Flesh! The Untold Origin of the Findlays and the ‘Flesh Trilogy’, Part 1 – Roberta’s story

Sex and violence have been part of movies since the very beginning.

Ever since Thomas Edison made and exhibited ‘The Kiss’ in 1896, an 18 second clip of a couple embracing, moviegoers have been shocked by onscreen depictions of lust. The outrage over ‘The Kiss’ was understandable: it was one of the first films ever shown commercially to the public, and kissing in public was prosecuted at the time. The Catholic Church knee-jerked instinctively, and said it was a “serious threat to morality and humanity”, and the film was met with the first demand for movie censorship.

Fast forward seventy years, and heaven knows what they would have made of Michael and Roberta Findlay.

The Findlays made a series of low budget films in the 1960s that combined sex with violence in a way that had rarely been seen. Sure, filmmakers like Russ Meyer or Herschel Gordon Lewis had already achieved success with exploitation flicks that mixed fornication with ferocity. But their visions gleefully and comically satirized the genre.

Michael and Roberta were different: theirs was a more shocking, sadistic vision that left an altogether different impression. More than with any of their peers, you find yourself looking beyond their work, instead wondering more about the filmmakers than the films. In short, you start to ask, “What kind of people made these movies?”

Over the last few years, I’ve tracked down and spoken to friends, family members, collaborators… in fact, anyone who knew Michael and Roberta back in the 1960s – including Roberta herself – to dig deeper into who the Findlays really were and where they came from. The new information I found was surprising, unnerving, and sometimes disturbing – and it changed the way I view the films themselves.

This is Part 1 of ‘Flesh: The Untold Origin of the Findlays and the ‘Flesh Trilogy’’ – Roberta’s story.

This podcast is 36 minutes long.

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Roberta Findlay walks into a midtown Manhattan bar.

Unruly dark mop, giant black sunglasses, scowling bad attitude. She looks like Bob Dylan in ‘Don’t Look Back.’ Or a microwaved Anna Wintour.

“I don’t like people,” is her opening gambit. “Especially not those who watch my sex movies. These people are creepy. With deep psychological problems.”

I’m lucky, I guess. I’ve known Roberta for years, and she insists I am one of her two favorite living people. I’m flattered until I learn that Dick Cheney is the other: “I like arrogant men who mistreat me” is her explanation.

Dick Cheney mistreated you? I ask.

“I can dream,” she grunts.

Today Roberta has decided to cement our friendship. She gifts me the copy of ‘Hollywood Babylon’ that sat at the bedside of her long-deceased husband, Michael. I’m strangely moved. This 1959 collection of crime-soaked, sleaze-boiled gossip from Hollywood’s golden age underbelly had been an inspiration to him when he first became a filmmaker in the 1960s. Their film titles bore the evidence: Satan’s Bed (1965), Take Me Naked (1966), The Ultimate Degenerate (1969), and the infamous Flesh trilogy (The Touch of Her Flesh (1967), The Curse of Her Flesh (1968),