NYT porn as business article -- continued ...
Some porn directors have similar pretensions. They can receive grandiose billing -- "A
Brad Armstrong Motion Picture" -- and are sometimes grudgingly indulged with a "big
budget" project ($250,000 tops) made on film, even though sex scenes are far harder to
shoot on film (with its trickier lighting and shot setups) than on video -- and even though
adult films are almost never projected on screens. "We have our own Brad Pitts wanting
to make 'Seven Days in Tibet,"' said one executive. Performers are paid at fairly
standardized rates -- by the day or sex scene, as much as $1,000 per day for women, as
little as $200 for men. The contract girls at Vivid and Wicked sign for $100,000 and up a
year, in exchange for which they might make nine movies, with two sex scenes each,
over that time, along with any number of brand-boosting promotional appearances at
consumer conventions and video stores. The top stars double or triple that figure by
running their own subscription Web sites, marketing autographs (along with less
innocent mementos) and most lucratively, dancing in the nation's large circuit of strip
clubs at fees that can top $10,000 a week.
But porn stars have an even shorter shelf life than Hollywood's female stars and fare
worse in love. Though H.I.V. and drug testing, as well as condom use, are rigorous at
the top adult companies, one producer asks rhetorically, "Who wants to date a woman
who's had sex with 60 people in two months?"
Since I've rarely found actors to be the most insightful observers of the movie business,
I wasn't eager to sample the wisdom of porn stars. But I did seek out Sydnee Steele, a
newly signed Wicked contract girl who is by many accounts a rarity in the business --
she's happily married. Her husband is Michael Raven, 36, a top adult director. They met
in Dallas in the early 90's, when she was a jewelry saleswoman in a shopping mall and he
was a car salesman who sold her a mariner blue Miata. Eventually they drifted into the
local swingers' scene. (One porn worker would later tell me, "Texas, Florida and Arizona
are where all the swingers and strippers come from, though no one knows why.")
"The industry looks up to our relationship," Raven says when I meet the couple, now
married nine years, at Sin City, another production company in Chatsworth. Avid porn
fans in Texas, they migrated to the Valley to turn their avocation into a livelihood. Like
many of the directors and male performers in the business, Raven is a somewhat lumpy
everyman, heading toward baldness and sporting a meticulous goatee. A Kandinsky
poster decorates the Sin City office. "I've gotten jealous on occasion," Raven allows.
"I'm not jealous of her because of sex in movies; I'm jealous when her work takes her
away from me. I get lonely if she's gone two weeks on the road."
"Sometimes I'm too tired for my husband," Steele says. "We love what we do, but it's
hard work -- lots of 12-hour days." By now, I've watched some of what she does and
find it hard to square the rapacious star of "Hell on Heels" with the woman before me,
who is softer-spoken, prettier and considerably less animated than her screen persona.
Maybe she can act.
The daughter of a college professor, Steele comes from what she calls a "Leave It to
Beaver' nuclear family," Raven from a religious one. "I've leaned toward the right in my
politics," he says, "but I'm bothered by the Republicans' association with the religious
right. I know from my experience of religious people that those who protest and scream
the loudest usually have the biggest collection of adult under their bed." He wishes they'd
protest violent entertainment instead: "In video games, you're supposed to destroy, maim
and dismember an opponent. But if one person is giving pleasure to another in adult,
that's evil. Sex on TV is more destructive than hard core. You can depict a rape on TV --
we don't touch that subject."
Like his wife, Raven is increasingly recognized by strangers -- largely because "Behind
the Scenes" documentaries about his movies appear on DVD's and on cable erotic
networks, much like Backstory features on American Movie Classics. But Raven no
longer stays in contact with his own family. And Steele's parents, she says, "don't totally
know what I'm doing and don't ask. We don't lie, but they've never really been told."
The secrecy among porn people is so prevalent that it's a running, if bittersweet,
gag in a made-for-the-Internet TV series called "The Money Shot" that Paul
Fishbein of AVN is producing as a lark. If you care to sample only one product of
the adult industry, this is it -- and the episodes can be seen free in streaming video on a
nonporn site, moneyshot-theseries.com. But be warned, its rating clocks in at about
PG-13. "The Money Shot" is a roman a clef comedy, much in the spirit of HBO's classic
"Larry Sanders Show," about daily life in the adult biz, as it filters into the offices of an
AVN-like publication called "Blue Movie Guide." In a rather poignant episode titled "The
Parents Show," one character dolefully concludes, "Nobody in this business tells their
folks nothing."
