Roger Earl – Filmmaker
Roger Earl, filmmaker, directed the 1975 leather classic Born to Raise Hell with co-director Terry LeGrand, along with Dungeons of Europe and Bound for Europe for Marathon Films. Jack Fritscher interviewed Earl for Drummer 126 (March 1989) in the profile “Roger Earl: S&M Auteur,” and later included their extended conversation, “Born to Raise Hell: Two Filmmakers in Conversation,” as a chapter in Profiles in Gay Courage: Leatherfolk, Arts, and Ideas (2022), Fritscher’s collection of essays on foundational figures of gay leather history.
Born to Raise Hell premiered in San Francisco after Los Angeles police blocked its screening, and it became one of the defining films of 1970s gay leather cinema. Earl and his co-director Terry LeGrand stayed friends and collaborators for forty-four years, producing nearly thirty films together for Marathon Films, including the 1988 Dungeons of Europe trilogy and the 1989 Bound for Europe series. The two men also played a part in Jack Fritscher’s own film history: in June 1989 they flew him and Mark Hemry to Amsterdam to work as the camera crew on a European S&M video shoot, an assignment that produced Fritscher’s last interview with the leather designer Rob of Amsterdam. Fritscher’s Drummer profile of the director and the longer conversation in Profiles in Gay Courage preserve Earl’s own account of how those films were made and why they mattered. For the wider subculture behind the films, see Wikipedia’s overview of the leather subculture.