Radley Metzger's The Opening of Misty Beethoven
Tuesday, March 25, 2025 at 7:30pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Introduced by Rob King
The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Radley Metzger (as Henry Paris), 1976, digital projection, 86 mins
Often labeled the "best" adult film of all time, The Opening of Misty Beethoven has long been recognized as the defining achievement of the 1970s porno chic era. Directed by softcore impresario Radley Metzger under his nom de porn "Henry Paris," Misty was an ambitious attempt to gentrify pornography by merging explicit sex with Hollywood production values. Shot on a reported $250,000 budget across New York, Paris, and Rome, it embodied the era's aspirations for a prestige adult film—what Screw magazine’s Al Goldstein called "Hollywood-porn HERE…right now!"
A hardcore riff on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Metzger's film follows his long-standing method of elevating adult cinema through literary adaptation, as seen in his softcore titles Carmen, Baby (1967) and Camille 2000 (1969). Constance Money takes the title role as an Eliza Doolittle to Jamie Gillis's Henry Higgins—here reimagined as Dr. Seymour Love, a noted sexologist who molds Misty into the "Golden Rod Girl" of the jet-set. Misty's training culminates not in an embassy ballroom, but in a three-way with a strap-on dildo.
Judged in retrospect, Misty can be seen as both the apex of porn's golden era and a turning point. Exhausted by its demanding production, Metzger would retreat to a smaller scale for his remaining Henry Paris films (Barbara Broadcast [1977] and Maraschino Cherry [1978]) before attempting to leave adult film altogether with the UK horror production The Cat and the Canary (1978). The porn industry itself was already experiencing a kind of gentrification fatigue by the end of the 1970s, at which point the home video revolution put paid to hopes that pornography would ever merge with mainstream cinema.
- RK
Copies of King's new book, Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger will be available at the event.
Rob King is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University's School of the Arts. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture and The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.