But after the work is done the film should be released immediately.

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I seriously question people who buy their smut to see sfx, car chases and explosions or digital skeletons. This isn't indication of erotic quality for me, and yes, let's not fool ourselves here -- this is porn we're talking about. The companies who invest in this sfx crap, trying to approach the level of b-mainstream junk, become pathetic in my eyes. Such titles fall into the gap of not being good porn and not being good mainstream, therefore being virtually useless.

I think they should invest in story, script and perhaps use their million budgets to tempt some desperate maintream talent to crossover into porn for more credible acting which will automatically allow crafting complexer stories with more emotion and "feelings", as it once was.

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On tempting desperate mainstream talent to take the plunge.
I agree that would increase the quality.
But I don't see this happen because of the costs. If a producer pays a C-Movie-star for example 30 000 dollars to move over to porn the major adult girls would demand higher fees as well.

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I also think Fashionistas can't be set as an example for other studios, especially the ones like Vivid. It seems like a one of a kind movie. There is only one Stagliano just like there was only one Damiano. By the way, does anyone find it a bit ironic that the most memorable feature film in recent years has originated from the creator of gonzo?

Edited by - Zoid on 10/2/2005 9:44:41 PM

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Why, if it fits the film, does F/X, car chases, etc make a company pathetic for you?

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I think there's a growing pool of filmmakers, on both sides of the porn/not porn divide, who see the unminded creative and professional potential that exists in the exploration explicit, cinematic depictoins of sex. I believe the "mainstreaming" of porn has created a huge potential audience, if only sexually explicit films can be brought up to some minimal standards of craft. Depending on which side of "the divide" a filmmaker is on, she faces a different sort of challenge to reach this audience.

For the "mainstream" filmmaker, I think the biggest obsticle is to stop regarding the idea that someone might want to jack off to your film as something low or embarrassing. Many recent sexually explicit "mainstream" films have been accompanied by the directors disavowing the films' purient appeal. To some extent I think this is because the filmmakers don't want their use of explicit sex to be regarded as some sort of exploitation crutch, much like the use horror and violence in the drive-in movies of the 50s and 60s that juha estutely sites. Until mainstream filmmakers embrace the idea that their sex films are meant to make people hot and horny, I think their sex films will continue to fall flat.

On the other side of the divide, if pornographers want to reach this new audience, their going to have to leave behind a lot of bad habits picked up in the 30 years since porn more or less gave up on trying to reach the mainstream. Just like their exploitation film making predisessors, pornographers are going to have to take themselves and their (potential) audience a lot more seriously, not just saying they regard their work as art, but putting the time, effort and money to make it art. That probably means (to some extent) weaning themselves of the "the suckers will buy anything" gravy train of today's highly intergrated porn distribution system. That may be a sure market, but it's neither a growing or demanding market; and it's certainly not a market that will support a Kevin Smith or Quinten Taranino – not yet at least!

-TC

-TC

Comstock Films:Real Life, Real People, Real Sex

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Anyways, I agree that it should be possible to make well-balanced feature porn, but my point is that it doesn't have to take two years or cost a million dollars. Quite a few Golden Age classics proved that. I mean we can talk all day long about how good Fashionistas is, but feature porn genre these days can't depend on movies like that -- it's just not financially possible. Therefore, I think it's more productive to ponder how the quality can be improved in their standard budget titles.

I'm basically tired of seeing the same shit over and over in nearly every 2nd modern feature: same siliconed, polished women, nearly same male talent, same mansions and villas, same mediocre acting, same primitive stories, same kind of unrealistic formulaic sex. Give me some variety.

Interesting, I saw several pornos from Joe Damato; that guy was basically shooting some mainstream flicks but also porn. In the interview he said that he sees shooting porn no different from shooting any other movie -- you are just filming explicit sex. I think that was his major flaw. I mean he always had great ingredients: gorgeous women, costumes, sets, but the sex just wasn't hot, and was nearly the same mechanical routine in all his movies (at least IMHO). He makes cuts from position to position with jerk-to-pop finish. Did Joe Damato masturbate to his own movies? I really don't think so.

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As for not thinking of "The Fashionistas" as smut, I think the word "smut" has a very negative image, which sadly porn has to most people. To me that word means something dirty and disgraceful. I obviously don't think of porn in general as those things, but I definitely don't think that of "The Fashionistas". You already know what I think of that movie.

