 |
| Did Ed Wood's words wind up in a classic film from 1975? |
A few days ago, in a private forum devoted to adult movies, someone asked the source of the loop excerpted in the 1975 Lee Frost feature A Climax of Blue Power. Forty-four minutes into this classic roughie, the main character—a psychotic security guard posing as a cop—spools up an 8mm loop in his bedroom. We can see that the loop is on a red plastic reel. That's consistent with the handful of 8mm loops produced by the Bloom family (Ed Wood's employers for most of the 1970s) that I have. For the next several minutes of Blue Power, we watch an excerpt from this subtitled loop, with a few cutaways back to the protagonist's reactions.
 |
| A moment from A Climax of Blue Power. Note the white box. |
Until about 1973, 8mm pornographic loops were usually distributed in white boxes, exactly like the one seen in Blue Power. Each box would typically feature a photocopied image from the film and a text summary. The characteristically silent footage features a male-female scene shot on an indoor set. The visible subtitles, which give a pretty clear indication of what's transpiring onscreen, are as follows:
