Tom Hanley

Raised in Mill Valley, California, Tom Hanley graduated from Tamapais High School in Mill Valley in 1959 and traveled around Europe for a year prior to attending Berkeley as a Social Anthropology major. Following two years of service in the military, Hanley went on to become a deputy sheriff in Marin County as well as was a captain in the Army Reserve who was assigned to military intelligence. However, in 1971 Tom left his job at the sheriff's department over a dispute with his superiors about the privacy of his notebook concerning a case involving political activist Angela Davis that Hanley served on the security team for. In the wake of quitting his job Tom decided to form a production company called Cinmarin with two friends with the specific intent of making a pornographic movie. Hanley wrote the script for as well as both produced and directed the unusually thoughtful and sensitive hardcore feature What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera (1972). The film was cast through an ad in the newspaper The Berkeley Barb; the male leads were paid forty dollars per day, and the movie was shot in eleven days on a budget of just twenty thousand dollars. Following two months of post-production, Tom found himself in trouble with the U.S. Army Intelligence office at the Presidio in San Francisco over the making of his film because he was still a captain in the Army Reserve at the time. Fortunately, the military concluded in the wake of an investigation that Hanley's movie wasn't of a subversive nature. Tom in turn used said investigation to publicize his film by declaring it the first erotic picture with full security clearance. What About Jane: An Erotic Soap Opera (1972) was first shown at an exclusive press screening on January 4, 1972 and subsequently was premiered to the general public the following day at Arlene Elster's Sutter Cinema in San Francisco. The film received good reviews. However, Hanley was arrested on February 19, 1972 at a screening of the movie in Sacramento on a misdemeanor obscenity charge. Fortunately, Tom was able to pay his own bail and the obscenity charges were eventually dropped. Alas, in March, 1972 the movie was seized by authorities, which resulted in Hanley having no copies of his own movie to exhibit. Although Tom did eventually manage to get the print of his film back (it was shown in such cities as New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Los Angeles), he nonetheless soon got tired of all the controversy, sold the film cheap, and paid off his investors. Hanley went on to earn a Master's Degree from California State University and got a job in law enforcement as a special investigator.