In Porn’s ‘Golden Age,’ New York Police Shot Their Own Porn Flick

At the height of the 1970s “porno chic” era, when New York City, and Times Square in particular, was the epicenter of what came to known as “The Golden Age of Porn,” a group of New York City police investigators came up with an unusual idea. In order to infiltrate what they suspected were the criminal networks behind the production and distribution of the era’s voluminous output of “XXX” rated movies, they would become porn producers themselves. The outrageous episode, which caused a scandal when it was exposed in 1976 that NYPD had spent $2,500 of taxpayer money—about $11,000 in today’s inflation-adjusted cash—to produce three short porn loops, was recounted in a lengthy retrospective article published online over the weekend by The Rialto Report, a site dedicated to documenting “the golden age of adult film in New York, and beyond.” The product of the NYPD effort is actually listed on the Internet Movie Database under the title Keystone Porn, and is described there as consisting of three short “loops” of the type run in coin-operated “peep shows” or sold from behind the counter in adult bookshops. The productions were not elaborate, according to IMDB, with just one female performer and one male performer in each. “The first loop involves a hotel guest who calls the bellboy to help her with a leaky faucet,” IMDB describes. “The second loop involves a burglar who brakes [sic] into a damsel's room. The final loop is about a newlywed couple on their honeymoon consummating their marriage.” The female performer involved, according to Rialto Report, was Michelle Lake, whose Internet Adult Film Database entry lists her as a performer in 16 adult films of the 1970s, including Insane Desires, Venture into the Bizarre, and Eighteen and Anxious. In the Rialto oral history of the NYPD porn film, Lake describes the process of filming the loops, oblivious, she says, to the fact that she was actually being employed and paid by the police department. “Over time, many of the details of many of the films I made have blurred in my memory, but for some reason, I remember a number of things from this job: I remember the room, I remember that the ‘producers’ were a man and a woman, and I think I remember a cameraman. The location itself was a shitty hotel room, nothing fancy,” she said. She did not remember the name of her male scene partner, but said that when the shoot was concluded, she was paid in cash and given the flowers used to decorate the hotel room, “which was sweet.” She then largely forgot the experience until a few weeks later when, “I got a call from Peter Wolff at Cheri magazine. He told me there was a big story revealing that some loops I’d made at JFK had been filmed by the New York Police Department. What’s more, he said that the television networks had contacted him, and they wanted to interview me for the six o’clock news.” At the time, Lake’s parents had no idea of her career in porn, so she sat them down and revealed all to them. “God bless them—they didn’t have heart attacks or hang up on me saying, ‘We’re disowning you,’” she recalled. “In fact, it’s still shocking to me that they had such a liberal mindset, and weren’t utterly freaked out the way most parents would be.” Robert Quinn, one of the officers involved in producing the film, told Rialto that he still does not know how news reporters were alerted to the film’s existence, but “the news coverage fucked everything up. It ruined everything.” But one commenter on the Rialto web page said the the police porn shoot had been an open secret within the adult industry almost as soon as it was conceived. “The business in that day was small and everybody knew everybody,” said the commenter. “The mob must have bust a gut keeping track of their adventures.” Lake enjoyed a brief time in the media spotlight, and ultimately penned an article, “I MADE A PORN FLICK FOR THE NEW YORK POLICE!” for Cheri.  Quinn was hauled in front of his superiors to explain the situation and ultimately, then-NYPD Commissioner Michael Codd stopped the entire operation—not because the police had spent public money to shoot a porn film, but because a female police officer was present at the shoot. “Seriously?!” Quinn said to Rialto. “You’re mad because a woman was involved? That’s your big problem?!” Photo By National Archives Collection/Wikimedia Commons