It’s been a busy time here at Under the Counter HQ. We did an event with the lovely people at Content Warning, which included an exhibition of rollers and talk about the archive. The archive has also been featured in the latest issue of the Erotic Review, and I gave a presentation at its launch last week in London. I’ll be part of the Berlin launch that takes place in early May.
In the midst of all this, I’ve also been working on a project that feels like a culmination of a very long, unexpected journey. I’m happy to announce that the films we rescued from the basement of Birmingham’s Electric Cinema are finally seeing the light of day as part of Distribpix’s recent Blu-ray release, The Naughty World of Stanley Long. I was invited to write the booklet for this set, which gave me the chance to further piece together the history of these materials and the man who left them behind: Barry Jacobs.
Jacobs was a fascinating, shadowy figure whose career mapped the rise and fall of the British sex film industry. Born in 1924, he founded Eagle Films in the early 1960s and operated out of Soho Square, then right at the heart of the British film business. To those who worked with him, like Stanley Long, Jacobs was the quintessential Soho producer —an “awkward bastard” with thick specs and a trademark moustache. I spoke to Tony Klinger, whose documentary Extremes (1971) was produced by Jacobs’ Eagle Films. Klinger recalled how Jacobs bluntly requested that Extremes needed to feature enough “tits and arse” to keep the audience interested. For Jacobs, sex films were nothing more than a saleable commodity.
This outlook informed the creation of the continental reels we discovered in the basement, which are also included on the Blu-ray release. Jacobs recognised that while British censorship remained restrictive, international markets were significantly more permissive. He facilitated the production of continental inserts—occasionally filmed several years after the original production using different performers—to incorporate explicit, and even hardcore, footage into distributed titles like Groupie Girl. This opportunistic business model allowed him to maximise the commercial return on his catalog by tailoring content to meet the specific expectations of overseas territories, such as France and Denmark.
I had long wondered why Jacobs’ Eagle Films titles remained in the Electric’s basement for three decades. The explanation is a mix of simple misfortune and the complexities of insolvency law. By the late 1980s, Jacobs had moved into regional exhibition, acquiring the Tivoli cinema in Birmingham. He also started a home video label named Elephant Video in 1987, which released video nasties titles he owned the rights for in heavily censored versions. Following the bankruptcy of Barry Jacobs’ companies in 1993, the film materials were legally required to remain on-site and could not be removed. Consequently, the collection was left behind as the building passed through successive owners, surviving by chance rather than by design. They transitioned from working assets into neglected relics, surviving several changes of ownership before we finally hauled them out in 2024 as the Electric closed.
Seeing them restored and preserved in high definition on a boutique home video release is an unexpected outcome for titles that were, until recently, at risk of heading for landfill. It transforms what was once a pile of decomposing cans into a vital record of British film history.
The Jacobs collection will shortly be housed at the Bishopsgate Institute for researchers to access.
The Naughty World of Stanley Long is available from the good folks over at Melusine.
