We present a major cinematic rediscovery, a significant film by an obscure director, J.X. Williams. His notorious tirade against the Chicago Syndicate comes to the screen for the first time after nearly four decades in limbo.

Produced in Copenhagen in 1965, Peep Show chronicles a secret history of the Kennedy administration, revealing a Mafia plot to addict Frank Sinatra to heroin. Peep Show holds a significant place in cinematic history for a number of reasons. Most notoriously, the film's use of pornographic imagery got it banned from several countries and even resulted in the director's brief incarceration in Rome. More importantly, however, the film tackled a multitude of subjects that did not come into vogue until the 1970s.

Nearly a decade before Coppola and Scorsese, Peep Show offered an unrelentingly grim and realistic portrait of organized crime, undoubtedly influenced by Mr Williams' personal experiences as a onetime "gofer" to Johnny Rosselli and other mobsters in Los Angeles. Released less than two years after the assassination of JFK, Peep Show was also the first film to explore the dark side of Camelot. Besides tracing the tangled web of theories that may have led to the assassination, Peep Show gives a blistering account of the fixing of the 1960 election.

Film scholar, curator, and archivist Noel Lawrence will give a detailed introduction on the making of the film and the colorful life of its director, including excerpts from William's forthcoming memoir, The Big Footnote. We will also present three of his short films from the late 1960s, Psych-Burn, Satan Claus, and The Virgin Sacrifice.

"Creating a unique body of work from a heady ferment of crime, drugs, politics and porn, J.X. Williams was either a mad genius or a mob stooge. Rediscovery of his films will help cinema historians decide. He could very well be the Missing Link in the secret history of mid-twentieth-century America." - San Francisco Film Noir Festival

Courtesy of the J.X. Williams Archive, San Francisco