If a porno movie can attract both raincoaters and general movie buffs, then it has succeeded in a big way. And I think that will help porn overall.

Edited by - Myload on 10/9/2005 7:59:30 PM

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Edited by - juha on 10/3/2005 8:57:32 PM

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The CGI skeletons had nothing to do with the eroticism of the film. They had to do with the story that was going on. Yes they added to the story, the film was better overall having them there. By having a better story, they do create a better erotic fantasy.

I don't expect every adult film to have CGI, as you mentioned films from the 70s didn't have them. However I think if there was a way to check you'd find that the better films cost a bit more to make than the average film today. Plus you weren't looking at a couple hundred thousand films getting release each year so although they could be released quicker there was more time to devote to editing, etc that I don't think exists today.

I love the films from the 70s, I think everyone who has been here for a while knows that. I don't think that we can ever have films like that again, the industry has changed too much. That isn't to say that we can't have quality feature adult films.

I think Tony brought up some important thoughts on how directors/producers have to think when creating adult films. I see such directors in the industry today. From my experience I think that directors like Jonathan Morgan and James Avalon, to mention two, care about the products they are creating. Another problem though is the discipline that will be required throughout the industry. I've seen commments about stars that don't read scripts before they show up, if this is occuring than that needs to be eliminated. However, I think it is possible to make higher level features. And I think some of the films that have started showing up recently prove this.

Edited to fix quoting.

Edited by - flash on 10/4/2005 11:18:04 AM

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I do generally prefer the actresses to be a bit older than the industry average, so given a choice between two movies shot, say, five years apart and of otherwise similar style and quality, featuring an actress I like, I'm much more likely to go for the newer title.

But why any studio would even want to delay their releases for years on end, is beyond me. Does anyone but Vivid do this?
Weren't the scenes in Pirates shot less than six months ago? IIRC, Wicked works with similar timeframes.
'fraid I never paid much attention to Fashionistas, was that a multi-year project?

For a movie there are far more important issues than it's age.
Of course the sex scenes themselves should be hot. But after spending relatively big bucks producing a feature, I also think the technical quality control should warrant some attention. That unfortunately is an area that, IMHO, has been sorely lacking.
I agree that some directors like Jon Morgan seem to care about their product.
Then again I would have expected more anamorphic transfers than we've seen in the past couple of years, and I was very disappointed that nobody at Wicked, including Morgan himself, caught the extremely bad chroma shift problem on Space Nuts, or felt that it was important enough to warrant re-authoring the DVD.

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Fashionistas is actually (in my opinion) a very good example of a well polished DVD but a poor example of how to make a sex feature. For those who haven't seen it the DVD set includes 4 discs and is held in a special cardboard case. Two DVDs are for the movie with an entertaining commentary featuring Mr Stagliano, Tricia D, Taylor St Claire, and Belladonna. A third disc is devoted to a making of which outstrips most mainstream supplemental documentaries in terms of clarity and a feeling of "being there". The last disc is a CD containing music from the movie, which is a nice touch. All in all that's as stacked as you're likely to find on any Hollywood collectors edition, and in addition the menus were slickly presented if my memory serves.

Where the movie falls down (again, in my opinion) is in the way it tries to dovetail the sex scenes into a workable storyline. Put simply: it's just too damn long. As a one off that's ok, but it's not something which would work for TV distribution, or I'd guess for most DVD releases. Fashionistas tries to have it's cake and eat it by sacrificing neither the length of the sex scenes or the non sex parts. The problem with that is not just in creating a bloated movie with an unmanageable running length, but also one where the thread of the plot is difficult to hang onto when you're 30 minutes into another fuckathon. I realise that's not the view of many who have watched it, and much is gonna depend on just how you plan to see it.

I don't see any chance of mainstream moviemakers crossing the divide en mass to sex productions, as they'll still face the stigma of porn if they ever try to leap back. And that stigma isn't going away. Which leaves us with porn producers attempting to dream the impossible dream... There are actually some very decent features out there I'd say, though they're less well known for not being made in English. Italian and French for the most part, and they have the qualities which work best IMHO to construct a successful porn flick.

1st) The sex scenes are short which means they don't unduly interrupt the flow of the movie (it should be a doddle to include extended scenes on a DVD with seamless branching, for anyone who would like the doggy anal to last for 8 minutes instead of 1.5 ;).

