Rebel Publisher
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Though sales were modest, the series was nevertheless influential. Film Quarterly called the texts “the best recreations of films yet to be achieved in book form” (an accolade that Grove prominently displayed in its promotion of the series), adding that they “will probably be surpassed only when 8mm or EVR copies of films are available for home use and study.” Until then, the review concludes, they “should prove extremely useful in film classes and for scholars working on close studies of film style.”24 For many scholars and students at the time, particularly those who didn’t live in major metropolitan centers, these books would have been their first contact with these films. As critic and film scholar Adrian Martin notes in his essay for the Criterion Collection booklet on Masculin Féminin, the film initially “existed entirely in my head—as a perfectly imaginary object, a little like the ideal movie that Paul (Léaud) himself ‘secretly wanted to live’—thanks to the fact that my only access to it at the time was through a gorgeous fetish object published by America’s Grove Press, in 1969, a transcription of the film accompanied by many luminous frame reproductions.”25 Martin’s essay is followed by an excerpt from Philippe Labro’s “One Evening in a Small Café,” an account of Godard’s direction that also forms part of the Black Cat edition. Thus, the Black Cat film series anticipates both the form and function of the Criterion Collection DVDs with their special features and accompanying booklets. Indeed, the technology of the DVD itself, which enables the viewer to freeze individual frames and to move in and out of the film at any point and for any length of time, digitally realizes the form of “reading” to which Grove’s series aspires.
Mark Betz affirms that these books, and others like them, were “instrumental in shaping academic film studies as it was forming in North America and later on in Britain,” but he is mainly interested in how they “provided the mortar for film course organization” and less in how their physical design solicited ways of reading and reception that in effect Americanized the Parisian littérisation of avantgarde film during the heyday of auteurism.26 Grove’s pioneering series provided a curriculum for film studies courses during this foundational period; it also helped establish the cinematic text as a legitimate object of close reading modeled on the formal analysis of literary texts. This literary legitimacy was crucial to the cultural consecration of these cinematic texts, as illustrated by their inclusion in the Criterion Collection canon, whose design clearly derives from the series that anticipated them. Though this literary legitimacy was initially established in Paris, it was mass-produced and made academically operational by Grove’s short-lived book series.
For Rosset, Grove’s film books were part of a larger plan to exploit and promote academic interest in contemporary cinema through rental and festival programs. Grove’s 1968 college catalog includes many films, and the suggested courses feature “imaginative combinations of books and films along interdisciplinary lines.”27 Thus, the catalog suggests using William Klein’s Mr. Freedom and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising in a course called “The Absurd as Reality”; Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi and Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa in “Africa—Culture and Myths”; Klein’s Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee and Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers: A Report in “To Be Black in America”; and Yukio Mishima’s Rite of Love and Death and Nagisa Oshima’s Boy in “The New Japan.” To facilitate this interdisciplinary and multimedia vision, Grove offered discounted rental rates to educational institutions.
