NYT article on pornography as a business.
May 20, 2001
Naked Capitalists: There's No Business Like Porn
Business
By FRANK RICH
In late January 1998, during the same week
that America first heard the ribald tale of the
president and the intern, Variety tucked onto
Page 5 a business story that caused no stir
whatsoever. Under a Hollywood dateline, the
show-biz trade paper reported that the
adult-video business "saw record revenues last
year" of some $4.2 billion in rentals and sales.
It soon became clear to me that these bicoastal
stories, one from the nation's political capital
and the other from its entertainment capital,
were in some essential way the same story.
In the weeks that followed, Washington
commentators repeatedly predicted that the
public would be scandalized by the
nonmissionary-position sex acts performed
illicitly in the White House. But just as
repeatedly voters kept telling pollsters that they
weren't blushing as brightly as, say, Cokie
Roberts. The Variety story, I realized, may
have in part explained why. An unseemly large
percentage of Americans was routinely seeking
out stories resembling that of the president and
the intern -- and raunchier ones -- as daily
entertainment fare.
The $4 billion that Americans spend on video
pornography is larger than the annual revenue
accrued by either the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or
Major League Baseball. But that's literally not
the half of it: the porn business is estimated to
total between $10 billion and $14 billion
annually in the United States when you toss in
porn networks and pay-per-view movies on
cable and satellite, Internet Web sites, in-room
hotel movies, phone sex, sex toys and that
archaic medium of my own occasionally
misspent youth, magazines. Take even the
low-end $10 billion estimate (from a 1998
study by Forrester Research in Cambridge,
Mass.), and pornography is a bigger business
than professional football, basketball and
baseball put together. People pay more money
for pornography in America in a year than they
do on movie tickets, more than they do on all
the performing arts combined. As one of the
porn people I met in the industry's epicenter,
the San Fernando Valley, put it, "We realized
that when there are 700 million porn rentals a
year, it can't just be a million perverts renting
700 videos each."
Yet in a culture where every movie gross and
Nielsen rating is assessed ad infinitum in the
media, the enormous branch of show business
euphemistically called "adult" is covered as a
backwater, not as the major industry it is.
Often what coverage there is fixates
disproportionately on Internet porn, which may
well be the only Web business that keeps
expanding after the dot-com collapse but still
accounts for barely a fifth of American porn
consumption. Occasionally a tony author --
David Foster Wallace, George Plimpton and
Martin Amis, most recently -- will go
slumming at a porn awards ceremony or visit a
porn set to score easy laughs and even easier
moral points. During sweeps weeks, local
news broadcasts "investigate" adult businesses,
mainly so they can display hard bodies in the
guise of hard news. And of course, there is no
shortage of academic literature and First
Amendment debate about pornography, much
of it snarled in the ideological divisions among
feminists, from the antiporn absolutism of
Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin to
the pro-porn revisionism of Sallie Tisdale and
Susie Bright.
I'm a lifelong show-biz junkie, and what
sparked my interest in the business was what I
stumbled upon in Variety -- its sheer hugeness.
Size matters in the cultural marketplace. If the
machinations of the mainstream TV, movie and
music industries offer snapshots of the
American character, doesn't this closeted
entertainment behemoth tell us something as
well? At $10 billion, porn is no longer a
sideshow to the mainstream like, say, the $600
million Broadway theater industry -- it is the
mainstream.
And so I went to the San Fernando Valley, aka Silicone Valley, on the other side of the
Hollywood Hills, to talk with the suits of the adult business. I did not see any porn scenes
being shot. I did not talk to any antiporn crusaders or their civil-libertarian adversaries. I
did not go to construct a moral brief. I wanted to find out how some of the top players
conduct their business and how they viewed the Americans who gorge on their
products.
Among other things, I learned that the adult industry is in many ways a mirror image of
Hollywood. Porn movies come not only in all sexual flavors but also in all genres, from
period costume dramas to sci-fi to comedy. (One series is modeled on the old
Hope-Crosby "Road" pictures.) Adult has a fabled frontier past about which its veterans
wax sentimental -- the "Boogie Nights" 70's, when porn was still shot only on film and
seen in adult movie theaters. (The arrival of home video revolutionized porn much as
sound did Hollywood.) Adult also has its own Variety (Adult Video News), its own
star-making machinery (the "girls" at Vivid and Wicked are promoted like bygone MGM
contract players), its own prima donnas and cineastes. It has (often silent) business
partners in high places: two of the country's more prominent porn purveyors, Marriott
(through in-room X-rated movies) and General Motors (though its ownership of the
satellite giant DirecTV, now probably to be sold to Rupert Murdoch), were also major
sponsors of the Bush-Cheney Inaugural. Porn even has its own Matt Drudge -- a
not-always-accurate Web industry gossip named Luke Ford, who shares his prototype's
political conservatism and salacious obsessiveness yet is also, go figure, a rigorously
devout convert to Judaism.
I didn't find any porn titans in gold chains, but I did meet Samantha Lewis, former
real-estate saleswoman and current vice president of Digital Playground, whose
best-selling "Virtual Sex" DVD's are, she says, "the Rolexes and Mercedeses of this
business." I talked with Bill Asher, 38, the head of Vivid, who is an alumnus of
Dartmouth and U.S.C. (for his M.B.A.) and Lawry's (the restaurant chain). I listened to
the story of John Stagliano, who was once a U.C.L.A. economics major with plans "to
teach at the college level" but who instead followed his particular erotic obsession and
became Buttman, the creator of hugely popular improvisational cinema-verite porn videos
that have been nicknamed "gonzo" in honor of the freewheeling literary spirit of Hunter
S. Thompson. A political libertarian, Stagliano was for a while a big-time contributor to
the Cato Institute.
If the people who make and sell pornography are this "normal" -- and varied -- might not
the audience be, too? It can't be merely the uneducated and unemployed who shell out
the $10 billion. And it isn't. Porn moguls describe a market as diverse as America.
There's a college-age crowd that favors tattooed and pierced porn performers; there's an
older, suburban audience that goes for "sweeter, nicer, cuter girls," as Bill Asher of Vivid
Pictures puts it. There is geriatric porn (one fave is called "Century Sex"), and there's a
popular video called "Fatter, Balder, Uglier." Oral sex sells particularly well in the
Northeast, ethnic and interracial videos sell in cities (especially in the South), and the Sun
Belt likes to see outdoor sex set by beaches and pools.
Yet such demographics are anecdotally, not scientifically, obtained. So few Americans
fess up when asked if they are watching adult product, says Asher, "that you'd think
there is no business." But in truth, there's no business like porn business. Porn is the one
show that no one watches but that, miraculously, never closes.
Porn doesn't have a demographic -- it goes across all demographics," says Paul
Fishbein, 42, the compact and intense man who founded Adult Video News.
"There were 11,000 adult titles last year versus 400 releases in Hollywood.
There are so many outlets that even if you spend just $15,000 and two days -- and put in
some plot and good-looking people and decent sex -- you can get satellite and cable sales.
There are so many companies, and they rarely go out of business. You have to be really
stupid or greedy to fail."
He points me toward
(see next post ...) |
