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Stanley Long

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English film director (1933–2012)

Stanley Long
BornStanley Alfred Long
26 November 1933
London, England
Died10 September 2012 (aged 78)
Buckinghamshire, England
Occupation(s)Film director, film producer, writer
Childrenone daughter and two grandchildren
Parent(s)Eleanor and Alfred Long

Stanley A. Long (26 November 1933 – 10 September 2012) was an English exploitation cinema and sexploitation filmmaker. He was also a driving force behind the VistaScreen stereoscopic (3D) photographic company. He was a writer, cinematographer, editor, and eventually, producer/director of low-budget exploitation movies.

Career

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Long began his career as a photographer with the RAF, and helped found the stereoscopic souvenir/collectible outfit VistaScreen with the Spring Brothers in 1956. Selling out to Weetabix in 1961, Long considered other outlets for his talents.

He produced striptease shorts or "glamour home movies", as they were sometimes known, for the 8 mm market, under the banner of Stag Film Productions.

Beginning in the late fifties, Long's feature film career would span the entire history of the British sex film, and as such exemplifies its differing trends and attitudes.

Long was the cameraman on several British horror movies of the 1960s, including The Blood Beast Terror, Repulsion (uncredited) and The Sorcerers. For the latter he was strapped to the top of a car to film one sequence.

In 1963, Harry Clifton (producer) re-financed Long's Circlorama cinema (which used the Circular Kinopanorama process based on the idea of Cinéorama) near Piccadilly Circus in London, requesting that the filmmakers make a film with some hobgoblins in it, but the ensuing film, "Circlorama Cavalcade", instead featured circus lions, Formula 2 cars, ice skaters, trains at Clapham Junction and The Swinging Blue Jeans.

His work ranges from coy nudist films (Nudist Memories, 1959) to moralizing documentary (The Wife Swappers, 1970) to a more relaxed attitude to permissive material (Naughty!, 1971, On the Game, 1974), to out-and-out comedies at the end of the 1970s.

He made several sex comedy movies in the 1970s, the most successful being Adventures of a Taxi Driver (1976), Adventures of a Private Eye (1977) and Adventures of a Plumber's Mate (1978); these starred a host of talented comedy performers including Barry Evans, Diana Dors, Irene Handl, Harry H. Corbett, Liz Fraser and Fred Emney.

Like Norman J. Warren, Long also made horror films. He made the anthology movie Screamtime in 1983 and was due to film a Jo Gannon script entitled Plasmid, about albino mutants living in London’s Underground. While the film was never made, confusingly a tie-in novel of Plasmid was released.

Long retired from film directing in the early 1980s; however, he briefly returned to direct The Other Side of the Screen in 2006, a one-off documentary about various aspects of filmmaking. This was hosted by Paul Martin, star of Flog It!.

As an entrepreneur, he was the creator of Salon Productions and, later, Alpha Film Distribution.

The "Adventures of" comedies were released to DVD on 2 June 2008. The following year several of his other sex films, On the Game, Sex and the Other Woman and This That and the Other were also released on DVD for the very first time.

Long was interviewed for the BBC's Balderdash and Piffle programme (broadcast 25 May 2007), and the British horror and comedy episodes of the British Films Forever series ("Magic, Murder and Monsters" broadcast 25 August 2007, "Sauce, Satire and Sillyness" broadcast 9 September 2007).

Simon Sheridan’s biography of Long - X-Rated - Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker - was published in July 2008.

Death

Stanley Long died in Buckinghamshire on 10 September 2012, at the age of 78, of natural causes.

Select credits

See also

References

  1. ^ "BBC News - Stanley Long 'King of Sexploitation' dies". Bbc.co.uk. 1 January 1970. Retrieved 13 September 2012.
  2. New York Times
  3. X-Rated - Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker by Simon Sheridan (Reynolds & Hearn books) (2008) ISBN 1-905287-78-X
  4. Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema by Simon Sheridan (fourth edition) (Titan Books) (2011)
  5. Sheridan, Simon (16 September 2012). "Stanley Long: Film director who was described by 'The Sun' as 'The King of Sexploitation'". The Independent.
  6. Ference, Ian (18 December 2020). "The Irving Theatre: VistaScreen's rarest set shows London's first strip joint". Brooklyn Stereography. Retrieved 10 October 2022.
  7. The true history of Circlorama 1962-65 Stanley Long, 2006, at "in70mm.com". Retrieved 27 May 2020
  8. Review of Plasmid tie-in novel
  9. "X-rated comedies". films. TV Cream. Archived from the original on 13 February 2007. Retrieved 30 July 2024. Long's Salon Productions
  10. "SALON PRODUCTIONS". T. V. Cream. 27 July 2009. Retrieved 30 July 2024.
  11. "Biography". Michael Armstrong. Archived from the original on 3 April 2017. Retrieved 30 July 2024.

External links

Images

Video

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