A Labor of Love (1976)

User Rating:

8.3/10   

Directors:

Robert Flaxman
Daniel Goldman

Genre:

Documentary

Runtime:

USA:70 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

USA:X (self applied)

The story of some people who tried to make an X-rated movie

Don't come expecting to see an X-rated movie. Come expecting to see how they're made.

With that tagline, Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman released their 1976 documentary, A Labor of Love. Shot in Chicago, A Labor of Love is an intimate look at the making of a seventies-era movie which included graphic sex scenes. Given unlimited access during the entire filming, Flaxman and Goldman interviewed the cast and crew, and were present on the set as the hard-core sex scenes were shot.

Director Henri Charbakshi originally set out to make a drama called The Last Affair which concerned a married couple unable to conceive. The answer to their dilemma was to have the woman visit a male brothel and allow one of the prostitutes to serve as a sperm donor for her child.

In 1975 Robert Flaxman was directing commercials and a short film for the City of Chicago. Through a mutual contact, Flaxman met with Charbakshi and later expressed his interest in documenting the making of The Last Affair for educational or commercial use. Flaxman, working the camera, was joined by co-producer and sound man Daniel Goldman as they interviewed the actors who would give it their all for the sake of the film. This was before the advent of pay television and home video, and a genuine movie about the creation of another movie was a new concept.

Once shooting was completed on The Last Affair, the producers again changed their minds and the explicit sex scenes were removed. Additional footage was added and the storyline of the brothel was scrapped. In the finished film, also known as Wife, Husband & Friend, the couple (Ron Dean and Debbie Dan) now seek a stranger at a bar (Jack Wallace) to serve as the biological father for their child. The Last Affair was universally panned and Roger Ebert called it "an appallingly bad movie." The film is noteworthy today only for the performances of then unknown actress/director Betty Thomas (Hill Street Blues, Private Parts ) and popular character actor Dean (The Dark Knight, Code of Silence, The Fugitive).

Robert Flaxman and Daniel Goldman received rave notices for A Labor of Love and, in the true spirit of independent cinema, self-distributed the film on a theater by theater basis in the Midwest before seeking and finding a distributor. In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote that A Labor of Love "captures exactly what pornography cannot permit: the human reality of the sexual experience." Flaxman revealed that a young actor named David Nichols, upon seeing A Labor of Love, recommended the movie to writer/director Paul Schrader. Flaxman arranged a screening and Schrader viewed the film prior to starting work on his 1979 drama Hardcore with George C. Scott and Peter Boyle.

A Labor of Love has never been released on home video and has not been seen commercially for over thirty years. Robert Flaxman is now a highly successful script analyst/consultant in Hollywood with his company, Deep Feed-Back. The master print of A Labor of Love survives, and this fine documentary would be a fantastic glimpse into the world of adult films for today's audiences. For now we can only hope that Flaxman's labor of love sees the light of day once again.