Celluloid Village of Dreams (1970)

1970, Wardour Street is awash with advertising for it's latest offerings, there is Twinky, the schoolgirl sex comedy starring Susan George and Charles Bronson, Hammer is pushing When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Tigon is unveiling their menage a trois drama Monique. There to record it all was ATV and director Ross Devenish for the TV documentary 'Celluloid Village of Dreams' which was shown on ITV on the 13th October 1970 in the 10:30pm slot.

Wardour Street was and is the hub of Britain's film industry, to the movie biz what Denmark Street was to the music industry. As the documentary's title implies, Celluloid Village of Dreams portrays Wardour Street and the surrounding Soho area as it's own little village. One that is unreal looking to outsiders, detached from the rest of Britain, and whose residents toil away in either the film or sex industries, the line between the two becoming very blurred by 1970.

For star spotters there is fleeting glimpses here of Marty Feldman, Julie Ege and Danny LaRue, seen at swanky film industry get togethers. The real stars of Celluloid Village of Dreams though are people who you've either never heard of or know only as names on movie credits.

Like any village, Wardour Street had it's own societal structure and hierarchy. On top there are big men flaunting their success in the form of fat cigars and rolls royces, but Celluloid Village of Dreams is equally fascinated by the have-nots of this society. Youths lugging film cans around Wardour Street, and the cleaning ladies of film industry offices, dining out on their brief interactions with Stanley Baker and Richard Attenborough. A smoky, boozy pub, where pipe smoking and sideburns are the norm, is described as the film industry's answer to the labour exchange, it's where actors go to talk shop, seek work or just drown their sorrows.

The subjects of Celluloid Village of Dreams are a mix of people on their way down, going nowhere and just occasionally going places. There's a quick glimpse of a very young, very dandy looking Andrew Lloyd Webber, prepping Jesus Christ, Superstar. As well as future Oscar winner Bob Godfrey, here putting the finishing touches to his X-rated cartoon 'Henry 9 til 5', taking to the recording studio and putting on his droning, pervy 'Henry' voice. 

The current big shot of the industry is Nat Cohen, the head of EMI. Cohen is exactly how you'd imagine the man who brought you the On the Buses movies to be...fast talking, chauffeur driven, inevitably the owner of a rolls royce and a racehorse, very Arthur Daley. Celluloid Village of Dreams is an ode to showmanship, with many men of Cohen's generation having backgrounds in the carnival, gambling or boxing promotion, the skills honed there serving them greatly when they transitioned to the film industry. Entrepreneurism is the name of the game in Wardour Street, with Jack Isow's restaurant -located just under the famous Raymond Revuebar signage- playing to the village giants' vanity and love of showbiz razzmatazz by offering amazing, personalised seats embossed with the names of the movie industry elite. Conveniently giving an idea of who was considered the film industry's most valuable assets at the time. Recipients of the embossed seats treatment including the aforementioned Nat Cohen, Colonel James Carreras of Hammer films and the American comedian Jerry Lewis. While visibly a patriarchal society, the documentary doesn't overlook the few female villagers, including hardworking film editor Marlene Fletcher and the elderly female owner of the Playboy strip club.

Sex and showbiz are seen to go hand in hand in Wardour Street, even if they occasionally seem reticent to be seen holding hands in public. Celluloid Village of Dreams takes a detour into the Pigalle nightclub where glamour girls work three backbreaking shifts a night in order to put food on the table of their young families. The odd hours they work, often returning home at 3am, leads to malicious gossip from normy neighbours about what these girls do for a living.

The TV Times coverage of the programme placed particular emphasis on the participation of a Soho stripper called Hazel Longley, who sounded burnt out and disillusioned "My eyes have been open by Soho. Now I'm so hard that if anyone really upsets me in the street I think I'd kill without thinking". Longley is a Soho subject who would have been worth hearing from, disappointingly then that the programme itself barely features her, apart from a few seconds of her strip routine. It wouldn't be until 2022 that Longley would get to tell her full story of stripping, sex work, beatings and her involvement with Maltese gangsters in her autobiography 'Wounds that never heal...broken' which sounds like a harrowing read. More Celluloid Village of Nightmares, than dreams.