Bryn Pryor, 33, is the director and a writer of "The Money Shot." He's an AVN staff
member who arrived in the Valley after nine years in the theater, much of it children's
theater, in Arizona. "The Money Shot" hits his friends where they live. "Porn is legal
now, but it has the mentality of other businesses, like prostitution and gambling, that
started with organized-crime connections," he says. "People approach it as if they've
done something wrong. If our customers project shame, than you must be doing
something wrong. Everyone at AVN writes under a pseudonym. We have people here
who don't want anyone to know their real name." Variations on this theme were visible
everywhere I went in the Valley. Receptionists at porn companies tend to answer the
phone generically: "Production Company" or "Corporate Office."
Typifying this ambivalence is Steve Orenstein, 38, the owner of Wicked Pictures. He
made his accidental entrance into the porn business through his mother -- who got him a
part-time job when she worked as a bookkeeper at an adult-book distributor and he was
18. But he does not seem eager to reveal his calling to his 9-year-old stepdaughter.
"Being in the business you walk that line all the time -- do you say what you do or not?"
he says. Orenstein has revealed his true profession to only a handful of people whom he
and his wife have met on the PTA circuit. "I'm comfortable with what I do," he says,
"but I don't want parents of our child's friends saying their kids can't play with her
because of it." His stepdaughter has noticed the Wicked logo on his shirt. "She knows I
make something only adults can see."
The Orensteins have spoken to a therapist about the inevitable day of reckoning with
their child. "The counselors say don't tell her yet," he says, "don't overexplain." But
surely she'll guess by adolescence? Orenstein, a slight, nervous man with a reputation as
a worrier, merely shrugs. For the moment, he's more concerned about protecting the
child from prime-time television, citing a recent episode of the sitcom "The King of
Queens" on CBS. He recalls: "The guy's rolling off his wife, and my 9-year-old asks,
'What do they mean by that?' Should I be letting her watch it?"
Russell Hampshire's gambit is to tell strangers he's in "the video-duplication business."
Allen Gold, a VCA executive with daughters ages 1 and 3, says he's "in the DVD
business." Paul Fishbein doesn't bring either AVN or adult product into his house.
Michael Raven and Sydnee Steele have decided for now not to have children.
I ask Veronica Hart, whose two teenage sons are at magnet schools for the highly gifted,
what they have made of her career. "It's horrible for them," she says. "I'm their loving
mommy, and nobody likes to think of their parents having sex and being famous for it.
I'm not ashamed of what I do. I take responsibility for who I am. I chose. From the time
they were kids, my stripping gear was washed and hanging in the bathtub. At the same
time I apologize to my kids for how the choices in my life have affected them. They're
well adjusted and can joke with me about it: 'I know I'm going to spend the rest of my
life on the couch."'
No wonder the porn industry has its finger on the pulse of American tastes. Not
only do its players have a lifestyle more middle class than that of their Beverly
Hills counterparts, but in their desire to keep their porn careers camouflaged in a
plain brown wrapper, they connect directly with their audience's shame and guilt. Still,
the next generation of porn consumers and producers alike may break with that puritan
mind-set. The teenagers who grew up with cable and the VCR "come to the table already
saturated with sex," says Bryn Pryor. "They've never known a time without Calvin Klein
ads and MTV. By the time they see porn, they've already seen so many naked people
they're pre-jaded."
This may explain why Americans are clamoring for ever more explicit fare. In
mainstream TV, sex is no longer sequestered on late-night public access shows like
"Robin Byrd." At HBO, Sheila Nevins, the highly regarded executive in charge of its
nonfiction programming, has been stunned by the success of sexual documentaries like
"Real Sex," now in its 11th year, and "Taxicab Confessions." Focus groups complain to
HBO that another hit series, "G-String Divas," doesn't go far enough. "They know what
really happens in a strip club," Nevins says, and find HBO's version "too R-rated."