Grove also promoted campus film festivals as a way to get its rapidly expanding catalog screened outside New York City. In a prominent full-page ad in the December 1969 Evergreen Review featuring college students sporting a sign asking, “Why wait for Godard? We want him Now!,” readers are invited to “Bring Grove’s Film Festival to Antioch or Ann Arbor, Oberlin, you name it!” The copy continues, “Now you can have your own film festival, right on your own campus. With films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, Susan Sontag’s Duet for Cannibals, Jaromil Jires’ The Joke, Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes, William Klein’s Mr. Freedom, Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabe. Films that have won awards in Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, and have brought audiences to their feet at the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals.”28 Rosset hoped to achieve with the cinematic avantgarde what he had already accomplished with the literary avantgarde: disseminate it from the exclusive culture capitals of Europe and the United States into university towns across the country. But the logistics of film distribution were expensive, and they did not align with the circuits Grove had established for books; the film division ended up being both a distraction for Rosset and a significant drain on the company’s capital. As Kent Carroll affirms, the film division “was like a giant sponge soaking up everything, and detracting from the publishing side of the business.”29
For Adults Only
In the end, Grove made money on a single film: Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious, Yellow. Rosset had read about the film by the Ingmar Bergman protégé in the Manchester Guardian during his annual trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1967. Intrigued by its purported combination of sexual frankness and political critique, Rosset asked the president of the Swedish publisher Bonnier to put him in touch with the film’s producer. He then asked Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, who were in Europe collecting materials for their International Exhibition of Erotic Art, to view it. After receiving a positive report from the Kronhausens, he went to see the film himself, liked it, and promptly purchased the rights to distribute it in the United States.30 Sjoman had already released two controversial films in the United States: My Sister, My Love, a story of sibling incest promoted “for those who love and those who make love!”; and 491, based on Lars Gorling’s novel (published, of course, by Grove Press) about seven delinquent boys who agree, as part of a psychological experiment, to live alone in a condemned building. The film 491 was charged with and then exonerated of obscenity in 1966. I Am Curious, Yellow was seized by US Customs in January 1968, and Grove had to arrange for critics, including Bosley Crowther for the Times, Stanley Kauffman and Richard Gilman for the New Republic, Andrew Sarris for the Voice, and Amos Vogel for Lincoln Center, to view it at the United States Appraisers Stores in New York City under an agreement that they would not “publicize the contents.” These same critics, along with Norman Mailer, sociology professors Charles Winick and Ned Polsky, and Sjoman himself, were witnesses at the subsequent trial in May. A jury of seven men and five women found the film to be obscene, and while waiting for the case to be reviewed by the court of appeals, Grove issued a Black Cat paperback filmscript with more than 250 illustrations and extensive excerpts from the trial testimony. In February 1969, by which time the court of appeals had overturned the lower court’s decision, the Times listed the filmscript as having sold 160,000 copies in the prior year, indicating that it was an integral component of the campaign that precipitated the phenomenal popularity of the film, which for the rest of the year was shown to packed houses by reservation only at the Evergreen Theater on East 11th Street and generated lines around the block for its continuous showing (seven times a day) at the Cinema Rendezvous on 57th Street. The film was widely reviewed and discussed, and Rosset aggressively pursued screenings across the country, retaining De Grazia to supervise the numerous legal challenges, and at one point going so far as to purchase an entire theater in Minneapolis when he couldn’t find an exhibitor willing to show it. By September 1969, the film had made more than $5 million across the country, with Grove remunerating local civil liberties lawyers who defended against the numerous obscenity charges with a percentage of the box office receipts. In November 1969, it became the first foreign-language film to top Variety’s list of the top-grossing films. It ultimately earned more than $14 million.
Updating and interrogating the thematic tradition running back through Emma Bovary and Constance Chatterley, I Am Curious, Yellow focuses on the sexual experiences of a young woman, Lena Nyman, through the eyes of her older male creator, in this case the director Vilgot
Sjoman. Both director and actress play themselves, providing the film with the self-reflexivity and ironic auto-commentary so common to avantgarde cinema and drama of the 1960s. Though tame by today’s standards, even for mainstream R-rated film, the movie’s sexual scenes, which included male full-frontal nudity, an extremely brief and fleeting kiss of a limp penis, and a number of simulated acts of intercourse in public places, including in front of Stockholm’s Royal Palace, generated extensive controversy. The film also attempts, in ways that were central to its defense at trial, to thematically and formally relate sexual to political revolution, interweaving Lena’s sexual experimentation with her political agitation against the Swedish class system and the war in Vietnam. In providing extensive testimony from the trial, Grove’s Black Cat version is clearly designed to establish that the political themes of the film provide the redeeming social value justifying the sex scenes at a time when the film itself was still working its way through the appeals process.
