and his final years, which included making videos on homeopathic medicine. Metzger’s career, King argues, sheds light on how the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, and it offers an uncanny reflection of the ways American film culture transformed during these decades.
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