Existing some place between the sex and film industries are the fellas of Nymph films, seen shooting an 8mm glamour film starring Lucienne Camille alias Sylvia Bayo. "I like film, I like good looking girls, I think if one has to work one should enjoy what one is doing...and err I like good looking girls" explains glamour filmmaker Derek, as footage from one of his earlier titty flicks, starring Sue Bond (pre-Benny Hill Show) unspools onscreen.

Celluloid Village of Dreams also captures a truly notorious figure to be, in the form of future blue filmmaker John Lindsay, who'd come to prominence in the 1970s for his jailbait fixated hardcore shorts like 'Jolly Hockey Sticks' and 'Schoolgirl Joyride'. Beginning as he meant to go on, Lindsay is here seen doing promotional work for Miracle films in Piccadilly Circus, taking photos of girls handing out flyers for 'Naked England' an Italian Mondo movie that Miracle was releasing. One embarrassed member of the public, sat at the statue of Eros, uses the flyer to conceal their face from the camera. The girls are topless, albeit covered by union jack flags, and true to form Lindsay is ordering the troops to be more daring "let's see a bit of booby, show em what you got, luv" insists Lindsay in his distinct Scottish brogue. One of the girls notes that the police have arrived, a situation that Lindsay would grow accustomed to in the 1970s.

Truth be told, there is nothing too deep or profound in Celluloid Village of Dreams, nevertheless it's an invaluable time capsule of the film industry at the dawn of the 1970s. Many of these people are gone now, but the documentary lives on, because Celluloid heroes, and villains, never really die. The documentary's funniest line, and it's own epitaph, is "there are two kinds of prostitution in Soho...and films pay better".

A Girl Gone Wild (2023, Hannah Huxford)

Coming of age in the late 1990s, one of my favourite porn stars of the time was Hannah. I first encountered clips from one of her videos on late night C4 television, and immediately knew I had to see more. The onscreen Hannah was funny and fun loving, wild and uninhibited, everything you'd want in a porn star. Time marches on, she disappeared from the porn scene but I never totally forgot about her, and her videos provided jolly good viewing over the years. I was therefore intrigued and surprised to discover that, after years in anonymity, she'd recently published an autobiography . A Girl Gone Wild is in no way, shape or form aimed at her old fan base, the crux of the book is her ADHD disorder, and its core audience presumably other sufferers, and those wanting a greater understanding of ADHD. Nevertheless A Girl Gone Wild is still an important book about 1990s UK porn- even if it chooses not to draw attention to that fact- since very little has been written about that era, especially by someone who was there, and saw that industry from a variety of different positions...no pun intended. Hannah was born in Grimsby, in 1975.

Considering Hannah's later hyper-sexual screen image, her younger self comes across as tomboyish, even prudish. Meaning her school age self is passed over in favour of more attractive girls, and what little interest from boys that comes Hannah's way is of a rather unsavoury nature. One of her first boyfriends calls her ugly and frigid, and her earliest sexual encounters are of a traumatic nature, including the first of unfortunately many rapes in this book...leading her to a lifelong aversion to alcohol and illegal drugs. Hannah's lifelong idol has been Madonna, whose footsteps she attempted to follow in, yet while the pursuit of fame and a need to be sexually provocative in her art paid off in dividends for Madonna, Hannah's is more of a cautionary tale. Every time Hannah hits showbiz, showbiz tends to hit back twice as hard.

