"Obscene cinema, what a marvel! It's exhilarating; a discovery. The incredible life of enormous and magnificent organs on the screen. The sperm that leaps. And the life of loving flesh, all the contortions. It's glorious."

This is how, in 1929, Surrealist poet Paul Eluard described to his wife Gala, the future life partner of Salvador Dali, his discovery of erotic cinema. The first artist to take a serious interest in so-called "stag" or "blue" films, Eluard alerted the rest of the Surrealists, includingAndré Breton and Man Ray, to this intriguing new art form. For the next century, his enthusiasm would be shared by such luminaries as Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, even Stanley Kubrick, all of whom flirted with a cinema whose clandestine nature only made it more intriguing.

John Baxter lived in Los Angeles during what is now acknowledged as the Golden Age of Adult Films, in the late Eighties, and knew personally its most important performers and creators. His first-hand account of that period, augmented by research into the shadowy history of erotic film, provides a vivid portrait of this most elusive of cinematic genres.