Black and grey Friday in the porn world, Gawker Media
The porn industry is contracting somewhat, and familiar faces at some companies are either leaving porn altogether or are moving to other companies to be familiar faces there. I'll mention some people in the latter category.
My pal Joanne Cachapero at XBiz will be leaving to become Membership Director of the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry lobbying group. Farley Cahen of AVN will move to Digital Playground in a "New Media" position, leaving his current job open (and I hear there are editorial changes coming to AVN as well), Tom Hymes of XBiz, formerly of both AVN and the FSC, is now the managing editor of Sex.com.
Q. Since you are integral to the success of these companies, Grams, what do these changes mean for you? A. Thanks for asking. There is a chance that, after the Pirates 2 review Joanne and I write for XBiz this month, our review column in XBiz Premiere will go away, because the company will then have to pay two people as freelancers rather than one. Then, if I become publisher of AVN, I would no longer be able to write for XBiz because, like Rush's "New World Man," both companies desire to keep their nature pure.
Once upon a time people said that Porn was recession-proof, and that remains true if you think of it in terms of what people used to say about sex before marriage: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
The amount of free or undercut porn on the Internet, coupled with pay-per-scene or pay-per-minute schemes, has crippled the ability of larger features to attract the audiences they once did. And audiences coming of age in a time when porn is more free than ever and accessible in bite-sized form don't appreciate the "classics."
Companies like Hustler strike when the iron is hot (such as with Gov Lov and the upcoming Lisa Ann-as-"Sarah Paylin" movie) and must resort to increasing levels of gimmickry to approximate the cash that once came so easily.
Porn personnel are "laying low" (I have heard this phrase several times): not advertising as much, throwing fewer parties, and not spending as much on productions. Visitors to the January 2009 Adult Entertainment Expo will see less extravagant booths, and fewer of them. Luckily, consumer tickets to both the Expo and the AVN Awards should somewhat compensate.
If DVD sales are down, the exception might seem to be Pirates 2, which is less a movie than an event and, as singular an event it is (more off the record sources from other companies say they've already accepted that the movie will sweep the major awards next year and hope only for its scraps), considering the average ROI on porn titles, it does not seem possible that Pirates 2 could have been financed in-house, in the same way that some of the "blockbuster" porn movies of the past few years have been financed with money not generated specifically by the company that produced them. Instead, they have been financed by the mainstream "real jobs" of their owners.
And while porn industry insiders blame company owners for long ago sacrificing "tangibles" to the Internet or sluggishly enforcing copyrights, if at all, now the outside economy is further darkening Porn's door.
Nick Denton, founder of the Gawker website empire (and who, if my Fleshbot checks weren't direct-deposited, would sign them) sent out the following memo informing his employees of staff cuts at those GawkerMedia sites that were underperforming:
I have some bad news. Here's the heart of it: we are cutting 19 of our 133 editorial positions and suspending bonus payments at the start of next year. With the savings, we are increasing base pay and hiring 10 new people on the most commercially successful Gawker sites. But I know that's scant consolation for the colleagues we're losing and for those of you who have been enjoying the bonus windfalls from breakout stories.
You can guess the reason for these brutal measures: the recession. Sure, the company is currently profitable and advertising sales are up by about 30% on their level of a year ago. Our biggest clients are consumer electronics and entertainment companies that are relatively well insulated. And, yes, this is not the first time I've predicted doom: in July 2006, when we "battened down the hatches" and closed down Sploid and Screenhead; and in April this year, when we spun off Idolator, Gridskipper and Wonkette.
But now the credit crisis is clearly going to affect every sector of the economy. Advertising buys typically plunge after the Christmas shopping season, and 2009 is obviously going to be exceptionally difficult. We have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us.
We never used to talk about the business side of the operation. Traffic was the only concern; my belief was that juicy news would draw the readers and the advertising would take care of itself. We were patient; even if it took four years for a site to develop the audience that finally registered with advertisers, we had the time. No longer.
Sites such as Consumerist, whose success has been measured more in traffic and recognition than in revenue, now need to cover their costs. I can't underline enough that this harsh commercial judgment is no reflection whatsoever on the editorial teams that are being cut.
Each of these sites performs a vital function. Consumerist provides an outlet for disgruntled consumers that exists nowhere else on the web; Valleywag has given puffed-up Silicon Valley the prick it's long needed; and Fleshbot manages to be classy and filthy at the same time. The site leads and writers on all of our sites have done exactly what we asked them to: work harder than the competition and grow the audience. It's my commercial judgment that's been at fault.
One reason we're eliminating these positions is to reinforce the teams on the sites with the most commercial appeal—Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Gawker—and the properties such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Jalopnik which are poised to join them.
One new recruit we're confirming today is Gabriel Snyder from W Magazine in Los Angeles who, as managing editor of Gawker.com, will continue the site's evolution into a national news and entertainment site. We are also hiring new contributors at Jezebel, Deadspin, Kotaku and io9.
Even in the growing editorial teams we need to control costs. And that means a new look at traffic bonuses. We've been spending $50,000 a month on average on pageview bonuses. The scheme has made writers hustle for traffic even in teams so large that there was a risk they become lumbering. It's helped us hit a record 274m pageviews last month, up 69% on last September.
Pageview bonuses will continue this quarter. And we are committed to pageview incentives, and to measuring performance by a writer's individual pageviews, in the long term. But a first quarter spike in traffic -- and the resulting bonus payments -- could be dangerous if advertising markets are troubled next year. And we're assuming that the economy is so volatile that most of you would like a little bit more predictability about your own income.
That's why we're suspending the pageview bonus for the first quarter at least, but making up for some of the loss of income by raising pay. If you haven't recently agreed to a new rate, your monthly base amount will automatically be increased by 5% in January.
The news about the job and bonus cuts will be demoralizing. The golden age of the blog is over, people will say. Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily. I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs; or how much more unpleasant life will be at the many internet ventures and newspapers that won't make it through the downturn. I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn.
But there is no escaping the fact that we're losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break — starting with this email, which you are free to leak.
Luckily, I am still Senior Erotic Consultant at Fleshbot; my job was not cut. But things are tough all over, and you can expect it to get worse before it gets better.
