“Mark my words”: John Wayne’s prophecy for the “death blow” to pornography that never came
Pornography and John Wayne are two phrases that don’t belong in the same sentence, but the legendary star nonetheless predicted that the smut industry was on its last legs.
That’s ironic for several reasons. First of all, ‘The Duke’ made his prophecy in the early 1970s, shortly before the ‘Golden Age of Porn’ arrived, when X-rated skin flicks would receive wide theatrical releases, make a killing at the box office, and edge the medium closer to the mainstream than ever before.
There’s also the small matter of porn being a multi-billion-dollar business in the modern age, although you can maybe forgive Wayne on that front when his all-seeing eye didn’t extend far enough into the future to see the advent of the internet age and how it’s become more easily accessible than ever.
If he didn’t like X-rated movies, with Midnight Cowboy a particular thorn in his side, then there was no chance ‘The Duke’ would approve of people shagging on-camera for the enjoyment of others. He was a man of upstanding moral conviction, whether those convictions were on the right side of history or not, but he seemed confident that the day of the porno was reaching the end of its life cycle.
It most certainly was not, with a young Quentin Tarantino especially devastated that the embrace of erotic cinema was a short-term thing only, and Wayne’s theorising did actually carry some merit. He got a couple of things right, but when it came to pornography, he couldn’t have been wider of the mark.
“I see pay TV in the not-so-distant future,” he surmised, proving right on the money. “At the moment, we know our feature films will show in theatres from one to a couple of years, and then, after quite a while, they go on the air. But pay TV is going to work differently. We’ll do the feature films, all right, but we’ll pull them out of the theatres in three to six months, hold them for another three months, then show them on pay TV.”
That was fairly bang-on, it’s still applicable today, and it remains a hot topic of conversation with streaming doing severe damage to the theatrical window. Wayne also forecast that home televisions would get bigger, which they did and continue to do, but he was dead wrong when he suggested that those advancements would light the funeral pyre for porno.
“See that over there?” he questioned, pointing to a screen that was roughly three-by-five feet. “That’s what’s coming, you mark my words, and it’ll be the death blow of dirty X-rated pictures, which have just about run their cycle anyway.” Sorry, ‘Duke’, but dirty X-rated pictures haven’t gone anywhere, and you can watch them on a screen of any size, from your phone to Tarantino’s New Beverly cinema.
How did he reach the conclusion that bigger home screens meant less interest in porn? Fuck knows, to be honest, and maybe it was just wishful thinking, because that type of film remains a staple, for better or worse.
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