Several years ago, amid great (and deserved) hoopla, Bill Osco, that San Francisco-based titan of primordial porn, release the first nudie-pornie musical, Alice in Wonderland. Rated R and full of lush sets and plush ladies, the flick featured a relative unknown, Kristine DeBell, as Lewis Carroll's classic heroine.
Alice in Wonderland was a slick production as you will ever find in X-land. Accomplished actors in non-sex roles, a spectacular score and truly clever songs, a highly sophisticated script all helped to make the film a highly entertaining softcore romp.
As a testament to the professionalism of Alice, young Kristine De Bell, a somewhat wooden actress at the time, went on to become a popular TV star. She's currently a featured performer on the day-time sudser, "The Young and the Restless." Kristine had the perfect "look" for Alice, a strong childish body and a convincingly stumbling innocence. In the porn business, Alice has always been written off as a sexploitation film, not a real honest-to-Goldstein fuckflick. And DeBell has protected her rep as a legit actress by pointing to the softcore nature of its presentation.
In truth, the film may be as slick and funny as say, Tony Newley's "Hieronymus Merkin." The writers, lyricists, the choreographers, the art directors all did Studio-quality work. In short, the actual quality of this production is so far superior to anything before it that it stands as a landmark in the history of adult films. That is not to say that there haven't been other excellent blue movies, but nobody has tried anything so complicated, ambitious and large-scale as Alice and succeeded so nicely.
For years, whenever anybody complimented Alice or waxed poetic on Kristine De Bell's lively performance and well-turned limbs, the standard response was: "Nudity. Simulation. suggestion. It was not an X. It was a movie."
