BARDCORE AND MORE

By Jon

Does literary porn as a film genre exist? It did but faded out in the first decade of the the new century. There were some Bardcore or Shakesploitation films. There were also adaptations of classic works of literature.
Why Shakespeare? The best films were trying to reach the female and couples market. Nina Hartley said in 2001,

By adding Shakespeare to anything you automatically class it up. Certainly it helps to get you onto Cable.

A great idea but do porn stars and the Bard’s works fit well together.
In 2004 Kirsten Price, Nautica Thorn, Sasha Knox, and Chanel St. James  appeared on Fox TV’s Reality Show My Bare Lady. They were sent to London’s most prestigious acting school to prove they could act. Mr Wavetheory wrote on his blog:

The best part of the pilot is when the girls are asked to do “Romeo and Juliet”. One girl had never heard of it, another thought it was written by a woman while another simply shrugs, “Reading books is very time-consuming

He added that they could have done Shakespeare but couldn’t do Shakespeare.
Funnily enough there have been more adaptations of Romeo and Juliet than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. The earliest known example of Bardcore is Peter Perry Jr’s The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet.(1969). The tragedy was turned into a corny comedy with sex scenes. It’s tag-lined as  Winner Best Erotic Film Cannes Film Festival. There never was such a prize. Oh! It’s a joke. Ha. Ha.
Lloyd Kaufman’s Tromeo and Juliet (1996) has Romeo masturbating  to an interactive CD-Rom called As You Lick It. Juliet calls 1-900-FUL-STAF for phone sex. Romeo appears again as Love Master of the Women’s Dorm in the extras offered with Troma’s Shakespeare In….and Out. The hero is Rich Longfellow whose dream is to play Hamlet with the Royal Shakespearean Company but ends up in the adult industry.
What better place than a theater for a sexy romp. A company preparing a production of Romeo and Juliet is the basis for the plots of three films. Paul Thomas  made Romeo and Juliet 1 and 2 (1988) . The first starred  Bardcore’s answer to Judi Dench, Nina Hartley.
Ron Savant’s Shakespeare Revealed (2002) has Renne La Rue required to play Juliet in the nude. During the film she ‘sheds stage fright, clothes and her inhibitions…’ In her final scene with Michael J Coxx they go as one reviewer noted from making the two backed beast to five legged aardvarking. The curious should consult the Shakespeare Compendium of Sexual Positions.
Sam Abdul’s Romeo and Julian A Love Story (1993) is a gay take on the play. It was also a musical. Franco Lo Cascio’s Hamlet For the Love  of Ophelia (1995) opens with the cast singing To Fuck or Not to Fuck. The film is , after all, a ‘slapstick comedy with vulgar dialogue mixed with XXX sex’. The cast dance to the same song  at the end.
Roman Polanski made a soft core version of Macbeth (1971) for Playboy. It included topless witches and a naked,sleepwalking Lady Macbeth played by Francesca Annis. You can imagine that things heat up a bit when Kylie Ireland gets the part and Lady Macbeth becomes insatiable.
Antoni Passolini and Stuart Canterbury moved the setting of the Scottish play to Budapest for their film In the Flesh (1998). It’s set in a ‘retro-future world of castles and cars’. There’s even some ‘poorly integrated ‘ Shakespeare quotes. The sex is European Gonzo at it’s finest with the highlight being a seven person table orgy. One reviewer reckoned there were four gallons of cum dispensed.
Stuart Canterbury hadn’t had his fill of the bard. He made A Midsummer Night’s Cream in 2000.It was tag-lined ,’What horny fools these mortals be’. Richard Burt claimed it was ‘apparently the first porn film to take much of it’s script from Shakespeare”s text.’ More of this English Lit professor in a moment.
Nina Hartley plays Titania Queen of the Faeries. (It isn’t a typo ; It’s spelled like this because this is Shakespeare.) She gets to shag Kyle Stone who plays Bottom. I’m sure you’ll remember in the original play he’d been turned into an ass so he’s wearing an ass’s head. He stayed so in character that he brayed loudly when he came. This won a round of applause from the crew.
What better though than someone spying on a couple bonking. Here it’s Puck that watches them fuck. Puck is played by Mckayla. She’s disguised with a beard and a hairy chest. As Puck heats up she changes her man wand by magic into a pussy to better pleasure herself. Whilst historical purists might not approve the use of condoms it would get a gold star from CalOsha.
Where would we be without spin offs and bad word play? There was Medieval Mischief A Midsummer Knight’s Cream (2006) and Puck A Midsummer Night’s Debauchery (2003). There’s a gay version ,Midsummer’s Night Dream (2001).It should have been tag-lined The Bard Goes Bare-backing.

Richard Burt teaches literature at Amherst. He was one of a handful of professors who wanted to introduce porn studies into the university curriculum in the late 90′s. His specialty is Bardcore. He liked The Taming of the Screw (1997). This was Jim Power’s gonzo remake of I’m sure you can guess which play. Burt himself wanted to do Shrew You , the first lesbian Bardcore. It was as far as I know never made. It was another play that finally served as inspiration.
Joe D’Amato’s Othello 2000 (1997) was a modern reworking of one of the Bard’s plays. Burt announced in 2002 that he had written a script called Hotel O He wanted to give Shakespeare’s tragedy a modern comic twist. (Sounds familiar.).The film made in the same year is set in a seedy motel with a desk clerk named  Willie who scribbles with a quill pen .It had Nina Hartley and Lexington Steele’s first scene together. This film and it’s sequel were probably the only porn to to be penned by a professor of literature. The university wasn’t happy about his foray into the adult industry and he doesn’t seem to have written any more scripts.

Bill Deresiewicz writing recently in the Huffington Post cited several great authors including Shakespeare that would never get the porn treatment. He should have done a little more research. He was wondering why Jane Austen and her novels had been the subject of recent attention  from writers in genres far from her own.
She appears as a vampire in Jane Bites Back. There’s also Emma and the Vampires and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You’ ll soon be able to enjoy Pride and Prejudice:Hidden Lusts.The author, Mitzi Szereto, wasn’t the first to see the sexual potential of P and P. On The Other Austen blog there’s a very funny clip called Porn and Penetration.

http://theotherausten.tumblr.com/post/4381885249/warning-if-the-title-jane-austens-porn-and

Now what has porn done with classic works of literature.

Nina Hartley was in The Erotic Adventures of the Three Musketeers (2000). I wonder what Alexander Dumas would have thought of Chi Chi Larue as the French king. Allessandro del Mar  offered us Robinson Crusoe On Sin Island (2005) with Sylvia Saint. and a host of East European lovelies. It’s apt that the real Robinson,Alexander Selkirk , sailed from the English port of Cockermouth. Alice in Wonderland has been the inspiration for several porn moves and at least two porn cartoons. When I came across Oliver Twisted  I thought I’d finally found Dickens porn but alas it was a slasher movie.
Pop culture  now serves as an inspiration for porn. The industry seems happier parodying TV Shows and mainstream films . The same values apply though as they did in the best literary porn. High production values and well crafted scripts. These of course would mean nothing without a quality cast.

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