Free Speech Coalition: Mainstream Legal Titans Speak to Porn Notables in Historic Summit
but do they make a sound?
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. -- I am in the elevator hurtling 17 stories to the top floor of the Universal Sheraton. It is a signal day in the three-year history of America's adult entertainment industry, which I founded with the launch of this website.
Beautiful women flood the lobby, but this is a red herring. They are here for the Paul Mitchell seminar elsewhere in the hotel.
"How to Survive and Thrive in the Digital Environment ... From the People Who Know" is a day-long series of panels, salads, law firm promotional leaflets, and three different kinds of sugar for the bottomless urns of coffee available just within reach of the speakers' platform. And I am Here, and this is Now, and the people in this room will remember this day Forever.
Because today is the day when mainstream legal and technology experts from law firms and entertainment companies turn their bright and benevolent faces to the adult industry, so that we may be Inspired and Instructed.
***
What I didn't understand before I came was that this was essentially a chance for various adult business types (no performers were there) to hear people from other disciplines talk about their own anti-piracy solutions, or their hopes for solutions. I had heretofore thought that sponsoring organization the Free Speech Coalition had offered attendance to concerned professionals from every field, thus removing the stigma of "adult."
In other words, I thought the FSC was throwing a big Piracy seminar for everybody, and would thus score points with the non-adult attendees who'd see that porn wasn't so bad after all.
But Nope. The audience was the same people I see every day.
Why this is significant became apparent with the first panel discussion, "Technology Show And Tell - Copyrighted Content's Best Friend Or Worst Enemy?" hosted by Kelly Truelove, PhD., of Truelove Research and featuring panelists Katherine Fallow and Michael B. DeSanctis, partners in the Washington, D.C. office of Jenner & Block, LLP, and George M. Borkowski, a partner at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp, LLP.
Truelove spent several minutes demonstrating how easy it was to download the currently-playing movie Madagascar 2 via BitTorrent. He explained the history of quasi- and true P2P file sharing operations and how they evolved to be decentralized networks to skirt litigation.
"No one component of the system is in itself illegal, they (pirate sites) believe," Truelove said, "so they learned from Napster's example to decentralize."
While this was worthwhile information, I have a feeling that 90 percent of the audience already knew how to torrent something, and the 10 percent who didn't couldn't follow the demo. What learning how to pirate something did not do was to teach how to stop it.
The morning panels were mainly theoretical and what emerged was a calm discussion about how piracy works and how people have litigated it.
One means of bringing charges against pirate sites was to establish the sites' intent to transfer copyrighted material, DeSanctis said.
"The ease with which users can download (copyrighted material) from pirate sites and how those sites facilitate and induce downloading are part of proving a pirate site's (culpable) intent," he said.
But this was not helpful to me personally. It seemed like a summary of what most of the room already knew, and couldn't be applied to the pressing need of keeping adult content from being pirated.
Once the stuff is on the web, panelists mentioned, there are established and less mature means of tracking that content, such as acoustic and visual fingerprinting. But it was also noted that producers would have to submit their content to be fingerprinted and to be registered with one of (many?) fingerprinting services. I wondered if any in the room were thinking, "That sounds like too much work."
The next program, "To Sue Or Not To Sue And What's To Gain?" was moderated by Steven A.Fabrizio, another partner at Jenner & Block, LLP. He hosted panelists Harvey W. Geller, Deputy General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs at Universal Music Group, Steve T. Kang, Vice President of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs at NBC-Universal, Alasdair McMullen, Executive Vice President of Legal Affairs at EMI Music North America, Gill Sperlein, General Counsel of Titan Media (an adult gay company and the only representative from the adult industry in the morning session), and Borkowski again, who liked the first panel so much that he stayed around for the second.
This one was a little more helpful in that it established piracy as an industry-specific concern. The videogame business, one panelist said, was such a young industry with content (perhaps) so difficult to pirate that it was not a common litigator. Further, another panelist noted, only if "people who sometimes pirate and sometimes don't" is added to "people who always pirate" and "people who always buy" should there be a course of litigation because "you don't want to end up suing your customers."
Geller was asked how his firm decides to sue.
"That's a trade secret," he said.
"We're among friends," Fabrizio replied.
But surrounded by perceived enemies, I was soon to find out.
At this point I was pulled aside and asked, gently, to not write this story for a non-adult publication, because the morning panelists were antsy about their names being associated with adult in a mainstream publication.
