LOS ANGELES—Friday evening saw the debut of an exhibit the likes of which has never before been seen in Los Angeles: an international collection of rare posters for films ranging from X to XXX, as well as Italian horror and thriller films—the genre called "giallo"—together with some of those movies' stars who came out for the occasion.
The exhibition/sale was put together by Christian McLaughlin of Westgate Gallery, an online retailer which boasts more than 20,000 posters for sale in genres ranging from cult and exploitation films and horror to the aforementioned golden age XXX and giallo.
"All of these posters are what was a year ago my personal collection that I had been amassing since I was three years old," McLaughlin explained. "I decided a couple of years ago that it was just ridiculous to have all this and just keep them in files and mylar envelopes and not be able to display them, and I ended up framing and backing a lot of giallo posters, and I decided to do that theme in my house, and I was able to really get some great stuff done with some rare giallo posters. But then that left all of my favorite adult posters without a place to go, and I thought, 'I need to get these out to a place where people can enjoy them and have them on their walls and enjoy them every day, and spread the word about how cool these are to collect.' So that's what happened."
But finding a venue proved to be more difficult than McLaughlin had anticipated.
"I did call a lot of places last summer and last fall, and they didn't quite get it," McLaughlin sighed. "I thought people would be a little more hip in L.A. and a little more receptive to it, but I was having a really hard time until my Instagram person, Nick Johnson—he's also an Uber driver; he has like nine jobs; he's a brilliant guy; he does everything. He picked up Danny [Fuentes], the owner of Lethal Amounts, and they began talking on one of Danny's Uber rides and Nick remembered that he had this place, and I emailed Danny that night, and on Monday I heard back from him. He had only seen a few little pictures, and so I brought a big box of stuff that I had just gotten in from Italy and did like a one-hour show-and-tell at the store one night as they were closing, and he immediately said, 'Let's do a show—let's do two shows! Let's sell these!' So we've been working on this non-stop for three months, and we're finally here."
And Fuentes couldn't be happier, considering that his art gallery, Lethal Amounts at 1226 W. Seventh Street in downtown L.A., was packed to the rafters on opening night.
"When Christian first came to me with the exhibit, I was on it like a fly on shit," Fuentes said. "He said he'd tried a few other galleries, but no one was willing to do it. I just think just the words 'pornography,' 'XXX' or anything like that is still taboo to some, or maybe he was just approaching the wrong people, but he found me and I think it was a good fit."
Among the celebrities on hand for the exhibit's debut were current and former actresses and actors Karen Summer, Long Jean Silver—both of whom were honored at this year's Legends of Erotica show in Las Vegas—Kelly Nichols, Serena and Annie Sprinkle, as well as Eric Edwards, Bill Margold, Herschel Savage and Ron Jeremy, plus directors Wesley Emerson and Roy Karch. On the more mainstream side of things, Russ Meyer favorite Kitten Natividad put in an appearance, with the poster from one of her movies, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, on display, and as well as Mink Stole, a supporting actress in several John Waters "cult" movies such as Hairspray and Pink Flamingos.
Our trip around the gallery revealed some real beauties, including foreign versions of movies like Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls (better known in Italy as Voglie Erotiche Di Una Porno Pizzaiola); Talk Dirty to Me III, New Wave Hookers and Love Bites, all featuring Traci Lords; Porno Holocaust, directed by the late Joe D'Amato; Kinkorama, directed by the late Lasse Braun; Sweet Cakes "introducing identical twin sisters Brooke and Taylor Young"; a foreign version of Andy Warhol's Flesh for Frankenstein; Baby Love & Beau, starring Jennifer Holmes, Cris Cassidy, Eileen Welles and Dewey Alexander—who's now better known as Richard Pacheco; plus a bunch of Dyanne Thorne movies including (if our Italian isn't too rusty) Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks and Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia.
The exhibit will be up for at least six weeks, and McLaughlin and Fuentes encourage all fans of XXX and exploitation/cult films to come on down and take a look—and while all the posters on display in the gallery are for sale, there are plenty more to be found on Westgate's website.
"I have 22,253 different films in there and my ISP is like, 'This is unmanageable; it's gonna crash,' and they want me to reconfigure the whole thing again, so I guess I have to do that. I spent 200 hours doing it in January. I'm new to all the web design stuff; I wish somebody had told me, but I know the stock really, really, really well now."
He's already marked the posters pictured on his website that are appearing in the Lethal Amounts show, but he's got some rarities that should thrill the heart of any collector.
"We have a lot of linen-backed adult posters, which it's very rare to find someone who has linen-backed them so they look as they did when they first rolled off the presses," he explained. "You don't find those very often; I've only seen them once or twice, but we have something like 16 linen-backed classic ones: Tell Them Johnny Wadd is Here, V The Hot One, Hot Rackets, and some very, very rare ones, too: Dental Nurses—some very old '70s things, lots of things, so whatever you're interested in, I pretty much have it covered. You know, they pretty much stopped making the posters in the mid-'80s, but up until then—I love it."
McLaughlin also mentioned that he tweets one poster daily here.
Pictured, l-r: Annie Sprinkle, Kelly Nichols, Serena, Mink Stole, Long Jean Silver and Kitten Natividad at the opening of the Westgate Gallery exhibit.
