The Mary Millington Movie Collection Limited Edition Blu-Ray Box-Set  (UK, Region 2 release).

An interview with historian and documentary filmmaker Simon Sheridan

BY ADRIAN SMITH

In June 2020 Screenbound are releasing a limited edition Blu-ray box set in the U.K. dedicated to the films of one of Britain’s most celebrated and tragic erotic film stars, Mary Millington. Historian Simon Sheridan has spent years researching her life (his book Come Play with Me: The Life and Films of Mary Millington was published in 1999) and has overseen this new collection.

Cinema Retro: How did you begin this lifelong quest to tell Mary Millington’s story? When did you first discover her?

Simon Sheridan: I’m not sure I can tell you this story! I was a curious schoolboy. I happened upon some porn mags when I was a young boy. It wasn’t in a bush, but someone I knew had these porn mags. I’m not going to reveal who! She was in copies of Playbirds and Whitehouse throughout the 1980s so I saw this beautiful woman, but they were talking about her in the past tense, and the articles next to these very explicit photographs said she had died at the age of 33. These kind of things just stayed with me throughout my life, that this woman who posed in the post explicit manner and was prepared to pretty much do anything on camera had died so young. She has always fascinated me, and the more I research and learn about her life, I just think, “What a great human being she was.” She really fought for people’s rights to enjoy pornography. People ask me what Mary was like: she was this 4’11" ex-veterinary nurse from Surrey who took on the force of the Establishment at a time when society was not mature enough to believe that people could be happy and work in the sex industry. What a brave woman she was. She was a pioneer, there was nobody like her at the time. When I went to university I wrote my dissertation on her, and then I wrote my book, then I worked on her film releases, then made my movie, and now this box set. So this was how I came upon Mary, so to speak.

CR: Could you tell us more about what the boxed set features? Is it every film she ever appeared in?

SS: It is all the films she made for publisher David Sullivan. When Come Play with Me came out in April 1977 it was promoted as Mary Millington’s first film, but of course it wasn’t her first. She had made quite a few before she went on to become a big star through Come Play with Me (1977). The other films are The Playbirds (1978), Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (1979), Queen of the Blues (1979), Mary Millington’s True Blue Confessions (1980) and Mary Millington’s World Striptease Extravaganza (1981), along with my feature documentary Respectable: The Mary Millington Story (2015).

CR: True Blue Confessions is such an interesting and unusual film.

SS: I’ve known David Sullivan for over twenty years, and when I first met him one of the films I really wanted to talk about was True Blue Confessions. I was astonished when I first saw it. It’s so visceral. It’s so brutal. In 1980 you didn’t really know what went on in celebrities’ lives. When Mary died it was in the newspapers, but all the stuff about drugs and prostitution wasn’t really reported, but it’s all in True Blue Confessions. It’s a very honest look at her life, quite unlike anything else that had been made in this country, or anything to do with the porn world. It probably shocked a lot of people, but it was a huge hit. It played for weeks and weeks. People were fascinated to see what the truth was behind Mary, although of course most of that film isn’t true! There’s a lot of elaboration, but at the heart of it there is some truth to her story. It’s always fascinated me. I’ve probably watched that one more than any of her other films. David will argue until the end of time that that was not an exploitation film. It was not there to make money. When Mary died it was completely sudden, the general public had no idea this was going to happen. She was the sex superstar who was going to go on and on. David was inundated with tens of thousands of letters. She was like the pornographic Princess Diana. Fans were just bereft and couldn’t believe it, so he brought out these tribute magazines which had her autobiography in it. She wrote an autobiography in 1978 that is half true, half faked, which was written with her probation officer, and those tribute magazines sold by the shedload. I think David did about thirteen or fourteen different ones. They kept being reprinted, so David felt compelled to also do something for the cinema about her life. He always says he was trying to make Mary more famous in death than when she was alive.

CR: How has it been possible for these films to be restored? Where were the original elements all these years?

SS: I had been nagging David for ages about where the original film negatives and reels were, and he had a warehouse in Barking, where he stored all the products for his U.K. sex shops. I went there with him and it was filled with racks of magazines and boxes of sex toys. There in the corner of this warehouse were these wooden pallets piled high with these huge tin reels with scrappy labels. They were rusting on these pallets. It was very exciting for me to see them. I said he should have them stored somewhere better, instead of in the corner of a warehouse full of rubber sex toys. These were worth preserving. He said, “Are they really, Simon?” Yes they are! A deal was done with the BFI and they took them and stored them in their archive in Berkhamsted, where they were frozen at a certain temperature. They’ve been there for about ten years. They were used to make DVDs, and it’s now taken a long time to make the Blu-rays. Initially, I was told British sex films would not sell on Blu-ray, but then a couple of years ago Screenbound told me they wanted to bring the Mary Millington films out on Blu-ray. I was beside myself with joy! This was the dream project. We got them restored in London by Final Frame. Come Play with Me and The Playbirds were not shot on the best film stock. These were David’s first films, and they were using little scraps of films, offcuts, to shoot these things. The later films were shot on much better quality film. But I’ve seen them now and they do look really good.