The Nerve Film Lounge


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The sex was mundane and silent. But from the 1920s to the 1960s, men gathered in Elks lodges and at bachelor parties across the land to clandestinely view stag films — brief, black-and-white depictions of people screwing. A few years ago, filmmaker Ben Meade began collecting these examples of early American porn, and the result is American Stag, a documentary that casts a bemused glance at a cultural phenomenon. American Stag has been gleefully making the film festival rounds, although its subject matter has caused it to be rejected in a few instances, most notably by Austin's high-profile South by Southwest festival — a baffling decision, since the movie is decidedly unporn and shows no actual sex. Meade employs a fun variety of talking heads, including Berkeley film historian Linda Williams (author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"), contrarian radio and TV host Adam Carolla, and FilmThreat.com's Chris Gore. The laughably amateur stag films display a fairly narrow range of male fantasy: the woman calling to get her car repaired ("The Flat Tire," 1939) is actually lying in bed naked! That hitchhiking woman you just picked up ("A Free Ride," 1915) will, with a grin and a shrug, immediately agree to have sex! Here Meade talks about the surprises you can find in other people's old film collections and why a guy in a bear suit is not a good star for a sex film. — Theresa Everline

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How did you start collecting stag films?
I make experimental documentaries, and I like to use other people's home movies. Call it voyeurism. Every film I've done employed found footage. So I'll buy a box of these things at a garage sale or on eBay, and then my wife and I will pop open a bottle of wine and go down to the basement to watch them — there'll be everything from drunk people riding mechanical bulls to parades to whatever. About two years ago I got a box from a guy on eBay, and I put this one reel on — it smelled sort of vinegary, kind of damaged — and it was this couple having sex. And we were like, "What the hell is this?" So I was thinking, wow. Of course it's not Hollywood. And I started wondering how much of this stuff was out there. What we found out through the research was that there were about 1,700 stag films made in the entire world, and more than 1,000 of them were made in the United States.

You mention in the documentary that the French made a lot of them, but they stopped around the 1930s. What happened?
There wasn't a censorship issue there — people said, "This is silly, let's just put them in theaters." Here [in the U.S.] you had to have a runner, which is a guy who had his projector, and loaded it up, and once a month went on the road and hit the VFW halls or whatever. That's what happened here.

How many stag films did you end up with?
Well, we started getting emails from people who were sort of embarrassed — "I don't know who you are, somebody told me you're buying this stuff, and I have this box that belonged to my father, I don't want to know what it is, I want it out of my life." People would just ship me stuff for free. We made this movie for $8,000 — I mean, the entire film. And I acquired over 900 stag films. Some are duplicates, some are more rare than others, some are bad prints, some really suck. Some you don't even know what they are. The thing about stag films, for the most part they had a story line. I became a lot more fascinated with how they were structured narratively. Once the sex starts, it's basically the missionary position then it's over. That's why we could easily do the film without showing any sex.

The documentary includes scenes from one called "New York Honeymoon," in which the couple visits the Empire State Building, Radio City —
And all the words are spelled wrong. It's terrible, terrible.

Which seemed to be one of the more elaborate plots. What is the range of storytelling?
Probably the most ridiculous one is called "Bearcat Goes Wild," which is a guy in a bear suit. It's two women trying to have a lesbian relationship. This is in the '20s, for Christ's sake. They can't because they keep getting pestered by this horny guy in a bear suit. But they don't get very complicated because, you have to understand, brevity is the word.

They're all about ten minutes long, which seems like, um, a convenient amount of time, given the subject matter.
You're shooting a 400-foot reel, so generally you're going to have ten to twelve minutes of film. Eight to nine minutes of that is going to be sex. Really boring sex. Awful, single-camera — like, okay, I get it. The first two to three minutes is the real key. One of my favorites that we used in the film is called "The Dice Game," with these two guys who look like Marines. Continuity-wise, it's pathetic. The women — their glasses are on, their glasses are off, you can see when the director is saying "action." That one is just hilarious.

You got some interesting people to comment on camera.
Chris Gore [of FilmThreat.com] is the godfather of helping independent filmmakers get their films out there. Before he started FilmThreat he was the graphic design artist for Hustler. And he talks about how these stag filmmakers were the first real indie filmmakers. But the most interesting guy in the film for me is Delmar Watson. He's the one that said, "I used to work for the city paper. I was a photographer." He talks about how the same lab that developed his photographs was busted for developing stag films, and how the police department would have the press come down and make them watch the films to say, "Yeah, they were lewd," before destroying them.

The main contradiction, of course, comes from the two academics: Joseph Slade says stag films make the men look silly, while Linda Williams says the women are the butt of the joke. Without the audience seeing the sex, it's impossible for us to judge who's right.
But on the other hand, it makes the audience argue more and talk more about it. They come out and they're disadvantaged because there's no closure. But really, there's this whole game that you play with the MPAA. I can show full-frontal nudity of a woman for up to three minutes total in a feature film, and I can still maintain an R rating. If I show full-frontal nudity of a man, it's sixty seconds. And furthermore, you will get an NC-17 rating if you show an erect penis, except if the penis is urinating. I read all the rules so I could still get an R rating. Still, the South by Southwest scandal actually frightened me at the time, and I was really intimidated. It's bad enough to be in the arts — you're laughed off the playground. There's something wrong with you because you want to be in the arts. Then you have the censorship over something that doesn't even exist in the film! To get kicked out of festivals because sponsors don't want a film about old sex films, about this phenomenon that happened in the United States — and they're saying we're not going to show this film, that's kind of sad. I've done four feature films in five years. We've sold them to the Sundance Channel, we got cable deals. But this film, to get it off the ground, I had to leave the country. It played all over Europe .

Adam Carolla has a funny riff about trying to explain to his son why men would get together and watch sex films. But guys still go see strippers as a group.
Let me just throw this out there. We just came back from the [Three Rivers] film festival in Pittsburgh. We had a layover in Cleveland; our plane was delayed for four hours. There's nothing to do in an airport except drink. So I go into the bar with my wife, and she's the only woman in the bar. There are about seventy-five guys in there, they're all watching the Pittsburgh Steelers game. And I looked at her and said, "This is like a fucking stag film." Look at this — this is about men, and all the women are on the periphery. I'm not knocking my gender, but there's something I just don't get. Joe Slade makes a comment in the film that's really interesting — how back in the 1950s, most men had never seen their wives naked. You know, I like seeing my wife naked. And we're old!

I think it's odd what the word "stag" has come to mean.
Yeah, a male deer. I'm "going stag," I'm going by myself, but what you're really not doing is going by yourself. You're going with a bunch of other guys who are all going by themselves. Somebody asked me, "How did this affect your sex life?" And I said, "Not in a positive way whatsoever." If you watch enough of this stuff — you're watching very ordinary people, sometimes not clean people, doing the nasty — it really tends to distance you from wanting to have a sexual experience.


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