A Girl Gone Wild initially raises fears of vanity publishing, her childhood, student days and pop culture tastes aren't really that different to the average person who was growing up back then, and leads you to question whether her story warrants a book. Then again I do find that by their very nature autobiographies tend to be full of inconsequential waffle and only really come alive when the subject receives their brush with fame. Fortunately A Girl Gone Wild justifies it's existence and gets more incident packed as it progresses, more out of the ordinary as it's subject becomes more out of control. Hannah arrives in Manchester in the early 1990s just in time for the 'Madchester' scene, and given that she is a non drugs, non alcohol person might be one of the few people to have viewed Madchester through sober eyes. After getting a job as a barmaid in a new nightclub things get heavy fairly quickly. Criminality, gangland rivalry, and punch ups are the order of the day in the nightclub she works at, eventually someone pulls a gun on Hannah and she decides to quit. A Girl Gone Wild isn't, truth be told, the greatest argument for following in Madonna's footsteps. Inspired by Madonna exposing her boobs on the catwalk, Hannah does likewise in a gay club which passes without incident, but doing similarly so in a heterosexual environment, on holiday in Ibiza, leads to yet another rape. She then starts dating a man of Jamaican descent -again inspired by Madonna she does admittedly have a thing for darker skinned men- who turns out to be awaiting trial for armed robbery. He goes to prison, Hannah stands by her man, paying his rent and acting as a glorified taxi service for his family to make prison visits. Upon his release he acts aloof and indifferent towards her, appears more interested in pursuing an acting career and cheats on her with the first woman who comes along.

Prior to this book, Hannah's last word of her porn career had been a series of message board posts on the BGAFD forum in the mid-2000s, where she gave the impression of having no regrets. Cut to 2023, and A Girl Gone Wild offers a less, shall we say, celebratory take on that period of her life. I did initially fear a Linda Lovelace type hatchet job on porn here, but although she certainly has enough anecdotes to have gone down that route, overall I feel Hannah has been fair and well balanced about her porn experiences. These are a mixture of good and bad, but when they were bad, we're talking really, really ugly. Her experiences in Bahrain are particularly hair raising, and her narrow, airport based escape from that situation generates suspense worthy of Hitchcock. Her Hollywood experience is marred by a predatory agent, who insisted on casting couch favours under the threat of withholding work. Hannah does at least get to indulge in some much deserved schadenfreude in this book, by emphasizing that said individual was the owner of an exceptionally small penis 'a freak of nature'. Hannah starts using allot of fake names for people at this point in the book, I suppose this could be for legal reasons, but could also be a way of concealing any paper trail back to her own career. Keeping in mind she never refers to her self by her porn names in the book, nor the names of films she appeared in, or the real names of directors and stars. The book does confirm my suspicions that porn and glamour model work often go hand in hand with high class prostitution. Hannah is pimped out as a call girl almost immediately as she embarks on a porn career. Her introduction into porn is cited as a famous porn actor of the time, who she refers to as 'Ross' in the book, and dubs a 'pompous narcissistic pratt'. He recommends her to his girlfriend, referred to in the book as 'Debbie', who owned a glamour model agency but basically seems to have been a madam and saw Hannah as a cash cow. She also makes reference to a Yorkshire based porn director, who creeped her out by asking her to dress as a schoolgirl and, confirming her bad time vibes, was later nicked for kiddie stuff, but I'm no idea who that could be. The identity of others are slightly more easier to decipher, particularly 'Richard' an Italian director and star known for the sexually severe. Her negative portrayal of him as a bully and a brute will surprise no one who is able to work out the identity of that particular degenerate. On a lighter note her story about attempting to work in Australian porn, which ended before it even began, is particularly hilarious. Basically, Hannah and her cohorts endured a lengthy plane journey, only to then be immediately deported by Australian customs, who detected undercover sex workers, due to one of her party forgetting to throw away her receipts from her call girl work. Hannah seems to have had better experiences filming in Spain, even participating in live sex shows over there, which played to her Madonna obsession, and following in Madonna's footsteps of being sexual and idolised by a live crowd. Given how amazing her filmed porn performances are, it must have been an off the richter scale experience to watch her having it off live, corr blimey.

I think the book leaves you wishing that the pleasure she'd brought others had been reciprocated in her own life. The book is a series of reports from the battle field of what's clearly been a difficult, tormented life... you leave the book wishing Hannah the best and hoping that confronting her past in print has the desired, cathartic effect for this courageous authoress.

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