Doris Wishman, From B to Z

The title of this post about sexploitation director Doris Wishman (1914-2004) arises from the fact that I’ve seen her second film Nude on the Moon (1961), and her last film, the posthumously released Each Time I Kill (2007). My ex-girlfriend had quote a good role in the latter film, which also featured cameos by John Waters and Fred Schneider of the B-5s, which is how I first heard about Wishman. She was one of those “legends” few have heard of, but through the efforts of Something Weird Video, and various critics and film festivals she gradually gathered a reputation as “The Queen of Sexploitation” and “The Greatest Female Exploitation Film Director in History.” Of course, B-Z might also refer to the grades of films she operated in. Neither “Top of the Bill” nor “Top of the Line” could be described as her scene.

Wishman was the daughter of Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants and raised in the Bronx. In her younger years she had done some acting and worked for movie producers like her cousin Max Rosenberg, co-founder of Amicus Pictures; and Joseph E. Levine, founder of Embassy Pictures. Both men made and distributed films that ranged from shlocky exploitation to quite legit mainstream successes. Wishman’s oeuvre makes either one of them look like Cecil B. DeMille. After her husband died in 1958, Wishman borrowed $10,000 from her sister and made Hideout in the Sun (1960). The film took advantage of the fact that New York State had recently made a landmark court decision that ruled that films shot at nudists camps were legal to produce, distribute, and exhibit. The rationale was that it was documentary, no different than a film an anthropologist might make of a primitive tribe. Believe or not, this was the beginning of the slippery slope that would lead to porn within a few short years.

Nude on the Moon (1961), her second movie, ran afoul of the law by actually telling a story in which astronauts visit the moon, which turns out to be…a nudist colony, complete with topless girls playing beach ball. The Criterion Channel recently made the film available and this is how I was able to check it out. Shot on location in Florida, it’s very much in that Kennedy era, space race spirit, much like Coney Island’s Astroland. A good bit of is clearly shot in someone’s garage. Another chunk (the moon) is at some park or botanical garden. (It looks exactly like earth). There is not a lot of forward momentum, plotwise, but it is colorful and pretty to look at, and is a wonderful time capsule of its era.

Diary of a Nudist (1961) dutifully returned to a literal nudist camp setting, but then Wishman got really smart and cast burlesque legend Blaze Starr in her next picture, Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962). Here she was following the letter of the law, while managing to cast a marquee name in the lead part. She continued to turn out movies at the rate of two a year throughout the sixties gradually amping up the spice element from nudism to soft-core. In the mid ’70s she worked with her two best known actresses, Chesty Morgan (named for her 73 inch breasts) in the campy Deadly Weapons (1973) and Double Agent 73 (1974); and Annie Sprinkle in the hardcore pictures Satan Was a Lady (1975) and Come With Me, My Love (1976).

Let Me Die a Woman (1978) was a semi-documentary about the trans experience, very much in the Ed Wood tradition. In 1983 she stretched in new directions with the gory horror film A Night to Dismember. In 1994 John Waters used scenes from Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 in Serial Mom. Wishman’s last completed film was Dildo Heaven. She was working on the murder comedy Each Time I Kill at the time of her death. She was 90 years old!