The film's attempt to move from adult theaters into the broader American cultural marketplace collided with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California. Miller replaced the older national approach to obscenity with a test centered on whether material lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, while also allowing local communities to apply their own standards. That legal change gave local prosecutors and judges much greater latitude to seize films they considered obscene. When Behind the Green Door opened in Suffolk County, New York, authorities prosecuted it alongside The New Comers, and the film was also banned in California, Colorado, and Georgia. The crackdown helped end the brief period in which hardcore features could seek a mass, mixed-sex theatrical audience alongside more conventional films. Its appearance at the Cannes Film Festival and its mainstream reviews had suggested that pornography might gain a degree of cultural legitimacy; the post-Miller prosecutions demonstrated how fragile that acceptance was.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
The 1973 Obscenity Crackdown That Banned Behind the Green Door
Behind the Green Door / 1970s
The film's attempt to move from adult theaters into the broader American cultural marketplace collided with the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California. Miller replaced the older national approach to obscenity with a test centered on whether material lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, while also allowing local communities to apply their own standards. That legal change gave local prosecutors and judges much greater latitude to seize films they considered obscene. When Behind the Green Door opened in Suffolk County, New York, authorities prosecuted it alongside The New Comers, and the film was also banned in California, Colorado, and Georgia. The crackdown helped end the brief period in which hardcore features could seek a mass, mixed-sex theatrical audience alongside more conventional films. Its appearance at the Cannes Film Festival and its mainstream reviews had suggested that pornography might gain a degree of cultural legitimacy; the post-Miller prosecutions demonstrated how fragile that acceptance was.
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