Casting-couch porn, all too relevant again

Suddenly all-too-timely with the #MeToo movement tearing through Hollywood, YOUNG STAR GAZERS is a perfect time-capsule of the prior state of affairs, where sexual congress was viewed as prerequisite for "being discovered."

Almost woefully underdeveloped, the film begins with a narrator, Horst Mai (which all sources tell me is porn director Toby Ross), opining about the necessity of "the horizontal position" for young hopefuls looking to make it in Tinseltown. After a few minutes of vintage Hollywood Blvd. footage, we head up to a home in the hills, where an aspiring actor (Jeff Colt) is seduced by a producer.

Taking almost 10 minutes (of a 56-minute feature!) to get down to action, the film moves herky-jerkily from here, with a long sex scene that takes things past the halfway mark. Left alone on the couch to get himself hard, Colt is joined by a blonde twink (another aspiring star? The producer's boyfriend? It's never clear) who helps start off the action before the producer returns to throw himself into the mix. Featuring the same piece of stock music looped over and over and scattershot editing that more often focuses on the guy talking than the one having sex, it's a weird scene, with attractive enough guys to achieve takeoff velocity but an incompetent non-style that hampers things from truly getting going.

The same is true for the follow-up, an encounter between a photographer (Kevin Gladstone) and model (Davey Williams). The scene begins with a long interview between Gladstone and Ross that's so awkward it makes one suspect it really was unscripted (Gladstone seems genuinely befuddled when Ross asks what hours he works with the gravity of inquiring about a medical diagnosis). After this strange interlude, Gladstone begins shooting Williams and slowly ushers him out of more and more of his clothes, with another sex scene finally wrapping up the film.

By the mid-'70s, the porn model had fairly well established a template of at least three sex scenes per gay film (and usually five for even its lowest-level straight counterparts), so this lack of variety leaves STAR GAZERS feeling kind of incomplete. It doesn't help that Ross' narration positions the film as an industry-wide tour of the casting couches of LA, when all it manages to deliver is a couple guys bedding a single one of their clients. While the participants are largely attractive, the weird editing frequently hampers the film's effectiveness, and Ross' heavily-accented, barely comprehensible narration doesn't make things any clearer. By the time he's wrapping up the film with the stumbling bon mots "thank you for listening to my story," all you can really do is scratch your head. YOUNG STAR GAZERS isn't a complete waste of time, but it's a wasted opportunity, and far more valuable as a cultural time capsule than an example of effective vintage porn.

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Young Star Gazers

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