Gerard Damiano's place in film history is secure thanks not merely to DEEP THROAT and DEVIL IN MISS JONES but also the superior films that followed in their wake, notably MEMORIES WITHIN MISS AGGIE and THE STORY OF JOANNA. With CHANGES he demonstrates his talent in the non-fiction realm.
Presaging the familiar "me, me, me" approach favored by Michael Moore, Damiano is a one-man dervish, providing narration and even appearing on camera as the interviewer, examining the monumental changes in American society during the late '60s. Like Moore, he is not above self-promotion, as evident in the awkward insertion mid-film of a trailer for his own current porn release, TEENIE TULIP.
While sex is the raison d'etre for this film, there are extremely valuable segments featuring Mary Philips of N.O.W and gay activist/magazine publisher Arthur Irving. Mary's comments especially are perceptive and indisputable, still relevant 40 years later.
But it is pornography and obscenity that dominate Gerard's consciousness, not surprisingly since he was in the vanguard of breaking down barriers against same. Al Goldstein and Jim Buckley, repping and plugging Screw Magazine (founded in 1968), are quite amusing in their mutual-insult routine, but also offer a valuable snapshot of what was going on in 1970. Goldstein forecasts that hardcore pornography will be legal in the U.S. by 1974; surprisingly it was allowed and started to proliferate within a year of this film's production.
Much of CHANGES is in the nature of a time capsule; many views of the then-popular split-beaver magazines focusing on women's genitalia; live sex shows; porn theaters; photo shoots for Screw and other nudie venues including peep-shows, etc. Damiano crosses the line into hardcore footage for less than a minute, showing fellatio between husband-wife team Patrick & Tally Wright (who both provide interesting voice-over commentary on their careers in porn) and several models' masturbating far more explicitly than usually presented in this era. A porn actor still active, Alex Mann, struts his softcore stuff with two women and tells us he has made 120 films already; it is interesting that IMDb only lists a dozen titles for him by 1970, showing how much of the Adult industry's activities has remained sub rosa to this day.
Porn films and documentaries are always a bit suspect, and here the recurring mantra which made me wonder was a repeated assertion by several interviewees that Denmark's completely permissive recent legalizing of all pornography had led to a zeroing out of sex crimes in that country. This was offered as evidence that the U.S. should follow suit, and of course in the wake of the Supreme Court's I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) decision, porn was made generally legal here too. I always have supported the anti-censorship philosophy, but especially with the growth of the internet in our culture, have become ambivalent as to the advisability of free & easy access to porn.
In retrospect, we would have benefited had porn remained accessible to addicts via the old-fashioned under-the-counter/adult bookstores/mail-order operations of those Good Old Days, rather than be allowed to dominate and clearly warp our culture as it has in recent decades. The old "combat zone" mentality had some merit, and as anyone who has paid attention to the recent proliferation of kiddie porn (virtually unknown in the pre-1970 era), increased cases of incest and tremendous problem with sex criminals and pedophiles knows, the prognostication of a future of "zero sex crimes" was pure bunk.
