Doris Wishman, one of the few women to work as a director in the genre of exploitation films, died August 10, 2002, in Miami, Florida. During her career, Wishman, who worked under a series of pseudonyms that included Anthony Brooks, Luigi Manicottale, O.O. Miller, L. Silverman, Louis Silverman, Lazarus Volkl, and Kenyon Wintel, directed more than 30 films that she often also produced and wrote. She started out making nudie pictures; her first hit was 1960’s Blaze Starr Goes Wild, which starred the famous stripper Blaze Starr. A series of films followed: Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1962), Nude on the Moon (1962), and The Prince and the Nature Girl (1962). She made a series of domestic-type dramas that doubled as soft-core porn, such as Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), A Taste of Her Flesh (1967), and The Love Toy (1968); her biggest hit was Deadly Weapons (1974). She later made slasher-type sex films such as A Night to Dismember (1983) and Dildo Heaven (2001). She continued working until her death. Her last film, Each Time I Kill, was in post-production when she died. Boston film booker George Mansour knew Doris Wishman and remembers her here.

Q: When did you work with Doris?

A: It was 1974, and I was a buyer for Hallmark Releasing, a Boston-based company, and I bought Doris’s film Deadly Weapons — which starred the burlesque queen Chesty Morgan as a woman who avenges her boyfriend’s murder by fellow mobsters by dating the hit men and then smothering them with her very large breasts.

Q: Where did you book Deadly Weapons?

A: We actually bought it outright and owned world rights. We paid $100,000 for it, which was a lot then. It did well in the US and played for over a year in Japan. It was the sort of film that did very well in drive-ins. It was Doris’s most popular film up until then, probably ever. It made her sort of famous. She didn’t get as much as she probably should have. It also made a name out of Chesty Morgan as well. They went on to do another film together — a James Bond parody called Double Agent 73. Doris did her own distribution, but the film didn’t do as well as Deadly Weapons.

Q: What did people think of Doris?

A: Well, most people didn’t know who she was, really. She was quite private. Much later, when I was the curator at the Harvard Film Archive, I suggested that we bring Doris for a retrospective of her work.

Q: Was she happy with the attention?

A: She was happy but not surprised. She felt it was her due and wanted to know how much money she was getting. It wasn’t much, but she came anyway, and had a great time. The audience loved her, but there was a lot of condescension. She had real fans, but let’s face it — the movies are not very good. She had an odd habit of focusing the camera on distracting, extraneous items — ashtrays or a squirrel in one film — during an important scene. Maybe she had a reason for it, but it wasn’t immediately discernable.

Q: Was it unusual for a women to work in the soft-core sex-film industry?

A: Very. And I am sure Doris was treated as an oddity. While there were some really great people doing these films — Radley Metzger and Russ Meyer — Doris was sort of hurt by the fact that while her films had an odd sort of energy, they were technically pretty bad. There is a scene in Double Agent 73 where Chesty leaves a tacky hotel room in New York and flies to Las Vegas. But when she arrives [at] her Las Vegas hotel, it is clearly the same room, with the same awful green shag rug. Doris didn’t even bother to change cheap hotel rooms for the sake of realism.

Q: What is Doris Wishman’s legacy?

A: Well, probably that women can make bad sex movies just as well as men. But what she did do is pave the way for people to look at this genre as camp. If she had been a man, she might have been the new John Waters — and while he was lionized, she was marginalized. At heart she thought of herself as a serious filmmaker, and that is what kept her going for more the 30 years.