2nd) Generally the sexual action springs from the situation, instead of happening just because it's time to show some more skin. Not only does that make the sex scenes more interesting and varied, but as they are informed by what is going on in the non sex action it makes the rest of the movie relevant as well.

3rd) The sex informs the plot. Which is to say that the fact that people fuck each other, and even the way they might do so, alters the rest of the movie. That gives the movie a far more cohesive feeling.

4th) Scenes of indeterminate length and type. Which might mean some are just a BJ while others run the full gamut. Having some hooks which don't get used at all helps to raise expectations while simultaneously creating the thrill of uncertainty in the viewer over what will get done to who and how.

Again this is just the way I would go about making an adult movie. But there seems to me to be clear parallels between Hong Kong martial arts movies and San Fernando smut flicks. In both cases there are usually 6 scenes of action (fighting/fucking), a group of performers adept at their trade but not necessarily trained at acting, a limited timetable (3-6 days), a very limited budget, and a belief that the punters aren't interested in the story just in seeing the money shots.

Jackie Chan produced a very interesting documentary showing how he went about making his low budget movies, and how the basic structure has changed very little even now that he has far more resources to call on. His basic premise was to come up with 6 fight scenes he wanted to stage and then construct a story around them that would tie the action together and provide a series of emotional threads to run through the movie. Substituting fucking for fighting that is exactly what I'd do.

OK, too much thinking. I'm gonna get a beer.

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One thing that we talked about is that prior to the Golden Age, porn never really got to go through the 50s drive-in phase that other exploitation genres enjoyed. Where slasher, horror, monster, etc got to work out creative issues and gain some measure of audience and credibility, all while making a little money, porn jumped from 8mm loops to 35mm features (albeit indies) all in about five or six years, before collapsing into the creative and finacial limbo of the video era. By contrast, when Sam Rami directed Evil Dead he had years of exploitation films to learn from; and today directors are adept at working all manner of exploitation elements into mainstream movies.

The other thing is a quantifable way to think about how unbalancing extended sex scenes can be (and usually are) in a traditional film narrative. Traditional films unfold in a series of scenes in which the action plays out in real time, and each of these scenes is rarely longer that a few minutes. The amount of time between scenes can vary widely ("Nine months later..."), but you rarely have a film with a bunch of 2-5 minute scenes plus five 15 minutes scenes – except in a porn feature. The story unfolds more or less in a traditional way, but takes time out every 5-10 minutes for a 10-15 minute "dance number". Even the finally in Singing in the Rain isn't 15 minutes long!

I think extended sex scenes are a very good thing but I think more work needs to be done to find and create structures that better encompass extended sex scenes. Of course more work means taking creative risks, a very expensive proposititon, even in the low-budget world of porn.

We have some ideas. Should our "real life real people real sex" idea continue to prove profitable, perhaps there will be money available to explore some of them.

-TC

Comstock Films:Real Life, Real People, Real Sex

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Whether they didn't notice the problem or chose to ignore it, I don't know. But neither scenario really presents an image of professionalism, and as long as flawed products like that are allowed to ship, I can't really take the notion, that they "care" about their product and want to invest significant amounts of time and money to make it better, seriously. However much I might want to, as I've otherwise liked several of their movies.

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RE: Titalate

In my opinion, any filmmaker who include explicit sex in his film without taking into consideration the audience's desire to be titalted is making a mistake. Look how much broo ha ha just a flash of Sharon Stone's bush caused; imagine what it would be like if you showed her sucking cock? If you only show it for 20 seconds, it's not enough. If you show her sucking cock, taking up the ass, and then receiving the load on her face, it's the only thing the movie is going to be about.

At the very least it's too early in the game to show explicit sex as a purely matter of fact element of a film, which is sort of what I meant by explicit sex not yet having had the chance to work through its "explotation era" the way that other charged material has. More ove, because real sex has real consiquences, I don't know that it can ever exist inside a fictional context the same way that fake violence can.

RE: Engine of change.

Even low budget shot on video porn is expensive and complicated compared to writing or drawing comic books. The only engine of change that has any real power is money.

