It's not his nose that grows.
A mid-1970s newspaper ad for a local movie theater features two programs. In the afternoon there was a children's matinee of a 1956 Margaret O'Brien musical called Glory, and the evening double feature was the X-rated Joys of Georgette and Sweet Taste of Joy. It appeared in an online group devoted to poring over this sort of vintage film advertising, and a reader in the comments asked, "Wouldn't people be wary about taking the whole family to an adult theater?"
I know the answer. It was not an adult theater. It was an everyday mainstream theater. It was a theater like The Civic, where I saw lots of Saturday afternoon matinees in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I was born in 1964.
In the early 1970s, weird shit was happening. The Hays Code was gone, a rating system was in place, and the "X" rating was for anything more violent or sexual than "R." Midnight Cowboy was rated X. Soft sex films about stewardesses and cheerleaders were rated X. Then Deep Throat arrived. It wasn't soft, but the 1972 film was also rated "X" and became a national phenomenon, playing all over the country in all kinds of run-of-the-mill movie theaters.
It prompted a wave of films, both softcore and hardcore, playing anywhere that would book them, and because Deep Throat made a mountain of money, lots of places would book them. This is how I wound up at a Saturday afternoon children's matinee in 1974, age 10, at the Civic, which was also showing The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio.
The movie was made in 1969, and it lives on, thanks to the internet. I've seen it, in its entirety, on XHamster, which to its credit, has a pretty large archive of vintage 70s adult films. Forgive me if I get the plot details wrong because I didn't take notes when I watched it. I was flabbergasted that it really existed and that I hadn't imagined it.
It's about a woman named Gepetta who carves a sex doll out of wood so she can fuck it. A fairy godmother turns him into a real man. He has a lot of sex. At one point his dick is like three feet long – under a sheet, saving money on prosthetics – and it is unwieldy. The End. It is very boring.
Here's the original poster. Are you nervous to click through? Then I'll explain it. It's a painting of inelegant execution, centering a half-human, half-wooden man with an elongated nose, and he's surrounded by what people of that era would refer to as "scantily-clad" ladies. They cannot keep their hands off him. The poster's tagline – IT'S NOT HIS NOSE THAT GROWS – is bold, the imagery strange, and though I can't remember what kind of movie I went to see that day – The Phantom Tollbooth? Snoopy, Come Home? – this freak-ass X-rated Pinocchio burned itself into my kid brain.
As a ten-year-old, looking at the poster in one of The Civic's exterior poster cases, I was confused, but curious, and I was sophisticated enough by that point to intuit that it was fake-Pinocchio's penis that grew, and that it had something to do with these nearly-nude women, but I had not yet learned the word "erotic," nor could I describe to anyone what sex was in spite of classmates who confidently and inaccurately explained it during school lunches, so I remained shut out of crucial knowledge about what secret naked things grown-ups were doing.
For younger people reading this who might be stunned by decades-old inappropriate business practices where children were concerned, all I can tell you is that people in 1974 didn't think twice about dropping off a ten-year-old at a movie theater with The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio on the marquee. They didn't worry that their child was about to watch a horny, man-sized marionette. They knew the deal. Their child was about to see Superbug: Super Agent, or Godzilla vs The Smog Monster or any number of sequels to Planet of the Apes. There was a clear demarcation. The theater management was not going to mistakenly show the wrong movie. Of course, if you arrived at 7pm with your kid in tow because you didn't understand which Pinocchio you were getting, then that was on your dumb ass.
The Civic went on to show other films like for their evening programs, with titles like If You Don't Stop It... You'll Go Blind!!! and its sequel, Can I Do It... 'Til I Need Glasses? (featuring Robin Williams and future Los Angeles billboard queen Angelyne as Little Red Riding Hood) and these alternated with movies like Funny Lady. As I said, it was the 70s and weird shit was happening, and if I had a time machine, I'd make sure someone was there to take my picture, waving at the camera, underneath that marquee.
End note 1: Sadly, Alex Roman, man who plays Pinocchio, died in a scuba diving accident near Catalina Island off the Southern California coast in 1970, so he never got to become a sex celebrity like Harry Reems. He wasn't even around for the film's release in 1971.
End note 2: Fairy Godmother Dyanne Thorne, who once showed up as "First Girl" on Star Trek, went on to star in The Swinging Barmaids, Chesty Anderson, USN, and the notorious Ilsa She Wolf of the SS and its sequels. Pinocchio's status as an intriguing oddity, in no small part thanks to its poster and tagline, kept it bopping around from theater to theater as the decade rolled on.
End note 3: Built in 1878, The Civic, having lived through a few names, both before and after its tenure as a movie theater, is now called The Music Hall, and it still stands. My older brother sent me pictures and video from the renovated interior when he was there for a recent concert. They kind of do it all at this place now, "all" meaning concerts, events, and even films, though to my knowledge this does not include retrospectives of weird vintage porn. But, like, why not?
