The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 420

Duke, no slouch in spite of his grammar, decides to dress up Fanny as the Princess, steer her toward the weed tycoon and let nature take its course. But the stable hand, rebuffed by Fanny now that she is practicing to be royalty, gets drunk in the very inn where the American is staying and blabs the whole story. Whereupon but stay, gentle reader. Suffice it to say the second half of the picture is equal to the standards of the first half. It's quite a pity, in a way, because the producers of the film seem to have gone to considerable effort and expense to get the background settings and costumes just right; the color photography is well above the norm for the field.

This leads to a central point. If Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley, minus the seven or eight minutes of frankly sexual material, were previewed and exhibited like an ordinary film, it would rot in its can. Critics would clobber it senseless; audiences would hoot it off the screen. (One good example of this happened at a theater showing a serious picture about Lenny Bruce. Coming attractions for a film called Crave Your Body, playing at another theater in the same chain, aroused great howls of laughter from the audience.

But I'm sure that nobody laughs when they come to see Crave Your Body they're all so bound up in the sexiness of what they're doing that their sense of the ridiculous deserts them at the door.) Are seven or eight minutes of sex worth the other 60 or 70 of painfully amateur boredom? Somebody must think sothe theaters and distributors are making money. As for the customers well, there's one being born this very minute. PART TWO: People and Places The theaters where girlie films are shown range from the moderate comforts of the Paris, next door to on Santa Monica, to drab downtown houses. In this case, drabness of surroundings does not equal blueness of films-all theaters are subject to the same laws and the ones with the grimiest decor show the cheapest, oldest and fuzziest films. Cluny's Movies, on Alvarado, shows what appear to be blown-up 8 mm.

mail order films (made for home viewing), so that the girls look like they're doing their thing underwater. At least at the Cluny the price is right: $1.50 for a couple of hours of what is essentially a low grade girlie magazine come to pseudo-life. The Park, down the block, is SO cents up the scale. It has what it cleverly calls its "Little GAL-lery Last Six Rows on the Left for Ladies Only." (Most theaters don't cater to single ladies at all.) It was here that I saw Hot Bed, written by Big Daddy Epstein III. Other theaters on about this level include the Vista, on Sunset; the Apollo Arts, on Hollywood; the Monica, down from the Paris.

In the dark, it's hard to tell them apart The one thing most of the theaters have in common at all hours is a marked lack of audience. At no time did I count more than 30 or 40 customers, all male and all seemingly bored by what they had paid to see. Everybody sat far apart, few even shared the same row, and nobody looked at anybody else maybe for fear of recognizing a friend or business associate. Lots of guys got up to leave right in the middle of a film; I found myself wondering how they remembered where they came in. The only theater which had anything like a full house was the newly-opened Paris Penthouse, home of that keyclub which excludes minors and snoopers.

There, at 4 in the afternoon, almost all of the 100-odd seats were filled. But, despite the management's claims that "something a little better" would be shown, all I saw was the same old parade of flesh and feather dusters. Ron Renn, the new manager of the Paris, is a young man who learned his trade working for Playboy Enterprises and who considers the girlie film field "a go-go business" which he is happy to be a part of He says that his audience is made up largely of regular customers who drop in once a week and pay $3.00 to see such attractions as Bevy of Beauties Week So and The Original Candy Ban No Cameras Allowed in Theater. "We get quite a lot of couples, too especially on the weekends." Joyce, the attractive blonde ticket seller at the Paris, also enjoys her work in spite of the occasional customer who expects her to carry on the on-screen tradition after the show is over. "It sure beats working in one of those all-night movies on Hollywood Boulevard.

At least you don't have to put up with kids or crazy old ladies. You get a nice class of customer here mostly respectable business men. They all say hello when they come in. Funny, though you don't often see them go out. I guess a lot of them use the back door." PART THREE: A Pillar of the Trade Edward E.

Paramore III has offices in the Playboy Building on the Sunset Strip. On the directory downstairs are the following listings for his suite: Art Films International, Film Distributors Film World Distributors Mondo Films, Pacific Distributing Park River Enterprises, Rossmore Film Distributors, Star Products, Triumph Productions and Unique Productions. The first person I saw when I walked into the suite was Little Jack Little, one of the stars of girlie classics. I complimented him on his work and was shown into Ted Paramore's office, a richly furnished room with a fine view of the Hollywood Hills. Paramore is a short, sprightly, cigar-smoking man in his mid-thirties who has been selling sex through feature films and mail order ever since he left UCLA in 1954.