RE: DVDs

Too often within a film narrative, the pleasure of being told a story and the pleasure of masturbating while enjoying erotic imagery are in conflict with one another. Several of the ideas that we're currently working on incorporate the idea of using a DVD to present different version of the same material to satisfy different creative ambitions and different desires in the audience; with the idea of creating and erotic narrative environment where story-telling needs and mastubatory needs can at least co-exist, and possibly enhance one another. The primary obsticle at this time are economies of scale. As I said before, money is the real engine of change.

-TC

Comstock Films:Real Life, Real People, Real Sex

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1. Stagliano has always been, to my mind, a feature director. The Buttman films were made, at least initially, as features with the twist that the cameraman was a fictional character in the story--actually, he was the story. Prior to that, John made a lot of video features, and almost all of them were similar to Fashionistas in approach and content--many of the strengths and weaknesses Lee O mentioned in his post are characteristic of all of Stagliano's work, going back to things like Bare Elegance . Pro-am porn and people like Ed Powers and the Anabolic crowd from the mid-90's really popularized casting couch gonzo.

2. The problem with sex informing the plot (which sounds good in principle) is that the soft cable versions won't have those scenes. The nature of the cable porn feature today virtually demands that there be no relation between the sex action and the rest of the movie. Which is just one reason why I think that feature porn will go nowhere as long as it relies on the cable dollar. But without the cable dollar, who will bother? Fashionistas , which was marketed at the $50 price range, and was made by a company with maximum "pull" in the marketplace, took a very long time to go into the black. What other company or director would, or could afford, to take that risk?

3. Actually, I think porn had two separate and very long incubation periods: the first one was in stag films, where pornographers gradually learned how to make a successful hardcore sex scene (the ingredients of which haven't changed much in the last 35 years); and the second one being in 1960's exploitation films--which led the porno camera jockeys to believe that the only thing you had to do was replace the softcore stuff with hardcore stuff, and presto! You had great porn.

The problem was that most exploitation filmmakers had already thought of everything we have said in this thread back about 1970, and rejected the idea that softcore and hardcore erotica had much in common. Their argument was twofold and went like this:

(1) the softcore audience wants to be titillated, not satisfied; they want the action to provide a sweet jumping off point for the viewer's imagination to take over. The explicit image is the lowest form of eroticism; the flat, close-up shot of that soft, slippery, engorged labia can't compete with either the one in my face or the one in my mind (or even the one I can write about on the page). Tease is for artists, hardcore is for dullards; and

(2) most hardcore fantasy is built on the absence of complex narrative context; there are a lot of reasons for this, and I think maybe I wrote about a few of them on this forum once before; basically, causality between narrative and sex is desirable in softcore films, undesirable in hardcore, because the sex desired in hardcore fantasy is usually implausible or impossible to begin with. Also, porn isn't like action movies or musicals because sex, unlike dance, song, or action routines, is both more graphic and yet more static; there is a lot less than can happen, yet what does happen, as Tony suggests, tends to shatter continuity very quickly. We've all made the point before, that sex and narrative seem too often to be working at cross-purposes in the hardcore feature; but consider that various softcore movies handle the sexual sequences without encountering the same sort of problems too much. Why? Is it just the time element? The skill of the actors or filmmaker? I think it is a lot more complex than that.

The exploitation filmmakers warned us it wouldn't work, but nobody listened. And it did work for a while, mostly because it still looked like a movie and was shown in theaters (plus a few skillful people managed to overcome some of these problems). Once video happened, the illusion faded quickly, and people stopped trying. Now the economics are against it also.

Despite all this, I don't think the situation is impossible. I have been thinking about this a bit lately, particularly in lieu of a thread here a month or two back. What many people would like to see is a kind of hybrid between conventional hardcore and titillation films, which might manipulate the hardcore imagery a lot more skillfully within the overall treatment of sex in the final product. Ultimately, it really wouldn't look much like conventional porn though; and that is a problem, because today the audience is so conditioned and stratified into a certain set of expectations, something the pornographer of 1972 didn't have to deal with.

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Sometimes I'll watch a spot of Shannon Tweed doing her thing as a make believe lawyer, or even just some mindbogglingly fit newsreader, and then let my mind fill in the blanks. Other times I'm lazy and let the hardcore do my thinking for me. It's the same with mainstream movies and deciding whether to watch In The Mood for Love or Jaws . The fact that at times I just want it all plain as a fishmonger's daughter doesn't mean I can't also enjoy the more sophisticated French delicatessen girl as well, does it?

