Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema From the Victorian Age to the VCR
Dave Thompson
350 pages
Publisher: Ecw Press; illustrated edition edition (September 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1550227912
In the 1920s they were called stags, smokes, or blue movies; today it's adult films. But until now, apart from brief summaries in film histories and scholarly articles, there has been no complete history of the pornographic film industry. That gap is filled by this lively and insightful book that provides commentary on individual movies and traces the evolution of film styles and storylines through nearly a century of X-rated material. All the research for the book is based on viewings of the movies—many of the oldest are now archived on DVDs—and on interviews with living actors and producers. Tracing an arc from the masks and dim lighting of the earliest days to the realism and absence of trick photography in the 1920s and 1930s, the account then ponders the obsession with close-ups of body parts in later decades. The overview ends in the late 1970s, when the advent of home videos changed adult entertainment completely.

Sex is a highly-designed coffee table book written by Madonna with photographs by Steven Meisel Studio and film frames shot by Fabien Baron, released October 21, 1992 by Warner Books. The book was released by Madonna as an accompaniment to her fifth studio album Erotica, which was released a day earlier (October 20, 1992). The extremely controversial book featured strong adult content and softcore pornographic photographs depicting simulations of sexual acts, which included lesbianism, male homosexuality, sadomasochism, anilingus, and rape. Madonna wrote all of the erotica in the book as a character named Mistress Dita, inspired by the silent film actress Dita Parlo.

Featured in the book, aside from unknown faces, are model Naomi Campbell, actress Isabella Rossellini, rappers Big Daddy Kane and Vanilla Ice, gay porn star Joey Stefano, actor Udo Kier, the European socialite Tatiana von Furstenberg, and nightclub owner Ingrid Casares. For the release Madonna gave a party at New York City's Industria Superstudio, for which she attended dressed as Little Bo Peep with a stuffed toy lamb.