‘Deep Sleep’: Scandal Over 1970s Porn Flick Shaped Adult Industry

Despite having been largely forgotten by adult cinema history, Deep Sleep, a made-in-New Jersey porn film that came out in 1972, the same year as the landmark XXX classic Deep Throat, played an important if inadvertent role in creating the modern porn industry, thanks to the local scandal it created that quickly went nationwide. The Daily Beast online magazine chronicled the making and aftermath of Deep Sleep in an exhaustively researched article published last week. The film was directed by Albert Sole, a Paterson, New Jersey, native who had no aspirations to become a pornographer, the Daily Beast report says, but who definitely harbored a burning desire to make movies.  “I wanted to be a film director more than anything else in the world. For me, everything started from the love of movies,” Sole told the Daily Beast. “To this day, if I don't get to a movie on a Saturday, I feel uncomfortable.” But when the now 75-year-old Sole, who had no experience in the movie industry beyond owning a 16mm camera, was trying to figure out how to finance his first feature film, he turned to his local group of friends in Paterson, one of whom half jokingly offered to give Sole $5,000 on the spot to make his movie—if he made it “X-rated.” The “joke,” however, quickly took on a life of its own, as several more friends agreed to pitch in to back Sole’s directorial debut, on the condition that the movie contain actual and explicit sex scenes. And just like that, Sole had $25,000—or about $150,000 in 2019 dollars—to write, produce and direct his feature film debut. “The guys who threw in the money ... one was a judge, one was president of a bank, and there was an accountant,” Sole recounted. “These were all guys in their thirties. Playboy-reading, horny guys from New Jersey. But thanks to them, I now had the budget to make a film.” Filling out the cast and crew with his friends and family and reportedly using his parents’ home as a primary set, Sole placed an ad in the theatrical trade magazine Backstage for actors willing to perform actual sex acts on camera. Among those who answered the ad was the soon-to-be-legendary “Dr. Inifinity,” whose own bizarre story was the subject of an earlier Daily Beast investigation, as AVN.com reported.  Dr. Infinity, whose main selling point was his uncanny ability to fellate himself to orgasm, didn’t get the part—but actress Kim Pope, who later appeared in Dr. Infinity’s porn debut Every Inch a Lady, did. “My first impression was that he was a very nice guy, very sincere,” Pope, who also performed under the screen name Mary Canary, among other monikers, said of Sole. "I think Deep Sleep was his first film and he really wanted to do a good job, within the limitations of a minuscule budget and a short shooting schedule. It was all really sweet, and I liked him very much so I was on board." In the end, it was Sole and Pope who banded together to fight Passaic County, New Jersey, district attorney, John T. Niccollai, who decided to make a cause celebre of the film after Sole premiered the movie at a local Passaic theater—and most of Sole's friends and family who had once been enthusiatic about the film, shunned him out of fear for their own reputations. In those days, laws governing obscenity prosecutions remained vague at best. Searching for a charge, Niccollai discovered a 174-year-old, apparently obsolete law against “fornication,” and slapped Pope with charges of fornication, conspiracy to fornicate, acts of carnal indecency, conspiracy to commit acts of carnal indecency, and something called “private lewdness”—charges Pope found “absurd.” But the case against Deep Sleep became more serious and went national when, through means that are still mysterious today, a stolen print of the film turned up at a theater in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma—and Sole faced charges of transporting obscene material across state lines. Sole, who went on to direct several non-X-rated films and continues to work in Hollywood as a successful production designer today, was hit with a one-year suspended jail sentence, and a $2,500 fine. Though Deep Sleep was ultimately a commercial success, he never saw a dime from it, the Daily Beast reports. Pope said that the prosecution’s success played a role in creating a separate adult film industry, as well as shutting her off from a career as a mainstream actress. “They accomplished their mission, because they frightened off legitimate actors, legitimate film people,” Pope said. “Today, 45 years later, we have a separate adult film industry. We had wanted to blur the lines. We thought that the idea of adult entertainment would disappear. We thought that once the public got used to adult films, they would get over the hysteria.” Finally, the Daily Beast screened his nearly 50-year-old porn film for Sole, who had not viewed the film since the early 1970s. His reaction? “Wow, it really sucks. It’s a piece of shit! Did I really make that?” Read the entire Daily Beast story, which goes into considerable depth about the making of the film, at the link in the first paragraph of this article. Photo By Rialto Report YouTube screen capture