The two aren't nearly as separate as they might at first appear. Both have the same aim: to aid masturbation (ok, plus the few couples who use it as foreplay). Both have a degree of sex (faked or real). And both make and effort to be "sexy", even if one is largely impotent in that regard.

I don't know if you've seen any soft core lately (and Vodka would be the guy to comment on this) but it seems to have become a good deal harder and more explicit lately. There's still no penetration, but the way the sex is performed no longer relies on the bodies sticking together at the hip with just a mild gyration, as the woman looks off into the middle distance and thinks of me. These days the movies often have current adult performers in them, and the guy will often pretend fuck with as much gusto as the big boys. Maybe that means the general audience is interested in seeing more realistic depictions of sex once the action starts, or at the very least more exciting depictions?

As to the second point: the issue of the samey and stationary nature of sex, well that's just an opportunity for clever camera men and women, and for creative directors, to come up with new and innovative ideas. It shouldn't be all that difficult, after all, this is sex we're talking about: The primary motivating factor of us all (ok, maybe second after food). How about changing the location the sex is in; the clothes the people wear and how they are removed or retained; the number of partners involved; sitting, lying down, standing up, on props like a park bench; the positions attempted; success or failure in those positions... There are a ton of variables which can be mixed around to reinvigorate any sex scene. After all you could say that there are only so many ways to show a gun fight, but that hasn't stopped Hollywood from constantly trying to come up with new variations. Hell, they could always do an Arthur, and have some b/b action thrown in too if necessary.

For instance, I'd suggest the basic structure of a feature could easily be made more flexible to suit the mood of the viewer watching it. I don't mean anything as far reaching as an interactive movie, more a bare bones story with very truncated sex scenes and the option to expand those segments that you might be inclined to watch. That is very much possible with seamless branching, as seen on the Alien Quadrilogy DVDs put out by Fox. Undoubtedly there are other possibilities which I'm not even considering, and with the advent of the next generation of disc (Blu Ray) and its more advanced interactive layer (B Java) there may be more to come. Those are just the thoughts of an optimist, anyway...

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I don't know what they can show on US cable, but I do know the details for the UK, and the movies for that market definitely have the sexscenes in them.

Over here we can see on free television the same version as the US unrated DVD, or the UK cable version, including (when it started out as a hardcore movie) the occasional edit slip.

And there has been real visible penetration or blowjobs on our tv's too, but only when it's educational
(Still have the tape of a several part Kama Sutra series, which did show everything but cumshots)

Jacco

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Maybe you can have an erotic feature with lesser stars that generally titillates the viewer with softcore action or/and very brief explicitness, but also builds up to a certain climax in the end, which might just as well be 20 secs. of unsimulated blowjob with a pop shot. It seems something like this might logically guide viewer's masturbatory process.

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Hell, we showed Thundercrack in our local youth centre, we're living proof how bad porn is for a society

Jacco

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Tony, I think you might be onto something about the bottom falling out before directors/writers/producers got a chance to fully play with the genre. However, maybe many years of mediocre video features can give them something to learn from. On a side note, I hope your "real life real people real sex" line continues to be profitable as I see you as part of the rise of directors that care about their work.

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With respect to the cutting of hardcore features for cable in the US, I would say it varies widely from channel to channel. Most do edit the features to some degree, and it has been a customary practice for porn producers to shoot scenes "hard" and "soft" to satisfy everybody. Some channels, however, will still edit the soft versions (as well as a lot of the more explicit softcore features). Some of the more conservative cable channels still won't show full frontal female nudity. So it is really a crapshoot as to what ends up left of the sex scenes in the end. Plus, there are all sorts of rules and regulations about what are appropriate themes and content for these features, which also vary from channel to channel. Many of these restrictions have nothing to do with the sex, but relate to the story lines and other content acceptable in the films. Like every branch of popular entertainment today, sex films are viewed as corporate "product"; imagination and quality are incidental but not required. Of course you could say that about gonzo as well, since these companies have basically the same attitude about what they sell. And I suppose the reason for that is simply because, historically, quality has proved to be completely incidental to profit in this businesslists and box covers make your margin. Even back in the 1970's, the biggest grossing features were often not the critically acclaimed titles, but the cheap grinders of the Teenage Deviant variety.

