Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Circus of Books’ on Netflix, a Documentary About the Most Unlikely Porn-Store Owners Ever

The new Netflix documentary Circus of Books shows how director Rachel Mason was part of a typical American family: mom, dad, three kids and a gay porn store. She profiles her parents and the business they owned, a business that was chock-full of “a gourmet selection of stuff for every pervert,” as one friend and patron put it. For 30 years, Circus of Books was a countercultural staple of Boystown in West Hollywood, a place where a fella could buy magazines, videos and paraphernalia from the last people you might expect to be selling such things. Now tell me you don’t want to see a movie about those people.

CIRCUS OF BOOKS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Karen and Barry Mason are a loving Jewish couple with three children, Micah, Josh and Rachel. She was a criminal justice reporter at the Wall Street Journal and Cincinnati Enquirer until she got burned out reporting on violence and death. He worked in the movie and TV business, doing visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek, eventually quitting to be an inventor, developing an innovative new dialysis machine. But he was priced out of the business, and the Masons were struggling. So Barry started distributing Hustler magazine.

See, no big distributor wanted to touch Larry Flynt’s infamous publication, so for Barry, it was nothing more than a business opportunity — and one that put food on the table. He befriended the owners of Book Circus, who ordered tons of the gay-porn magazines Barry eventually distributed, and soon, he and Karen took over the business and implemented a minor name change. What with one thing and another, they sold stacks and stacks of printed materials, ended up bankrolling a gay-porn production business that produced two movies a week at its peak and sent this documentary’s director to college thanks to films titled Got it Bad for Stepdad, Meat Me at the Fair and Nacho’s Monster Tits.

Circus of Books also became a place of acceptance for its oft-persecuted patrons. (It also helped that the space behind it was known as Vaseline Alley.) Karen and Barry mournfully discuss how AIDS killed many of their friends and employees, who saw them as de-facto Mom and Dad at the local porno mom-and-pop because their own parents wanted nothing to do with them. This opens the film to addressing relevant political issues in the 1980s, ranging from the Reagan administration’s cruel indifference to the AIDS epidemic to conservatives’ attempts to censor pornographic materials. Meanwhile, the Mason kids grew up barely knowing their parents’ business, which was largely kept secret for reasons that seem logical but really aren’t when you stop thinking like a total square.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sarah Polley’s extraordinary Stories We Tell is a similar documentary, in which the filmmaker explores the intricacies of her family with great intimacy. Except in Circus of Books, the home movies are real.

Performance Worth Watching: Karen is the captain of the S.S. Circus of Books, and she’s also the film’s most complex “character,” a religious woman who didn’t consider the contradictions of her anti-gay conservative upbringing and her liberal profession until she absolutely had to.

Memorable Dialogue: “So this guy here,” Karen says during a tour of the store, “Handjobs magazine, just stopped publishing. Now he does organic chicken farming. So when I order from him we catch up on his chickens.”

Sex and Skin: Many images of magazine and video covers, almost all of them with hilarious names.

Our Take: Circus of Books isn’t just a highly amusing portrait of normies working within the counterculture, although it definitely is that at first. (Go ahead, try not to laugh when Karen very matter-of-factly caters to a customer’s request for a video with a highly specific type of content.) Rachel follows her mother to an expo, where she meets contacts and orders a new brand of lube. She interviews Larry Flynt, who’s grateful that Barry was one of the first L.A. distributors of his product. She chats with former gay-porn star Jeff Stryker, who testifies on behalf of Barry and Karen’s kind personalities, and then shows off the anatomically correct, impressively poseable Jeff Stryker doll.

As the film progresses, Rachel subtly guides it into deep, compassionate waters; the more personal she gets, the more universal its themes of change and acceptance become. We get a portrait of the complex people who backed into an unlikely line of work in 1982, and watched it unexpectedly cross over into their family life, a moment Rachel drops not like a bomb, but a color tablet into a glass of water, where it quietly and steadily turns the water blue. She covers a broad range of material but always remains focused, imbuing it with warmth and meaning.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Circus of Books is funny and full of heart, and an absolute gem.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Circus of Books on Netflix