Fellatio First Freaks Out Filmgoer

The other day, when I was writing a video description of a fuck’n’suck scene and the girl was going down on the guy, I suddenly flashed to the first time I saw a blowjob onscreen. I’ll never forget it. It was at the Standard Theater on Prospect Avenue in Cleveland, where I used to go when I wanted to get away from the small town nearby where I was going to college. The school was only 32 miles from Cleveland but the bus trip took two and a half hours, and as I rode in I looked at the Cleveland newspaper which always had a sleazy ad for the adult films the theater showed. The anticipation of the sinema experience was very pleasurable. I was eighteen years old and already an aficionado of Playboy magazine and other lesser, but equally significant (to my imagination) stroke books.

When I first started going to the Standard, circa 1970, the fare was softcore. Stimulating yes, nudity yes, but no actual sex onscreen. I think the first movie I saw there was Over 18…And Ready!, a black-and-white melodrama from 1969 about a rebellious girl who wants to be an actress and whose sexual antics in Hollywood lead her to grief. I saw the movie again decades later when it was re-released by one of the cult movie video distributors, Something Weird Video.

Something Weird basically rescued the entire once-lost 1960s softcore film genre.

You can read more about Over 18…And Ready! here, and see an image collage too.

I also remember another movie I particularly found exciting was 1970’s Teenie Tulip, about some psychiatrist who was treating patients about their various sexual hangups. In one scene, a girl was sucking on a banana for, shall we say, an extended period of screen time. Most edifying to my charged-up psyche.

Much later on I learned that movie was directed by Gerard Damiano, who eventually became famous for Deep Throat and whom I met in New York briefly during my sex magazine writing days. And I only discovered last night, when looking online for Teenie Tulip references or images, that it is actually listed (title only) on the Turner Classic Movies website here. Maybe someday it’ll show up on their Friday night cult fest TCM Underground?

Anyway, the movies at the Standard in 1970 were tame, but then one day, maybe in ’71, after the softcore feature they abruptly cut to a coming attraction wherein a gigantic penis filled the screen, with a female mouth descending upon it. I recall the screen at the Standard was fairly large, so it was a huge organ indeed, pointing up maybe ten feet high, swallowed by enormous horizontal lips maybe six feet across. I was so startled by the jarring transition that instead of being turned on, I was befuddled, and almost thought I was having an hallucination–but it was real. Hardcore movies soon became the fare at the Standard. Unfortunately, the XXX films they showed in those days were not as interesting or entertaining as the softcore ones–most were pretty crude and unimaginative in the beginning–and I soon lost interest in going to the Standard. Obviously, the hardcore genre improved with age.

I became curious to see if I could find a picture online of the exterior of the Standard from the ’70s, complete with the marquee I recall it having. I haven’t found one so far (but if I do, I’ll come back and post it here) but I did find a site that shows a picture of the auditorium interior (the theater, opened in 1914, was closed in 1989 and demolished in 1995). And suddenly, from this one picture, I felt as if I were back there. The bus from college always deposited me in Cleveland around 8 a.m., so after breakfast I always got there for the first show around 10 a.m., walking down the long entranceway to the auditorium after getting my ticket from the middle-aged lady in the admissions booth. I remember sitting there, eager for the movie, amid the sparsely populated audience of other smut fans awaiting our scuzzy dreams to unfold before us.

Here is a link to the site where you can see the interior of the Standard, and many other images of it through its history.

Postscript: when I went to look for images of the movies I mentioned above, I discovered that my own blog was referenced in Google Images as I had written about the Standard and Teenie Tulip here way back in 2013! I guess I forgot! You can read that earlier post here. The film I refer to in that post, wherein an actress is asked in an audition about her “Hebrew school” acting experience, was Over 18… And Ready!, but I didn’t include the title then because I wasn’t sure it was the right movie.