Coast2Coast Swingers Blog

WHEN the television series “Swingtown” has its premiere on June 5, viewers can expect to see the following scenes in the first episode: a ménage à trois; a high school junior smoking pot and later flirting with her English teacher; the flagrant enjoyment of quaaludes and cocaine; and the sight of the neighborhood scold unwittingly stumbling upon a groaning and slithering orgy. “Why don’t you kick your shoes off, Mom, and join the party?” is how a middle-aged participant, clad only in mutton chops, says hello.

Debauchery, however, is only an appetizer for the main story line: the open marriage of an airline pilot and his wife, who, in pursuit of new partners, set about seducing the businessman and housewife who have just moved in across the street.

Seems like something that would be right at home on HBO or Showtime, where programs tend to loiter in the muck of moral ambiguity. But “Swingtown,” a one-hour scripted drama, will appear on CBS. Though perhaps not as prim and upstanding as it was when shows like “Murder, She Wrote” and “Touched by an Angel” defined its airwaves, this network tends to be more decorous than others where sex is concerned. So basing a series on sexual experimentation and other taboos, even if from a bygone era — “Swingtown” is set in the mid-1970s — is a notable experiment in and of itself.

“Swingtown” was born in large part from a serendipitous collision of circumstances. A CBS executive happened to have a hankering for ’70s retrospection at a time when the network was looking for critical cachet and a way to expand its brand beyond grisly crime dramas and mainstream comedies. “Swingtown,” then, is something of a trial balloon.

One CBS official said it was probably inevitable that some companies now advertising on “Without a Trace,” the show temporarily yielding its time slot at 10 p.m. Thursdays to “Swingtown,” would beg off during the new show’s run. But with a subtle release of its 13 episodes between June and late summer (the heart of its promotional campaign is a teaser already on YouTube and spots on classic-rock radio stations), the network is hoping to beckon new viewers without alienating old ones.



“We wanted to give people something fun and fresh in the summer,” said Nina Tassler, the president of CBS Entertainment and the person who greenlighted the series. “The summer gives you a kind of different license.”

In setting the tone for “Swingtown,” its producers— including Mike Kelley (a writer for “The OC” and “Jericho”) and Alan Poul (a principal director of “Six Feet Under”) — said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of “Boogie Nights,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of “The Wonder Years,” the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

While “Swingtown” does not have a narrator, it is certainly born of an adult looking back on his childhood. In 1976 Mr. Kelley, the show’s creator, was 8 and living in Winnetka, Ill., the Chicago suburb in “Swingtown.” And while the show is fiction, he said he was inspired by his memories of the Harvey Wallbanger-fueled parties that his parents and their friends staged on Saturday nights; he would often watch from a perch on the stairs.

When he wrote the pilot episode, he surrounded himself with photographs his mother took of those times, and some of their details have been virtually grafted onto “Swingtown.” One character drives a maroon Cadillac Eldorado convertible and works as a trader, just as Mr. Kelley’s father did. Another wears the long denim skirts his mother favored and sips gimlet martinis, her favorite drink. (The singer-songwriter Liz Phair, a classmate of Mr. Kelley’s at New Trier High School, has created the show’s original score.)

Mr. Kelley, now 40, also says that at least some of the show’s more salacious moments are based on real events. “I remembered one summer where the kids all hung out, and some of the parents in the neighborhood kind of switched partners,” he said in a recent interview. “It felt like they all just moved one house to the left. Eventually most of those marriages broke up.”

In a later conversation Mr. Kelley’s mother, Marcia Arnold, speaking with her son at her side, said that particular recollection was “embellished a bit.” “Mike saw it through young eyes,” she said, adding that she had no frame of reference, for example, for anything remotely like the basement orgy depicted in the series pilot. (She has seen that first episode twice.) Mrs. Arnold did acknowledge, however, that within her circle of perhaps 20 couples, most of them in their 30s by the mid-1970s and many of them already parents to adolescent children, there were flirtations, breakups and eventually remarriages.

“A lot of us married very early because that’s what you did, and some people grew apart because they probably shouldn’t have been together in the first place,” Mrs. Arnold said.

Mr. Kelley’s parents were among those who separated, much to his relief. “It was hard to see your parents so unhappy in something they didn’t seem to be able to get out of,” Mr. Kelley recalled as his mother sat next to him in the big backyard of his red-brick home, which is near Hollywood but looks like it could be in the northern suburbs of Chicago. “Even though I was 20, I remember feeling thrilled for Mother in particular.”

