The Hollywood Erotic Museum was an adults-only museum located in a restored 1926 building on Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California specializing in sexual history in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. [1] [2] The six thousand square foot space was also home to the Erotic Museum Hall of Fame, whose eight inductees included Hugh Hefner. [3] It was established by Boris Smorodinsky and Mark Volper in 2004 and closed in mid-2006 due to lack of business and gentrification. [4] [5]
The museum featured many different items, including original etchings by Pablo Picasso as well as a legendary stag film dating back to 1948 that is allegedly of Marilyn Monroe having sex with an unnamed man.[ citation needed ] The video owned by the museum is the only known copy in existence. Also in their permanent collection, contemporary erotic art by such artists as Julian Murphy and Tom of Finland. [6] [7]
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV is an American actor and producer. Regarded as a Hollywood icon, he has received various accolades, including an Honorary Palme d'Or and three Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards. His films have grossed over $5 billion in North America and over $12 billion worldwide, placing him among the highest-grossing actors of all time. Cruise holds the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive $100-million-grossing movies, a feat that was achieved during the period of 2012 to 2018. One of the most bankable stars, he is consistently one of the world's highest-paid actors.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a landmark which consists of 2,783 five-pointed terrazzo-and-brass stars embedded in the sidewalks along 15 blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and three blocks of Vine Street in the Los Angeles, California district of Hollywood. The stars, the first of which were permanently installed in 1960, are monuments to achievement in the entertainment industry, bearing the names of a mix of actors, musicians, producers, directors, theatrical/musical groups, fictional characters, and others.
Leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities that involve leather garments, such as leather jackets, vests, boots, chaps, harnesses, or other items. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures. Many participants associate leather culture with BDSM practices and its many subcultures. For some, black leather clothing is an erotic fashion that expresses heightened masculinity or the appropriation of sexual power; love of motorcycles, motorcycle clubs and independence; and/or engagement in sexual kink or leather fetishism.
David Lawrence Geffen is an American film producer, record executive, and media proprietor. In music, he co-founded Asylum Records in 1971 before founding Geffen Records in 1980, DGC Records in 1990, and co-founding DreamWorks Records in 1996. In film, he founded the Geffen Film Company in 1986 and co-founded DreamWorks SKG in 1994.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
Los Feliz is a hillside neighborhood in the greater Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California, abutting Hollywood and encompassing part of the Santa Monica Mountains. The neighborhood is named after the Feliz family of Californios who had owned the area since 1795, when José Vicente Féliz was granted Rancho Los Feliz.
Heather Tom is an American actress and director. She is best known for her roles as Victoria Newman on The Young and the Restless, Kelly Cramer on One Life to Live and All My Children, and Katie Logan on The Bold and the Beautiful. On The Bold and the Beautiful she has earned four Daytime Emmy Awards and a total of six in her career, tying her for the most wins by a soap actress. In addition to her acting work, she has directed episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful, The Young and the Restless, Dynasty, and Good Trouble.
Christopher David Noth is an American actor. He is known for his television roles as NYPD Detective Mike Logan on Law & Order (1990–1995), Big on Sex and the City (1998–2004), and Peter Florrick on The Good Wife (2009–2016).
Emmis Corporation is an American media conglomerate based in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Emmis, based on the Hebrew word for "Truth" (Emet) was founded by Jeff Smulyan in 1980. Emmis has owned many radio stations, including KPWR and WQHT, which have notoriety for their Hip Hop Rhythmic format as well as WFAN, which was the world's first 24-hour sports talk radio station. In addition to radio, Emmis has invested in TV, publishing, and mobile operations throughout the U.S.
Rick Castro is an American photographer, motion picture director, stylist, curator and writer whose work focuses on BDSM, fetish, and desire.
Ronald Jeremy Hyatt is an American former pornographic actor.
The erotic thriller or sexual thriller is a film subgenre defined as a thriller with a thematic basis in illicit romance or sexual fantasy. Though exact definitions of the erotic thriller can vary, it is generally agreed "bodily danger and pleasure must remain in close proximity and equally important to the plot." Most erotic thrillers contain scenes of softcore sex and nudity, though the frequency and explicitness of those scenes can differ from film to film.
Guy Baldwin is an American psychotherapist, author, activist, and educator specializing in issues of particular relevance to the BDSM and leather communities. Based in Los Angeles, he maintains that inclusion of non-injurious elements of sadomasochism in a consenting sexuality does not itself indicate or confirm mental illness or psycho-sexual dysfunction.
The Elton John AIDS Foundation Academy Award Party is one of the annual parties held in Los Angeles following the Academy Awards ceremony the same evening. The first party was held in February 1993 at Maple Drive Restaurant and raised $300,000. It had been produced by Patrick Lippert, an AIDS activist who died of the disease just months later. In recent years it has been held at the Pacific Design Center and was attended by 650 people in 2009. It is hosted by Elton John and the AIDS Foundation, and is one of the most high-profile parties in the Hollywood film industry, particularly for people of British origin working in Hollywood films or the entertainment industry. The annual party contributes to the foundation fund by its high priced ticket sales which are given by invitation only and a celebrity auction. The 2010 party raised over $8 million or £4 million.
Fred Charles Halsted was an American gay pornographic film director, actor, escort, publisher, and sex club owner. His films Sex Garage and L.A. Plays Itself are the only gay pornographic movies in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where they were screened before a capacity audience on April 23, 1974. A screening of L.A. Plays Itself was sponsored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 2013, and another took place on December 16, 2011, at the Los Angeles art gallery Human Resources. His films have also been shown the Netherlands Film Museum and in competition at The Deauville Film Festival.
Bill Schmeling, better known by his pen name The Hun, was an American artist active in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, known for his explicit, homoerotic fetish illustrations and comics.
Durk Dehner is a businessman, film director, and publisher who co-founded the culturally influential Tom of Finland Company, and later established the Tom of Finland Foundation dedicated to preserving, collecting, and exhibiting homoerotic art, a registered historic landmark in Los Angeles, California, US.