It was furher pointed out to me that filming was not permitted in the morning session, either, lest the mainstream panelists be seen hobnobbing with filthmongers.
I found this ricockulous. "Their names are on the FSC's website," I said. "Anyone running a search can find their names associated with this seminar."
I wasn't sure that people who probably accepted some kind of honorarium in addition to the free coffee should then not want to be publicly associated with their hosts. Free speech and all. Oh well.
I went back inside.
Talking about geting tugh with pirates, Kang was saying that graduated responses, like warning letters to illegal downloaders, need to be followed up with graduated sanctions or they won't be effective deterrents.
Sperlein pointed out that many sites use pirated content to jumpstart traffic and then, if ever, scale back. Geller said that many Hollywood movie pirate sites are notable for not featuring adult content, and that coincidentally makes them easier to go after for improperly filtering other copyrighted content, saying "if you can hire someone to weed out the adult stuff you can't say you didn't have the means to filter out the rest."
There seems to be no concern whatsoever about peer-to-peer piracy of Wendy Wasserstein plays.
The final panel of the morning session was moderated by DeSanctis and featured the panel-sitting talents of Dean Garfield, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of the MPAA, Lawrence A. Kanusher, Executive Vice President, Business and Legal Affairs of the Global Business Group of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, David P. Kaplan, Senior Vice President and Intellectual Property Counsel of Warner Brothers' Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations, Davd Ring, Executive Vice President of Business Development & Business Affairs, Universal Music Group & eLabs, and Steven R. England, yet another partner at Jenner & Block.
"Is Mainstream Entertainment Making Money In This New Environment?" was the title of the panel.
"Yes, But We're Freaking Out, Too" was the answer to the title.
It was fitting that a morning spent discussing our common money hemorrhage would end with an emphasis on how to make more of it.
The panel seemed to agree that the multiplicity of possible content portals was not a strain. "The easier it is to buy what you see or hear, the more money the owner of that content makes," no one on the panel said, but should have.
I asked whether the pursuit of myriad new tech-based revenue streams that might prove buggy or temporary yielded a net gain. Myself, I can only pursue a risk so far before I need some proof that it will make money. How to do this for dozens of new media?
No one seemed to advocate anything other than follow every rabbit down every rabbit hole.
The bottom line of the third panel, said Kanusher, is to make money from everything one does.
"Yes, we know this," thought everyone in the room.
But there was unresolved anger in the room.
"When will people realize that pirate sites are fencing stolen property?" giggled Jeff Mullen of AllMediaPlay.
The big event of the day found Tom Hymes, peripatetic porn employee, moderating a panel with Vivid founder Steven Hirsch, who walked across the street from Vivid's offices, and Scott Coffman, founder of Charlotte, N.C.'s Video On Demand pioneer AEBN.
This was the best panel because of the history of the two companies represented, the actionable ideas expressed, and the active disagreements between Hirsch and Coffman.
Last year Vivid sued AEBN property PornoTube for illegally hosting Vivid content. PornoTube is, as the name suggests, a "tube" site that, like Youtube, hosts user-generated content. At issue in the suit, of course, was that the UCG was in fact ripped from Vivid DVDs. The companies came to a settlement but, Hirsch said, this wasn't the end of the problem.
"AEBN has a vested interest in this industry," Hirsch said. "Many of the other tube sites do not. He (Coffman) is working with us, not against us."
Hirsch founded Vivid in 1984, and the company originated what became porn's contract star system, a callback to Hollywood's Golden Age. But Hirsch compared porn's piracy problems not with Hollywood's but to those of the music industry, which used to sell whole albums but now parcels out singles for either .99 or, just as often, pirates do it for free.
Where porn fans used to buy whole movies on VHS or DVD, now sites are clipping them into pay-per-minute segments which are just as often available gratis.
Hirsch and Coffman, sitting side by side, both agreed to having learned something from last year's legal tussle (I speculate that the suit was dropped rather than resolving in a financial settlement). Coffman said that Pornotube now vets its submissions better and Hirsch, echoing sentiments from earlier in the day, not only said that he'd come "full circle" in his feelings about tube sites, but now wanted to make the sites work for him rather than try to crush them.
"If we can bombard a site with three-to-five-minute clips that send everyone back to Vivid.com," he said, "it's better than having somebody else posting whole scenes."
