The Passions of Carol

My name is Shaun Costello and I wrote and directed this movie. This was the very first hard core XXX adult film to open in a straight theater. It opened at the Quad Cinemas in 1975 to empty seats. My first flop. It was big, it was noisy, it was colorful, it was funny, but there was one thing it wasn't; it wasn't sexy. It was shot in 16MM film with a budget of $14,000. which wound up at about $18,000. after overages. I had never worked on a sound stage before, and had to keep the production going 24 hours a day to complete it anywhere near it's original budget. It was shot at what became Mother's Sound Stage in New York's East Village. My wonderful neighbors, who lived in my rent controlled apartment building on East 21st Street, built the sets, sewed the costumes, and in general just made it all happen. My friend David Wool created the skyline of Manhattan that is seen from Carol Scrooge's window, and built it out of corrugated cardboard. To David, and Harriett, and Shelly, and the rest; I could never have done this without you. This is an odd movie that does have some hilarious moments.
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　　One of the key works from legendary adult-auteur Shaun Costello, The Passions of Carol (1975) is among the strangest and most effective films of its kind ever made. Shot on 16 mm, for less than 20,000 dollars over a two-week period in late 1975, The Passions of Carol is Costello’s quite startling and extremely entertaining updating of Charles Dicken’s timeless A Christmas Carol, only it is quite unlike any other film version of it ever released.
　　Starring an extremely effective Mary Stuart (working under the delightful pseudonym of Merrie Holiday) as cranky magazine publisher Carol Scrooge and featuring a number of great seventies icons like Carter Stevens, Jamie Gillis, Marc Stevens and future mainstream mainstay Sonny Landham, perhaps best remembered as being a major scene-stealer in Walter Hill’s mega-hit 48 Hours (1982), The Passions of Carol is a film marked by ambition and it is that ambition that separates it from the hundreds upon hundreds of adult exploitation films shot in New York in the mid-seventies.
　　By 1975, Costello had already established himself as one of the kings of the ‘One-Day Wonders’ but he wanted more and his cinematic aspirations, along with his voracious appetite for literature, led to The Passions of Carol, his first fully-scripted film. Just known in some-circles as the man behind brutal works like Forced Entry (1973) and Water Power (1977), Costello reminds us of what an innovative filmmaker he is with The Passions of Carol, a film that that trades in the brutality of Costello’s more infamous works for a surprising, if still incredibly perverse, sweetness. The Passions of Carol is, after-all, a Christmas film and Costello manages to give a fresher spin on Dicken’s often told tale than most of the better known mainstream hands that have touched it throughout the years.
　　Despite the fact that the finished product is such a successful hybrid between adult-feature and timeless literary classic, The Passions of Carol was a nightmare for Costello to shoot, as he had never been in charge of such a production. Costello recalls, within his indispensable liner notes that accompany Video-X-Pix’s excellent DVD, that, “it took a week of eighteen hour days to complete the screenplay”, for The Passions of Carol after which he made the mistake of only blocking, “out four shooting days” for its actual production on a New York Soundstage he had located. Costello goes on to detail that he, “had no idea” what he was getting into and that he was, “marching head-long