The sale of the book, as well as admission to the film, which had been rated “X” by Jack Valenti’s recently established Motion Picture Association of America, was limited to adults. I Am Curious, Yellow came out during, and in many ways was symptomatic of, the interregnum between the decline of the Production Code and the codification of the ratings system, an interregnum that also enabled the overlap between avantgarde and pornographic cinema exemplified by Grove’s catalog as a whole. As Jon Lewis establishes in Hollywood v. Hard Core, during the first years of the ratings system there was extensive debate about which films should be designated with an “X” rating, which in that same year was given to, or independently chosen for, such films as Lindsay Anderson’s If, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay in 1970).31 Eventually, Valenti’s decision not to copyright the “X” designation resulted in its appropriation by the emerging hard-core industry, eliminating the inchoate cultural zone these films occupied at the time.
Rosset anticipated, though he did not in the end profit from, this transition. As Albert Goldman reveals in his Life magazine profile of August 29, 1969, “The Old Smut Peddler,” Rosset foresaw the privatization of film viewing that would enable the pornographic market to consolidate legally:
It’s time to scale the movies down to human proportions. The moving picture camera today is just a very expensive typewriter. A Hollywood director can go home, like the young writer used to go home from the ad agency, and knock out a very good movie for $50,000. It’s possible to take that movie and squeeze it into a cassette videotape the size of a book. And then one evening, when the kids are in bed, you can slip that cassette into your TV set and, without getting dressed or driving the car, you can watch Tropic of Cancer or The Story of O right in your own living room—where the censor can’t go.32
First anticipating and then capitalizing on the Supreme Court rulings in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), which had made it legal to view hard-core pornography in the privacy of one’s home, and in Ginsberg v. New York (1968), which had affirmed a lower legal threshold for determining obscenity with materials made available to minors, Rosset attempted to realize this vision through the nownotorious Evergreen Club. As with his forays into print pornography, Rosset cast a wide net, acquiring any and all erotic films he could find and offering them for sale and rental through the club. One promotional brochure trumpets, “Now you can have a nostalgic ‘blue film’ festival right in the privacy of your own den or living room!” Claiming to have “picked these films from the largest private collection of its kind,” Rosset offers in the brochure such titles as Broadway through a Keyhole, Sultan and Slaves, and Flaming Youth, claiming they can provide “a unique look at the customs and morals of a never to be forgotten time.”33 Another letter promoting a film called L announces, “In the secret collections of Europe’s Millionaire Connoisseurs of Erotica, there are films so provocative, so incredibly earthy, the average collector can’t even begin to imagine what they are like.”34 Yet another boasts that “the most famous actress of our time will ‘go all the way’ for you—in your own room!”35 Grove deployed the same populist rhetoric with film as it did with print, advertising that materials previously reserved for wealthy elites were now being made available through legitimate mainstream channels.
These promotions anticipate with uncanny accuracy the direction the mainstream porn industry would take in the 1970s and 1980s, as videocassettes, DVDs, and then the Internet drove down the costs of production and enabled a privatization of consumption that made pornography into a legitimate industry leveraging the “X” rating to market its materials to an adult, and mostly male, audience. Indeed, Rosset’s forays into pornography—particularly cinematic pornography—generated a political backlash against Grove that helps account for how and why this industry autonomized in the 1970s, leaving Grove as a relic of a former era before the consolidation of a separate “adult” marketplace.
