From http://popwatch.ew.com- It happened almost invisibly, without the overheated hype, the aren’t-you shocked/aren’t-you-titillated? tabloid media blitz that would surely have accompanied it today.
In 1977, back when David Cronenberg was just an obscure Toronto-based maker of low-budget horror films (though critics were already starting to foam at the mouth a t his metaphors), he wrote and directed a nasty little psychosexual shocker called Rabid, in which he cast, in the lead role, the adult-film actress Marilyn Chambers. It was the first instance of a performer rising out of the seamy swamp of hard-core pornography and crossing over, without irony, into a mainstream movie. It would also be just about the last.
In Rabid, Chambers, who died last week at 56, plays a young woman who becomes a mutant predator, with a dagger-like…thingy that emerges, bloody and vicious, from her armpit, turning everyone it stabs into a rampaging, teeth-gnashing, id-flaunting zombie demon. In an interview on the Specal Edition DVD of Rabid, Cronenberg claims that he has never, to this day, seen Behind the Green Door, the 1972 adult-film landmark that made Chambers famous.
True or not, Cronenberg knew what he had: He did an extremely shrewd job of playing off her image as a willowy girl next door with a secret depraved dark side. In Rabid, Chambers, with her wide eyes, come-hither smile, and cornstalk bearing, makes a disarmingly vivid demon-vixen on the loose. Despite the faintly tinny coo of her voice, she was, at least in this role, not a bad actress, perhaps because she identified with the perversity of the movie’s sex-kitten-gone-nutzoid imagery. A performer who’d gotten famous for being defiled on screen was now getting the chance to defile back.
By starring in Rabid, Chambers effectively blazed a trail, one that, as it turned out, went cold fairly quickly. In our own time, we’ve seen adult-film stars become icons of kitsch — like Ron Jeremy, the burly “Hedgehog” who gets cast in bit parts whenever a director wants to lend a comedy a bit of cheap “underground” cachet (e.g., Class of Nuke ‘Em High 3), or Traci Lords, who has carved out a TV and movie career lampooning her earlier infamy.
And, of course, the adult superstar Jenna Jameson is a one-woman self-promotion machine. Marilyn Chambers, though, enjoyed her short-lived mainstream breakthrough near the end of the porno-chic era, when it wasn’t just a cool-cred joke or a naked PR stunt. Her role in Rabid seemed to open the door to further possibilities.
Seven years later, in 1984, director Brian De Palma flirted with casting another ’70s adult-film star — Annette Haven — in the role of triple-X actress Holly Body in Body Double. But the idea fell by the wayside (there were reports that it was nixed by the studio), and the part went to Melanie Griffith instead. By that point, it was clear that these two worlds were not destined, at least in America, to do much in the way of cross-pollinating.
At the time she made Rabid, Chambers claimed that she was done with the adult-film industry. But just when she thought she was out, it pulled her back in. Of course, the scandal that launched — and forever defined — her career was, in its singular and bizarre way, the ultimate case of mainstream/adult film crossover. Only this was crossover in reverse. After she’d finished shooting Behind the Green Door, the film’s creators, the Mitchell brothers, got wind of the fact that she had once been “the Ivory Snow girl,” posing in dewy sanitized soap commercials as “99 and 44/100 percent pure.” The ultimate icon of American purity starring in the ultimate dirty movie became an instant publicity sensation.
More than that, however, it became an enduring myth of adult films: that the squeaky-clean soap princess — an image that hearkened back to the Mad Men early ’60s — wasn’t what she seemed. And if she wasn’t, what did that say about everyone else? The true legacy of Marilyn Chambers, who crossed over before it was fashionable, or even permitted, may be that the lines you cross will forever be defining even after you’ve demonstrated that they’re not entirely real.