As America's foremost critic of pornographic and pornotextual material (it even says so on my parking space), I am often asked, upon writing an unfavorable review of a movie, what right I have to say so if I have never directed or performed in a pornographic movie?
A reasonable question if one disregards the following two things:
Do I have to be a chef to appreciate good cooking? If I throw up, am I therefore a bad eater?
How come my credentials are never questioned when I give something a good review?
More and more I am falling out of love with porn features, those movies with stories and scripts, because too often the weight of the parts overwhelms the appeal of the movie's basic porniness. The inevitable disparity between hype and substance reveals limitations less ambitious movies don't have. I think a simple, cheap gonzo movie succeeds much more frequently than one that tries and fails.
I even see a little arrogance in some of the bigger feature efforts, as if just trying should be enough to justify and forgive a train wreck's failure. Only in school are we given grades for effort independent of success.
The features that most often fall afoul for me are the serious ones dealing with sexual obsession, darkest desires, and hidden secrets. People who can't act are not allowed to have those things. And sometimes even porn comedies, those things which I think are closest to the spirit of what getting naked on camera should be, also trip over themselves.
Of all the things that get jammed down the throat in a porn movie, the script should not be one of them.
I mention this because, oh man, I really didn't like Carolina Jones And the Broken Covenant, much as I like Ava Rose and Bree Olson. I wish it could have been a bunch of sex scenes with no script, costumes, or foreign locations. The money saved could have gone for a pizza party at the end of the school year.
What with all the nuisance lawsuits flying around the adult industry these days, along comes Thays Schiavinato, a dead ringer for Charlotte Stokely (except for the penis). Stokely should so sue.
Transsexual Jerk-offs is a movie from Juicy Entertainment. The very title sounds like something a New York City cab driver might say (judges would also have accepted "Transsexual Jagoff"). It's a comforting sign that porn is getting more mainstream every day.TM
Joanne Cachapero, with whom I write a monthly review column for the adult trade magazine XBiz Premiere, walked into my office while this movie was on and said, "Who's the pretty girl?"
"It's a transsexual, Joanne," rolling my eyes like a teenager.
I wrote a porn screenwriting article for XBiz and it was published there a few months ago. Since then I got a complaint from a director who felt I misrepresented him, so I've left his name out of my edit of the article.
How do we recognize good screenwriting in a business that, sales show, has no need to value it? Porn's screenwriters say that there are more differences than the presence of the word "blowbang" between the scripts of Porn Valley and Hollywood.
EXT. CHATSWORTH APARTMENT - AFTERNOON
DICK knocks on door of Apartment 69. Shirt open to his navel, he carries bags of delivery food. He checks his watch, ad libs other impatient gestures (suggestion: watch passage of sun across sky, sigh heavily, look at watch again).
DICK Damn. I'm impatient.
Door opens to reveal AMBER. She is perfectly made up and in high heels. Otherwise, she is wearing a bathrobe that is threatening to fall open. We can see she is braless.
AMBER Hi.
DICK I brought your Indian food.
AMBER Oh, really?
DICK Yeah. Really.
THEY exchange smoldering glances.
AMBER Do they have blowbangs in India?
DICK I'm Lakota Sioux, baby. (And Yes.)
B/G SCENE ONE
The first rule of writing is to write what you know. This either means that fast food delivery personnel across Los Angeles are the luckiest men in the world or that porn screenwriters are breaking the first rule of writing. It is probably the latter, and that is because screenwriting for porn follows a different set of rules.
It is a cliche to deride porn's scripts in the same way it is fashionable to dismiss awards for acting in adult movies. But while it is a disservice to porn to make it play by the rules of mainstream fare - for budget reasons, if for no others - we will see that porn scripts face their biggest challenges when attempting the quality of the least Hollywood script.
This makes it difficult for screenwriters who know the expectations but who stalk the elusive quality porn script regardless; the script that seamlessly blends the required sex with a compelling reason to have it.
"I know that I can write the best porn script in the world and it will still be judged below the lowest piece of Hollywood crap," said director Eli Cross, whose "Corruption" (written with Alvin Edwards) won the Best Screenplay prize at this year's AVN awards. The grim tale of the moral unraveling of a U.S. Senator also picked up numerous acting awards from adult outlets, with Cross routinely recognized as Best Director.
Writing often seems at odds with the goals of porn producers, who strive to deliver as much sex as possible. Managers of several L.A. area video stores interviewed for this story reported that their top ten rentals were all all-sex titles, with couples movies like Digital Playground's "Pirates" far down the list.
Sales of scripted porn movies are far brisker on the Internet, said Ron Austin, buyer for Inglewood's Wildcat Distributors. "The stores are still the home of the raincoat boys," he said, "and they look for theme or girl or sex act, not script.
"People who come to the stores are obviously the ones who are not too embarrassed by it," he said. "But even people who want the tamer Wicked Pictures products tend to go online, as do the people who want the really nasty stuff we can't sell in stores due to local ordinances."
Purveyors of scripted materials also have to contend with the emerging pay-per-scene or, even more threatening, pay-per-minute VOD markets.
But that doesn't mean porn's screenwriters will be out of a job.
"The feature isn't dead," said Vivid veteran Paul Thomas, whose feature "Debbie Does Dallas ... Again" recently won top honors at Berlin's Venus Fair, "but it doesn't have the market share it once did."
Further, fetish stylemaker Ernest Greene, who directed last year's "O; The Power of Submission", points out that "every new technology and format convinces people of the death of the old ones, but that isn't always true."
So if the feature isn't dead and most studios, for reasons of prestige, boredom, or genuine interest, aren't planning to give them up, what are the secrets of a successful porn script?
The most important is that a porn script is a different animal from a mainstream script, a play, an infomercial, or a Powerpoint presentation; it is a genre unto itself.
"We ask, 'How does the sex find its way into this movie?'" said "Upload" co-writer Edwards. The sci-fi script called for a cast of more than 40, and the film was almost a month in production. "'What does the sex reveal about the characters?' 'How do we make sex and the story one and the same, where a deficit of one will mean the deficit of another, and vice versa?'"
