Roberta Findlay

Noted adult and exploitation cinema filmmaker Roberta Findlay was born Roberta Hershkowitz in 1948 in New York City. The youngest in a family of three children, Roberta grew up in a tenement apartment in the Bronx. Findlay's Hungarian immigrant parents wanted her to be a pianist. Roberta met her husband Michael Findlay while a student at the City College of New York after she volunteered to be the accompanying pianist for a silent movie program that Michael was running on campus. Roberta married Michael at age eighteen. The couple collaborated on several sleazy and sadistic exploitation features together in the 1960's which include the notoriously nasty "Flesh" trilogy. After parting ways with Michael in the early 1970's, Roberta went on to direct a handful of explicit hardcore movies for producer and distributor Allan Shackleton. Moreover, Findlay also worked on various films as an editor, composer, producer, and cinematographer. Roberta ended her directing career toiling away on low-budget horror and grindhouse fare throughout the mid to late 1980's. In addition, Findlay and her late partner Walter E. Sear founded the recording studio Sear Sound in New York City.