Maidstone is a 1970 American independent drama film written, produced and directed by Norman Mailer.

Kingsley has his friends, actors, wannabe actresses and others join him on his estate in Upstate New York to audition for and work on his sexual drama.

The twelve chapters in Maidstone are filmed in documentary form, and they depict Kingsley's everyday life as an actor and filmmaker.

The film opens with a male voice presenting a series of newscasts by British commentator Jean Cardigan, who is known in England for the intimacy in her portraits of the great and the near-great.

The next scene is "The Meeting of High Officials," in which a group of people are sitting in a living room and listening to a man describe Kingsley.

Jean Cardigan talks about the new secret elite peace organization called Prevention of Assassination Experiments, Control (PAX,C).

A photographer takes pictures of the potential actresses, and then an older woman speaks with Kingsley about using her estate for filming.

The scene changes to Ms. Cardigan talking about how Kingsley is receiving political delegations while he is making his "sex movie."

Then the president of the ladies' college appears and says that she does not want to have a myth in the presidential office, and asks Kingsley about his credentials as a candidate.

Kingsley is next shown talking to a different woman about an Irish poet who said, "The devil is the most beautiful creature God ever created."

Several more sex scenes are shown, one with Ms. Cardigan exposing her almost-bare chest as her dress is open and loose on top.

Ms. Cardigan is shown very disheveled, in an almost demonic state, holding a baby doll and screaming, "I hate NTK!"

He says that they have made a film by a "brand-new process" that is akin to a military operation and that they have been making an attack on the nature of reality.

After the two brothers start walking up the dirt road, they call each other offensive names, and soon after Rey proclaims that everything that just happened was a scene from a "Hollywood whorehouse movie."

"[3] Mailer's determination to blur reality and fiction as scenarios unfold could only be achieved by capturing true responses to situations.

"[4] Maidstone is the final of three underground[5] films written and directed by Norman Mailer in the late 1960s and was his largest production in terms of capital expenses and physical and emotional expenditures.

Production occurred over five days at various East Hampton estates, and "[t]he actors worked without a script, without a net, and often, without any idea what they were doing.

"[7] Mailer relied on his own acting as a method of directing while prodding cast members to react on film rather than reading from a script.

[12] The film cost $200,000 to produce, causing Mailer to sell part of his interest in The Village Voice.

"[14] D'Amico credits the totalitarian-littered world in which these filmmakers were born as fuel in their rage against the politically oppressive utilization of perfect order, considering these factors to be more important than the experimentation with illegal drugs which were also associated with counter-cultural film production.

[16] Driven by the assassinations of the 1960s, Maidstone serves as a test of counterculture's promised political equality and social freedoms' ability to "hold up under the spotlights.

"[10] Mailer viewed feminism as "potentially, part of the drift toward totalitarianism," which inspired the book The Prisoner of Sex, which he wrote as a response to the movement.

"[17] John D'Amico references "Chapter Four: Instructions to the Cast" to illustrate the treatment of actresses as "needling and taunting," as Mailer's character Kingsley calls one woman a "ninny" if she refuses to strip for a scene.

The film ran for two weeks, five times a day, and sold about 7,000 tickets, breaking several house records for the theater.

With some extra money in the bank, and feeling optimistic about its reception, Mailer opened the film at The Lincoln on 57th Street.

"[10] Vincent Canby of The New York Times lauded Mailer's creativity and ambition, but his review remained negative: Maidstone is a sometimes hilarious, often boring, but always adventurous ego trip, a very expensive, 110-minute home movie that has been edited, rather fancily, out of something like 45 hours of original footage.

That, in turn, prompts the thought that almost anybody should be able to get 110 minutes of something out of 45 hours of anything, even if it's simply the filmed record of a chic, chaotic, seven-day brawl in East Hampton, which is the raw, not-so-base material of Maidstone.

[20]Like many viewers, he found the Rip Torn hammer attack to be the only intriguing moment: Nothing else in Maidstone is as interesting, not the satire of the news media, not the soft-core sex scenes, not Mailer's put-downs of actresses auditioning for Norman T. Kingsley ... not even Mailer's flights of fancy about politics, Presidents, blacks and whatnots.

"[21] In his essay "Overexposed: My First Taste of Film-Making", Michael Mailer recounts this final scene as his first experience with trauma.

[22] Shortly before Norman Mailer's death, he spoke with his son about the final scene of Maidstone and its impact as the "clear" force that drove Michael into the film business.