Both men provided details of the adult industry's woes. Coffman noted the high Alexa rankings of content thieves, Hirsch said that DVD sales were down 50 percent from a few years ago and that the 10 percent bump in VOD sales wasn't making up for the loss. Coffman said, "things have been going downhill for a year and a half," then said that "Pornotube only does good numbers because it was the first. If I started it now, we couldn't be competitive."
Hirsch also implied that losses from piracy were affecting the public's appetite for quality porn (the kind that only Vivid can provide!).
"People can't afford to make high quality content," he said, "and so if (consumers) can get the other stuff for free, they'll take it."
"We don't want to give away what we want to sell," Coffman said, and this drew a round of applause.
Hymes asked good questions. Reminding Hirsch and Coffman, as leaders in their field, that the porn business as a whole couldn't resist the temptation to undercut its prices, asked, "Do we only have ourselves to blame?"
"Content producers are so beaten down that they will sell to anyone," Hirsch said.
Coffman and Hirsch, despite being reconciled, often disagreed on how to fix things. This was refreshing in that each proposed solutions, expressed frustration, and connected with the audience in doing so.
Hirsch suggested a TV model - free porn - with intermittent advertising. Coffman said that no one would click over to an advertiser and buy something that the viewer was currently getting for free.
Earlier in the conversation Coffman said that there were only a "handful" of advertisers sponsoring most of the tube sites. He mentioned this in terms of possible litigation targets. But this also was important because, just as with the reluctance the morning speakers had for being outed as participants in a porn seminar, willing advertisers were few and did not offer the range of products that would make a TV delivery model worthwhile.
Then Coffman said, "I see no way that more than one company - maybe Steve - can survive."
On the whole, Hirsch appeared more hopeful, speaking (I'm speculating again) as one who knew that, however bad things were for everybody, he had his ducks in a row. He is a second-generation porn mogul.
"I come from a place where we deal with the distributors, we figure out how to get DVDs for .10 less, we send our invoices, and sometimes we get paid faster than others. But now it's about diversification. You can't be so dependent upon one revenue stream."
One bright point, Coffman said, was that he is no longer besieged with people asking him how to get into the adult business.
"Why do we want new people to come into our industry?" he asked. "Why can't you just stay out?"
Today's seminar comes at the outset of the mini-convention Webmaster Access West. I may or may not be talking abut that tomorrow, depending on people calling me back. This won't be another Phoenix Forum.
I am so excited I can hardly type: Control MFG is coming out with new skateboards!
As you know, I can often be seen blowing out my knees on a well-worn skateboard in the concrete half-pipe I've constructed here at Gram Ponante Towers, Cloisters, Salmon Hatchery, Heliport, and Server Farm, so today's news that the Quebec-based Control MFG is launching a new line blew me away.
The five boards will feature members of Team Control, including Thomas Parent, Gab Ekoe, Casey MacDonald, and PIF. Can you believe it? Not only do consumers get Control MFG's dedication to the finest Hardrock Canadian maple, glue and varnish, but they also get the names of their heroes below their feet!
Control MFG partners with Vivid, creator of Vivid Wheels, for the skateboards, which will be available in January.
Sources speculate that Vivid's future branding endeavors might include pita bread, bowling balls, grouting, and adult entertainment.
Microsoft unveils "My First Porn Article" software
Redmond, WA (GP:PVO) -- Software giant Microsoft today launched the Porn Article template for its Microsoft Word application.
The template contains all the elements standard to anyone's first article about the porn industry, including the writer's general skittishness, Paul Thomas, fist-shaking at the Internet, the word "dire," blanket acceptance of a quote about how much money porn makes annually, Paul Fishbein, a reference to the AVN Awards as "the Oscars of Porn," Steve Hirsch's tan, the death of the DVD, and the cameraman's ennui.
"This is the biggest template modification since we would Auto Complete with 'troubled' any sentence with the phrase 'Britney Spears' in it," said a Microsoft spokesperson.
The template was beta-tested for several months with the help of the Symantec Corporation, which dispatched its Norton Anti-Virus team to quash an annoying and repetitive strain of the Margold Worm.
See the template in action in this article from London's Financial Times.
Savanna Samson 1988 Status Quo song, says 1982 Joe Jackson song
Vivid contract performer Savanna Samson is the "cream of the crop" of the adult world, according to Steppin' Out magazine, an east coast publication that uses phrases like "cream of the crop" to describe porn stars.
