Box Office Prophets: Doris Wishman: An Appreciation

Doris Wishman: An Appreciation

August 20, 2002

This picture is dedicated to Russ Meyer.

Doris Wishman is rumored to once have said, "When I die, I'll direct movies in Hell". If such is true then the viewers down at the Ninth Circle Cineplex should consider themselves lucky, since it's probable that the films now showing for all eternity on those infernal screens likely have far more in common with your average Michael Bay blockbuster than the "nudie cuties" and assorted sex films upon which this director's reputation is based. Over a lengthy career that spanned some 40 years, this prolific woman churned out a series of 28 films (the shooting of her final film, Each Time I Kill, was mostly done and the project will be finished as requested by the filmmaker) that run the sexploitation gamut from nudist camp picture to soft-core roughie to straight-ahead porn to sexy spy thriller to transsexual docudrama. Often overlooked in serious historical discussions about female directors due to the prurient nature of most of her work, as we take stock of her life at the time of her passing, it should be recognized that in truth, her output represents a remarkable independent contribution to a cinema history too often dominated by men.

A true auteur, Wishman wrote, produced and directed nearly all of the films she made, beginning with the 1960 naturist piece Hideout in the Sun. Having started in the distribution end of the film business, she came to production after the death of her first husband, and with the concurrent relaxation of the laws concerning the onscreen depiction of the human body au naturel, turned first to the now-forgotten genre of the nudist camp film. What followed was a series of aimlessly fun T & A romps featuring naked-as-a-jaybird volleyball playing and innocent hot-sun frolicking, though the filmmaker offered more unique plots than was usual in this low-budget, blue-movie world. A prime example is 1962's Nude on the Moon, in which some amateur astronauts voyage to the moon only to happily find it populated with beautiful and topless space maidens.

When the artless naïveté of these early skin-flicks became unprofitable, the artist then began to give her exploitation set pieces a grittier edge more in tune with the darker worldview of the post-Texas School Book Depository years. With lurid titles like Bad Girls Go to Hell, A Taste of Her Flesh and Too Much Too Often, these motion pictures reflect the seedier tastes of the grind-house audiences of the time. Though she also later dabbled some in more pornographic ventures, Wishman's own tastes did not really run to hardcore and by the 1970s she had branched out into spy thrillers with a pair of films starring the absurdly well-endowed and amazingly untalented actress Chesty Morgan, a Polish stripper who was so uncooperative on the set that she was branded a monster by the filmmaker. After the mid-'70s, however, work slowed for this female film pioneer, though she did manage to fit in a pseudo-documentary gender-hash film (Let Me Die a Woman), a Samantha Fox slasher sex film that was completed even though a laboratory accident destroyed most of the original negative (A Night to Dismember) and the provocatively-titled Dildo Heaven over the last 20 or so years of her life. In addition, with the supposed future posthumous release of the aforementioned 2002 grand finale Each Time I Kill, we'll have one last addition to the Doris Wishman canon to enjoy.

Hopefully, this piece will retain all the hallmarks of the filmmaker's singular and manifestly unprofessional mode of direction. Working on brutally small, shoestring budgets, Wishman utilized a series of cheapie techniques to get her films made, including unprofessional actors, handheld camerawork, the eschewing of synched dialogue and the camouflaging of this with errant static shots of extraneous props. Often baffling in its execution and seemingly compositionally challenged at times, this incomparable style is nothing if not the expression of an individual artist immersed in a medium she both loves and is slave to. While the unkind might tag her movie yield as ineptly made, the films undeniably exude a certain romance for the form that sometimes transcends the shoddy limitations of the quickie sex film, and it's this honest but eccentric feel that allows her output to rise above the morass of standard sexploitation fare.

With the departure of Doris Wishman from our mortal plane this past week, one of the historically seminal figures of truly independent female film has vanished from the world. Operating in a borderline milieu chauvinistically lorded over by men, this fiercely opinionated composer of trashy-yet-heartfelt sex flicks has left us with her contribution to screen posterity slightly neglected by the mainstream but certainly assured to the enthusiast. For four decades she created productions for the adults-only circuit and distinguished herself from the general sleaze crowd with the distinctive oddball touches she brought to her somewhat impure craft. During interviews she was sometimes fond of summing up her outré output in tagline form by saying that her movies were made with such care that they were "not Eastman Color but Wishman blood", and that this was all that mattered. Luckily for the more adventurous aficionados of the art form, she couldn't have been more right.