Professor Rob King’s New Book Examines the Art of Erotic Cinema

Film and Media Studies Professor Rob King is set to release his highly anticipated book, Man Of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger, on March 25, 2025. 

With this new book, King argues that Metzger’s career sheds light on how the distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, offering an uncanny reflection of the ways in which the American film culture transformed during the 1960s and the 1970s. 

Published by Columbia University Press, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of Metzger, who was one of the foremost directors of adult film in America, with credits including softcore titles like The Lickerish Quartet and the hardcore classic The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Metzger got his start through editing arthouse trailers for Janus Films and then went on to become the most feted director of the ‘porno chic’ era of the 1970s—during which sexually explicit films were just beginning to be widely released in mainstream cinemas and taken seriously by film critics. Working under the pseudonym of Henry Paris, Metzger produced a body of work that would expose the porous boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from hardcore and good taste from bad.

Bringing his signature depth and rigor, King examines Metzger’s entire life in the lavishly illustrated book—from his early years in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, his attempt to bring arthouse aesthetics to adult film in the 1960s, his turn to pseudonymously directed hardcore movies in the 1970s, and his final years, which included making videos on homeopathic medicine.

The book is available for pre-order and an event celebrating King’s work is being held on April 22, 2025 at The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, with Professor Claudia Breger, Associate Professor Racquel Gates, and Associate Professor of Professional Practice and Chair of Film Jack Lechner. 

Rob King is a film historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. His recent follow-up, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2017), challenges the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition. He has published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of anthologies and journals, and is the co-editor of three anthologies: Early Cinema and the “National” (John Libbey & Co., 2008), Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, 2010), and Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (John Libbey & Co., 2012).