Though HBO, known for its heavy promotions of "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the
City," spends nothing to advertise its sex series, they always are among the network's
most watched. "I can do all the shows I want about poverty in the Mississippi Delta,"
Nevins says, "but this is what hard-working Americans want to see. At first we were
embarrassed by the sex shows, and producers didn't want their names on them. Now we
have Academy Award producers, and their names can't be big enough."
At Playboy, Jim English, the head of its TV division, and his boss, Christie Hefner, have
felt the heat. Its Playboy and Spice channels have been squeezed from both sides in the
cable-satellite marketplace. The softer, if X-rated, cuts of hard-core movies that it runs
are no longer much more explicit than regular cable programming at HBO, Showtime
("Queer as Folk") and MTV ("Spring Break"). Even the Learning Channel (with "Bra
Wars" and "Wild Weddings") and the History Channel (with its four-part "Sex in the 20th
Century") are testing the waters. Meanwhile, erotic networks like Hot and Ecstasy,
which run XX films, are cannibalizing Playboy's audience from the other end of the
erotic spectrum. The result: This summer Playboy plans to start "Spice Platinum Live,"
which edges toward XXX. (I'll leave the codified yet minute clinical distinctions
separating X, XX and XXX to your imagination.)
Even in an economic downturn, everything's coming up porn. Newly unemployed
dot-com techies who can't find jobs in Silicon Valley are heading to Silicone Valley,
where the work force is expanding, not contracting. "Vivid overall has doubled, tripled
revenues and profits in the past couple of years," says Bill Asher. While he says there's
no such thing as a Hollywood-style "home run" in porn -- unless another celebrity like
Pamela Anderson turns up in a sex video, intentionally or not -- he sees potentially "a
tenfold jump" in profits as distribution increases through broadband and
video-on-demand. (Porn executives are no less fuzzy than Hollywood's as to when this
might be.) "There are opportunities here that Paramount will never have in terms of
growth," Asher says. "Our product travels well internationally and is evergreen.
Five-year-old product is still interesting to someone; it's not yesterday's news like a
five-year-old Hollywood blockbuster. Our costs are relatively fixed. As there's more
distribution, 90 cents of a dollar hits the bottom line." The absence of adult retail stores in
conservative pockets of the country is no longer a barrier. "You can get a dish relatively
anywhere," Asher says, "and get whatever you want."
When Vivid took over and expanded the Hot Network in 1999, Asher says, "there was no
outcry. We got thank-you letters and sales boomed. We put up two more channels in
months. Cable companies were begging for them. It doesn't take a genius to do this.
Literally the customers say, I like what you've got -- give me some more of it."
Entertainment-industry executives not directly involved in the adult business confirm its
sunny future. Satellite and cable companies have found that the more explicit the
offerings, the more the market grows. AVN reports that TV porn may actually be
increasing video-store sales and rentals rather than cannibalizing them -- by introducing
new customers to the product. Though some cable companies say they don't want adult,
only one of the country's eight major cable providers, Adelphia, forbids it. The others are
too addicted to the cash flow to say no. The organized uproar that recently persuaded a
teetering Yahoo to drop its adult Web store -- but not its gateways into other adult sites
-- is the exception, not the rule.
And despite a rumor that one porn mogul keeps a Cessna waiting at Van Nuys airport to
escape to Brazil if there's a government crackdown, the odds of that look slim. Too
many Fortune 500 corporations with Washington clout, from AT&T to AOL Time
Warner, make too much money on porn -- whether through phone sex, chat rooms or
adult video. At the local level, the Supreme Court's 1973 "community standard" for
obscenity may be a non sequitur now that there's a XX national standard disseminated
everywhere by satellite and the Web. A busted local video retailer in a conservative
community can plead that his product is consistent with what the neighbors are watching
on pay-per-view -- as one such owner successfully did in Utah last fall.
Should John Ashcroft's Justice Department go after porn, smart betting has him
pursuing shadowy purveyors of extreme porn on the Internet (though it's not clear that
the actionable stuff originates in the United States) and child pornography, all of which is
condemned by the professional adult industry. "No one in this business will complain if
Ashcroft goes for the kid angle," Fishbein says.