Edwards said that "Upload"'s reported $375,000 budget helped preserve the creative elements that would otherwise get stripped away from a standard porn with a budget of $30k.
"The money made it happen," Edwards said.
Indeed, Paul Thomas' AVN acceptance speech for 1996' "Bobby Sox" thanked the money as much as the actors.
"If the right people had the right budgets, as I did here, there would be more great movies," he said.
As a large percentage of today's porns are gonzos with setups as limited in length and character development as the snippet that opened this story, many performers would rather not be bothered with dialogue.
"I show up on set and of course my agent hasn't told me that there's dialogue," said one female performer known mostly for gonzo roles but who lately has been showing up in features. "So I'm not motivated to learn lines; it's not like I'm being paid any more for it."
The actress, who chose to remain anonymous, makes a good point. She can earn just as much money in a gonzo with no dialogue, where she will be in and out, as it were, in a few hours, and possibly even make it to another shoot the same day, as she would in a feature that would require her to turn down other work.
Performers are paid by the blowjob, or the double penetration, or the race of their partner. These are notated as "BJ", "DP", and "interracial" on the various adult talent booking sites. Not one mentions "dialogue". Since performers are not paid to act in this most capitalist of businesses, it is not incredible that they don't.
"So sometimes, when I know it's a feature, I conveniently get sick," the actress said (and this is why she chose to remain anonymous), "and shoot web content instead."
"You have to think of the performers as dollie heads," said director Gazzman, production manager of London's Harmony Films and winner of AVN's Best Foreign Feature for "The Scottish Loveknot". "You're never sure if someone isn't going to be there on the day of filming, so you need to make the parts as interchangeable as possible."
Cross echoes this sentiment almost to the exact wording (except the American says "doll" rather than "dollie"). "One consideration when writing the script is being conscious of the real possibility someone won't show up."
Despite comparatively huge (for porn) budgets for "Corruption" and this year's "Upload", Cross still contended with the no-shows and flakes ubiquitous in the porn industry. "You can have someone locked and then suddenly she'll get a boyfriend who only wants her to do girls," Cross said. "So there goes your anal scene."
This does not happen in Hollywood, where performers would do double, or even triple anal scenes if the money was right.
Porn scripts, once written on doomed napkins the day of filming, are now computerized. Some even make it to the cast before the shoot.
"But it's not like they courier it over," said the actress.
Even though many porn screenwriters type their scripts into Hollywood-standard screenwriting programs like Final Draft and Movie Magic (and Cross and Edwards used the Hollywood term "pink pages" to describe one part of the revision process, which is understandably ambiguous in their chosen industry), most feature porn scripts are 15-to-20 page affairs saved in Microsoft Word.
"I write it down and have my secretary type it up," said one industry veteran who thought I wasn’t painting him in the right light so I took out his name, whose recent feature script ran to nine pages and was filmed in one day, along with most of another movie. "There were sex scenes going on all over the house."
But most feature directors bemoan the limited budgets and tight deadlines of a studio system afraid of breaking the formula of five-to-six sex scenes in a movie in which one needs to be girl/girl and another needs to be anal.
"I know a lot of people who end up putting their own money into their movies (directed for other studios)," said "O"'s Greene, "just so they can retain a semblance of honesty to the script."
Jim Powers makes movies for Sin City and JM Productions. Most are filmed in a day. "I know there are limitations," he said, "and I work within them."
Powers, who is a prolific moviemaker, is representative of porn's writer/directors who aren't aspiring to Great Art.
"Porn is what it is," he said on the set of a MILF movie. "Guys watch porn for five to seven minutes at a pop, then hide the DVD, then watch it the next day. I guess your dialogue needs to fit in there somewhere."
One way to handle dialogue that actors don't want to learn and that directors don't have time to direct is by layering on a blanket of voiceovers.
"It's a shortcut to at least approaching an effective narrative," said Rebecca Gray, whose script (with Ren Savant) for Vivid's "Seven Deadly Sins" won AVN's 1999 screenplay honor. "If you can't get actors where you want them to be, you can solve a lot of problems with a voiceover."
Gray recalls hiring out of work Hollywood voice talent for several films for this purpose. "They charge less than porn actors," she said, "and they're motivated to do a good job because a voiceover is the most anonymous thing you can do in porn and still get to brag about being in porn. It's all the glory with none of the consequences."
And as Hollywood has a fascination with porn, so does porn relentlessly attempt to go Hollywood. Wicked Pictures is the most earnest of the Hollywood wannabes, with director/writer/contract girl Stormy Daniels churning out high gloss porn versions of Hollywood movies, most recently "Operation Desert Stormy", a hybrid of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", and the "James Bond" and "Austin Powers" series. The budget was reportedly $250,000, which Wicked used for screening parties, creative swag boxes for press, and both an airplane and a live camel in the movie.
Daniels, like Paul Thomas before her, maintained that the money was essential to the success of the movie. "This is an expensive movie because it needs to be expensive," she said on the first day of shooting.
Most of the writers and directors interviewed for this story highlighted workarounds like voiceovers and interchangeable characters, and each mentioned money as integral to the success of a feature. Working independently of studios, or working as autonomously as possible within studios, was also considered a plus.
"I appreciate the freedom Wicked gave me," Daniels said.
And it was only when constraints of time and budget were relaxed that some felt they could do their best work.
"We had money, so we could buy time," said Edwards. "And with the time, Eli (Cross) could direct, and the actors didn't have six other sets to go to that day."
"And we had people on set who weren't 'feature' types," Cross added, "who hadn't had the opportunity to do a lot of acting in porn before." Here Cross mentioned Eva Angelina, who he said not only auditioned (this is what a $375k budget buys) but also "did a brilliant job."
Another porn cliche is that of the failed artist who cannot get work anywhere else but who succeeds in porn as the smartest monkey in the zoo. This serves as a cautionary tale to screenwriters writing for their employers and not their audience.
"Porn has become more acceptable to educated people," said Wayne Hentai of Hentai PR, a marketing firm for porn companies and personalities. "The Internet has made porn safe for women and couples who don't want to go into the dirty bookstores. But they come to the picture with higher expectations."
