| --Wednesday, November 21, 2007--
Exclusive: Porn writers' strike enters 30th year
 CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- The corner back booth of this Lamplighter restaurant franchise has, since the Carter administration, served as the war room for San Fernando Valley's former porn screenwriters.
From a dwindling coffer of residuals eight men and one woman purchase coffee and sandwiches while poring over picket sign slogans.
"Back when I wrote The Erotic Moods of Monique for Erotic Moods Video I was assured that every iteration conceivable for pornographic delivery, from movie theatre to second-hand description on the street, would be covered," said Lou Dirigibilio, nursing an omelette with bits of his toupee in it. "I even put in a clause for wax cylinders."
But the porn business has moved on, with the now-famous Invisible Ink Utter Buyout language included in every contract, guaranteeing non-payment to writers for presentation in every past, present, and future medium, from dirty black and red line art delivered in displays on pizza boxes to aboriginal smoke signal porn (including Digital Playground's Maize God Gets Lucky with Sophia Santi).
"These studio moguls continue to make so much money off my words," said Gertrude Sploins, writer of over 400 "erotic mysteries" from the early 1970's. "Just yesterday my grandson showed me a clip of Murder in Her Dark Woman-Grotto on his iPhone. I didn't get paid for that.
"The most erogenous erogenous zone is the mind," she added.
So with the advent of video technology, porn screenwriters went on strike in 1977, promising to hold out until the smut business ground to a halt or paid dividends to writers from profits on the new technology.
"And we haven't worked since," said Harvey Quim, who won the 1975 Philadelphia Porno Critics' Award for his erotic adaptation of "The Joy of Sex", Things in the Erotic Paunchy Man's Beard.
Porn industry insider Loup Perch-Tounge points out that there are no scripts in adult films anymore "the way the general public understands scripts," saying that porn movies are created with a blend of cocaine, Keith Johnstone-style improv, and divine inspiration.
"Have you seen Alpha 15: Reform School Girls?" Perch-Tounge asked. "You can't say someone wrote that."
The striking porn writers have long since abandoned picketing studios because, as Dirigibilio says, "I'd rather eat a reuben than stand in front of a Van Nuys warehouse all day." But socialist fervor still grips the small group, whose median age is 65.
"The other day I popped my dentures out at Sasha Grey," said Quim. "But the nice lady popped them right back in."
In addition to meager residuals from theatre screenings in communities serviced by Peace Corps volunteers, the members of Porn Screenwriters Union Local 2 (Locals 1 and 3, based in New York and Cleveland, respectively, both folded in 1981) subsist on toasting hundreds of teddy bears stolen from Protecting Adult Welfare and pallets stacked with steveporn stickers.
Many adult industry workers have never heard of Local 2, and regularly avoid its members when they stand with donation cans outside Los Angeles area adult conventions.
"These people don't know their own history," said Clevon Pudendiferous, writer of the early Mitchell Brothers' film Through the Red Keyhole. "They're so involved with their own little moneymaking schemes that they pay no attention to anyone else."
In that way the members of Local 2 are true members of the adult community. When asked about the parallels of his strike to the one being carried out by Hollywood writers, Pudendiferous replied, "Who? I thought we were talking about me."
Previously: Don't shit where you eat; One is the gooiest numberLabels: business, hollywood, interviews, lamplighter, strike
posted by Gram the Man
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--Wednesday, October 24, 2007--
The Boys And Girls Guide to Getting Down
 "Try not to hate the world as it goes about its business; remember: it's you who is the freak."
When I first moved to Los Angeles from Bogue Chitto and got a job (five years ago next month) at AVN, I remember sitting in my Hollywood apartment watching one of the 60 or so porn movies it was my job to review each month before going out with a friend visiting from back home.
There were some gunshots outside and soon police converged on the area and helicopters descended. It didn't faze me, but my friend said, "If I told anyone from back home that I sat on a couch watching porn with another guy while helicopters buzzed around the window, they wouldn't believe me."
