Doris Wishman

Doris Wishman (June 1, 1912 August 10, 2002) was an American filmmaker. She is credited with having directed and produced at least 30 feature films during a career spanning over four decades, most notably in the sexploitation film genre.

A native of New York City, Wishman began her film career as a hobby after the death of her husband in 1958. She made her feature debut with Hideout in the Sun (1960), and went on to direct numerous nudist and sexploitation films, such as Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls (1963), Behind the Nudist Curtain (1963), and Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965). In the 1970s, she made her first foray into directing pornographic films.

In 1979, Wishman filmed her first and only feature horror film, A Night to Dismember, which she spent several years editing after multiple reels were destroyed during post-production. She made a further three films in the early 2000s before dying in 2002, aged 90.

Life and career Early life Doris Wishman was born on June 1, 1912, in New York City, Her father was a hay and grain salesman; her mother died when she was still a child. She was raised in the New York City borough of the Bronx, where she graduated from James Monroe High School. After graduating from high school, Wishman claimed to have taken acting lessons at the Alviene School of Dramatics in New York City in the early 1930s, where she was a classmate of Shelley Winters. She later studied at Hunter College.

She later worked as a film booker for her cousin Max Rosenberg, an independent film distributor who handled both art films and exploitation film fare during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Wishman also worked as an actress in New York City throughout the 1950s, and for some time worked with Joseph Levine. During this same period, she was married briefly to advertising consultant Jack Abrams and resided with him in Florida until his death in 1958 due to a heart attack at age 31, In this genre, Wishman also used a different style of filmmaking in which she would cut to objects or scenery not in the scene, similar to Soviet montage. When she returned in 2001 she had three new projects. Wishman won Best Comeback Kid at New York Underground Film Festival for the drama film Satan Was a Lady starring Honey Lauren, unrelated to her 1975 pornographic film of the same name. The others included a sex comedy called Dildo Heaven, released in 2002, and Each Time I Kill, which had cameos from John Waters, Linnea Quigley, and Fred Schneider, the singer of the B-52s.