Stanley A. Long (26 November 1933 – 10 September 2012) was a British Exploitation cinema and sexploitation filmmaker. He was a writer, cinematographer, editor, and eventually, producer/director of low-budget exploitation movies.
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. 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. From coy nudist films (Nudist Memories, 1959), to moralizing documentary (The Wife Swappers, 1969) to a more relaxed attitude to permissive material (Naughty!, 1971, On the Game, 1974), 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 (1975), Adventures of a Private Eye (1977) and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate (1978), starring 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 (uncredited) 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 in 2006 he briefly returned to direct The Other Side of the Screen a one-off documentary about various aspects of filmmaking, 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 (broadcast 25 May 2007), and the British horror and comedy episodes of the British Films Forever series (“Magic, Murder and Monsters” broadcast 25 August 2007, “Sauce, Satire and Sillyness” broadcast 9 September 2007).
Simon Sheridan’s long-awaited biography of Long – X-Rated – Adventures of an Exploitation Filmmaker – was published in July 2008.
Stanley Long died in Buckinghamshire on 10 September 2012. He was 78.