As far as the aim of soft and hard sex films, I would agree with Lee O that they are similar in goal, but I am not convinced that they are much alike in method. Perhaps those of us that have watched a lot of this garbage are more desensitized than the average viewer; we view the two forms as different degrees of the same thing: one more explicit, the other less so. But I wonder about that for the so-called "mainstream." Many would argue that when sex becomes graphic, it becomes completely unsexy; it becomes objectified as body parts and biological acts, rather than as intimate human interactions between people. Conversely, much of the hardcore crowd seems to bask in the knowledge that it is just disconnected parts and acts in all their close-up gaping glory. This seems to be a central idea in the fantasy world of much hardcore, and is connected with what I (poorly) was trying to articulate in my previous post about the distinctions about the compatibility of story and sex in hardcore fantasy. I could go on about this, but I am still trying to work out the connections myself--I think it is a very interesting area, asking what exactly the viewer of hardcore needs to happily jerk off to the images on his (or her, for that matter) screen. But then I am a theorist who likes to ponder these kinds of questions. Most people could care less.

Then there is the problem of the stigma of porn; it is a weird kind of popular pleasure seeking, this: millions of people who watch but remain hidden. The stigma of porn is both its weakness and its strength; a official repugnance that keeps the mainstream at arm's length (albeit peeking in constantly) and provides PC moral censure, while also giving it the subversive, anti-civilized vitality needed to thrive in the underbelly of the social culture. Thus a lot of people might argue that making porn hybrid and mainstream would turn it into something akin to most modern pop music: safe, sedative, and ultimately meaningless.

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I disagree, incidentally, that feeling an intimate response to imagining your own cock in Hillary Scotts ass necessarily has anything to do with the level of intimacy shown on screen. Unless a pornographic director finds a way to package your imagination along with the movie then the intimacy exists nowhere but in your head. Your imagination is not an intrinsic part of the movie, even if for you it might appear to be.

The issue of graphic sex being "unsexy", and of disconnected body parts flailing wildly at each other is a real issue, but mainly I'd reckon for incompetent cameramen and women. There's no good reason why the camera should focus for extended periods on just one part of the performers bodies unless it's a fetish title. The full body shot should, IMHO, be the staple of any scene, with close ups used as they become obviously useful (or stylistically useful). Anything less is surely down to poor camera work and editing, no? The part of the audience who want to just watch body parts are possibly less significant than their over representation on ADT might suggest.

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But what do I know.
The production crew are professionals in their field, they know what to do better than me.

I, however, am a movie professional also - a viewer.
This type of professional is the most arrogant, because it has no boss and has sole authority for at least one customer.

Such a viewer may regard the act of mating as quite uninteresting in itself. Maybe an electrician, who by profession is interested in connecting devices, who happens to be a wrestling fan also, may be interested in pure mating, but anybody else?

It is like watching people on a firing range - utterly boring.

If I watch a feature I demand some kind of "frame" to make it interesting
(Actually I demand such a frame also in other porn genres. My voyeuristic streak is probably too weak to enjo the pure biomechanics of mating.)

Now dress two gunners in black and white, place them on the ends of a street and let them walk to the town square.
They walk itself will be interesting, not to speak of the relief and "reward" the viewer gets, when the guns are actually pulled out, the trigger is squeezed and shots are fired.
Even if the guns aren't pulled and the encounter is resolved in another way, it is interesting.

This is not only true for features - mainstream or porn, but also for commercials, artcore porn, documentaries, porn vignettes (and even for what is sloppily referred to as "gonzo").
You do not even need epic broadness, if you only have idea for a short story do a (classic) vignette, and if you can't even tell a short story, then try to capture/create atmosphere like a painter or video installation artist, artcore (vignettes).

And if you pretend doing a documentary - "gonzo", keep in mind a good documentary also has some build-ups, switching between different paces.

When you decide to watch a movie, you know - within boundaries - what awaits you.
People usually avoid watching movies, whose structure they don't like.

I.e. you are acquainted with the (narrative) structure; a die hard gonzo fan will not watch a feature, and there are even people who like to watch documentaries but don't like mainstream feature films, and vice versa.

But within the viewers preferred genre, the viewer most often chooses products (in mainstream), which don't call for the fast forward button.

In porn however it seems to be different.
I would assume even an experienced and seasoned porn viewer pulls "garbage" from the shelf more often than he does when purchasing/renting a mainstream DVD.

