Epstein: The Man From O.R.G.Y.
We’ve skimmed over hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein stories over the past week but not one of them that raised this salient fact: What was Epstein’s favorite movie? To find that out, you’ve got to go back a few years — to the Mother Jones article from Oct. 9, 2020 by Leland Nally entitled “I Called Everyone In Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book.” Unlike the social media influencers who went to the White House last Friday, Nally, a writer and filmmaker, used an unredacted copy of the book to call everyone in it — not only the rich socialites who patronized Epstein, but even the gardeners employed by him and the massage therapists who worked over the pervert.
It turns out his favorite picture was a 1970 release called The Man From O.R.G.Y., based on a bizarre, James Bond-knockoff sex comedy novel by the late Theodore Mark Gottfried, writing under the pseudonym Ted Mark. “It’s about a con man who travels the world under the guise of being a ‘sex researcher’ in order to spy for the US government,” Nally writes. “The novel begins with protagonist Steve Victor in Damascus for the kickoff of an ‘extensive survey of Arab and Oriental sex practices.’ There he is approached by a US diplomat and invited to the embassy. In short order, Victor is recruited to spy for the US government.”
The 1970 movie travels around the world to Paris, London, Barcelona, Hollywood and New York, but in reality, all of it was shot in and around San Juan, Puerto Rico. Victor is played by Robert Walker Jr., the son of the movie star Robert Walker and his short-term wife, the famed Hollywood actress Jennifer Jones, who left him to marry producer David O. Selznick. Victor duels Mafioso and spies of every color while traveling from brothel to brothel, seeking three women, each with a “mouse” tattooed upon their left butt cheek. The most elaborate of these brothels — the House of All Nations, said to be in Lisbon — is under the thumb of a female impersonator (Lynne Carter), masquerading as Phyllis Diller, Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis!
You can’t find the movie on YouTube — no doubt, the CIA goons ordered it scrubbed — but a clip remains there from an admirer of Lynne Carter, sashaying long before RuPaul!
Sidney W. Pink, who had worked for many years in burlesque, produced the “pink” movie, a comedown from his heyday in the 1950s toying around with 3-D (Bwana Devil) and the surreal CineMagic process, used to mirror the surfaces of Mars in The Angry Red Planet. He had turned to pornography after working a spell in Denmark and Sweden, where he also produced the Godzilla rip-off Reptilicus at a fraction of what it would have cost in Hollywood.
As director for The Man From O.R.G.Y., Pink tabbed a veteran hand from Great Britain, James Hill, best known for the African wildlife saga Born Free. Hill had worked on the front lines as a documentary filmmaker in World War II. If you’ve seen the 1963 Steve McQueen adventure The Great Escape, you’ll have a sense of James Hill. The blind character played by Donald Pleasence, Lt. Col. Collin Blythe, is patterned after Hill.
In case you’re wondering, O.R.G.Y. stands for the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth. Obviously, Epstein took his mission quite rationally and seriously — at least two or three times a day!
