Event

Hustler White at the Studs Theater

Hustler White, dir. Bruce La Bruce & Rick Castro
16mm on DVD, 79 min, 1996

An incendiary romp directed by queercore festival darling Bruce La Bruce and fetish photographer Rick Castro, Hustler White is an unlikely West Hollywood rehash of Sunset Boulevard, only that strip (and tone) is lowered to Santa Monica, where the hustlers and johns butt heads with the seedy and degenerate local milieu. Starring Madonnas sultry Justify My Love(r) Tony Ward, co-director La Bruce (in a nod to Kenneth Anger) the film features a coterie of Santa Monica Boulevard regulars and luminaries (like Vaginal Davis, Glen Meadmore, Ron Athey and Divinity Fudge). Hustler White is a surprisingly romantic take on lust, exploitation and obsession, with a verité eye trained to the infamous streetwalker strip that once stretched through 1990s West Hollywood.

The Studs Theatre in West Hollywood opened in 1940 as the Monica theater and became the Pussycat Theater in 1970. It was the flagship for the Pussycats 50-location chain of adult theaters clustered around Southern California. Peter Alilunas, professor of media studies at University of Oregon has noted this location is one of the most important spaces in North America [in the history of adult film] Its Smithsonian-level history when it comes to adult theaters.