In porn fans of different genres are often disappointed by movies of "their" genre, as if they have lost their "sixth sense" to choose wisely.
I say it is not the fans fault. The artists fail to meet their viewers.

This lead to the notion of "garbage", because the porn watcher knows from his experience of viewing mainstream movies, he is proficient in avoiding products, which do not meet his standards.

You are not tempted to hit fast forward every so often in watching mainstream, compared to watching porn.

Just look at the phrase fans use: "It is only porn."
Its implication or meaning: "What do you expect? It is most often garbage. Get accustomed to it."

Quite sad for anybody involved in producing porn, if he or she is interested in getting something else than money from hir profession. (Probably "porns good natured contempt to its customers" comes from here).

With pornography I often feel tempted to press FF in the "non-action" scenes in features.
However, I rarely feel tempted to FF to the next "Alien eats the next Nostromo team member"-scene, even though I have seen the movie for the umpteenth time.

I am also seldom tempted to FF in a documentary, even if they show more or less only scenes of a predatory cat hunting and catching its game.
Watching gonzos I can't resist to do FF during the "action scenes", probably because of the lack of camera technique, but also due to editing.

How is it that the top-notch mainstream movie makers can do this quite consistently, while the top-notch porn makers fail in this respect more often than not.

I often think a 30-45 minute gonzo scene could be hilarious if condensed to just a few minutes, like a commercial or music video.
I mean, music videos can be quite exciting (and even be rousing like a good tease scene) but more than 5 minutes of watching some people hopping around gets dull.
Tricia Deveraux mentioned her husband let a 60 minutes - IIRC - scene, because it would lack something if he edited too much.
I am inclined to trust him.
But for sure there are more "good" short music videos than "good" musical or opera movies of epic length.

Strangely artcore (Blake, some Ninn, Mourthe, e.g.) seems to be the one (and only?) genre in pornography, where a fan of the genre has the same odds like in mainstream, when it comes to pulling a fulfilling vs. a disappointing product from the shelf.
The very genre of the four genres, which relies the least on the action (or shooting) scenes.

(Mind you, I am not talking about people who oppose the genre like a die hard gonzo or (classic) vignette fan, but people who like the "structure" of the artcore genre.)

Is it because the essence of a sex scene is so difficult to capture?

How do the porn artists counteract this widespread - let's talk French - incompetence?

How do you make watching people at a firing range or baking a creampie with 10 metre in diameter interesting?

Right on, you transform it into a competitive sport event or hire some official of the Guiness Book of Records.

The powers that be in porn rely on circus acts.
But circus acts don't carry you for a long time.
Circus acts get boring also, and you just expect them.

Just see the Matrix trilogy.
The first movie made everyone scream ah and oh, incredible. The circus acts of Matrix covered the other flaws of the movie.
But the hype was gone after the second movie, and few people are genuinely interested in this style of movies any longer.

Another lesson learned: The "shooting scene"-length is also vital for features. Long "shooting scenes" are seldom able to carry a movie, neither in mainstream nor in porn.

You can see this on ADT also. It doesn't matter if someone is from the gonzo or feature party.
Most people get tired of the the breaking boundaries attitude which is nothing else than relying on gizmos, circus acts in porn.

Many people simply don't get a thrill anymore waiting for the Guinness Book of Record Official to jump on front of the camera (or rather the cover designer) declaring "Nobody has ever shoved up three intercontinental ballistic missiles up his ass - New world record! And watch our next release, when we do a creampie in the central train station of a city with one million inhabitants.
The first ICBM and sperm flood is innovative, then it is standard,
Besides a few people who seem to write their doctoral thesis in epidemiology or about the elasticity of circular muscles and collagens in the vicinity of orifices, fewer and fewer seem to care.

This boundary breaking attitude seems to be also quite en vogue with US producers, and in fact it is ridiculous.

I can relate somehow to how cinema fans from Hong Kong or movie buffs acquainted with Hong Kong cinema felt, when some directors were hyped as saviours of (Hollywood) cinema, if I read about some extreme porn associates who thrive for maximum hardcore.

These movie buffs must feel like I do (and probably European ADT-ers and ADT-ers familiar with Japanese and Europorn on beforehand).

The fucking boundary breaking is oh so retro, show us something new - some quality perhaps?
Your extreme thingies are so widespread and most often mainstream in other parts of the world.

