Misty water-colored mammaries

Seattle likes to pretend we're a highbrow town -- see our recent bout of don't-touch-the-stripperism. But as anyone who's gone on the Underground Tour can attest, our smutty streak goes back a long way.

Case in point: Seattle helped launch the career of Russ Meyer, auteur, gazonga fetishist, and key player in of Scarecrow's sexploitation section. How so? We were the first city the country to embrace his first feature, 1959's The Immoral Mr. Teas.

According to Joe Bob Briggs' excellent new book, Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History, the film debuted in San Diego, but some unbribed cops seized the one existing print. It took a year for Meyer to get it back, and then it sat on the shelf for 8 months because exhibitors had been scared off. However:

[Pete] DeCenzie [the film's producer] was working Seattle with one of his burlesque road shows when a man came into the theater who turned out to be a local member of the censor board. DeCenzie offered to screen Mr. Teas for the entire censor board, at his own expense, in his own hotel suite. (DeCenzie had no suite, but he quickly rented one.) The board member happened to be a fan of burlesque, so he asked his colleagues to join him at the hotel, where DeCenzie played the film while plying the board members with Italian food and wine. They approved the film on the spot, and the next week DeCenzie booked it at the top art house in the city, the Guild 45th Avenue. It ran continuously for fifty-eight weeks.

"Once the run in Seattle was under way, exhibitors in Los Angeles and San Francisco couldn't ignore the colossal returns," says Briggs. Seattle took a strong, pasta-fueled pro-bazoom/anti-censorship stance and Meyer's career was launched, giving the world such masterpieces as Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Mudhoney, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and Vixen.