Many movie makers beginning in 1966 pushed the limits as sex sells and the sexual revolution was born. Documentaries about nudity, sexual positions, and claims that pornography was art eventually won the day to the point where prosecutions stopped.
Theatres started showing risqué movies on the coasts more freely, opening an opportunity for filmmakers to make very good money off the showing of these movies at theatres, which then exploded with VHS and DVD. Inside the coasts, theatres that dared show these movies were shut down regularly and charged with obscenity crimes. The genre of movies that came out of this was referred to as sexploitation which eventually became soft-core and then matured into hardcore movies as prosecutions stopped after a SCOTUS rulings in 1973.
One of the biggest stars of this era was Jennifer Welles. Jennifer started as a body painting model in the 1968 documentary Sex by Advertisement, a perfect example of a docu-sextary, which were followed by Love after Death in 1969, another docu-sextary. She then moved into attempts at serious artistic sexploitation movies, Career Bed in 1969, This Sporting House in 1969, Submission in 1969, and The Good, The Bad and The Beautiful in 1970. Scorpio 70 was the first sexploitation color movie Jennifer Welles starred in followed by A Weekend with Strangers in 1971 (Hard to find-still looking).
Jennifer’s story is quite interesting. She was born in New Jersey in 1934 and did not get into movies until she was in her thirties (one of the original M I L F s before the word became a regular vocabulary word in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary). She was one of the only stars I could find that went through the roller coaster of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s first starring in docu-sextarys then serious sexploitation movies, and eventually made her way into soft-core and hard-core. Her 1977 movie Inside Jennifer Welles was one of the highest grossing hard-core movies of that year and played for four (4) years straight in some of the most famous adult theatres of the time.
Then suddenly, Jennifer vanished from the scene. According to a recent podcast she did before she passed away, a wealthy man proposed to her and his only condition was that she had to get out of the business.
Scorpio 70 is about a heroin dealer and his nymphomaniac secretary played by Jennifer Welles, that go on a small sailboat ship cruise with two other couples, where they are supposed to meet up with a supplier and receive a million and a half dollars worth of heroin. Things don’t go as planned, and Jennifer starts having sex with just about every man on board and it all ends in disaster. There is a serious attempt here to make this softcore movie about more than sex.