Takeover
By the second half of the 1960s, Grove had become profitable, partly through its well-established connections to the booming academic market and the burgeoning counterculture, but mostly through its highly successful campaigns to legitimate and popularize sexually explicit writing and film. To expand on and exploit this profitability, Rosset decided in 1967 to take the company public with an initial public offering (IPO) of 240,000 shares at seven dollars each. The prospectus circulated for the IPO, issued by Van Alstyne, Noel, and Co. on July 25, 1967, provides a fairly complete profile of the company on the eve of its cultural and economic apotheosis. By that time, Grove Press had published more than one thousand titles, and the prospectus affirms that many of these titles “have been adopted as text and supplemental course materials at college, university, and high school levels,” accounting for “approximately 35% of net sales.”1 As “other operations” of the company, the prospectus lists the Evergreen Book Club (which, supplemented by the membership of the recently purchased MidCentury Book Club, claimed fifty-two thousand members in 1966), the Evergreen Review (claiming a circulation of seventy-five thousand copies per issue in 1966, the first year in which it posted a profit), and the recently purchased Cinema 16 library. The prospectus lists as property and equipment eighty-five thousand square feet of office space at 80 University Place, thirty thousand square feet of warehouse space at 315 Hudson Street, and a 162-seat theater to be used as “a showcase for Cinema 16.” The prospectus specifies that “as of May 1, 1967, the Company employed a total of 85 persons. Of this number 9 were editors, 6 were salesmen and sales consultants, 9 were departmental heads and the balance were general office, warehouse and accounting employees. The Company has never had a work stoppage or strike and considers its relations with its employees excellent.”2
Going public put a strain on these relations, resulting in unionization efforts and culminating in a feminist takeover of the press in 1970. But the term “takeover” is also meant to suggest the ways in which Grove’s revolutionary aspirations were both realized and revised by the rise of women’s liberation. Like those of the New Left more generally, Grove’s politics and policies both encouraged and inhibited the women’s movement; many of the books it published provided both philosophical and practical insight into revolutionary thought and action, but many of the attitudes held by its writers and editors were patently, even virulently, misogynist. In leveraging the former against the latter, the feminist attack on Grove represents both a dialectical reversal and a final rehearsal of the cultural revolution Grove inaugurated.
Going public was a fateful decision and a transformative moment in Grove’s history. Over the next few years, the company expanded exponentially as Rosset rapidly spent the profits made on I Am Curious, Yellow on a variety of reckless ventures that brought the company to the edge of bankruptcy. In addition to indiscriminately investing in foreign, avantgarde, and pornographic film, Rosset in 1969 bought a massive, seven-story, forty-thousand-square-foot office bui
lding on the corner of Mercer and Bleecker and embarked on an ambitious series of architectural renovations, including an arched entranceway in the shape of the letter G and a private elevator for himself and the other senior editors; the renovations ultimately cost more than $2 million. The value of the building was declining even as it was being renovated, due to a collapse in the New York real estate market at the time.
Grove was no longer a company; it was a corporation, albeit a countercultural one. To maintain this countercultural reputation, Grove issued its first annual report “in the guise of an Evergreen Review special issue,” ambitiously announcing that its objective was to become “a new kind of communications center for the sixties.”3 The annual report proudly trumpets the company’s growth and expansion, profiling its new education department, book club division, and film division; citing the effusive critical praise for recently published titles by Borges, Fanon, Burroughs, Pinter, and Beckett; and featuring a portfolio of sample advertisements, including the full-page “Join the Underground” ad that appeared in the New York Times.
As the number of its employees rose, Rosset’s relations to them became both more distant and more strained. In an effort to maintain the charismatic community at the company’s core, he had special hotlines installed in the offices of his senior staff that went directly to him. As Nat Sobel told me, “We had what Barney called the hotline. This was in the late sixties when Barney didn’t want to talk to anyone. Barney had already built an elevator so he could go to the office without seeing anybody. Only Fred and Dick were on that same floor.” As the company grew, the original tight-knit cadre of Rosset, Seaver, Jordan, Sobel, and Goldfischer began to disintegrate (Braverman had already left for the Monthly Review). In particular, Sobel and Rosset fought frequently over Rosset’s reckless investment in film, which Sobel felt was distracting from the core mission of selling books. As he related to me, “The place was in chaos, and I’d been particularly vocal about the way the film division had been taking all of Fred and Dick’s time.”