Hentai mentioned misspelled boxcovers and movies with boom shadows and audible offstage banter.
"You can put on airs and talk about Nabokov all you want in your porn movie," Hentai said. "But if you can't get your lead actress to pronounce 'Lolita' properly, the jig's up."
A veteran director says porn movies need to be simple. "You need the hot girl, and everything else is just you winking at the camera. But the viewer is looking at the hot girl."
Everyone agrees that the porn script is its own thing; it has a structure particular to it. Whether that structure is populated with five or six simple setups and sex scenes or if it is, like "Upload", a film Edwards calls "a porn movie for sci-fi geeks, complete with a lexicon on disc four," the structure has to compell viewers beyond those five to seven minutes.
And the script is as important an investment as a perfect under the muscle boob job (though porn scripts are far less expensive).
Justin Kane, the writer/director of this year's comedy "Spunk'd", shopped around the treatment of his "Punk'd" parody to several studios but couldn't get the budget he wanted. So investors who also happened to be friends put up $90,000 for the project and Kane wouldn't have it any other way.
"I wrote (the main part) for Nick Manning, and I'm glad he agreed to it, because he was perfect," Kane said of the ensemble project, uncharacteristic of most porn. "But in retrospect I couldn't have made that movie anything but independently. I think it would suck the life out of me not to have the final cut or to do a job for hire. The extra time was important for the actors to get to know their lines."
Kane said that writing the script presented challenges one would not encounter in Hollywood.
"You'd think that writing a group sex scene would just be about the choreography, right?" he asked. "But each performer is contracted for a certain thing, so I can't have somebody get anal who was only hired for a blowjob, or I'd get their agents mad. I had to be precise in writing who got what, and where. A cock in the wrong place would have meant the difference of hundreds of dollars."
I am not saying that the Porno-Industrial Complex does not deserve to honor itself or that pornfolk do not deserve recognition for their hard work, but I can't shake the feeling that adult awards shows, with their Lifetime Achievement honors and Man of the Year trophies, seem like kids dressing up in their parents' oversized sportcoats and ball gowns and putting on a show in the barn.
"...and watching white guys mack their pimpness to doormen isn't how I want to spend my time," added Blueblood.com editor Amelia G. (seen here with the amiable Forrest Black).
I enjoy adult awards shows. They are charming. But last night's XBiz Awards, last month's AVN Awards, the XRCO Awards and all the various Kucinich-level adult award events are all the same gig albeit in different venues with differing amounts of money behind them. The audience's tenuous attention to its host at the inevitably tardy start rapidly unravels by the 20-minute mark.
By the end, most of the audience has drifted away, the presenters are calling for attention, and the majority of attendees remaining are just in earshot in case their award category is coming up.
How often have you heard Billy Crystal tell the Oscar audience to "Shut the fuck up"? It happens all the time at adult awards shows.
That said, I always have a good time, because I'm hanging around with everyone else in back. As Porn's ambassador to the outside world, however, I imagine the wry and winking, bemused and condescending takes visiting mainstream reporters might have on such events - mostly because I hate competition in the Bemused and Condescending department but also because I have tender feelings for this business.
The XBiz Awards were held at the Hollywood Highlands, a popular nightclub adjacent to the Oscars' Kodak Theatre. XBiz Conference attendees needed only to walk across the street from the Roosevelt Hotel and climb the stairs. Inside were several bars and a large VIP area. I heard there were snacks there, but I left coldcut-free because I kept bumping into people I knew.
One was Veronique Vega, whose new haircut reminds me of a healthy Amy Winehouse that I want to debase and hook on drugs. She is part Puerto Rican and part Tahitian. I wonder if we're related?
Here is intellectual filmmaker DCypher getting into a shot of Halcyon Styn and Ashley Steel. It was the couple's six-month anniversary.
"I am a Buddhist," DCypher said.
People might argue that adult personnel are an army of rebels and free-thinkers who can't sit down and shut up due to their boundless energy and First Amendment patriotism. Those people might have been correct about this as few as ten years ago, but if they're still saying it they're dummies. Now it's nothing more than limited attention span coupled with nothing to pay attention to.
Tommy Gunn and Ashlyn Brooke attended the awards, squabbling over who looked better.
"I have full breasts," Brooke noted. "You lose."
Nina Hartley expertly handled three different gan interactions in our two-minute conversation. Each fan left with a remarkable sense of well-being.
Casey Parker pinned Holly Randall to the unyielding brick. She couldn't do it to me becausae I was holding the camera.
When last we saw Tori Black, she was crawling all over Sindee Jennings in pasties. It was a magical time for us. But I finally got to talk with her with clothes on.
"Glad you have your clothes on this time," the 5'9" Seattle native did not say. She has only been in the business for a few months, she said, but wanted to make clear that, though her scenes might be hardcore, she is still a lady.
"People forget that women are elegant," she said.
Svengali in training James Bartholet proposes something distasteful to Veronica Rayne.
It is very important the world sees more of Ava Rose. I hope she's off tomorrow.
This unintentionally arty photo of Michael Lucas and Titan Media's Keith Webb was one of several camera accidents. I explained to Lucas that his excellent Intern was the only gay movie I have seen (other than Quadrophenia)and he quickly suggested several others. He didn't seem to think I should quit while I was ahead.
I told Stoya I would put a picture of her on my website every day if I could. I think she must be some kind of witch; she doesn't take a bad picture.
"People saw my vagina on your site and started e-mailing me about flashing people in Las Vegas," she said.
"It can't be flashing if you took the picture under the table with my camera while I was away," I said. That wasn't flashing; it was a gesture of love.
Here's shrewd businesswoman Shy Love. Shy Love fans will be happy to know she is even prettier in person.
Pride of Nashua Heather Silk was set to appear in a "Pussy Party" before the shoot was rescheduled. I had never met her before but her dress sort of rides up that way, which I think is a plus. We didn't have time to talk about the Orange Julius at the Pheasant Lane Mall.
Finally, Flower Tucci let me know in no uncertain terms that she's into Satan, too.
"Let's get out of here; you're weird," she said, which in that context was a huge compliment. I doubt she remembers it, but I gave up drinking three days too soon.
