Free Republic

Fifty Shades of Grey is easily seducing the North American box office, where it's poised to gross north of $26 million Friday for a historic $75 million to $85 million debut over the long Valentine's Day and Presidents Day weekend. Universal's film adaptation of EL James' S&M-laced romance novel will easily best the $63.1 million launch of Valentine's Day in 2010 to tie up the best showing of all time for the holiday. The range of $75 million to $85 million indicates that no one is exactly sure how the movie will perform or how front-loaded it is since there...

Is it just global warming, or has it gotten a tad steamy in the multiplex lately? No sooner had viewers taken in the long, graphic lesbian sex scenes in the French coming-of-age drama “Blue Is the Warmest Color” last year than they were treated to “Stranger by the Lake,” a homoerotic thriller (also French) set in a gay cruising site, at which men could be seen pleasuring each other and themselves with unsettling, frankness. ........................................................ The challenge today is that, rather than being relegated to disreputable theaters or scruffy back sections of video stores, porn is on the home entertainment...

LOS ANGELES – Lindsay Lohan has landed the lead role in an independent movie about 1970s porn star Linda Lovelace, one of the film's producers said. The 24-year-old actress will play Lovelace, who shot to fame with the landmark 1972 porno movie "Deep Throat," while Bill Pullman will portray Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner in the period drama, producer Wali Razaqi told The Los Angeles Times. The film, called "Inferno," will be based on the events of Lovelace's life and will delve into the "difficult stuff she went through and overcame," Razaqi said. Razaqi said he and director Matthew Wilder...

MIAMI – Gerard Damiano, director of the pioneering pornographic film that lent its name to the Watergate whistleblower known as "Deep Throat," has died. He was 80. Damiano died Saturday at a Fort Myers hospital, his son, Gerard Damiano Jr., said Monday. He had suffered a stroke in September. "He was a filmmaker and an artist and we thought of him as such," the younger Damiano said. "Even though we weren't allowed to see his movies, we knew he was a moviemaker, and we were proud of that." Damiano's "Deep Throat" was a mainstream box-office success and helped launch the...

THE PORNO-IZATION OF AMERICAN MEDIA AND MARKETINGHow Hard-Core Sex Stars are Penetrating Mainstream Culture January 26, 2004 QwikFIND ID: AAP30D By T.L. Stanley LOS ANGELES (Adage.com) -- Ron Jeremy, the legendary star of some 1,700 hard-core porn films over the last two decades, steeps in the hot tub of a sweeping hilltop Los Angeles mansion, glass of merlot in hand, flanked Declaring the ascendence of porn is a 48-foot-high billboard of porn queen Jenna Jameson in Time Square, the symbolic heart of the U.S. advertising industry. She is now courted by TV producers, book publishers and marketers as a cultural...