What do you give the King of Sodom on his birthday?

The following is an excerpt from “Beautiful Downtown Sodom” by Sam Staggs, former editor of the gay magazines Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy. Read the book free at sstaggs.substack.com

You give him a temple prostitute, of course.

Your dose of fabulosi-TEA

Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.

Daily

Weekly

That’s the gift of choice in Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days, an adult film produced and directed by Jim and Artie Mitchell in 1975. It boasted one of the largest porn-film budgets up to that time: a rumored $500,000. (Deep Throat, three years earlier, reportedly cost a mere $22,500 plus an additional $25,000 for music–the latter a most unnecessary add-on.)

In 1972, the Mitchell brothers had produced and directed Behind the Green Door, a pioneering work made for $60,000 that is said to have eventually grossed over fifty million–a highly doubtful figure. Such numbers are wildly inflated, and approximate at best owing to Mafia involvement in distribution and to the sub rosa nature of the genre. In creative bookkeeping, the erotic-film industry has always outpaced the Hollywood studios. 

Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door, along with The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976), and a few other heterosexual titles launched the phenomenon known as the Golden Age of Porn. That grandiose designation was bestowed by critics who, as if wearing latex gloves, probed for “artistic merit” and “socially redeeming content”–liberal versions of fundamentalist cant, and equally absurd. Discussing these films, or others made for glandular stimulation, in terms of cinematic artistry is like extolling Duck Dynasty or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo as finely textured, deeply felt explorations of changing mores in the New South.

Those same eager critics typically failed to point out that these heterosexual titles were preceded by Boys in the Sand (1971), directed by Wakefield Poole and starring Casey Donovan. This was also the first gay porn film to include credits and to be reviewed in Variety.

With millions in the bank, Jim and Artie Mitchell had the porno world at their feet–or at least the straight market segment. Unfortunately, they took seriously those media commentators who found artistic merit in their early work. The Mitchells decided their oeuvre must be fully fleshed out aesthetically as well as literally.

But Aristotle’s Poetics overlooked the rules of erotic raunch. Nor have latter-day theorists picked up the slack. If such a document existed, a primary axiom might relate to the three unities of triple X: (1) Confine the setting of erotica to the present day; (2) employ a minimum of plot and dialogue; and (3) avoid the use of costumes, props, animals, architecture, voice-over narration, vegetables, and fancy camera work.

If the Mitchell brothers had possessed such guidelines, their opus might have parodied a contemporary text rather than the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, for instance, a bestselling novel in 1970, or Ball Four, a baseball yarn that same year. Had they wished to do a suggestive spoof of a current movie, they had such early-70s hits as Five Easy Pieces, The French Connection, even Jaws to pick from.

Instead they chose the biblical book of Genesis, Chapter 19–the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, sin cities supposedly as gay as Key West and Provincetown. The Mitchells’ first mistake: their film was bisexual, and leaned heavily toward straight turn-on. Except that it was laughably unerotic.  

It must have seemed hilarious in the planning stages: Sodom, sheep, the hip-swinging daughters of Lot, fresh-squeezed olive oil as lube, bananas, zucchini, and a chimpanzee in a space ship playing God. “Groovy, man,” we can imagine one Mitchell brother drawling to the other, as time stands still in their psychedelic universe.

Soon, pages of script are blowing in the wind as cast and crew do their own thing, fueled by cocaine and mellowed by weed and magic mushrooms. “If it feels good do it” must have resounded on the shoot more often than “Roll ’em” and “Cut!” and “Let’s rehearse that scene again and do another take.”

Filmed on a ranch in Livermore Valley, a mountainous, rocky area southeast of the San Francisco Bay Area, the movie opens with a title card: “Near Sodom, 1980 B.C.” A stentorian narrator intones, “Spacebusters, guardians of a shrinking universe, travel through time and space, policing the galaxies to insure a just and lasting peace. This is the starship Tarzania, en route to earth to rid the universe of an old archenemy, gonococcus sexualis.”

In command of the spaceship is that ribald chimp playing God. He calls down to Abraham in a John Wayne voice, “You and all your men children must be circumcised.”

Abraham: “What is circumcised?”

God: “Hack some hide off the end of your pecker.”

The ceremony comes close to disaster, since there is no mohel and Abraham is not handy with a knife. Soon Lot’s herdsmen and Abraham’s mix it up in a knock-down-drag-out fight. Separation is immanent. Cut to Lot and Abraham, bearded and berobed on a hill in the desert.

Lot: “Which has the best grazing land?”

Abraham: “The Jordan Valley, asshole.”

Meanwhile, a soldier of Sodom is penetrating one of Lot’s daughters in a gnarled olive tree. “You’re hurting me!” she squeals. “Use more olive oil.”

Hilarious? Hardly. Even a slow Saturday Night Live would produce more laughs.

Porn actors should never be allowed to speak except for the limited vocabulary inherent in their trade. The Mitchell brothers believed the opposite. Indeed, their film is so chatty that the orgy scenes start up only after an hour of druggy story line. King Bera of Sodom, a Charles Manson lookalike, has forbidden traditional sexual intercourse owing to his own impotence — surely an odd premise in a porn film. Sodomy, on the other hand, is encouraged.

