Sharon's Rosebud

Years before Joe Sarno and Wesley Emerson (on opposite coasts) pioneered & milked the lucrative "Inside" and "Deep Inside" format of confessional porn film, Frisco filmmaker Richard Wilton took a stab at it with this inside look at Sharon Thorpe. Result: NSG.

Using the same interview format as his co-feature on this Something Weird video ("a portrait of two women"), Wilton gives porn star Sharon Thorpe the opportunity to showcase her wares and supposedly illustrate her fantasies. As in the other film, it's a fake and a time-waster, sunk by a poverty row budget, even for porn. Though IMDb dates both these two films as 1976 (Rosebud was previously listed as 1974) releases (with no documentation), merely estimated. The interviewer's voice is the same, so one may infer they were probably filmed in the same time frame.

A black guy is brought out as a "sex object" for Sharon to order around, creating the flimsy outer structure of the film. At one point she calls him Mick, inadvertently revealing his identity as longtime (but never spotlighted) porno journeyman Mick Jones (not the Rolling Stone guitarist of course).

Sharon's fantasies are inter-cut with her being serviced by Mick. Illustrated is her picking up a femme hitchhiker in her Cadillac, taking her home to the mansion and having sex with her, Sharon narrating. Then she fantasizes sex with her teacher (Mick again) in the teacher's lounge (a couch in front of a blackboard with "teacher's lounge" written on it in chalk) plus a three-way with Mick and another co-ed in pigtails. Sharon is wearing a blonde wig on this occasion.

Main event is down on the farm where Sharon and her sister (played by beautiful porn star Clair Dia, clearly not her sister so the fans didn't need to get uptight about the incest angle) get it on with her father's "new farmhand", and then just each other in the hayloft. Again, the purported documentary format is dropped, as viewers are hardly expected to believe Thorpe grew up on a farm, let alone any of the other b.s. she relates here.

Director Wilton's fetishes of interracial sex and black stockings are on view, along with an added kink of the sisters using a carrot for mutual masturbation and then eating the vegetable afterward. Film ends abruptly, and not too soon, with Mick still nibbling away at Sharon's privates in the framing footage as she keeps repeating over & over "How I come..." Wilton uses a pirated mostly jazz score, stealing from such greats as Eric Dolphy, with an extended flute solo and once again tapping the Jimmy Smith catalog, using a lengthy track from one of the organist's collaborations for the Verve label with Oliver Nelson -I'm guessing it was from his hit "Bashin'" LP which I listened to umpteen times back in the day.