It’s funny because people think of the adult industry in such glamorous, outrageous terms, but the people that work behind the scenes are sitting at desks and filing paperwork, sending out invoices, doing their government tax forms, all that boring stuff. Mason: Yeah, it was like any other mundane job that people have to worry about (my grandparents owned a hardware store, for example).
How they went about raising a family (and how they kept secrets) became a natural storyarc that would bind everything together.įilmmaker: Having your parents operate a gay book store is probably not as scandalous as it sounds at one point in the film you skim numerous titles of adult DVDs while your mom remarks that those films probably put you through college! What was your relationship like with your parents’ profession? Was it just something that mom and dad did for a living? I always knew of the stores’ importance to the local gay community, but in choosing to take on this project, I began to unearth my family’s deeper connection to their place of employment. I didn’t set out to make a film as personal as it ultimately became. Up until I made Circus of Books, my films existed exclusively in the art world, in an arthouse context and were considered more obscure performance art pieces.įilmmaker: What was the impetus then for Circus of Books ? Were you getting the sense that your parents were going to have to shut down their stores and you wanted to document it? My background is as a visual artist, musician and songwriter. I performed live alongside several screenings and, as a result, it was compared to the work of Sam Green, a filmmaker who also does “live-performance documentaries.” But it wasn’t a traditional documentary by any stretch. It was a rare coincidence that I happened to discover.
It’s called The Lives of Hamilton Fish and it focuses on a very obscure subject: two men named Hamilton Fish (the Republican member of the United States House of Representatives and the notorious serial killer) who both died on the same day in January of 1936. That being said, my first film was considered a documentary to some because it was based on real individuals and a lot of personal research (it was also partly a musical). Mason: Circus of Books is technically my first documentary. Anyone who’s ever worked with adult video–discounted buy-one-get-one-free and previously-viewed promotions remain all the rage–will get caught up in the clunky nostalgia of what is now considered something of a halcyon era.Ī few days before Circus of Books was set to premiere on Netflix (where it’s now streaming), I spoke with Mason about her family’s lurid past, the history of gay rights and activism in California, meeting with Hustler’s Larry Flynt, and why every family has an interesting story waiting to be discovered if you just dig deep enough.įilmmaker: This isn’t your first foray into documentary filmmaking, right? Less quirky or twee than you might expect, Circus of Books is the story of a tightknit Jewish family who, by serving an underserved market, backed into a fight against the conservative powers-that-be (President Reagan and Attorney General Ed Meese’s war on the First Amendment), while adjusting their personal beliefs for the betterment of progressivism and acceptance. Titled after the popular gay bookshops in West Hollywood and Silver Lake owned by her conservative parents for decades, Mason’s documentary is steeped in American (LGBTQ consumerism and activism) and familal history (mom and dad ran these mom-and-pop shops like any retail operation, except theirs just happened to sell adult content).
Whether the internet killed the gay porn industry or helped to further proliferate its distribution is but one topic discussed in Circus of Books, director Rachel Mason’s new documentary that premieres on Netflix this week.
Why browse in person when you can search through endless adult content online free of charge? Who wants to sheepishly walk toward the back of a store, slipping through the creaky saloon doors to peruse graphic DVD covers that promise over eight hours of explicit content when you can just as easily scroll through an infinite archive on your phone? Feel awkward purchasing toys, lubricants, edibles, and reading material over the counter in person? Thanks to the internet of things, human-to-human interaction can be but a distant memory! Long an enclave for individuals to frequent and explore without fear of condescending judgment, brick-and-mortar porn shops have been going the way of the dodo bird. Circus of Books, Netflix, Rachel Mason, Ryan Murphy