In her interview with writer Chaunce Hayden, Samson also reveals that actor Ken Stafford, who was on "Survivor: Thailand," recently asked her to make a "celebrity sex tape" with her. She refused. "I thought it was so funny. I said, 'I'm sorry, but I can't help you out.'" Because she is an adult star, she said, men almost always expect her to hop into bed with them. "I was kind of taken aback that he thought being with me would be a sex scandal. I happen to be a good girl!" she told the magazine
Now I know that you don't actually have to be a celebrity to have a celebrity sex tape, but what weird subgenre of fame was just created by announcing that Savanna Samson turned down an offer of sex that mighthave become a celebrity sex tape?
In other news, I am thinking of doing a celebrity sex tape with E.G. Daily.
In Benny Profane's splendid Hospital a couple (Zak Sabbath and Mandy Morbid) fake a miscarriage to scam Kimberly Kane out of 20 bucks.
"You sure you don't want a ride to the hospital?" Kane asks.
"We don't want to mess up your car," Sabbath responds. They get the money and blow it on candy.
I found myself thinking: This is a thinly veiled dramatization of how Vivid agreed to open Vivid-steve; same miscarriage, but it cost way more than 20 bucks. So not only do you get a great movie but you get a creation myth, too.
A review will follow, but I will leave you with my favorite line from the movie, which I encourage you to work into your weekend barbecue banter:
"You are a drug addict and you are a sexual deviant. We have to fix that. We are going to trepanate you. You've got too much brainblood volume."
Nikki Jayne is the newest Vivid girl, joining the ranks of all the other household name Vivid girls. She is tall and full-figured and hails from Manchester, England (beyond the Atlantic Sea).
Jayne was discovered by the crew from Porn Week and brought to America for a few days last September, during which she shot scenes with Bobbi Starr and was courted by several companies, including Digital Playground. But a Nikki Jayne and a Jesse Jane in the same roster would be too much for fans to handle, as evidenced by the confusion that erupted when both Sophia Santi and Carlos Santana were contract girls there.
It takes moxie, gumption, chutzpah, great boobs, and thighs that could crack a fire hydrant to be a successful contract performer, and Jayne has all of these (although in England fire hydrants are called hooded ficuses).
Jayne's first movie will be shot at the end of the month by the intense and sensitive director B. Skow. It is unclear at press time if Vivid plans to follow up its branding of Vivid Rims with the fielding of an English football team.
Former Vivid Girl and current NinnWorx contract performer Brea Bennett has many irons in the cauldron, including her redesigned website, which will be a clearinghouse for her myriad talents.
She writes:
This new site coming soon, will be my personal baby, quite simply put - the site will consist of five major parts, Glamour/Gonzo, daily Webcam shows with I and my friends, Reality based media, Brea Bennett merchandise and Holistic/Spiritual sales, and finally my music!
It would be folly and madness to go anywhere else for all things Brea, even to the Shadow Realm of Faerie.
Like any complex and multifaceted star, Bennett alternates between refering to herself in the first and third persons, like offering multiple angles on a Blu-Ray disc:
My new website is just the beginning of my sensational plans for 2008, including the launch of a clothing line, my band's continued touring schedule and the addition of Brea's Playhouse to this multi-talented beauty's growing empire.
I, for one, and Gram, for two, am/is very excited! Both of us have/has been everwhere, and I/he always ask/asks Brea how she got started and how to get in the business. She replied that upcoming events are almost certain to make you almost famous:
Everywhere I go I am asked how did you get started? Do you have any advice? Can you please help me get into the industry…so I conjured up a venue to hold monthly talent searches this coming May and every month thereafter at hip night spot e4, in Scottsdale, Arizona with sponsor Playtime Magazine. It’s just a place where the lady’s can get a little crazy, and the ones who are serious have a chance to shoot with me, my company and my website…for almost certain exposure.
Bennett's new site will go live shortly. Prepare yourself to be enchanted.
Lou & Amy & Joe & Evanka: Coming to terms with your celebrity sex tape
Two couples, both alike in dignity In Chatsworth and Long Island where we lay our scene From ancient scandal break to new celebrity Which one deems wholesome and the other obscene
Joey Buttafuoco said, "I didn't know the place was wired for cameras."
Lou Bellera, husband of Amy Fisher, said, "We wanted to make a video of a couple in love."
