Stanley Long


Stanley A. Long was an English Exploitation cinema and sexploitation filmmaker. He was a writer, cinematographer, editor, and eventually, producer/director of low-budget exploitation movies.

Career

Long began his career as a photographer, before producing striptease shorts or "glamour home movies", as they were sometimes known, for the 8 mm market, under the banner of Stag Film Productions. Beginning in the late fifties, Long’s feature film career would span the entire history of the British sex film, and as such exemplifies its differing trends and attitudes. His work ranges from coy nudist films to moralizing documentary to a more relaxed attitude to permissive material, to out-and-out comedies at the end of the 1970s.
He made several sex comedy movies in the 1970s, the most successful being Adventures of a Taxi Driver, Adventures of a Private Eye and Adventures of a Plumber's Mate ; these starred a host of talented comedy performers including Barry Evans, Diana Dors, Irene Handl, Harry H. Corbett, Liz Fraser and Fred Emney.
Like Norman J. Warren, Long also made horror films. He made the anthology movie Screamtime in 1983 and was due to film a Jo Gannon script entitled Plasmid, about albino mutants living in London’s Underground. While the film was never made, confusingly a tie-in novel of Plasmid was released.
Long was also the cameraman on several British horror movies of the 1960s, including The Blood Beast Terror, Repulsion and The Sorcerers. For the latter he was strapped to the top of a car to film one sequence.
Long retired from film directing in the early 1980s; however, he briefly returned to direct The Other Side of the Screen in 2006, a one-off documentary about various aspects of filmmaking. This was hosted by Paul Martin, star of Flog It!.
The "Adventures of" comedies were released to DVD on 2 June 2008. The following year several of his other sex films, On the Game, Sex and the Other Woman and This That and the Other were also released on DVD for the very first time.
Long was interviewed for the BBC's Balderdash and Piffle programme, and the British horror and comedy episodes of the British Films Forever series.
Simon Sheridan’s long-awaited biography of Long - X-Rated - Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker - was published in July 2008.

Death

Stanley Long died in Buckinghamshire on 10 September 2012, at the age of 78, of natural causes.

Select credits