• Starz Inside: Sex and the Cinema, 10-11 p.m. Tuesday, Starz

American films have been wallowing in erotic voyeurism for, oh, about 103 years, since Thomas Edison's film The Kiss. (Edison's own review of his 47-second film: ``They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.'')

So you can't expect the single, hour-long documentary Starz Inside: Sex and the Cinema to (un)cover every development in its chosen subject, and, indeed, entire fetishes go undiscussed. Not a single mention, for instance, of coupling with baked goods, which launched the whole American Pie film series.

That doesn't mean there aren't oddities galore in this fast-paced and unblushing look at naughtiness in the movies. From directors' descriptions of their hinky negotiations with the industry board that hands out film ratings (``I'll give you a thrust here for a nipple there'') to actress Jennifer Tilly's explanation of how to distinguish porn from art (``The difference between artistic nudity and just plain nudity is lighting''), Sex and the Cinema careens through the corners of cinematic kink.

The show's most amusing section is a collection of clips demonstrating how filmmakers got around the so-called Hays Code, the puritanical list of do's and don'ts handed down by industry morality czar Will Hays in 1930. With even ``lustful kissing'' banned from the screen, directors resorted to every Freudian camera trick in the book to get their point across.

Among the most memorable on display in Sex and the Cinema is a shot of a train roaring into a tunnel immediately after Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint kiss in North by Northwest, and Jayne Mansfield clutching a couple of milk bottles to her chest in The Girl Can't Help It.

It seems a long way from that to American Pie, but as Sex and the Cinema notes, there are still plenty of spastic areas in Hollywood's approach to sex. It was OK for 14-year-old actress Dominque Swain to play a pubescent girl weaving an erotic spell over a middle-aged man in 1997's Lolita, for instance -- as long as an adult body double took over for her in the clinches. Swain, forced to leave the set entirely for those scenes, didn't even know what her character was doing for the most of the movie and recounts pleading with a stonily silent cast, ``Could you guys please stop being so uptight and tell me what I just did with this guy?''

She did, however, lock lips on-camera a few times with co-star Jeremy Irons. ``Jeremy Irons was my first kiss,'' she remembers. ``I don't know how I feel about that.'' Evidently, neither do we.