Dan Erdman is an A/V archivist and video preservationist at Media Burn Archive, Chicago, USA, where he is responsible for a variety of media materials as they are reformatted, cataloged and ingested into the digital repository. He has published film reviews in Senses of Cinema, The Moving Image, Public Books and Democratiya, and co-wrote a chapter for Internet Spaceships are Serious Business: An EVE Online Reader (2016).
I am fully convinced that this book is as much as we can currently know about the world of stag films … it is, without question, the new bedrock for future historical work. * Cineaste Magazine * Erdman has managed to piece together what is surely the definitive history of this elusive subject … This book gives fascinating and non-judgemental insight into the secret world of the twentieth century American male. * Cinema Retro Magazine * The lowly stag film has long been mired in the longest shadows of film history, shrouded in rumor and innuendo, but Dan Erdman carefully parses myth from evidence about the technological and industrial circulation of all manner of dirty pictures. Drawing extensively from press accounts and law enforcement records, this fascinating new study offers glimpses of illumination that will be essential reading for histories of pornography, amateur filmmaking, and nontheatrical cinema. * David Church, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Gender Studies, Indiana University, USA * Dan Erdman’s bold and meticulously researched Let’s Go Stag! pushes past the speculations, false claims, and inaccurate assumptions that have long plagued the study of stag films to deliver—finally—the kind of clarity and grounded histories that have been so desperately needed. This extraordinary book not only opens the door to adult film history’s crucial origins, it makes a deeply significant, field-changing contribution while doing it. * Peter Alilunas, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, University of Oregon, USA, and author of Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video (2016) *