Both men and their wives were the stars of sex tapes released within three months of each other, distributed by the same company, Red Light District, that sold sex tapes of Paris Hilton, Pam Anderson, and "Saved By the Bell"'s Dustin "Screech" Diamond.
But only one couple admits they did it on purpose. Bellera and Fisher shot their movie in front of a stationary camera Bellera had set up in their home and rented ones on Long Island. The Buttafuocos claim they were literally caught on tape in May, 2007.
"Here's how it happened," Evanka Buttafuoco, 45, told me. "Joseph had been out of jail for a month and we went over (adult director) Rob Spallone's house for a barbecue. (Spallone) was shooting something down by the pool and he had release forms that everyone entering the house had to sign. So we signed them. It was a standard thing like when you go to a club and have to sign a 'You may appear on film' form."
Evanka told me this after I had already watched the movie and had determined that it had been staged.
"So - and this was my fault - I wanted to take Joseph upstairs for a quickie, and we just searched around upstairs," Evanka said.
"And that was the room (Spallone) had set up with webcams or whatever," Joey Buttafuoco said.
The couple have a 40-minute sex scene, Evanka in high heels and leading the action. Joey, 52, seems grateful. He says "I love you" several times. This is the part that's real.
Spallone, so the story went, later combed through the "webcam" footage and discovered the Buttafuocos' tryst, and sold it to Red Light District using the blanket permission of the releases the Buttafuocos had signed on entering.
I met the Buttafuocos on Hollywood Boulevard. We talked outside the Jimmy Kimmel Show theatre.
"So that wasn't staged?" I asked.
"No," Joey said. "We had no idea."
Joey met Evanka when the latter brought her friends' Land Rover into his Chatsworth car shop. He gave her his card, which didn't list his last name. Having worked for 17 years in car repossessions, Evanka exhausted most of the means at her disposal to turn up any information about him, but found nothing. Finally, when he took her to dinner, she first heard the story of Amy Fisher, "The Long Island Lolita."
"But that is so far behind us now," Evanka said. "Everybody is friends now. We just had dinner with Lou and Amy and we wish them the best."
Since losing his business for insurance fraud - resulting in the jail time that ended just before the filming of their tape - Joey has been a host on the Internet radio station Let's Talk Recovery.
"I've been sober since 1988," Buttafuoco said. "I didn't even use (drugs) all through 1992 and everything that happened then."
Because of the tools he learned to use in his recovery, Buttafuoco said, the release of the sex tape hasn't sent him over the edge.
"I'm the only one who's mad at Rob Spallone," Evanka said. "Joey's still friends with him."
Rob Spallone did not respond to e-mail requests for his side of the story.
After meeting the Buttafuocos, who were a charming couple, I watched the tape again and knew without a doubt that it had been staged. Webcam technology has not evolved to the point that it is capable of complex zooms.
"Yeah, they had a guy with a camera at the foot of the bed," a source with knowledge of the filming of "Joey Buttafuoco: Caught on Tape" said. "Maybe they just wanted some documentation of this time in their lives. Evanka's pretty hot."
Celebrity sex tapes are cheap to produce and, by virtue of their "caught on tape" marketing, are forgiven for any technical glitches. Paris Hilton's 1 Night in Paris sold millions but appeared to have been shot using the night vision goggles from "Silence of the Lambs." Vivid's Kim Kardashian: Superstar tape sold very well for the company despite having very little actual sex in it.
One element of celebrity sex tape culture is deniability. Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton both have disavowed knowledge that their tapes were being marketed by the rapper Ray J. and Rick Salomon, respectively.
Accepting money for appearing in a sex tape can be swept under the rug by denying you knew the tape was being made (Hilton) or that it would be sold (Kardashian and the Buttafuocos), because the bigger shame in a cool-obsessed culture is appearing to be attention-seeking.
But Fisher and Bellera embrace their sex tape, as evidence by quotes like the following:
"I look even better in person than I did on the video," Bellera, 55, said. "But Amy looks great no matter what."
Every commercial porn title must gather signed documentation that its stars are over 18 and that they have agreed to be filmed for the working title of the movie in question. They must also provide identification like driver's licenses. Every "reality" porn, from Couples Seduce Teens to Bang Boat to (to a lesser degree) Girls Gone Wild has a file cabinet full of performer releases stating that each actor knew what was happening.
