After 32 years, why has the reclusive icon of two legendary 1970s movies suddenly cooperated in the making of a third?
“Because [director] Jim Tushinski asked me to. No one ever asked before,” says Peter Berlin. The movie is Gorilla Factory’s runaway, multiple prize-winning, film-festival hit documentary That Man: Peter Berlin, a title coined from 1974’s That Boy, in which Berlin’s wide-shouldered, wasp-waisted, muscle-blond image was so challenging that, he mourns, “Nobody ever imitated it.”
He would have liked to have it imitated. “At sixteen or seventeen I looked in the mirror and for five seconds was scared by what I saw there. Then I became entranced by it. And then I thought it would be even sexier in tight clothes, sheer clothes. I was like a little girl dressing up a doll. Whenever they’d let me, I even dressed my boyfriends just as I dressed myself. My friends said I ‘Peter-ized’ them. I would have loved to have seen Peter Berlins running up and down the street. Then I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to have a picture of it?”
Born Armin von Hoyningen-Huene in Lodz, Poland, in 1942, and a Berlin resident since the age of three, he had already taken amateur erotic photos with a young boyfriend. Taking pictures of himself in the skin-hugging, flamboyant outfits he designed led to a German career as a photographer of fashion and celebrities. But his real goal in life was to perfect the Peter Berlin doll.
By the time he hit San Francisco in 1970, he had refined his tight-pants, ripped-abdomen, taut-tits persona, and had begun his lifelong mission of capturing it in photographs, drawings, and paintings. Moving pictures of it seemed inevitable. Friend Richard Abel had a movie camera, so they “very casually” made Nights in Black Leather (1972).
“I directed it in fact, but I let Richard have the credit. It was a hit, which suited what people call my exhibitionism,” Two years later he took credit for directing That Boy, a smash. Both movies were very much a realization of his desire to see Peter Berlins running up and down the street — and having sex. “But the money that the movie brought in disappeared on its way to me into the hands of exhibitors and distributors, and I found that porn stardom, rather than enhancing my sex-life, as you might think, confused it. I wanted to be liked for myself, not for being the famous porn-star. Money and fame were never concerns of mine, anyway.”
Sales of his self-portraits, along with an inheritance, freed him from financial concerns, and he was at liberty to immerse himself in three decades of making photos, films, and videos of Peter Berlin masturbating or having sex with strangers. “Not lovers,” he cautions, “I feel that only by divorcing sex from the myth of love can we be free.”
It never occurred to him to release the movies. “All that interested me was the technology, and mastering it so that I could make the images ever better, more nearly perfect.”
Other artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, depicted him as well. “Warhol offered me his people, his entourage, to make another movie, but I preferred to work alone, by myself and for myself, using every advance to come nearer to the realization of my vision. I love digital cameras, with which one can instantaneously see the results and what one must do to make the next shot nearer to the ideal. That’s mind-boggling! I attained the image I visualized, but I find with the new devices one can have ever more control. I wish I would have had them when I was photographing Peter. I should have been born now!”
The still pictures, including a famous poster, were widely-circulated, and often the subject of exhibitions, but many hundreds of hours of videos stayed in storage, as did some undeveloped film, until he dragged it out to the surprise and delight of director Tushinski.
Tushinski has written, “When I had the sixteen-millimeter reels transferred to video, I was amazed at what had lain unseen for almost forty years: Peter walking the streets of Paris, Peter cruising the Castro at sunrise, Peter masturbating on a train from Germany to France. Peter, too, was surprised. Some of the film he didn’t even remember. Then we watched the videos of Fire Island, of New York lofts and vacations on Long Island, and of Peter posing, strutting, and climaxing for the camera. It was clear I had an embarrassment of riches to consider and a daunting editing task ahead of me.”
The result, That Man: Peter Berlin, dripping with interviews, insights, and DVD extras is available from Water Bearer Films. Berlin is pleased to be the subject of the documentary, and pleased that the re-released That Boy won the GAYVN Award as the Best Classic DVD of 2005. “I am floored that my name is not forgotten!”
But his very private life continues as before. “I make pictures, I watch television, I have sex by myself or with Reggie, Reginald Powell, the only man I have had sex with for years now. I never ‘retired.’ I am not at all averse to doing another movie. I have hundreds of hours of me having sex alone or with Reggie and with another black friend, Bryce. If someone would help me to edit what I have, I would make — oh, what I would make!
"I have shown so many, many hundreds of pictures of the still Peter Berlin, but now I could reveal to the world the animated Peter! I do not see movies now, they are so alike, so old, doing and re-doing the same old things, and so is porn. The cock going into the mouth, the cock going into the ass, always the same, so old! What I would make would not be porn as it is known, but something entirely new. I would take them into another world, into the stratosphere, into another universe!”
That Man Peter Berlin can be ordered at ThatManPeterBerlin.com and WaterBearerFilms.com, or Water Bearer Films, 800-551-8304.
Photo courtesy of PeterBerlin.com