Only at great festivals can more familiar lovemaking take place, and even then “seed” must be donated to Anu, the god of Sodom. In charge of this offering is an actor who plays the Seed Catcher, a profession that elsewhere might be related to agribusiness. Lot, meanwhile, having taken up residence in the city, sets up a kiosk where he sells dildos, which he naively mistakes for “idols.”

The orgies, when they finally commence, look antiquarian to jaded eyes of the twenty-first century. Redolent of bygone arousal, they now seem as quaint as naughty French postcards of the Belle Epoque. Finally, all passion spent and seed properly rendered to Anu, word comes from the simian space ship: the city will be nuked. The reason: “Because they’re a bunch of liberal assholes.”

Did anyone bring a Bible to the set? Unlikely, though someone must have remembered, or misremembered, parts of the story from Sunday school.

“You must not look back at Sodom,” warns this Northern California Abraham. Lot’s intrepid wife turns. “You see, nothing happened,” she declares just as a mushroom cloud envelops the city. Next shot: Lot’s wife, a white salt silhouette, fills the frame.

Like all other filmmakers who have taken on Sodom and Gomorrah, the Mitchells omit the couplings of Lot and his daughters–surely the ideal starting place in a story like this. And it’s right there in the Bible, in Genesis 19. After Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, Lot’s two nubile daughters ply him with wine, then take turns in his bed. Why? Because they believe all other men have been annihilated, and they must repopulate the earth! Nine months later, each daughter bears a son. These boys are Lot’s sons and his grandsons, a line echoed by Faye Dunaway at the end of Chinatown: “She’s my sister and my daughter!”

Despite its attempted lavishness, Sodom and Gomorrah: The Last Seven Days bombed as fatally as the cities of its title. Variety, reviewing it in 1976, reported good box office in California and New York. But nowhere else. The Mitchells had overspent, eventually shooting twenty-seven hours of film. Reduced to ninety-nine minutes in the release print, it still amounts to limp, burnt-out porn.

The brothers were also powerless against the Mafia, which made bootleg copies of this one and of other X-rated films for exhibition in their own heavily protected urban theatres.

Then, too, obscenity prosecutions were still common, even in such cities as San Francisco. Dianne Feinstein, mayor from 1978 to 1988, hounded the Mitchell brothers and their O’Farrell Theatre, where adult films were shown and later live sex shows were staged.

At her instigation, the police raided the O’Farrell and closed down the movie. Sensing a conservative wolf under the mayor’s liberal disguise, the Mitchells posted this sign on the theatre marquee: “For Show Times, Call Mayor Feinstein at 558-3456”–her home number at the time.

Feinstein was only gay-friendly and progressive when it furthered her career agenda. Her disguise often slipped. In 2017, she told a reporter from the right-wing Washington Times, “I believe Trump can be a good president.” That paper, incidentally, was founded in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon, a deranged cult leader who claimed he was the Messiah and the second incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The Mitchells, like so many others, developed a dependence on drugs. Then, too, whatever their innovations in tearing down the walls of American censorship, by the 1980s their product was obsolete. Video recordings brought erotica to any TV monitor.

By 1990, Jim Mitchell had ended his drug use. Not so Artie, who had no wish for sobriety. The brothers drifted apart. On the night of February 27, 1991, Jim went to Artie’s house in Corte Madera on what he later described as an “intervention.” Supposedly, his mission was to convince his brother to enter a drug rehab program. His method of persuasion, however, was highly provocative. He slashed the tires on Artie’s car, kicked in the front door of the house, and crashed in with rifle and pistol. A confrontation ensued, and while Artie’s girlfriend was on the phone to police, Jim shot his brother dead.

Convicted of voluntary manslaughter, Jim Mitchell was sentenced to six years in prison. Reportedly a model inmate, he was released in 1997 after serving three years. He died in 2007, and was buried in Lodi, California, beside his brother.

Sam Staggs is the author of eight books, including All About “All About Eve”: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made (2000); Close-up on “Sunset Boulevard” (2002); When Blanche Met Brando: The Scandalous Story of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (2005); Born to Be Hurt: The Untold Story of “Imitation of Life” (2009); and Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High Society, Hollywood, the Press, and the World (2012), all published by St. Martin’s and all in print.

His latest book, Finding Zsa Zsa: The Gabors Behind the Legend, was published in 2019 by Kensington Books. (Audio version read by the actor Paul Boehmer for Blackstone Audio.) This biography has been optioned by Amy Sherman-Palladino, writer/producer/director of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, for a film or miniseries. (Blackstone has recently brought out All About “All About Eve” and Close-up on “Sunset Boulevard” on audio.)

Staggs’s work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Movie Writing 2001 and Vanity Fair’s Tales of Hollywood (2009). His earlier journalism appeared in Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Opera News, Publishers Weekly, New York, Artnews, and a number of travel magazines.