MISS NUDE AMERICA
(aka The Miss Nude America Contest)
Dir. James P. Blake, 1976.
USA, 71 min.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 – 10:00 PM
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 – 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 7:30 PM

Naked City was a nudist colony in Roselawn, Indiana, the brainchild of Dick Drost, a charismatic cross between Hugh Hefner (his idol and nemesis) and Charles Manson, confined to a wheelchair due to muscular dystrophy. Drost was an ambitious man who planned to build several Naked Cities “with buildings and skyscrapers” all over the world.  This plan, and his ultimate dream “to be head of state of the United States or Communist China or the Soviet Union” was derailed in the 1980s after he was charged with molesting a 13-year old girl and plead guilty to 10 sex-related misdemeanors, exiling him from Indiana. Legal and financial woes forced Naked City to close in 1986, and Drost’s current whereabouts are unknown, though he is rumored to have died penniless and legless not long ago.

Filmed throughout 1975, MISS NUDE AMERICA was made during happier times. Even at its heyday, Naked City appears to be, in the words of a blogger named Steve, “a cross between a blue collar strip joint and a beer chugging stop for long distance truckers,” where the entrance gate is a giant woman’s leg which moves up and down to admit cars. But Drost’s own enormous, futuristic office resembles the Korova Milk Bar by way of 8½’s harem fantasy, a tin-foiled wonderland where various nude mistresses do his bidding, and clothed matronly women do his accounting.

Naked City comes alive during its annual Miss Nude America contest, which, though Drost describes it as “the most ambitious, Esalen-type group therapy in the whole world,” seems more like a fairly typical beauty pageant (“the incentive is that there is an automatic $1000-a-week booking fee [for stripping] attached to the winner”) where naked amateurs, $300-a-week strippers and aspiring Penthouse models prance around onstage, to the excited and befuddled gazes of gawking truck-drivers, curious midwestern tourists, and Drost’s own nude parents, who are among his disciples.

Too raunchy for widespread release, and too tame for the porn circuit, MISS NUDE AMERICA, which has remained largely unseen since its release, has found its rightful home in an old bodega on South Third Street. Playing like an episode of “Mad Mad House” directed by the Maysles, it is a hugely fascinating, highly entertaining and somewhat competently directed documentary from an era of carefree sexual permissiveness and creepy sexual predators.