He shifted his gaze toward her. “You did something that was right for you emotionally, personally,” he added.

With both his parents now happier in new marriages than they were in their first, Mr. Kelley said he has taken their experience to heart.

“Watching my mom navigate her first marriage and the crazy second adolescence she and her friends seemed to be living in the 1970s inspired me to be as brave and honest as I can be in my own adult relationships and not worry so much about what other people think or say about them,” he later wrote in an e-mail message. “But the jury is still out for me on marriage and monogamy.”

Asked if he is now involved in a relationship, he said only, “I’ve been lucky to have had a handful of primary relationships over the years, none of which society would probably deem conventional.”

In setting out to sell a story as unconventional as “Swingtown,” Mr. Kelley said, he did not immediately think of the broadcast networks.

Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul first pitched the idea to executives at HBO, where Mr. Poul had a development deal following his run on “Six Feet Under.” HBO passed, Mr. Poul said, at least in part because “Big Love,” which is about polygamy and was already in production, and “Tell Me You Love Me,” a soft-core treatment of intersecting relationships that was in development, were deemed too similar. The producers then began to shop their idea to Showtime.

But in the interim an acquaintance of Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul mentioned to a dinner companion that her friends had conceived a TV series that touched on open marriage in the 1970s. Lucky for Mr. Kelley and Mr. Poul, that dinner companion was Ms. Tassler. Luckier still, Ms. Tassler’s second cousin, Nena O’Neill, had with her husband written “Open Marriage,” a well-known 1972 book that encouraged couples to consider experimenting sexually outside matrimony as long as everyone’s cards were on the table. (It went on to sell nearly four million copies through the decade and beyond.)

“I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Tassler, 50, recalled in a recent interview. “That’s right in my sweet spot, in terms of my nostalgia.”

Less than 24 hours later Ms. Tassler was reading the script. “It was a page turner,” she said. “I called the next day and said, ‘I want it.’ ”

There was, however, the not insignificant matter of nudity and the graphic depiction of sexual acts. The script, as written for cable, was rife with both. Mr. Kelley, in consultation with Mr. Poul, was directed to do a rewrite.

“I think we’re able to be more groundbreaking and more culturally subversive by putting this on a network, where more people will be exposed to it and where we’ll have to deal with these adult issues in an oblique way,” Mr. Poul said.

Mr. Kelley agreed. “I actually think the shackles of having to show more explicit things every week to week to week on cable would have been far more constricting.”

What remains to be seen is whether viewers accustomed to the quick and easy doffing of clothes on cable will be interested in a network series about sex with no more nudity than an afternoon soap opera — and far less than “NYPD Blue” had on prime time on ABC in the 1990s.

Still, whatever restraint the network and creators have imposed on themselves is unlikely to quiet a vocal segment of the viewing public that feels prime-time television is sufficiently polluted and in no need of a series in which the central characters may well go off to bed in groups of three, four or more.

“I have seen the promo for it that was posted on YouTube,” said Melissa Henson, director of communications and public education for the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that has campaigned for years against what it considers inappropriate content on shows including “NYPD Blue” and, recently, “30 Rock.”

“It’s sort of driving a stake through an institution most of us regard as being fundamental to our culture and to our society,” she said.

Ms. Henson said she would wait to see the show until she and her group would act. “We’re certainly disturbed by the premise,” she said, “or at least our understanding of the premise.”

None of the series’s stars will be immediately recognizable to most viewers. Molly Parker, who plays one of the lead characters, a housewife named Susan Miller, appeared in “Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO, and Jack Davenport, who plays her husband, Bruce, was in the original British version of “Coupling,” a sex-obsessed comedy.

The best-known actor to American television viewers is probably Grant Show, of “Melrose Place,” though he is hard to place behind the long blond mustache he has grown to play Tom Decker, the pilot.

Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Show one of the most memorable lines in the first episode (and in that YouTube trailer) — one that signals to viewers early the ride on which they are about to embark.

“Your wife’s going to kill me,” a flight attendant says to Tom after she has inadvertently spilled a drink on his shirt in the cockpit.

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A Brisbane swingers club has asked the City Council for official approval as a nightclub venue.
Couples International runs partner-swapping nights at an industrial estate in Woolloongabba.

The Brisbane City Council says the application is controversial, but Councillor Helen Abrahams says there have been no complaints lodged so far.

