Man of Taste

"After three years of waiting for his completed movie to finally find a distributor, aspiring filmmaker Radley Metzger realized that if you want to avoid problems in distribution you should add either horror or sex. Metzger chose the latter and for much of the 1970s, he went on to make, depending on who you ask, erotic or pornographic films that combined explicit sex with elements of the European 'art' films he so admired. His films made during an era of 'porno chic' earned Metzger a kind of subcultural legitimacy even if his films were never recognized in the ways he had hoped. He became a filmmaker who had legitimate aspirations but no legitimate accomplishments. Rob King's A Man of Taste is a critical study of a filmmaker whose career offers a kind of fun-house mirror reflection of an era in which American film culture was transformed by a language of taste and distinction. The years in which Metzger came into his own as a filmmaker - the late 1950s through the late 1970s - mark out the period when cinema's reputation as an art form was at its loftiest, thanks to the postwar popularization of new critical categories like 'art cinema,' and the 'auteur' director. Metzger was at once an active agent in these processes and sought to channel his own cinephile aspirations into the more questionable arena of adult film. King uses Metzger's career to investigate what taste means, and how it works when exercised within the sphere of what taste scorns. It tells the story of a filmmaker whose aestheticism took root in a soil well beyond the manicured lawns of cultural legitimacy, and of the curious forms into which his aestheticism flowered"--