LA Plays Itself (1972) - Fred Halsted

 

 Quote: Shot with an underground art aesthetic of dramatic shadows and non-synchronous sound, Fred Halsted’s LA Plays Itself, about two sexual drifters, captured the raw underbelly of 1970s LA as few films ever have.

Sextool (1975) - Fred Halsted

The last of this loose trilogy is Sextool. This is probably the most complex of Halsted's films, with radical narrative shifts and some of the — still — raunchiest sex scenes in all of non-amteur gay porn. Sextool features the director's trademark faceless machos: a pair of cops who shove their nightstick up a trick 's ass, and a group of sweaty gangbangers who whip, fuck, and fist a cornfed blonde sailor on a bunk bed without a mattress. This scene offers a distillation of Halsted's world-view. The ruthless abuse of the neatly dressed, boyish, sweet-faced sailor is the director's most pointed assault on everything wholesome that he hated in postwar American culture. The sailor-boy's enthusiastic acceptance of his abuse is Halsted's proof that the mindless "goodness" and optimism of the rising middle class deserved to be attacked, and he does it with gusto. Like the sailor, Joey Yale appears as a too-willing bottom, eagerly embracing the authentic abuse that the real Fred Halsted dishes out. Sadly, the culture wasn't as accommodating as Yale; these films were censored and remain difficult, and in the case of Sextool, virtually impossible to see (much less own) even today outside rare cinematheque and museum screenings.

The Sex Garage (1972) - Fred Halsted

Fred Halsted, S&M aficionado and XXX film actor, emerged as a director rivaling Kenneth Anger in the genre of gay art-erotica. L.A. Plays Itself (1972) was his take on the same territory as Anger's Scorpio Rising. When it opened at the 55th Street Playhouse, doubled billed with his Sex Garage, it was a case of see-it-now, or now you don't. The police shut it down - not for the notorious fisting vignette that climaxes L.A. Plays Itself (which is cut from the video versions), but for a scene in which a guy gets it on with his motorcycle.