As Penthouse's Marc Bell walked to the stage amid awkward clapping and the "Rocky" theme to accept his Man of the Year award, I bumped into a little white guy dressed in a pimp suit.
"Pardon me," I said.
"It's all good, brah," he said.
It was all good. (It would have been better with a drink, though.)
XBiz panels tackle piracy, butt piracy, Miley Cyrus
Visitors to the Mylie Cyrus show at the nearby Disney-run El Capitan Theatre did not know Nina Hartley was talking about post-Federalist Papers cocksucking two doors down.
"...a little John Jay B.J.," she was saying.
Panelists at the XBiz Hollywood Conference addressed keeping track of revenues and HIV infection, the prolonged death of the DVD, and why the coming change of presidential administration might be as hostile to the adult industry as the old one.
"A Clinton presidency might result in the paying off of political favors to anti-porn feminists at our expense in the same way Bush did with the religious right," said Ernest Greene, editor of Hustler's Taboo Magazine and director of O: The Power of Submission.
Others acknowledged the money-making opportunities presented by harsh political climates.
"(Political) backlashes help because the cowards get out of the business," said Steven Scarborough of Hot House Entertainment.
Sharon Mitchell, founder of STD screener Adult Industry Medical, described battles with the L.A. County Health Department over preventing and controlling HIV outbreaks.
"Sometimes I think their concern is (actually) not solving the problem but proving to someone else that they are concerned with it," she said.
The air of adult conferences has always been charged with a feeling of doom, as participants fret about dwindling sales and political oppression. But the explosion of porn delivery systems in recent years, such as user-driven "-tube" sites, has people especially worried.
"People told me at the AVN convention, 'I've got the greatest -tube site for you that'll save you a lot of money,'" said Hustler vice president Michael Klein. "And I said 'Yes, it'll save us money because we won't have to rent a booth here next year. We'll be out of business."
But Ali Joone, president of Digital Playground, said that "traditional" media like DVDs still had a place in the market because upscale customers would still purchase high-definition DVDs.
"They'll buy blockbuster movies to watch on a big screen," he said, "because you're not going to get quality like that online in a while."
But when moderator and XBiz president Alec Helmy asked what the future held for a DVD-only business model, Joone responded, "I think that's like sticking with VHS."
And unlike the much-vaunted porn-driving-technology axiom from the 80's, online "Netflix of Porn" company WantedList founder Anh Tran expected mainstream media's tech choices to trickle down to porn rather than the other way around.
"How mainstream consumers choose eventually finds its way to porn," he said.
Tran reflects an aspect of the adult industry that views DVD as another delivery system instead of the one nail to hang the business on.
"We're in the media delivery business," he said, "DVD is just one aspect of that."
Typical of tradeshow breakout sessions anywhere, questions tended to be softball ones, and the dialogue was often mutually congratulatory.
But there were occasional spirited exchanges, where harder questions yielded real information.
XBiz publisher Tom Hymes asked Penthouse CEO Marc Bell (who would later win XBiz' Man of the Year award) about what differentiated Penthouse from Playboy.
"Playboy likes to avoid saying they're in the adult business," he said. "We're not afraid to."
But when Bell spun Penthouse as a unique media empire, Hymes shot back with "What about Hustler?"
The animated discussion that followed was one of the most interesting of the conference; it touched on the likelihood of more adult companies going public, whether or not Penthouse would take an active role in combatting anti-porn legislation ("If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem," Bell said, without actually answering the question) and the problem of getting Penthouse Pets to also do porn.
"Well, we want them all to shoot porn, too..." Bell said.
As panelists discussed consumer demand further splintering into niches and how to get people to pay for what they can increasingly get for free, one attendee stood to talk about the quality of studio porn.
"Why is it that user-submitted content on -tube sites always outperforms stolen stuff from big companies?" he asked.
He was unable to supply numbers or sites to support this claim, but I think his remarks speak to the sameness of studio porn, to the point that anything that appears "real" is more exciting.
Whereas recent years' legal discussions focused on 2257 recordkeeping, this year the boogeymen were piracy and the constant threat of external controls.
First Amendment attorney Jeffrey Douglas pointed out that, though injuries in martial arts films are expected, martial arts movies are not regulated any more than other genres.
But the adult industry is constantly threatened with regulation. Douglas posited a possible defense against regulation on free speech grounds.
"If you need to enforce battery laws in martial arts films, for example," he said, "you would dramatically alter the content."
Veteran performer Nina Hartley offered a view of porn workers as a whole, suggesting that self-regulation was something to constantly strive for.
"People are in porn because, traditionally, they don't want to play by the rules of others (in the mainstream), but (accurate) paperwork is a sign of growing up and working with the community," she said.
But she offered a compromise.
"Maybe to prove our patriotism we can recite a bit of the Declaration of Independence before we say, 'Can I suck your cock please?'"
What we learn about the adult industry by its swag
Adult trade publication XBiz is hosting its Hollywood Conference here at the Roosevelt Hotel. XBiz, which began as a publication for the online adult business, has grown into a competitor in the video and events side of the industry as well.
Bizzo, the company's lovable, floppy-eared mascot, now appears on lunchboxes and Nickelodeon and has partnered with police departments around the country to keep kids away from shady Internet Payment Soultions schemes. So XBiz has high aspirations.
Swag bags provided by the conference provide a look into what is important to adult industry professionals.
Webcam host VideoSecrets lures customers by letting them know that they pay on time, and have for over a decade. What is unspoken here is that other companies don't. In fact, to base an entire swag presentation on the fact that you pay your bills says something about the state of accountability in the adult industry.
Swag in any industry is often unimaginative. In various travels I will get ballpoint pens, lanyards, and branded paperclips. These I donate to schools and food pantries. But the XBiz conference handed out several useful and representative doodads.
Gay content provider GunzBlazing.com provided each attendee a tin of mints. This was very helpful after drinking the Roosevelt's coffee.
Billing solutions firm Epoch gave out sleek, crack pipe-style lighters (mine didn't work, so no Hollywood Blvd. rock for me today). This demonstrates New Porn's desire to make vice elegant.
