Why isn’t more softcore porn as educational (or gossipy) as this? Hollywood Babylon, pseudo-based on the best-selling Tinseltown scorcher by psychedelic Church of Satan co-founder Kenneth Anger, is the ultimate precursor to The E! True Hollywood Story, with a much-needed emphasis on the nastier side of fame. Granted, we’re never really told who most of the stars (repeatedly referred to as “the golden people”) are, but it doesn’t matter — you came for some ‘70s bush-filled debauchery, and that’s exactly what you get.
Here are a few highlights among its star-studded and stud-starred recreations:
• Corpulent comedian Fatty Arbuckle bangs a girl to death with a champagne bottle after saying things like, “Later, Toots, I’m in a lovin’ mood.” The narrator laments, “If only his fans could see their jolly, fat star now!”
• One nameless star falls in love with a 7-year-old girl, gets her pregnant at 15 and marries her in a Mexican village that “smells of human urine and donkey dung.” Now mortally afraid of normal penis-to-vagina sex, he vows never to have to do it that way again. So what does he do? He obsessively forces her to go down on him all the time, even bringing in other girls to teach her how to do it properly (i.e. no teeth — you fellas know what I mean).
• Hilariously German director Erich von Stroheim, when not filming orgies, masturbates and cackles maniacally (monocle and all) as he watches a “professional sadist” whip the shit out of a chained naked girl. Is it just me, or did Stroheim look like Dr. Hugo Strange?
• Notorious lover Rudolf Valentino liked highly masculine, domineering women, was married to two “renowned dykes,” was worshipped by “swishing sissies” and his final words were, “Now, do they still think me a pink powder puff?”
• Swedish sexpot Uschi Digard — the hottest, most buxom star of ‘70s adult cinema — gets into a face-slapping catfight that leads to one of the most erection-inducing sex scenes you’ll ever see. She then models lingerie for her director.
• Lastly, America’s first sweetheart Clara Bow invites the whole football team into her boudoir, with sexy results. In the best end credits sequence since Don’t Go in the Basement, they run over the final scene of the exhausted football team, exposed wangs and all, sprawled out in Bow’s room. —Louis Fowler