A Pornographer

In 2012, in the months following the death of playwright and filmmaker Arch Brown at the age of 76, an unpublished manuscript was discovered while archiving his possessions, a memoir titled A Pornographer. In it, Brown, whose career as a director of sex films stretched from 1967 to 1985, recounts his interviews in the late 1960s and early 1970s with many of the men and women who wanted to star in his sex films—some who did, others who did not. Here, he is all at once receptionist, gopher, casting agent, writer, director, stagehand, cameraman, talent scout, friend, and on-the-spot psychiatrist. You don’t need to have viewed any of Arch Brown’s sex films from this era to appreciate this memoir. In fact, Brown goes out of his way to not mention the titles of any of his films and he only identifies his cast of characters by fictional first names. The result is that A Pornographer is an historical gem, an unexpectedly insightful psychological view of the performers who were drawn to having sex in front of a camera and how and why audiences responded to them.