Discreet purchasing outfit Net Cash distributed shot glasses. While I have given up drinking for Lent, I nevertheless appreciate the gesture, as the adult business is historically powered by alcohol. But here we see the porn world's constant metaphorical pull between discretion and decadence.
And content provider Flashcash offers a glimpse of the new adult entrepreneur by passing out money clips. No longer is adult business transacted in alleys with shopping bags full of cash. It's not even kept moderately quiet. Instead, today's adult business professional wants the world to know what she does.
That's why non-porn visitors to the staid and haunted Roosevelt see a huge PussyCash banner upon entering. (And no one fainted.) PussyCash also sponsored the attendee badges, so at any given time one's badge might flip over and shout PUSSYCASH at shocked passersby.
"Deal with it, you prude," you would then say. "Don't tamper with my sacred First Amendment freedom to pretend I care about First Amendment freedoms while making money."
Expanded XBiz Awards categories still a fraction of AVN's
Despite increasing the number of trophies it will distribute in next February's 6th annual XBiz Awards to include performer honors, XBiz was dismayed to learn that its 51 categories still falls far short of the 3,217 awards AVN will have given out the previous month to most of the same people.
"We've got our own awards and conference in Los Angeles one month after AVN has its awards and conference in Las Vegas, we've got our own video magazine just like they do, we've expanded our toy coverage to compete with theirs, we revamped our website..." a visibly shaken XBiz said, "we've hired everyone they fired...Jesus Christ; What more can we do?"
Moments after announcing their expanded categories, XBiz learned that not only had AVN added 50 more prizes, including Perfect Attendance and Least Likely to Smell Like Adultcon, but also that the Chatsworth titan had purchased a zeppelin.
XBiz, on the line with Aeroflot, declined to comment on this or rumors that an independent commission will be splitting Dave Navarro in half for the purposes of the two adult trade magazines.
Nominations for the 2008 XBiz Awards will be open until December 31.
FBI 2257 inspector and XBiz BFF Chuck Joyner has cited two Florida porn companies for a number of minor violations, but the one that sticks out is TMI, or too much information, heretofore merely a social offense like when one's wife tells less-attractive girlfriends that "we sometimes let people into our marriage."
"Another violation involved having too much data with the records for a given title, (CandidCam.com rep Mark) Dolan said. In that instance, records for performers who had nonsex roles in the video were included in the records for the performers who did engage in sexually explicit conduct. Curing that violation involved merely removing the records for the nonsex performers, Dolan said."
L.A.'s Knitting Factory is host to the surprisingly expensive Los Angeles Erotica Film Fest this weekend, featuring screenings of 70 abridged and full length films and panels covering everything from classic porn to steveporn. I talked with steveporn's Eon McKai and Classic Porn moderator Roy Karch about what was on their agenda this weekend.
Read more after the gap.
"Demystifying altporn will be quality entertainment," said Eon McKai, who will be enlisting the likes of Dana DeArmond, Violet Blue, and Winkytiki for his panel discussion. McKai will be screening the documentary Llik Your Idols about New York's 80's-era Cinema of Transgression Movement that involved Lydia Lunch, Richard Kern, and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.
McKai likens Cinema of Trangression to steveporn.
"The work of Nick Zedd and Richard Kern have a major influence on how alt girls are captured by the moving image with sound," he said, referring, I think, to what we know as film, "so for me it's the perfect type of movie for me to help set the tone for this new Los Angeles institution. Llik has a good non-porn insider appeal. It's funny to note what the alt porn movent takes from that movement."
In an e-mail, McKai added: "if alt was a the C.T. was a FW to the film school establishment... The Alt Porn Movment tasks the same attended in it's PR and it's spirit... "
I don't know what this means, but I think FW might mean "Fuck You", so McKai might be saying that steveporn is a Fuck You to the prevailing porn standards the way the Cinema of Trangression was a Fuck You to the film school movement.
I have a feeling that McKai can actually spell just fine, but he enjoys having his words puzzled over and interpreted.
On the other side of the spectrum, veteran director (and still very hard at work) Roy Karch moderates a panel on porn's Golden Age that will feature Marilyn Chambers, Christy Canyon, Seka, Ron Jeremy, and the beloved director Henri Pachard.
"All these people are in the Hall of Fame," Karch said, "including me."
"The AVN Hall of Fame? Make sure you mention AVN a lot during your appearance at this XBiz event..." I said.
"Well, they're probably also in the XRCO Hall of Fame," Karch said.
"The showcase will feature a compendium of clips from some of the hottest and more prominent films from the Golden Age of Porn," Karch said. "The clips wil be interspersed with conversation from the panel led by me. The showcase will close with a section devoted to questions and answers from the audience. Bring your queries for the panel along with your favorite t-shirt, autograph book, or whatever you use to keep the autographs of your favorite classic porners. Now's your chance to be up close and personal with the ones that got you off time and time again."
The Festival is in its first year. People close to the proceedings have said that it was an "organizational nightmare" and "emotional rollercoaster" but are excited about Saturday's party, film contributions from outside the porn realm, and the prospect of mingling Porn Valley with Hollywood Boulevard.
Festival Director Richard Mayer of Silver Lake swore at sponsor XBiz.
"The first year of every festival can be a real sonofabitch," he said, reveling in the looser standards of adult trade journalism. "Not enough good films, too much room for amateur hour. Luckily, I brought in some real experts in the slippery slope of arthouse erotica and managed to pull off a coup."
I get it: where most disciplines invoke a field, arthouse erotica is a slippery slope. Is that right? Regardless, congrats on the coup! While there is a chance they are all quoted out of context, film festival organizers always sound like buffoons.
I asked McKai how he would follow up this weekend's festivities.
"I'm leaving alt and starting a cult," he said. "After the Llick screening on (Saturday). I'll skip the party and go right to work across the street to study what L. Ron did to all thoes people."
Well, if you've ever seen the Dianetics film at the Celebrity Center, that's all about the Cinema of Transgression.
I visited the set of Cousin Stevie's Pussy Party prior to my vacation and wrote about it for the adult trade magazine XBiz in a story that will be published next month. Because I am so goddamn good at what I do, I rarely get edited and can generally print whatever I please, including my tangential thoughts on natural childbirth, salmon ladders, and alien autopsies.