That the Buttafuocos didn't knowingly provide this information would have been grounds for a fantastic lawsuit if the events of May, 2007 had happened as the couple said they had.
"We came to a settlement (with Rob Spallone and Red Light District)," Joey Buttafuoco told me that day. "That's why we're more or less actively promoting the movie."
From Long Island, Amy Fisher talks about her own sex tape (which, according to the managers of several local video stores and online outlets like Gamelink and Adult DVD Empire, is easily outselling the Buttafuoco tape) as a cathartic experience.
"People come up to me and tell me how good it was," she said. "People seek me out. A lot of my publicity because of 1992 (both couples use "1992" as shorthand) has been negative, but this has really been positive."
Bellera and Fisher have promoted the tape extensively and in only a few occasions, Bellera says, have interviewers failed to be polite.
"We tell people that we want to talk about today and to be positive," Bellera said. "And I establish ground rules before every interview." Fisher walked off the set of the Howard Stern show when the shock jock took a call from Joey Buttafuoco's still-sngry daughter.
"But we cleared that one up later," Bellera said.
Both couples know that their celebrity is not from Buttafuoco's Internet radio job or Fisher's post-prison stint as a Long Island newspaper columnist, but both try not to dwell on the source of the celebrity that made their sex tapes a marketable commodity.
"Anything having to do with my 'story', so to speak, I can never earn a dime on," Fisher said. "I have learned through the years to make lemonade out of those lemons. I keep a positive attitude and make the best out of what I have to work with."
But why the Buttafuocos denied knowing their romp was being recorded and the Lou Belleras freely admitted it seems odd. Maybe the Buttafuocos weren't happy with the finished result and wanted to disavow it? They shouldn't have - they seem like they're very happy together.
"I suppose it'll be good to look back when I'm 70 and say 'My 45-year-old ass looked good,'" said Evanka.
Long before he was raising Debbie from the dead, Paul Thomas was professionally denying Jesus Christ. Above is a picture of the man who would become "PT" alongside Yvonne Elliman in Norman Jewison's 1973 production of "Jesus Christ Superstar," in which the future Vivid director played Peter.
The above might be the scene in which Thomas claims he taught Mary Magdalene that everything was all right, everything's fine:
"Yvonne Elliman (Mary Magdalene) had just seen 'Deep Throat' but wanted to know what one was like," PT said of his time shooting the Norman Jewison classic. "So we went off to the desert and she practiced her deep throating techniques on some of the, er, saints."
I have been listening to Thomas saying "I don't know him!" for many Good Fridays before I ever met him, although Jewison claims in the movie commentary that he dubbed Thomas' voice for the few speaking parts in the film.
Sunny Leone has broken up with fiancé Matt Erickson, her first onscreen male partner, making the title of her Boy/Girl debut, Sunny Loves Matt, retroactively incorrect.
The Canoga Park-based International Porn Naming Registry voted Thursday to add a silent "...at least when this movie was shot" to the title. Should the movie win any awards or otherwise be mentioned aloud, the speaker will be required to indicate the amendment with a subtle undulating hand gesture.
The "...at least..." amendment was first invoked in 1998, when reality porn company Empowerment released Real East Coast College Lesbians, only to be rebuked by a Family Research Council study that found that 100 percent of the cast had bolted to heterosexual relationships within seven days of graduation.
Leone is now working with other male talent, but is not engaged to them.
Vivid Plus' has released its heavier women epic Curvaceous.
I went to the digital capture of this movie last August (I won't say "taping," I'd be embarrassed to say "lensing," and it would be inaccurate to say "filming") and there was so much flesh that producers allowed me to take home a to go bag of it.
I was reminded of a great line from "Honey White" by the late, lamented Morphine.
When the lovely and dangerous Janine Lindemulder signed a Digital Playground contract in March 2005, she appeared in her promo picture without a right arm and sporting what appeared to be a nasty head wound.
Today Vivid announced the arrival of Meggan Mallone to its Hall of Contract Girls, an echoing marble edifice located 300 feet below Universal City Nissan. Claiming Irish, German, and Cherokee heritage (making Cherokee the Native American nation that has most contributed to the porn world, with Anna Malle, Lezley Zen, and Sophia Santi acknowledging Cherokee ancestry. Take that, Oglala Sioux!), Mallone is a former cheerleader from Houston.
