Desire Pie was created at a time when sexual liberation made possible by the availability of the Pill combined with the power of the women's movement to create an environment in which women began to be more open about expressing their sexuality in art. Additionally, it was part of a golden age of independent animation, a flourishing of experimental and personal films, which was documented in books such as Frames: Drawings and Statements by Independent Animators, compiled by George Griffin, 1978, The Animation Book by Kit Laybourne, 1979, and Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art, by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr, 2nd Edition, 1989. Animation historian Cecille Starr wrote in Sightlines magazine, “The first wave of animated films made by “liberated” women in the 1970’s included many expressive statements about being female. In some, the animators bared themselves to the skin and revealed their most secret feelings, often light-heartedly….Some of the films had daring sexual imagery and themes, as, for example, Lisa Crafts’ Desire Pie (1976)…”
Heterosexual sex films of that time were primarily written and shot by men for men, often with themes of domination and exploitation of women; the sex act was presented as something performed by women for the pleasure of men. Desire Pie is from a woman’s point of view, and presents explicit sex with humor, fantasy, and warmth. Desire Pie was shown in film festivals, theaters, and college level animation and women’s studies classes. It traveled around Landmark theaters in the mid 1980’s as part of a midnight movie called “The San Francisco Erotic Film Festival.” It was included on a VHS collection called “Adult Animation.” Desire Pie was also distributed internationally for many years as a tool for sex educators and therapists, who used it to make nervous people laugh and relax before serious discussions.
Desire Pie was part of a film program called “Heart Throbs” at Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Off The Wall Cinema, a tiny, well respected art house. The “Heart Throbs” program was closed down by the Cambridge police for “obscenity”. After a week of being “banned in Boston,” and claims of censorship flying, the city and the theater negotiated, and the show reopened.
Over the years, Desire Pie had three distributors who kept and made prints from the original film: Serious Business Company, Picture Start, and Human Sexuality Resource Center (who later changed their name.) One by one, they went out of business. When the last one closed, they notified their artists by mail, but by the time the letter travelled from California to New York, their phones had been disconnected. The original film was lost.
The original film was lost for years. When Playboy channel requested it, they were referred to a collector who had bought a print years before. In 2003, Serge Bromberg, a film preservationist/collector/exhibitor in Paris who is also the artistic director of the International Animation festival in Annecy, had heard about the film, found a magenta-hued copy on Ebay, and screened it at the festival. From there, a curator in Germany obtained the same bad print from him, and those screenings brought more requests for this now legendary lost film. Then, in 2006, a surprise letter arrived from the Pacific Film Archives, saying they bought the contents of a film lab that had gone out of business, and they had Desire Pie. It was returned and received a grant for preservation by the Women’s Film Preservation Fund, a program created by New York Women in Film and Television and The Museum of Modern Art, NY. The restored Desire Pie enjoyed its first public screening at the Museum of Modern Art in November 2010.
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