Still, I did leave a word out of the first paragraph of my XBiz story because folks get touchy. See if you can determine which one it was in the un-self-expurgated version after the gap.
After awhile, watching a porn movie being shot seems less like an event than a job, and that’s how it should be. After all, this is a legitimate business. But visiting one of Cousin Stevie’s Pussy Partys allows the observer to rediscover the childlike wonder of watching someone squirt all over a rented Encino wall.
Anyway, Sindee Jennings' squirting was the big gun of the day, but I especially liked Annabelle Lee and Lexi Love. If Jennings' aquabatics was Star Wars, then Love and Lee were like the Falkland Islands Conflict; I was assured that nothing would fly out at me and everything was pleasant.
Navarro film to explore duality, empowerment, avoid grandiosity
Rock star Dave Navarro is directing porn, as was inevitable considering his proximity to this world over the past few years.
Dave Navarro: Broken was shot this summer for Teravision and features Sasha Grey, Jenna Haze, Victoria Sin, Audrey Bitoni, Kayla Page, Lisa Daniels, Tommy Gunn, Marco Banderas, Mark Davis, and Spyder Jonez (but not Tera Patrick).
Read more after the gap.
Porn world shorthand for Navarro's music career has always mentioned his role as guitarist for Jane's Addiction (currently broken up) and also the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Navarro has been with Jane's Addiction through all its incarnations but only played with the Chili Peppers for 1995's "One Hot Minute" album.
But his work as a hired gun has also been impressive. He has played with Christina Aguilera, Marilyn Manson, and was featured on Alanis Morrisette's 1995 "Jagged Little Pill". Currently, he fronts the band Panic Channel, hangs around porn, and is involved in a number of new media ventures, including Spread Entertainment.
Navarro's dabbling in porn was an open secret this year, and the question was which side of the camera he'd show up on.
"We're trying to get him to perform, but I don't know if he'll do it," Teravision president Evan Seinfeld told me in July. Navarro does not perform in Broken.
Navarro, whose father was a Spanish immigrant, grew up in Los Angeles and has led a rich and varied life. Married and divorced three times, most recently to Carmen Electra, Navarro co-authored his biography, "Don't Try This At Home", with "The Game" author and Jenna Jameson's ghostwriter, Neil Strauss.
Even more autobiographical is Navarro's solo album "Trust No One", which is excellent.
Teravision decribes Broken's protagonist, Sasha Grey, as "a young woman torn apart by the duality of control and powerlessness in her life." Navarro told adult trade publication XBiz that he wanted the movie to contain themes of empowerment without being "grandiose".
Dave Navarro: Broken will be released September 27.
Whenever I go to any kind of convention, the rhythmic motions of my neck, like the waters of Solaris, conspire to turn my ID necklace around, so all anyone sees is the name of whatever company sponsored the costly lamination/lanyard process.
On a deeper level, it raises questions of who we really are. In the porn world, there have always been two camps.
I feel that, of the two adult trade publications, AVN is more defiantly pro-porn; freakier in its makeup, more accepting of the weird, and not self-conscious. There are people at AVN who would gladly go to jail so that porn could continue. But why shouldn't they? I've been to some of their apartments, and I've been to many correctional facilities. California Institute for Men - Chino has better carpeting and televisions than those of AVN's editorial staff.
But this week's XBiz Summer Forum proved to me that one does not have to like porn to make money on it. In fact, having an emotional attachment to the material often clouds judgment when ordering and reordering one's TGPs and linklists for optimized ROI.
Read a full account of the proceedings after a break in the HTML continuum.
It is very difficult not to compare AVN with XBiz, as XBiz is doing everything that AVN does, except -mostly- differently. There's the Awards, the video magazine, the sponsorships, and now the conventions. The only thing XBiz has not yet tried its hand at is a trade show.
That XBiz has had its two Summer Forums at the Hard Rock Hotel is very classy. The place is big enough to hold the several hundred people who came and small enough to have character, whereas AVN's January shindig at the Sands seems overwhelming at times.
But it was 112 degrees the other day, in the shady garage. Perhaps XBiz' reluctant acceptance of the porn aesthetic (although one cannot get more porn than Joanne Cachapero) is reflected in its decision to hold its porn convention in Hell.
The Hard Rock's comprehensive pool, estuary, and watering system was the focal point of the convention, with 33 tents arrayed around it, each rented by a different affiliate program, product, or studio (including Shane's World, which turned its teepee into an igloo for humanitarian purposes).
Hustler's new president, Michael Klein, was there, as were Adam & Eve's Peter Reynolds and Mischa Allen, Oren Cohen of Tightfit, and Pink Visual's Kim Kysar (all spoke at seminars). Private and Vivid were also represented.
At a seminar about generating free traffic for websites, I sat on a panel with Jay Quinlan of OCCash, traffic hub operator Harry Thomas, and Greenguy of Link-o-rama.
Quentin, known as XXXJay "on the boards", pointed out that he might not like "Black Lesbian Strap-on" content personally but that it was up to webmasters to assess new trends in their purchasing of content for their affiliate programs.
What was interesting to me was that discussions of "content" left out words that weren't part of meta tags. People talked about pictures rather than text, and I wondered if pictures without text was trulyy the wave of the future.
I felt the need to speak about the power of words to turgidify customers.
In a previous seminar on traffic, panelists had suggested to newbie webmasters that generating their own content was not recommended, "since there are so many other people out there who are already doing it," and that recirculating other people's work was the way to go. This seemed shocking to say and was shocking to hear, but the feeling passed; reducing sexuality to high-yield niches is at the center of what porn is about, so for panelists to suggest without irony that newcomers leave the originality to others should not have been surprising.
Other seminars included a well-intentioned but not very informative discussion of financial planning for pornographers and, in the minutes following the publication of the new 2257 proposal in the Federal Register, Free Speech Coalition lawyers dissected the text. Bottom line? If this passes, things will suck, with no distinction between primary and secondary producers and an adults-only warning on every page of porn websites, as opposed to the general warning people tend to use now.
With each event centrally located to the Hard Rock, people got to know each other over the course of the convention, mostly in the pool. Each of the lunches and most of the drinks were sponsored by some company or other.
