The reasoning behind this was a bit purist, but also practical. Most of the films are hardcore, but a few are soft and one or two are more pure documentary than anything else. So I’d say nearly a year altogether.Ĥ8 HILLS What were your parameters, including historical, for what you would and would not use?ĮVAN PURCHELL I only used titles that were shot on film and-with two small exceptions-played theatrically. Editing took about four or five months, and I toyed around with it a bunch in the months following that first screening. So much of the academic writing about these films centers on their verite qualities and their value as ‘documentary’-I figured that if I had these hundreds of hours of documentary footage at my disposal, then I should be able to reconstruct a day in the life and see what that might look like reflected through the fantasy that these films frequently indulge in. I think the idea was to make a mix of clips from a bunch of different films that would run on a loop, but I wanted to do something that people wouldn’t be able to immediately dismiss as just ‘old porn’: I wanted to challenge their preconceptions of the genre and show its importance in a way that was fun and engaging. But it’s here, right now, in the intro that I’ll mention the existence of Edgar Allen Poe porn (Peter de Rome’s The Destroying Angel) and note than no-one other than Bruce Vilanch wrote the script and did sultry voice-over for an X-rated vampire flick (1983’s wonderfully-titled Gayracula).Ĥ8 HILLS How did the idea behind Ask Any Buddy take form, and how long did it take you to create the movie?ĮVAN PURCHELL I was approached by the programmers of the Austin-based Contrast Film Festival to put together something for a mixed-media event that they were going to be doing for last year’s festival. You’ll soon hear about about the hardcore cousin of Hellraiser. It is long, but like Ask Any Buddy, it has been edited.
#Full length vintage gay movies movie#
(Interested parties may inquire privately via Purchell’s personal Instagram as to the state of the movie’s release.) This interview with the Austin, Texas-based man behind the movie covers heady terrain while also allowing for fun. Needless to say, Ask Any Buddy’s future is in a state of limbo, to the point that it appears valuable if not urgent to honor the impetus of Purchell’s project by sharing it with readers and potential audiences. Purchell performs a magic trick of sorts, not only rescuing porn from decay but bringing it out of the home video and internet realm into public experience. In a sense, this crossover potential harkens back to-or brilliantly mirrors-the communal aspect of the early commercial porn that it is built from. When Ask Any Buddy was picked up, as it were, by a popular genre movie distributor early this year, its commercial prospects brightened considerably, moving beyond personal pet project or intellectual curio status into the prospect of being seen by large audiences at film festivals and daring movie theaters around the world. Not only is it an intensive archival work, there is something innovative or pioneering to its formal approach to relating a fictional story-and a nonfiction history-without relying on voice-over. In general, such meta-projects tend to be long and lugubrious, but Ask Any Buddy clocks in at a brisk, provocative, humorous, informative and yes, graphically sexy 77 minutes. More recently, Ask Any Buddy is also the name of en epic feature film by Purchell that combines dozens of gay porn movies from the late ‘60s through mid ’80s into one grand narrative. Online it’s the name of a popular Instagram account where devoted archivist Evan Purchell shares promotional materials for vintage gay pornography, conveying historical information through the visual hook of alluring imagery.
But there’s another element at play, one that foregrounds non-monogamy-the value of sexuality as a facet of friendship, and vice versa.Īsk Any Buddy the project has two forms. On its surface, it brings up the idea of acquiring knowledge or answers through communication with friends. As titles go, Ask Any Buddy is evocative.