"Council cannot make a determination on the ethic grounds or the moral grounds of a swingers club," she said.
"They have to make it on, this is a club, a nightclub, and what are the impacts of that nightclub ... on the local residents?"

Club owner Brian Horn says he has met Council guidelines.

"The lifestyle has become more accepted," he said.
"We are running a proper business here and in order to do that we really want to operate above the radar as it is." If approved, the club would be Queensland's first official swingers club.

SAN FRANCISCO -

The California Supreme Court has overturned a gay marriage ban in a ruling that would make the nation's largest state the second one to allow gay and lesbian weddings.

The justices' 4-3 decision Thursday says domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage. Chief Justice Ron George wrote the opinion.

The city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples and gay rights groups sued in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco's monthlong same-sex wedding march.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Both sides in the gay marriage debate will be watching California's highest court Thursday to see if the nation's biggest state goes the way of Massachusetts and legalizes same-sex marriage.

The California Supreme Court was scheduled to rule on a series of lawsuits seeking to overturn a voter-approved law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, California could become the second state after Massachusetts where gay and lesbian residents can marry.

"What happens in California, either way, will have a huge impact around the nation. It will set the tone," said Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California.

Supporters and opponents of gay marriage predicted a number of possible outcomes from the California court's seven justices, six of whom were appointed by Republican governors.

Like the top court in Massachusetts, they could hold that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying constitutes unlawful discrimination and order state lawmakers to remedy the situation.

Less likely but still feasible, they could bypass the Legislature and simply strike the one man-one woman definition from the marriage statutes, according to Kors. In that instance, the soonest couples could start walking down the aisle would be in 30 days, the time it typically takes for Supreme Court opinions to become final, he said.

A majority of the justices could also join the top courts in four other states that have upheld gay marriage bans.

Such a decision would leave any subsequent changes in the hands of voters or the Legislature, which has twice passed laws to make gay marriage legal. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed them both times, citing the ban approved by voters in 2000.

"If California issues a decision legalizing same-sex marriage, it will reinvigorate the fight for same-sex marriage" nationally, said Jordan Lorence, an attorney with the conservative Alliance Defense Fund. "But if they affirm that marriage is for a man and a woman, then what has happened is that Massachusetts is leading a one-state parade."

Lorence and Kors agreed that there is another, more nuanced option. The court could strike down the 2000 ban, known as Proposition 22, but give the Legislature the leeway of devising a solution that falls short of allowing marriage for all.

That's what the New Jersey Supreme Court did in 2006. After that court ruled that gay couples should receive the same legal protections as husbands and wives, New Jersey legislators opted to allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions, designed to give them spousal rights without marriage.

California already offers same-sex couples who register as domestic partners the same legal rights and responsibilities as married spouses, including the right to divorce and to sue for child support. It's therefore unclear what additional relief state lawmakers could offer short of marriage if the court renders the existing ban unconstitutional.

A coalition of religious and social conservative groups is attempting to put a measure on the November ballot that would enshrine California's current laws banning gay marriage in the state constitution.

The Secretary of State is expected to rule by the end of June whether the sponsors gathered enough signature to qualify the marriage amendment, similar to ones enacted in 26 other states.

The cases before the California court were brought by the city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples, Equality California and another gay rights group in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco's monthlong same-sex wedding march that took place at Mayor Gavin Newsom's direction.

The City of Duncanville has reworked an ordinance aimed at shutting down a swingers club.

The Cherry Pit has been throwing adult-oriented parties inside a private house. The city maintains that the Cherry Pit is a Sex Club, which violates city law.

But the owner of the Cherry Pit claims it's not a business because the house only accepts voluntary donations.

The new ordinance addresses the issue of donations by stating that if donations are solicited, accepted or paid, even if the donations are voluntary, the Cherry Pit can be considered a sex club and can be shut down.

The new ordinance does provide a victory for the swingers club. It now states that the Cherry Pit is entitled to a hearing if the city inspector attempts to shut down the house.

Le Chateau swingers club planned to open at the end of the month. The owners of a swingers club in Lorca, Le Chateau, have locked themselves inside the building after it was closed down by local police last Saturday for not having a licence.

The local town planning councillor, Francisco García, told the press that owners had not complied with a previous order giving them four days to shut down, and that given that two men did not want to leave the premises, they were taped by the authorities with the people inside. There is a small side door which remains accessible if they do want to exit, he added.

Le Chateau was to officially open as a couple swapping venue on May 30th, but the local town hall ordered a halt to building work on the 5th, given that there were no licences for the construction.