Photograph by AJ Epstein
July 18, 1941– Fred Halsted was the son of a construction worker and a farm laborer. Even though he grew up in Long Beach, not all that far from the movie studios in Los Angeles, the idea of becoming a filmmaker was probably not on his mind while he was a youth. He attended California State University, Los Angeles with a major in Biology. One of his professors there had a Bolex 16mm camera, the number one choice for experimental filmmakers, and Halsted asked him if he wanted to help make a porn flick. The professor found Halsted very hot and so a career was born. For financing, Halsted found work as a gardener, with singer Joey Heatherton and actor Vincent Price among his clients.
Halsted wanted to make sexually explicit experimental films and he wanted to be the star. With L.A. Plays Itself (1972), he succeeded. This was before video or digital. Halsted spent three years shooting film for L.A. Plays Itself. The idea of the fisting scene that made him famous, or should I say notorious, was the seed for the idea of L.A. Plays Itself, sort of like the way John Water’s scene with the lovely Divine eating dog poop gave birth to Pink Flamingos (1972). It was definitely the first gay porn flick to be screened like an art film. It was also the first to have a sex scene with no sex; simply shots of traffic with a voice-over of an experienced top man and the younger rube doing the deed. The film has an impressionistic style throughout, cutting between landscapes and bodies for poetic rather than narrative effect; the combinations of sound and image were striking.
After L.A. Plays Itself, Halsted spent years getting ready for what he hoped would be his greatest triumph, Sextool (1975). He talked it up during interviews, working up advance publicity for it, but when it was finally released the film fell flat. Porn films during this era actually played in theatres, and Sextool ran for just a single one week at the 55th Street Playhouse in NYC, where LA Plays Itself had played for a year, breaking records earlier in the decade.
Halstead kept making arty gay porn films, the final one, Breaker Blue (1988), was released a year before he died, but Sextool essentially ended his career as an independent filmmaker. He had been making his movies using 35mm, a choice that proved disastrous. The expensive 35mm film stock meant that he had to avoid shooting too many takes. He relied on the editing to get what he wanted and he constructed the films almost to the point of incoherence. He had hoped that the format would mean that his films would be shown at art houses, few of which had 16mm projectors. Legit theater bookers were wary of Sextool, which was more aggressive in its sexuality and aesthetics than LA Plays Itself. Only a few of porn theaters were equipped with 35mm projectors, so he couldn’t show Sextool on the porno circuit, leaving it with no real theatrical distribution. Interest in 1972’s straight porno films like Deep Throat and Behind The Green Door had climaxed. Halsted was unable, or unwilling, to understand how society had changed in the 1970s. By 1975, the mainstream interest in porn had shot the wad, and the production of adult films moved to video with little interest in an eccentric independent filmmaker like Halsted. But, his vision helped define the gay macho clone look of the 1970s.
Sextool is now what film archivists call “an orphan”, a movie with no studio, artist’s estate, or any rights-holder to see to its preservation. There is only one 35mm print of the film, It is held at MoMA in Manhattan, in fact, the only hardcore sex films in the Film Collection at MoMA are L.A. Plays Itself and Sextool.
Halsted was a manic depressive, and his medication took away his good-looks. He drank too much, and his behavior became self-destructive at the end of his life. After the death of the great love of his life and co-star Joey Yale in 1986, he went into a spiral of emotional and physical decline. He was also broke. Halsted ended his own life in 1989.
Unusual for a gay guy of my age, but I actually have little interest in porn. On the occasion that I see any, I become impossibly horny in the first three minutes and then I am bored beyond an erection. It’s just pink, pink, pink, in and out, in and out, in and out. But, I am going to be totally honest with you and admit, although I did see his films when they were originally released, I took another look at some clips from L.A. Plays Itself and Sextool to prepare for this #BornThisDay. You can find them on YouTube. Yet, you kids know I am very interested in our Gay History and Halsted’s films were released at a rarefied time in the history of X-rated Gay Cinema. Pornographic films had only been legal to screen publicly for a couple of years and both gay and straight versions had been looking to legitimize themselves through consciousness artistic techniques. Wakefield Poole‘s classic Boys In The Sand (1971) had led the way for gay adult films, and Deep Throat (1972) was an example of the short-lived “porno chic” era in straight porn that L.A. Plays Itself tried to capitalize on, although Halsted’s film was conceived of and in production well before any of them. Halsted hired a publicist for it, held VIP advance screenings for the critics, and had a remarkable success for such a low-budget, gritty gay porn film.
This story of L.A. Plays Itself would probably be a shock to people who get their pornography online, little of which has any pretenses of being art. It is now seen as a period piece, not a piece of ass on a computer screen. I am sorry I can’t include a clip, but even The Wow Report has limits.
For more about Halsted and his era, try the tasty Halsted Plays Himself (2011) by talented writer William E. Jones.
