Product: Beefcake [VHS] (1998)
Rating: 4.0
Fun look at a forgotten time in gay America
Beefcake is a bright fun movie, that looks at the beginings of the moderngay porn era.The movie focuses on Bob Mizer and his Athletic Model Guild Studio.Started at first as a modeling agency for male physique models.The enterprizing Mizer soon discover that his photos of the handsome semi-nude men were more in demand than the models themselves!Thus began an industry based the (gay) erotisim of physical male beauty.You might say that Mizer is the father of the modern gay male magazine. and that Physique Pictorial (his magazine) is the precusor of such modern 'zines as Unzipped, XY, DNA, Blue, Advocate Men (and its various off-shoots)and many others.The movie begins in a courtroom with Mizer on trial on charges of disseminating obscene material through the US mail. As well as charges that his bussiness was engaged in male prostition as well. (While convicted of the former. He is aquited of the latter.)The rest of the film is played out through the eyes of a young man named Neil O'Hara (ie.Neely O'Hara from Valley of The Dolls) who becomes one of Mizer's models.He is there at the begining of AMG. And is there as Mizer and hisstudio begins its slide downward from tasteful male nude photogaphy, to distateful lewd pictures,(ie full-frontal nudity).Beefcake is not to be taken as a serious documentry or bio on Bob Mizer.For that, read the book on which the movie is taken from "Beefcake" by Valintine F. Hooven.It is a humorous look at how the modern gay male magazine began.