Even the waitresses and booth girls were sponsored. I wondered at first why I did not recognize many of the people in XBiz tank tops and short shorts or the bikini'd ladies representing affiliate programs; it is because they were local or L.A. contracters for modeling/catering agencies.
I asked one woman who was walking around with a drink tray how the XBiz Forum measured up to other conventions she'd hostessed for.
"I was in a much skimpier outfit for an RV convention earlier this year," she said, "and the people weren't as nice."
Unlike the AVN convention, actual porn girls were at a minimum, and there were no male porn performers there, unless you count Evan Seinfeld, who was there representing Teravision.
I talked with Seinfeld at length, but never saw Tera Patrick. "She's up in the room," he said, then showed me her picture on his iPhone (I counted 14 iPhones in all). I saw Seinfeld several times during the week, but never saw Tera. I began to doubt she was there. At the club Body English I was told that Jenna Jameson was in attendance but after several trips through the VIP area did not see her. I heard she looked good.
I spoke with Louisville's own Tera Wray. I have not yet met someone from Kentucky who wasn't charming. That is why I am a Kentucky Colonel.
Wray is the newly-signed contract star for New Jersey's Pleasure Productions. I told her I didn't know Pleasure Productions had contract stars.
"Well, they hadn't met me yet," she said sweetly.
I asked her if she went to the Kentucky Derby.
"I go every year," she said. "This year I didn't even have tickets, but I knew all the security guards."
We held a moment of silence for Barbaro, but I refrained from pouring out my 40 on the ground in his memory.
I gave her my business card, but she had nowhere else to put it. Note to self: next year print business cards on watermelons.
I spoke with Brett Franklin of a gay site called Manaconda.
"You're probably going to judge me," he said, "but I want to go over there and suck that guy off."
"I judge no one," I said. "Just let him know beforehand." There were several well-sponsored and casual events around the pool, like open bars and an evening happy hour, and I expected the same breezy nature of a late-night club event on Wednesday.
I feel about clubs like Body English, what with its bottle service, bikini dancers, and PowerBook-wielding DJs, that they should go the way of MySpace. People tend to go through the motions at such events and I am unaware of anyone actually having a good time. Not like Disneyland. At the crowded Body English, which was located downstairs at the Hard Rock, I stood in various places, danced in various places, and spent most of the time yelling at people I like.
"THAT'S SOME CLEAVAGE," I said to one person.
"NICE PANTS," she replied. We would have said more but we were hoarse already.
I talked with Josh of Fleshlight, the Austin-based company that puts flashlights into cyberskin penis (now vagina) replicas.
"MY BOSS' SON MADE THE FROGS FOR 'MAGNOLIA'," he said. "HE DESIGNED THE FLESHLIGHTS AFTER HE MADE HIS DAD A RUBBER VAGINA WHEN HIS MOM GOT PREGNANT AT 47."
Apparently Fleshlight's owner was indignant that he would not be able to have sex with his wife, the future mother of healthy twins, during her pregnancy, so he sought refuge in Science.
"SO THE FROGS IN 'MAGNOLIA' EMPLOYED THE SAME PENIS FLASHLIGHT TECHNOLOGY?" I asked.
"YES."
"WERE THEY MADE AT THE SAME FACTORY?" I asked.
"YES."
As I talked with Josh, both of us were casually spilling our drinks on one of the women in the booth. This is how crowded it was. I went from booth to booth, drinking vodka with little mixers, spilling little bits on myself and others, while others spilled their drinks on me. As you know, I am a bigger sybarite than most, but this was silly.
As I walked out, I approached a group of women, who looked at me frankly. They were not with the convention. I still had my ID lanyard on. One of the women grabbed it and looked at it, then shouted something to her friends.
"WHAT JUST HAPPENED BETWEEN US?" I asked.
"NICE NAME TAG," she said.
My name tag, turned around, read "Pussycash".
My two biggest regrets were that I did not actually stay at the Hard Rock, so an Internet connection was hard to come by, and that I hadn't brought a bathing suit. I could as easily have jumped in a microwave to cool off.
For me the high point of the convention was to be a seminar delivered by XBiz staff on how to write press releases. As a person who reads press releases from porn companies every day, I am indeed blessed that I have a job where I can say whatever I like about them. Employees of trade publications have no such luxury.
So I was looking forward to how writer Anne Winter and the rest of the XBiz team were going to handle the words of current and future porn publicists, and I fully expected them to use examples from life, but they did not take the bait.
Instead, their version of a bad press release was written from scratch. I have to say it was better than some I've received. I asked XBiz publisher Tom Hymes why there weren't any real-life examples.
"There's so many that it would have been unfair to narrow it to just one," he said.
"Plus {name withheld} would have tried to capitalize on it," Winter said.
I suggested to XBizVideo editor Steve Javors that telling publicists how to write press releases for your own magazine was like telling your girlfriend how to give you a blowjob. It is self-preserving.
"That is apt," he said.
I could not imagine AVN's editorial staff delivering a lecture on how to write press releases. Not that they are not as plagued, if not more so, with bad press releases as XBiz, but their own bitterness and regret is augmented with a certain resignation.
It was also noteworthy to see that there was no coverage of the XBiz Forum on AVN whereas there has been plenty of advertising for AVN events like Internext and Erotica LA in the pages of XBiz. The only AVN employees I saw at XBiz were members of its sales team, probably keeping tabs on the tenuous affections of its advertisers.
This is unfortunate. Both of those media entities need the other, and officially pretending the other is not there is useless other than to look bad.
For an idea on how far there is to go, I will leave you with a quote from an XBiz story on its Forum.
“The show’s good. I always come to Vegas for the XBIZ show,” Python Cash’s Derrick Bronco said. “The basis for me is seeing people I already know and solidifying those relationships better.”
Next year's Summer Forum should, in addition to being held no earlier than September 20, feature a seminar on how to give statements to press, if for no other reason than to solidify speaking better.
The porn industry is contracting somewhat, and familiar faces at some companies are either leaving porn altogether or are moving to other companies to be familiar faces there. I'll mention some people in the latter category.
