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Finally, a book on Radley Metzger! Positioning the director both as auteur and impresario of the sex film, Rob King insightfully explores how Metzger’s insistence on “high class eroticism” paradoxically at once secured and siloed his legacy. Man of Taste is an acutely perceptive tribute to the uniqueness of this long-overlooked filmmaker who profoundly influenced American film culture and sex scenes in the 1960s and 1970s. Metzger’s sly, cinephilic, and lively work is in gifted hands, imbued by the wry and self-conscious persona of Metzger himself. A true pleasure to read. -- Elena Gorfinkel, author of <i>Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s</i> Finally a book worthy of the master himself: Radley Metzger’s life, career, and preoccupations are elegantly explored and intelligently analyzed in Rob King’s excellent, long-awaited, and much-needed biography, Man of Taste. -- Ashley West, <i>The Rialto Report</i> Cinephiles typically know director Radley Metzger only for his ""porno chic"" classic The Lickerish Quartet (1970). But as Rob King's revealing Man of Taste demonstrates, Metzger's decades-long career as a filmmaker shadowed the cultural conflations of ""high"" and ""low"" that so defined independent filmmaking across the post-code era. Detailing Metzger's work across the eras of sixties exploitation, seventies hardcore, and the video/cable market of the eighties, King makes a compelling argument for Metzger's importance, not necessarily as a consecrated auteur but as a filmmaker who consistently renegotiated this period's shifting line between cinematic sophistication and sleaze. -- Jeffrey Sconce, author of <i>The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity</i> Comprehensive, impressive, and ambitious, King’s text is well-written, compelling, and thought provoking. * George Bidwell * King brings erudition to sexploitation, grounding this work in film theory and exploring the subjectivity of taste. * Library Journal *

Finally, a book on Radley Metzger! Positioning Metzger both as auteur and impresario of the sex film, Rob King insightfully explores how Metzger’s insistence on “high class eroticism” both paradoxically secured and siloed his legacy. Man of Taste is an acutely perceptive tribute to the uniqueness of this long-overlooked filmmaker who profoundly impacted American film culture and sex scenes in the 1960s and 1970s. Metzger’s sly, cinephilic, and lively work is in gifted hands, imbued by the wry and self-conscious persona of Metzger himself. A true pleasure to read. -- Elena Gorfinkel, author of <i>Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s</i>

Author Information

Rob King is a professor of film and media studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017) and The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009).

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