Doris Wishman

At 90 years old, Doris Wishman has this physical status:

Doris Wishman (June 1, 1912 – August 10, 2002) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer.

She has been recognized with producing at least thirty feature films in a career spanning more than four decades, most notable in the sex films genre. Wishman, a native of New York City, began her film career as a hobby after her husband's death in 1958.

She made her film debut with Hideout (1960) and went on to produce numerous nudist and exploitation films, including Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1963), Behind the Nudist Curtain (1963), and Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965).

She will make her first attempt at directing pornographic films in the 1970s. Wishman directed A Night to Dismember, her first and only feature horror film, in 1979, but she spent many years editing after multiple reels were destroyed during post-production.

She would make three more films in the early 2000s before death in 2002 at the age of 90.

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Life and career

Doris Wishman was born in New York City on June 1, 1912. Her father was a hay and grain salesman, and her mother died when she was a teenager.

She was raised in the Bronx, a borough in New York City, where she graduated from James Monroe High School. Wishman's after graduating from high school, she appeared to have taken acting lessons at the Alviene School of Dramatics in New York City in the early 1930s, where she was a classmate of Shelley Winters. She later attended Hunter College.

She later worked as a film booker for her cousin Max Rosenberg, an independent film distributor who specialized in both art films and exploitation film fare in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Wishman appeared as an actor in New York City in the 1950s and briefly worked with Joseph Levine for a brief period of time. She was married briefly to advertising consultant Jack Abrams and stayed with him in Florida until his death in 1958 due to a heart attack at age 31, and widowed only five months after their marriage. Wishman began her filmmaking career after Abrams' premature death because she felt she "needed something to fill my hours with."

Nudist camp films or nudist romances are some of her first films. A film depicting nudism was shown in theaters in New York State in 1957. Because of her acquaintances with Walter Bibo, whose film Garden of Eden gained notoriety due to its influence in swaying censorship laws for filming nudity, Wishman was aware of the attraction and potential of nudist camp films. Wishman claimed in several interviews to have borrowed $10,000 from her sister to produce her first film, Hide Out in the Sun, a nudist film that was shot in late 1958 and released in early 1960. Nude on the Moon, her next film, was released in 1961, and it was a science-fiction nudie. After the New York State Censorship Board found that films based on nudity in a nudist colony were legally approved, the film was not banned in New York, but nudity in a fantasy film set in a "nudist colony on the Moon" was not allowed. Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962), her fourth nudist film, starred legendary burlesque actress Blaze Starr. Between 1958 and 1964, Wishman made eight nudist films in total. After the fad of the genre began to decline, she decided to leave nudist exploitation films and move into the new sexploitation style. When she decided to change direction, Doris Wishman had produced, directed, and written more films in the nudist-film style.

Wishman began to produce and direct sex-exploitation or exploitation techniques in 1964, which were often described as "roughies." Wishman and other exploitation actors used melodrama, cutaway, softcore sex talk, and suggestive nudity that had just skirted under the rules, but not much. Wishman was put in disarray with the censorship statute, which put him at odds with the censorship statute. Wishman also used a different method of filmmaking in which she would cut to objects or scenes not present in the scene, which is similar to Soviet montage. Moya Luckett considers that the Wishman's cutaway style may have caused male gaze to be disfigured and incorporate a feminine gaze.

Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), Wishman's first collaboration with her long-time cinematographer C. Davis Smith, was her second in this genre. She worked under the alias "Louis Silverman," the name of her second husband's second husband's, during this period. In his film debut, she also produced The Sex Perils of Paulette (1965), which starred Tony Lo Bianco in his first film appearance. The New York Censor Board had heavily restricted Paulette's Sex Perils.

All of Wishman's exploitorial shots were shot in black and white before the introduction of her first soft-core color feature, Love Toy (circa 1970). Keyholes Are for Peeping (1972) (also known as Is There Love After Marriage) was released shortly after. Sammy Petrillo, a film actor, appeared. Chesty Morgan, the former of which was distributed internationally by Hallmark Releasing Corporation, continued to produce two low-budget thrillers in the mid-1970s, starring burlesque actor Chesty Morgan: Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, the former of which was published internationally by Hallmark Releasing Corporation and made on a budget of $50,000. Wishman shot roughies with a handheld camera, an experimental filmmaker's tactic, and exploitation filmmakers trying to minimize shooting expenses when producing roughies. The sex of Doris Wishman's films and other exploitation filmmakers were greatly limited by an antiobscenity statute at the time.

All of her 1970s-80s work was in the softcore genre of exploitation, except that Wishman produced two hardcore pornographic films entitled Satan Was a Lady (1975) and My Love (1976), both of which featured Annie Sprinkle. With the demise of censorship, the demand for nudity in film increased, possibly affecting Wishman's film direction. Hardcore was now available and explicit sex could be shot; this, however, was distasteful for Wishman and several exploitation producers. Wishman was not fond of watching pornographic films, and later in her life, she denied ever having directed them. She launched The Hot Month in August and Passion Fever, two newly completed Greek films, which Wishman purchased and added minimal original content, such as voiceover. She also launched Let Me Die a Woman, a semidocumentary film in 1978, where she had first begun shooting in 1971. Several transgender people were interviewed, one of whom was Deborah Hartin, was interviewed, and the film included dramatic reconstructions of scenes from their lives. It was one of the first films to concentrate on transsexuality and to actor transsexuals. According to Dr. Leo Wollman, who was in the film, the film represented realistic life. Harry Reems, a porn actor, appeared in Deep Throat (1972), as one of several dramatic dramas. Wishman's last film, A Night to Dismember, was an slasher film that began with Halloween in 1978. It began in the late 1970s and was finally completed in 1983. Samantha Fox, a pornographic actress, appears in the film. It was never theatrically launched. The films take a bloody and grotesque turn in these later works, and they are often referred to as her cinema of somatic representational due to heavy themes of the body's betraying itself.

Wishman relocated to Coral Gables, Florida, where she began working in an adult-novelty store after the failure of A Night to Dismember. Since the home video of several of her films via Something Weird Video was posted, her interest in her work began to gradually increase. A cult following began to appear at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1998 and performed twice on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, one of which she was interviewed with Roger Ebert. When she returned to work in 2001, she began working on two projects. Dildo Heaven, a sex comedy, first appeared in 2002. Both Time I Kill was the B-52s' front page, while John Waters, Linnea Quigley, and Fred Schneider, the singer of the B-52s, appeared.

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