[7] 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,[2] being widowed only five months after their marriage.

[7] By her own account, Wishman began her film production career after Abrams' untimely death, as she felt she "needed something to fill my hours with.

[1] Censorship at the time would allow very little, meaning Wishman and other sexploitation directors used different tactics to portray eroticism and excitement, using melodrama, cutaway, soft-core sex talk, and suggestive nudity that just skirted under the law.

[8] 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.

[8] Her second release in this genre was Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965), Wishman's first collaboration with her long-time cinematographer C. Davis Smith.

[8] All of Wishman's sexploitation work was shot in black and white until the release of her first soft-core color feature, Love Toy (circa 1970).

In the mid-1970s, she went on to direct two low-budget thrillers featuring burlesque performer Chesty Morgan: Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, the former of which was distributed internationally by Hallmark Releasing Corporation, and made on a budget of $50,000.

[1] Antiobscenity law at the time greatly limited the circulation of the films of Doris Wishman and other sexploitation directors.

In 1968, she released The Hot Month in August and Passion Fever, two already completed Greek films, which Wishman bought and added minimal original material, such as voiceover.

The film featured interviews with several transgender individuals, one of whom was Deborah Hartin, and included dramatic reconstructions of scenes from their lives.

One such dramatization featured porn star Harry Reems before he became internationally renowned for his role in Deep Throat (1972).

In these later works, the films take a bloody and grotesque turn, and are sometimes referred to as her cinema of somatic portrayal, due to heavy themes of the body betraying itself.

[1] After the failure of A Night to Dismember, Wishman moved to Coral Gables, Florida, in the mid-1980s, where she found work in an adult-novelty store.

[2] A cult following started to form and Wishman was honored at the New York Underground Film Festival in 1998 and appeared twice on Late Night with Conan O'Brien,[11] one of which she was interviewed with Roger Ebert.