[Commlist] New book on filmmaker Radley Metzger

Robert J. King is writing to announce the publication of my new book, 
/Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger(Columbia University 
Press, 2025) 
<https://cup.columbia.edu/book/man-of-taste/9780231560160>/. A 20% 
discount is available for the book’s launch with the code CUP20.


A description of the book, and some early reviews follow:


Radley Metzger 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/. 
After getting his start making arthouse trailers for Janus Films, 
Metzger would go on to become among the most feted directors of the 
“porno chic” era of the 1970s, working under the pseudonym Henry Paris. 
In the process, he produced a body of work that exposed the porous 
boundaries separating art cinema from adult film, softcore from 
hardcore, and good taste from bad.

Rob King uses Metzger’s work to explore what taste means and how it 
works, tracing the evolution of the adult film industry and the changing 
frontiers of cultural acceptability. /Man of Taste/ spans Metzger’s 
entire life: 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. Metzger’s career, King argues, sheds light on how the 
distinction between the erotic and the pornographic is drawn, and it 
offers an uncanny reflection of the ways American film culture 
transformed during these decades.

Lavishly illustrated with rare photos and publicity images, this book 
paints a vivid picture of a filmmaker who channeled his artistic 
aspirations into some of the most disreputable movie genres of his day.

REVIEWS

Finally, a book on Radley Metzger! Positioning the director both as 
auteur and impresario of the sex film, Rob King insightfully explores 
how Metzger’s insistence on “high class eroticism” paradoxically at once 
secured and siloed his legacy. /Man of Taste /is an acutely perceptive 
tribute to the uniqueness of this long-overlooked filmmaker who 
profoundly influenced American film culture and sex scenes in the 1960s 
and 1970s. Metzger’s sly, cinephilic, and lively work is in gifted 
hands, imbued by the wry and self-conscious persona of Metzger himself. 
A true pleasure to read.

/Elena Gorfinkel, author of /Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema 
in the 1960s

Finally a book worthy of the master himself: Radley Metzger’s life, 
career, and preoccupations are elegantly explored and intelligently 
analyzed in Rob King’s excellent, long-awaited, and much-needed 
biography, /Man of Taste/.

/Ashley West, /The Rialto Report


Cinephiles typically know director Radley Metzger only for his "porno 
chic" classic /The Lickerish Quartet/ (1970). But as Rob King's 
revealing /Man of Taste/ demonstrates, Metzger's decades-long career as 
a filmmaker shadowed the cultural conflations of "high" and "low" that 
so defined independent filmmaking across the post-codeera. Detailing 
Metzger's work across the eras of sixties exploitation, seventies 
hardcore, and the video/cable market of the eighties, King makes a 
compelling argument for Metzger's importance, not necessarily as a 
consecrated auteur but as a filmmaker who consistently renegotiated this 
period's shifting line between cinematic sophistication and sleaze.

/Jeffrey Sconce, author of /The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, 
Insanity//

//

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rob King is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia 
University’s School of the Arts. He is the author of /Hokum! The Early 
Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture/ (2017) and /The 
Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture 
/(2009).


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