 This is the feeling I got from watching Paul Sapiano's jokey, observant, and sometimes poignant snapshot of millennial hipster Hollywood, The Boys And Girls Guide to Getting Down.
Read more after the gap.
 A humorous etiquette guide to being 21 to (at most) 34 in Hollywood (and nowhere else), The Boys And Girls Guide follows a talented ensemble cast through hookups, drug deals, party and club crashing, and the bleary morning after, from which the quote at the top of the article is taken.
 Not a porn movie, though there is a smattering of boobs, each in oddly non-sexual situations, the Guide nevertheless presents scenarios familiar to Porn's own parallel party circuit, in which a little cocaine opens many doors, Costco vodka in a Grey Goose bottle is never discovered (because all vodka is the same), Mr. Belding shows up, "fauxmosexuals" fool few, bouncers are judged by their accumulation of hot dogs, and people have enough money for bottle service but not for cab fare.
 A slick and and well-produced movie with some excellent performances (I'll single out Dominique Purdy with his bit on Dionne Warwick's cell-phone), The Boys And Girls Guide is solidly a movie euphemistically described as a "love letter", meaning you won't get it unless you've lived it. In that way the movie is also like a documentary, except with tips on how to do "titty bumps" rather than Alan Alda talking about the Serengeti.
 Shot in and around Hollywood, particularly the Cahuenga club corridor, this movie could be pitched like Swingers with Dirty Vegas standing in for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy meets Slackers with better clothes and L.A. standing in for Austin, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (The BBC version).
 Unlike its decades-old predecessors, however, this Guide's hipness and narcissism leaves just a little room for sadness, as if the whole process of getting down leaves those attempting it a little empty.
Previously: Barely Legal: Generations; Young Hollywood; Gia Paloma's fan letter
See also: The Boys And Girls Guide to Getting DownLabels: comedy, documentary, hollywood, mainstream movies
posted by Gram the Man
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--Tuesday, August 14, 2007--
Gia Paloma's fan letter
 Last week I went to the launch party for Julie Simone's Hollywood-gone-right casting couch movie Audition. The event was at Bar 107 downtown, and in attendance were the director and her star, Gia Paloma.
Just a day before Van Damage had told me that Paloma, not of her own accord, had almost bit his dick off. I forgot to ask her about this because I'm drinking again.
Read more after the gap.
Watching porn in a bar is becoming something I'm used to. If you would have told me as a boy growing up by the banks of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg that one day I'd be drinking Jagermeister in downtown L.A. watching Gia Paloma get beat up with the sound turned down I'd have said, "Jagermeister?"
 The movie looked good. It is amazing how much context you can get out of a porn movie by watching it several times on end, muted, in a bar. Apparently Paloma, a struggling Hollywood actress, answers an ad and goes to a place run by people not interested in her well-being and they fuck her. I don't know if she gets the part or not.
I found this movie quaint and Paloma's breasts large. It was quaint because getting fucked in Hollywood is the least of your problems.
Anyway, there were posters available and they were not characteristic of porn posters in general. The spelling was correct and there was no gaping. Since the director and star were there, I thought I'd get one autographed.
Simone wrote:
To Gram. Julie Simone I find this reflects her austere filmic vision.
Paloma wrote:
Graham, tie me to your darkest desires, your deepest fears. Gia Paloma I think there is about a 98 percent chance that Paloma writes this to everyone, especially people named Graham. But just in case, from now on I am going to think of Gia Paloma every time I'm cavorting with "Valley Girl" era E.G. Daily, "Dangerous Liaisons" era Uma Thurman, and any era Carla Gugino while drowning.
Previously: Pabst Blue Ribbon night with the steveporn kids
See also: Julie SimoneLabels: BDSM, fetish, gia paloma, hollywood, julie simone
posted by Gram the Man
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While GramPonante.com is written for a tenth-grade reading level (in some countries), you must be 18 years or older to visit this site. Sorry.
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CHATSWORTH, Calif. -- The corner back booth of this Lamplighter restaurant franchise has, since the Carter administration, served as the war room for San Fernando Valley's former porn screenwriters.
