The Golden Age of Adult Films

The Golden Age of Adult Films

This article relates to Lovers XXX

Allie Rowbottom's novel Lovers XXX is set in early 1980s Los Angeles against the backdrop of the adult film industry, during the waning days of what has since been called the "golden age" of adult cinema. For a brief time, from the early 1970s through the early 1980s, hardcore porn films achieved a kind of cachet, earning splashy red-carpet premieres, distribution to general movie theaters, bona fide celebrity actors, awards ceremonies, and coverage by mainstream film critics.

Many sources trace this era, dubbed "porno chic" in a 1973 New York Times article, to the 1969 release of Blue Movie, directed by Andy Warhol, which was the first theatrically released motion picture to depict actual sexual intercourse. The success and widespread acceptance of erotic and pornographic films like Blue Movie and, a few years later, Last Tango in Paris (1972) and Deep Throat (1972), cemented the realization that, with a relatively small investment in talent and production equipment, films depicting sex acts on screen could become hugely popular.

These films often featured full storylines and at least partially developed characters; as Casey Scott, the curator of a 2013 film festival screening masterpieces of this period, noted, "These movies seemed like Hollywood films that just happened to have sex in them." Many actors who were struggling to make it in "legitimate" film or theater were drawn to the higher paychecks and steady work of adult films to keep their careers afloat. As Deep Throat star Harry Reems said in a 2009 interview, "I could get $150 for a few hours in a sex film – compared to next to nothing for appearing for weeks in an off-off-Broadway play."

The milieu depicted in Lovers XXX is one of an industry on the verge of massive change, one that played out in the real-world history of adult cinema as well. What contributed to the end of porn's "golden age"? The novel touches on several factors, including the Meese Commission's obscenity crackdown during Ronald Reagan's administration, as well as "Women Against Pornography" activists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose 1981 Pornography: Men Possessing Women positioned pornography as fundamentally misogynistic and anti-feminist. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s also took a toll on the free-wheeling 1970s adult film scene. But what most analysts point to as the death knell for the era was the rapid advancement of VHS technology, which changed the way adult films were both distributed and watched. Quickly, high artistic production values and theatrical releases on 16mm or 35mm film were supplanted by lower-budget straight-to-video approaches that prioritized cheap, widespread distribution to the home video market. Of course, in the forty years since then, the near-total transition to internet distribution and consumption has transformed the industry once more.

Theater in Amsterdam showing Deep Throat, 1977
Photo by Rob Croes / Anefo, via Wikimedia Commons

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This article relates to Lovers XXX. It will run in the July 15, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.