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ABSTRACT
This article examines the record-breaking box-office performance of pornography mogul David Sullivan’s 1977 film production Come Play with Me in substantial detail. This film was so successful that it remained on release at one London cinema for nearly four years and went on general release at around 1,000 cinemas across the UK. The article also considers the role that Mary Millington had in generating this ongoing box-office success and her associated capacity as a pornography superstar, who was fashioned as such by her patron David Sullivan. It then more briefly examines the box-office performance of the follow-up films made through the Millington-Sullivan combination. Finally, it considers the hypothesized notion of national porn culture by comparing some popular UK (Come Play with Me), US (Deep Throat), and French (Emmanuelle) pornography films from the 1970s, and then some porn/sex star actresses from the 1970s – Millington (British), Linda Lovelace (American) and Sylvia Kristel (Dutch/European) – as part of wider cinema trends and national film cultures.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Thanks are due to Simon Sheridan for his very helpful advice on some specific issues relating to Come Play with Me and for his excellent website about Mary Millington (www.marymillington.co.uk). Thanks are also due to Adrienne Rashbrook-Cooper and Ian O’Sullivan at the BFI Reuben Library for assistance in locating the relevant issues of Screen International.
2. The term ‘sexploitation’ obviously has a multitude of social and political overtones but these issues are not the focus of this article, which aims in part to document the degree of success of the particular films under review in purely empirical terms.
3. The term ‘superstar’ first came to international prominence through the title of the 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. More recently the term megastar has been proposed for someone who is even more famous than a superstar.
4. David Sullivan named one of his own racehorses Playbirds and another one Miss Park Lane as a means of generating free publicity.
5. Both Tiger Woods and Usain Bolt were sports superstars for certain periods of time in their respective fields, but they have not always been so, and Albert Einstein became a physicist superstar after the spectacular success of his special and general theories of relativity.
6. Issue one of Playbirds magazine was priced at 75 pence.
7. Diana Dors in 3-D is very tame by contemporary standards, with the most explicit image showing an oblique side-view of her naked breast.
8. Emmanuelle’s long cinema run in Paris (1974–85) is not the current world record. That belongs to the Indian film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which ran for more than 20 years in Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theatre.
9. It is not the longest running film in the UK: that was South Pacific (Citation1958), which ran for 4 years 22 weeks, but which was made in the USA (Robertson Citation1988, 186).
10. The Eady Levy was a tax on UK box-office receipts initiated in 1957 that was paid out to qualifying British films in proportion to their box-office earnings, a mechanism designed to support the British film industry. It was abolished in 1985.