Clutching both her collarbone and her head, Mallone nevertheless expressed enthusiasm about her new job.
"My friends say that I'm bubbly and animated and I think they're right," she said, struggling to hold her head still. "I have a lot of energy and love sports and definitely have a positive attitude towards life. I'm certainly excited about being a Vivid Girl and hope to break some of the stereotypes people have about adult stars."
One persistent and pernicious stereotype is that injuries to the brain are detrimental to a porn career.
"I can only say, watch out world, I'm coming!" she said, not adding, "After all, I've got an arm up on Janine."
Monique Alexander (and friends) find the limelight but come close to losing their souls in B. Skow's searing indictment of celebrity culture and threeways.
Alexander plays Sunrise, an ingenue with a dream of stardom. Can she realize it without compromising everything she believes in? Can she??
You know that the porn industry is built on the backs (and other parts) of the very young, but it was not always that way. Once upon a time, all someone had to be was willing.
The commoditization of filming someone new to porn and/or new to legal age is a phenomenon that has only been around for the past decade, and so many people are exposed to pornography that getting real reactions out of them when they get on camera is tricky.
That is why watching Vivid's Brand New Faces series is more of a lesson for us than it is for the people on screen for the first time.
Read more after the gap.
"We have a money back guarantee," said director B. Skow. "If you can find this girl anywhere else on film doing a scene before this one was shot, you get your money back."
"You mean a commercial video, or the Internet..."
"Yes."
Brand New Faces is both a website and a DVD series featuring women who have never before had sex on camera for pay. Why is this so important?
"Because after awhile you can see people phoning it in," Skow said.
Skow, who picked his porn name 15 years ago - in haste - and now wishes he had chosen something cool like Gram Ponante or Ronnie James Dildo, performs a lengthy interview segment with each girl as she prepares for her scene. Prior to this, Vivid vets the talent.
"Have you ever caught anyone lying?" I asked.
"We did," he said, "and we busted her." Skow said that he's hoping to start a "Busted" section on the site in which women who clearly have been in porn before, whether under a different name or (as was the case Skow mentioned) a day or two prior to the Brand New Faces shoot, get their comeuppance.
"I'll even call them on: 'Who told you how to put your finger in your mouth?' I really want people who haven't done this before."
As in America, there is a dwindling middle class in porn. But in porn the attraction is either being new or famous. In this case, the middle class is women who've been around for between a month and three years who will never be Tera, Jenna, or Belladonna. And the promise of someone new is intoxicating.
"You've got a tiny fucking pussy," Skow says to Taylor Jones. "Where's the hole?"
A 25-year-old hairdresser named Makali Chanel is new to the business but she clearly knows what she wants.
"I'm the Porn Princess," she says about a thousand times.
But the real find of the DVD is Courtney James, who mentioned she turned 18 last December.
"You'll be 19 pretty soon," Skow says. "You're getting old."
"Don't say that," she says.
Skow tells her how to hold her breasts for an upward camera angle.
"Hold your tits over the top of the nipple and push them together," he says.
James is from South Carolina, natural, and adorable. She arrives at the studio wearing khaki shorts and a t-shirt, like she just got off her job at the ice cream stand. She smiles toothily and has a great scene with Sascha, who can't believe his good luck.
"Sascha's one of those guys who really loves girls," Skow says at one point begging the question: Are there men in porn who don't like girls?
Like most gonzo porn shot by its director, Brand New Faces features a lot of Skow talking. He manages to walk a fine line between respectful distance, honest admiration, and sounding creepy.
"But there's a market for Ed Powers, too," Skow hastens to add.
Brand New Faces #1 features four women, some of whom seem more innocent than others. What separates them is their enthusiasm. There is at least one person in the movie I don't think we'll be seeing much of in the future, whereas James might get a contract.
What is especially valuable about Brand New Faces is that the women don't need too much coaching to appear like they've been doing this for a year.
LOS ANGELES - PornoTube, a web site where individuals and companies upload pornographic materials for free public viewing, has been sued by Vivid Video for copyright infringement.
Vivid attorney Paul Cambria is seeking no less than $4.5 million.
Mirroring a March, 2007 suit filed by Viacom against YouTube, Vivid's suit against Pornotube.com, whose parent company is North Carolina's adult Internet content provider and portal AEBN, alleges that PornoTube's "business plan depends on the uploading, posting, display and performance of copyrighted audio-visual works belonging to Vivid and others."