His father is a screenwriter, one of the founders of the Screenwriters Guild, and Ted's ambition was to be a writer, too. "My father said give it a try, but get yourself a trade first So this is my trade. It's not exactly what he had in mind, naturally, but it's a good business. I pay my bills regularly and my bank loves me. It's also almost a foolproof way of getting into the film business.

You know your market, you know you're going to get a guaranteed return. Your risk factor is very small. "When you start to make a sex exploitation feature, you know that there is a hard core group of theaters, maybe 150 across the country, that will take this kind of picture no matter how bad it is. And if you make something worthwhile, you may get lucky and break into an art house or a commercial run. A Woman is a good recent example of this it's doing fabulous business in legitimate theaters." Paramore's biggest hit was Not Tonight, Henry a Shnook in Paradise feature which was rocketed to success by a court case and a layout in Playboy.

"We broke the house record at the Monica the first week we opened," Paramore says. "The second week the police came in and arrested the theater owner. We went to trial in Beverly Hills in January, 1961. The jury, who had seen a special screening of the film and had screamed with laughter, stayed out 10 minutes and brought back a verdict of not guilty. When we reopened at the Monica, which has only 640 seats, we did $14,000 worth of business the first week better than any other picture in Los Angeles except for Ben Hur and Exodus.

There was even a traffic alert on Santa Monica Boulevard it was beautiful." None of his feature films has hit the big time since. Pictures like The Girl With the Angry Eyes and The Agony of Love both of which he calls trash make a steady profit but others in which he has tried to do something out of the ordinary haven't come off. And not long after Henry he dropped two years of his life and $10,000 of his own money trying to make a serious, legitimate film which never got off the ground. Luckily, his mail order business continued to thrive. Paramore plans to make a series of short, two-reel color and costume dramas based on literary classics know Boccaccio, things like and then later this year to start another serious picture.

He says it is too early to discuss this project in any detail, although he does plan to spend $40,000 on it twice as much as the usual budget for a sexploitation film. (Are you listening, Charles Feldman of Casino Royale fame?) The average feature film from the Paramore stables takes five months from conception to distribution five to seven days of which is for actual shooting. The girls get $100 a day, but they don't work every day. Finding good-looking girls who can go through the motions of acting is a problem; often their voices have to be dubbed in later by real actresses. Just how far to go in their films is something which has been concerning sex exploiters for a long time.

You can get away with a lot more in Los Angeles than you can in New York, for example, and with a lot more in San Francisco than in Los Angeles. Theaters like the Hub and the Peerless in San Francisco's Market Street area show things that would have the LAPD on the scene in minutes. "Not long ago," Paramore says, "a group of San Diego film producers brought some of their stuff up here to show. It was too rough for this town; the police told them to knock off. "The law here is finally quite explicit about what you can do and what you can't you've got a kind of guideline set down.

And the people who are intelligent in this business who don't want to break any laws anyway now have something to stick to." Finally, I asked Paramore if he had any regrets about his chosen field of endeavor. "I regret it for one reason I don't believe that this business taxes a man's ability the way it should be taxed. You don't have to exercise your creativity, your agressiveness, your ingenuity, your intelligence to the extent that I think you should. It's been a constant disturbance to me. What I do is fairly easy, I'm a good businessman, I make good money.

But in a way I feel that it's a child's business not really for adults at all. Mind you, there are people in this town who talk big movie deals all day and all night and who are still bums. I'd rather run my business which is legal and run like a business even if it isn't the best business in the world than be like them. What I do, I present honestly; I'm not kidding myself." As I was leaving, Paramore handed me one of his mail order brochures. "Extra! Extra! Extra! WOULD YOU BELIEVE Barbara Martine now has her own SECRET AGENTS? Barbara Martine Agent OOSex! And look what she has UNCOVERED just for you I hurried home to my couch and thoughts of Harriet Sokolow.

I got there just in time. 21.