Howard Ziehm

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Howard Ziehm (born April 7, 1940 ) is an American former director , producer , cameraman and screenwriter of porn and erotic films . As the director of the first porn film shown in a regular cinema ( Mona: The Virgin Nymph ), he is considered to be the pioneer of porn chic in the 1970s.

Life

Howard Ziehm grew up as the eldest of five children of a strictly Lutheran soldier family in various army bases in the United States. He visited in Monterey , the high school , after which he studies in mathematics and engineering science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recorded. A year before the end of his studies, he dropped out and moved to Berkeley , where he opened a folk music café in 1961. In the following years he led an unsteady life, took drugs, hitchhiked through North America and enjoyed the sexual revolution of the 1960s. To develop a relationship with his father, he moved to Los Angeles in 1967 . There he trained as a carpenter and founded a rock band.

At the end of the 1960s, Ziehm met the enterprising Bill Osco, who briefly managed Ziehm's band. Osco had the idea of ​​making motorcycle films, but since neither Osco nor Ziehm had any knowledge of film production, they switched to cheaply produced pornographic films that could be sold even if they were of poor quality. They founded Graffiti Productions together in 1969, due to the boom in porn cinemas in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, more and more extreme material was in demand. By 1970 they had earned enough to produce their first full- length film, Mona: The Virgin Nymph , which was the first film to show explicit sex scenes embedded in a fictional plot and the first porn film to be shown in a regular cinema. Ziehm was involved in the film alongside Mike Benveniste as a co-director and at the same time as a cameraman .

In the same year Ziehm shot the documentary Hollywood Blue with Mickey Rooney in the lead role, in which the story of the Blue Movies (colloquially for pornographic film) is told and which brought the young company a lawsuit for copyright infringement. From the 1971 film City of Sin , a parody of the television series Dragnet (German police report ), Ziehm increasingly began to work under pseudonyms. In later films he is only named in the credits of Flesh Gordon and his successor by real name as a director. During the filming of Flesh Gordon in 1974, it turned out that one of the actresses was still a minor, whereupon the pornographic footage was confiscated by the police. There was a falling out between Ziehm and Osco about how to proceed, and Osco withdrew from the company. Ziehm completed the film by rewriting it as sex clothes, "Graffiti Productions" was then dissolved.

Until 1981 Ziehm made several films, none of which came close to the fame of the early works. With the spread of the video format in the early 1980s, porn films were both cheaper to produce and widely available. The resulting reduced profit was no longer worth the legal and other problems associated with the production of pornographic films. In 1986 he was inducted into the Hall of Fame by the X-Rated Critics Organization for his work , and in 1990 he shot Flesh Gordon, a sequel to Flesh Gordon .

Withdrawal from the film business

After his retirement from the porn industry in 1981, Ziem published learning cassettes with Wordbank and Wordbuilders , which are supposed to help expand his vocabulary.

In the 1990s he put together two books that present historical comic strips on a respective topic. In 1997, Golf appeared in the Comic Strips: A Historic Collection of Classic Cartoons , for which Bob Hope wrote the foreword. This was followed in 1999 by a volume entitled Lawyers in the Comic Strips .

In 2015 Ziehm published his autobiography Take Your Shame and Shove It: My Wild Journey through the Mysterious Sexual Cosmos .

Since June 2016 Howard Ziehm has been running his own website with the accompanying blog Shame Busters , on which he writes "against prudish and prejudice".

Filmography

Director
  • 1970: Mona: The Virgin Nymph (uncredited)
  • 1970: Virgin Runaway
  • 1970: Hollywood Blue (documentary)
  • 1971: Harlot
  • 1971: City of Sin (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1971: The Daring French Touch (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1971: Naked Hunter (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1972: The Incredible Body Snatchers (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1972: Seeds of Lust (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1972: Tijuana Blue (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1974: Flesh Gordon
  • 1975: Sexteen (as Lynn Metz)
  • 1976: Honey Pie (uncredited)
  • 1976: Sweet Cakes (as Hans Johnson)
  • 1977: Hot Cookies (as Albert Wilder)
  • 1980: Star Virgin (as Linus Gator)
  • 1981: Naughty Network (as Linus Gator)
  • 1990: Flesh Gordon - Shame of the Galaxy
production
  • 1970: Hollywood Blue
  • 1971: Harlot
  • 1971: City of Sin (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1972: The Incredible Body Snatchers (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1972: Seeds of Lust (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1972: Tijuana Blue (as Harry Hopper)
  • 1973: Cop Killers
  • 1974: Flesh Gordon
  • 1975: Sexteen (as Lynn Metz)
  • 1976: Sweet Cakes (as Hans Johnson)
  • 1977: Hot Cookies (as Albert Wilder)
  • 1980: Star Virgin (as Linus Gator)
  • 1981: Naughty Network (as Linus Gator)
camera
  • 1970: Mona: The Virgin Nymph (uncredited)
  • 1970: Hollywood Blue
  • 1971: Harlot
  • 1973: Cop Killers
  • 1974: Flesh Gordon
  • 1975: Sexteen (as Lynn Metz)
script
  • 1971: Harlot (as Lester Romano)
  • 1973: Cop Killers
  • 1981: Naughty Network (as Linus Gator)
  • 1990: Flesh Gordon - Shame of the Galaxy

Books

  • 1997: Golf in the Comic Strips: A Historic Collection of Classic Cartoons. General Publishing, ISBN 1-57544-053-9 .
  • 1999: Lawyers in the Comic Strips. General Publishing, ISBN 978-1-57544-119-1 .
  • 2015: Take Your Shame and Shove It: My Wild Journey through the Mysterious Sexual Cosmos . Graffiti Productions, ISBN 978-0-692-59364-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Howard Ziehm. In: Lukeisback.com. Retrieved June 22, 2011 .
  2. ↑ a b Richard Corliss: Mona . In: David Sterritt, John Anderson (Eds.): The B list: the National Society of Film Critics on the low-budget beauties, genre-bending mavericks, and cult classics we love . Da Capo Press, 2008. ISBN 0-306-81566-4 pp. 196-198. in Google Book Search
  3. ↑ a b Wolf-Dieter Roth: "Permit, his horniness King Hodes, the inventor of the sex bomb". In: Telepolis . January 20, 2005, accessed June 22, 2011 .
  4. ↑ Genzel, Christian: Take your shame and shove it: The memoirs of porn pioneer Howard Ziehm. In: www.wilsonsdachboden.com. November 25, 2015, accessed August 10, 2016 .
  5. ↑ https://howardziehm.com/ howardziehm.com
personal data
SURNAME Draw, Howard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American director
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1940