The suit also seeks damages for seemingly opposing factors: infringing the privacy of Vivid performers who did not give permission for their images to be broadcast on PornoTube, and not providing access to 2257 documentation that would reveal those performers' real names and birthdates.
While the privacy invasion charge seems like a high-minded facade on the more down and dirty reality of copyright infringement, the suit can be distilled into a single line of dialogue: "We paid for it; you shouldn't be making money from it."
Vivid's suit might have a chilling effect on services like PornoTube, whose site claims that it takes copyright infringement "very seriously":
"We provide legal copyright owners with the ability to self-publish on the internet by uploading, storing and displaying various media utilizing our services. We do not monitor, screen or otherwise review the media which is uploaded to our servers by users of the service."
Indeed, PornoTube often removes videos posted by non-copyright holders. It even offers a form for plaintiffs to use if they spot copyright infringement. Clearly Vivid did not find the form helpful.
Other adult companies, like Wicked and Red Light District, have content on PornoTube that entices viewers to purchase the full-length movies, or higher-resolution scenes. But Vivid has no such deal with AEBN, and Cambria said that Vivid's material has been on PornoTube regardless.
“Vivid has already found dozens of violations of its copyrights, and AEBN needs to know that it cannot continue pilfering Vivid’s products no matter how they might reformat or reshape (them)." Cambria said. "Once they put up any material on their site and fit it into their format, they are no longer just a ‘pass through’ medium—they have become producers or distributors under the law.”
AEBN has not yet responded to the lawsuit, filed this morning in the Los Angeles/Western Division of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
The director B. Skow and Vivid producer Shailar were on hand in the hills above Studio City. I have been to two of their shoots before; each time I spend much of the day laughing.
Porn shoots should be like this all the time. Everything got done, there were no hysterics, no one was late, no one wandered off and had to be called back when shooting resumed because there'd been too much of a break. My rigid sense of order was maintained.
"The last time I saw you," I said, "you were blowing Derrick Pierce in a coffin."
"That hurt my back," she said, "but the job got done." She is a professional.
There were about ten cast and crew assembled in a music producer's house across the Valley from the Hollywood sign. I wanted to get a picture of Ryan and Alexander standing with the Hollywood sign on one side and Porn Valley on the other. It could be the cover of a Chamber of Commerce brochure.
I wasn't able to get exactly the shot I wanted, such is my commitment to professionalism. Alexander and Ryan were very accommodating, though.
Instead, I got this picture. It is so geometrically perfect it's like the photo was taken by ancient astronauts.
Together, Shailar and Skow have worked at Vivid for about a decade more than Monique Alexander has been alive. (I will send a porn movie to the first person who can notate that algebraically.) I find stories of long-term employment in any entertainment industry comforting; it also helps the mood of a set when you're with people who seem secure in their jobs.
Skow is my elder. He told me about the practice of upper-decking. I imagined planning whole vacations around this practice, like others do with golf.
After I arrived, the day went like this:
1. Alexander's scene with Deen 2. Lunch 3. Still pictures with Ryan 4. Alexander's scene with Ryan
After what I thought was 45 miutes, I looked at my watch and realized I'd been there for five hours, watching Monique Alexander have sex, eating, and talking about alternative defecation methods. As I drove down the hill I thought that just one of those things would have made a perfect day on its own.
but do they make a sound?
The next program, "To Sue Or Not To Sue And What's To Gain?" was moderated by Steven A.Fabrizio, another partner at Jenner & Block, LLP. He hosted panelists Harvey W. Geller, Deputy General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs at Universal Music Group, Steve T. Kang, Vice President of Anti-Piracy Legal Affairs at NBC-Universal, Alasdair McMullen, Executive Vice President of Legal Affairs at EMI Music North America, Gill Sperlein, General Counsel of Titan Media (an adult gay company and the only representative from the adult industry in the morning session), and Borkowski again, who liked the first panel so much that he stayed around for the second.
The big event of the day found Tom Hymes, peripatetic porn employee, moderating a panel with Vivid founder Steven Hirsch, who walked across the street from Vivid's offices, and Scott Coffman, founder of Charlotte, N.C.'s Video On Demand pioneer AEBN.
Where porn fans used to buy whole movies on VHS or DVD, now sites are clipping them into pay-per-minute segments which are just as often available gratis.