Jim English of Playboy suggests that one way to meet the typical American porn
audience en masse is to accompany him to a live broadcast of a hit Playboy show
called "Night Calls 411." Fittingly, "Night Calls" is televised from a studio in
Hollywood, right by the old Gower Gulch, where low-budget studios long ago churned
out early features in bulk much as the adult business does now.
Two underclad hostesses, Crystal Knight and Flower, intersperse wisecracks and sex
tips with viewers' phone calls. Though only a few callers get on the air, as many as
100,000 try to get through, with still more deluging the show with "Miss Lonelyhearts"
e-mail.
It's not "Larry King Live," but in some ways it could be an adult version of the "Today"
show, whose fans cross the country with the hope of being in view as the camera pans
Rockefeller Center. The "Night Calls" devotees go further: many of them are engaging in
sex when they call. "Having sex is not enough of a turn-on in America -- you have to be
on TV too," jokes English. The callers often ask that the hosts talk them through to what
The Starr Report called completion, and the women oblige -- hoping for slam-bam speed
so they can move on to the next caller. I'm struck by how much the male and female
callers alike mimic porn performers, with their cliched sex talk and over-the-top
orgasmic shrieks. The adult audience apes its entertainers as slavishly as teenagers do
rock idols.
By now, I've become intimately familiar with the conventions of adult entertainment,
having asked those I met in the business to steer me to their best products. I've watched
Wicked's "Double Feature," a multiple winner of AVN awards, among them Best
Comedy, and found it full of erudite cinematic references, including a campy spoof of Ed
Wood films. I've seen Vivid's new "Artemesia," a costume drama set in 16th-century
Italy and given AVN's highest rating; it is laced with high-flown ruminations on the
meaning of art, somewhat compromised by the tattoos on the performers. From Video
Team, a company specializing in interracial porn, there is a thriller called "Westside" with
a social conscience reminiscent of "West Side Story," a soundtrack that features music
by Aaron Copland and a take on the drug wars that wouldn't be out of place in "Traffic."
It's no wonder, though, that Stagliano's gonzo, in which the performers just get it on,
has such a following. All the plot and costuming and set decoration and arty
cinematography -- why bother? The acting -- who needs it? (In "Flashpoint," Jenna
Jameson, cast as a female firefighter, sounds the same when sobbing over a colleague's
death as she does in coital ecstasy.) The films are tedious, and I'm as tempted to
fast-forward through the sex scenes as the nonsex scenes. No matter what the period or
setting, no matter what the genre, every video comes to the same dead halt as the
performers drop whatever characters they're supposed to be assuming and repeat the
same sex acts, in almost exactly the same way, at the same intervals, in every film. At a
certain point, the Kabuki-like ritualization of these sequences becomes unintentionally
farcical, like the musical numbers in a 30's Hollywood musical or the stylized acrobatics
in a martial-arts film. Farcical, but not exactly funny. All the artful mise en scene in the
world cannot, for me anyway, make merchandised sex entertaining or erotic.
I tell Bryn Pryor of AVN and "The Money Shot" my reaction. He's a professional porn
critic. Is this the best that adult has to offer?
"The top of the heap in porn is the bottom in mainstream," he says. "The sad fact is that
while consumers are more aware than they've ever been, nobody cares if it's a good
movie, and we all know that. They care if it's hot in whatever subjective way it's hot to
them. Most porn directors don't even watch the sex; they just direct the dialogue. They
tell the camera people they want three positions and then go off and eat."
He continues: "Porn is not a creative medium.
Everyone in the porn industry says he's on the way to something else, like waiters and
bartenders, but it may be that most of us belong here. If we were really good, we'd be
doing something else."
Pryor envisions a day when adult and Hollywood will converge, but in a sense that's
already the case. If much of porn ranges from silly to degrading, what's the alternative
offered on the other side of the hills? The viewer who isn't watching a mediocre porn
product is watching -- what? "Temptation Island"? W.W.F.?
Moralists like to see in pornography a decline in our standards, but in truth it's an
all-too-ringing affirmation of them. Porn is no more or less imaginative than much of the
junk in the entertainment mainstream -- though unlike much of that junk, it does have an
undeniable practical use. In that regard, anyway, there may be no other product in the
entire cultural marketplace that is more explicitly American.
Frank Rich is an Op Ed columnist for The Times and a senior writer for the magazine.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company |
