Now Playing: When Your Book Becomes a Film

Rachel Maines

It took twelve years of research and writing to turn a thin and highly speculative manuscript with the working title of The Vibrator and its Predecessor Technologies into the Johns Hopkins University Press book The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. It took another seven and half years, and more than $150,000, for award-winning documentary filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori to turn it into a feature-length film, Passion and Power, that premiered at New York City's Lincoln Center on July 28 to a sellout (and highly enthusiastic) crowd. And you thought things like this only happened to the likes of Natalie Zemon Davis, whose Return of Martin Guerre was filmed in 1982.

Certainly, that's what I thought, as I spent all those years chasing obscure sources, visiting distant repositories, and double-checking footnotes for a book I thought might cause a mild stir among my fellow historians of technology, assuming I could find anybody willing to publish it. The auspices were not promising: three different versions of an article based on the research were rejected by the leading journal in my subdiscipline, and in 1989 the Technical Advisory Board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) threatened to withdraw the charter of its publication Technology & Society, for having published my "Socially Camouflaged Technologies: the Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator." In 1996, when I finally had a complete book manuscript, the first university press to which I submitted it returned it within days, along with a letter asserting that it would be at least another ten years before the work was publishable. And even then, they wouldn't be interested. I have never held a tenure-track position in a college or university, so tenure and promotion weren't issues, but it was worrisome just the same.

Once Johns Hopkins had accepted the manuscript, I spent the next six months jumping out of my skin every time the phone rang, thinking it was my editor Bob Brugger calling to say he'd changed his mind. So it was a pleasant surprise when positive reviews—and even more positive sales results—started coming in early in 1999. Everybody from the New England Journal of Medicine to WHAP! Magazine, it seemed, had something to say about my book. For those of you who haven't been reviewed in WHAP!, that's Women wHo Administer Punishment. When the book won two prizes in 2000 and 2001, I began to think the thing might be a success. The book got an unexpected boost from the Alabama state legislature, which passed the Anti-Obscenity Act of 1998 just before the book was published, making its jurisdiction the fourth state in which it is illegal to sell vibrators or dildos, and to own more than five. The other states are Texas, Georgia and Kansas. Naturally, everybody wanted a sound bite from the only university-trained historian to weigh in on vibrators.

In 2000, I started getting phone calls from filmmakers, the first of what were to be fourteen bidders on the rights to Technology of Orgasm. Neither Johns Hopkins nor I had much experience evaluating filmmakers, so we hired an agent, and I called my old friend Pat Ferrero, a documentary filmmaker who teaches film production at San Francisco State University, for advice. Her advice was that she and her colleagues Wendy Slick, Emiko Omori and Pat Jackson should make the film. In the event, her team prepared by far the best proposal, and was the high bidder as well, at $30,000. Johns Hopkins and I were dumbfounded and delighted. My fifty percent share of this bounty was more than three times what the book earned in royalties in its best year.

None of us anticipated that it would take as long as it did to make the film. Over the next few years, Pat, Wendy and Emiko flew me out to San Francisco for what were for me more like giggly slumber parties for middle-aged women than real work. The filmmakers, though, slaved through fourteen-hour days, renting a mansion for the filming, hiring a costumer and make-up artist, searching heaven and earth—well, maybe only the earthy sources—for historical images of vibrators and their use. They tirelessly interviewed women who had modern perspectives on the kinds of women's sexuality issues I had raised in my book, including Dell Williams, owner and founder of the world's first feminist sex-toy boutique, Eve's Garden; Betty Dodson, who is the only septuagenarian I know who makes a living from classes in female orgasm; performance artist Reno; and Joanne Webb and her attorney BeAnn Sisemore, who fought Joanne's arrest on obscenity charges for selling vibrators in Texas in November 2003.

The making of the film had to proceed in fits and starts, as the team was forced to make frequent and discouraging pit stops for fundraising, which ultimately included mortgaging the homes of both the team members who had survived the process through 2005: Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori. So it was yet another pleasant surprise when Wendy called at the end of April 2007 to tell me that the film would be premiering in New York City in July. Could I possibly be there? Could I! My husband and I spent two exuberant days shopping for appropriate clothing and shoes, mobilized my parents, my friends and colleagues, and even my tenant and her boyfriend, and bought tickets to the Big Apple.

The premiere was an amazing experience. My mother, fiction author Natalie Petesch, to whom Technology of Orgasm is dedicated, called the event "a miracle." Even my tired old jokes, by now repeated in dozens of presentations over a period of twenty years, sounded new and funny in the colorful context of imaginative documentary film-making. I was especially impressed by how successfully the contemporary issues were integrated with the historical substance of my book, and with the diversity of disciplines represented in the audience. Psychologists, sociologists, historians, physicians, film critics, lawyers, and sex educators all find something to love in it; the film got a standing ovation at the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) meeting earlier this summer, and was shown at the Society for the History of Technology annual meeting in Washington D.C. in October. Gratifying as well was the immediate interest in classroom use. I should not have been surprised. It says a lot about gender, technology, and law that you can buy and sell any number of guns in all fifty states, but in four of them you can't own more than five vibrators. If you cannot get your students talking about that, I respectfully submit that you are ready for a sabbatical.

The film, as historian of technology Ruth Cowan expressed it, "captures the essence of the book," but it's really Wendy and Emiko's film. The film's proceeds will all be theirs, and more power to them--they're going to need them to pay off those mortgages. But I have to say, all this glamorous Hollywood stuff makes every single one of those footnotes seem worthwhile.