Frankly I have to smile whenever industry people (or "young" porn fans) go on with their (or repeat) PR-blabla on how extreme they go in their productions on ADT, since the posters here are probably a little bit more educated porn(history)wise than the average Joe and Jane.

Just ask a Hong Kong movie buff about Tarantino.

This sex scene as a stand-alone, even out of context has more "erotic value", than the accumulated erotic value of the average adult video store.

And there are plenty of mainstream movies which capture eros, passion and lust, and often they don't even show skin as in this scene.

IMHO you shouldn't need to start moving your hand, when you have placed a porn feature in the DVD-player's slit.
Watching a porn feature should move you, forcing you to take a deep breath, and eventually force you to lower your pants and grab for some tissue.

Probably it is due to making use of camera angles, or whatever.
Fact is, mainstream movie crews (amateurs if you will) can capture eros, passion and lust better than the professionals who do nothing else?
Isn't it stunning?
When I think of an erotic scene, the "shooting scene" of porn/erotica, the first scene which comes to my mind is from a mainstream movie. The "amateurs" outdo the professionals!

Maybe capturing the essence of a sex scene is not something miraculous and special, if "amateurs" can do it.

(On the other hand Shock and Latex outdid Matrix , when it comes to the plausibility of the story.)

Thinking of such a scene in porn, I remember a scene from Constance , which showed the penetration only once or twice, most camera angles showed most of the body and shots of the face were also quite prominent, but somehow the atmosphere, the mood was captured and although the setting per se was not "real" it - the passion, lust - felt much more real or plausible than in most other scenes with penetration.
I haven't seen the softcore version, but I assume the hardcore version with one or two close-ups of the penetration made the scene hotter.
The scene in Original Sin may also have benefitted from a penetrattion close-up.

The gyneco-/proctologist close-ups are certainly not necessary for creating a good scene.
Just as it is not necessary to show blood in a thriller or horror movie. But a little bit of blood helps for plausibility - maybe a better term is immersion.

Ceterum censeo:
1. a) Actions have to be taken that facial will become a synonym in porn for a camera angle showing the face during a sex scene and not a certain kind of cumshot.
1. b) Every porn director should have a subscription to this site.
2. Editors of porn features should be forced to make an option for three viewing modes based one the male-female ratio of the "new" facials: male interest, female interest, bisexual (couple) interest.
3. Porn actors and especially actresses should have taken a course on acting in high school at least in high school.

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I'll admit there are animalistic lust times when the pussy is the first thing that I go for, however on average there is foreplay, on both sides. Since features also make money from cable, and foreplay is showable on the premium channels, you'd think that they would have started doing decent foreplay scenes. Tony, the only industry participant in this thread so far, manages them in his films that I have seen so far.

Eroticism isn't showing just body parts or people who jump into graphic sex acts. Eroticism is how you show the bodies, male and female, and how they get to the graphic sex acts. The mood should continue through the scene. Clothing can be erotic in what it shows and doesn't show. A button down shirt, open slightly to show one breast to the bottom of an areola is erotic, especially if then the male plays with the nipple. A woman over a male bending over him wearing a tank top so that we can see the breasts and nipples inside it is erotic.

Some cloths can stay on during the sex scenes, and don't make it just disappear. I hate it when people in the scenes go from partially dressed to naked in an edit. I know I've had sex before when we've remained partially dressed and occasionally mostly dressed.

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The reason I went word by word and phrase by phrase through a couple of your sentences was that they seemed so densely embedded with value-laden language and implicit opinions, and therefore so complicated to parse and unpack -- that I felt incensed by the difficulty of responding to you cogently. Instead of making the effort to do so anyway, I weakly gave into the churlish temptation to use your post as target practice. Yeah, I took some cheap shots. My bad.

I should have bitten off no more I could actually chew, rather than merely gnawing on the whole thing.

Lee O wrote:

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Edited by - Bob on 10/9/2005 9:39:36 PM

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"I love youse all..."

I think I have more to say.

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I didn't say that "graffic-ness" is unimportant. What I said was that graphicness itself doesn't make a scene hot or not for me. However, if I would otherwise like a scene -- the performers, the set-up, the chemistry, the energy, the vibe -- then I'd prefer it to be more graphic than not.

Have I tripped? (If so, it won't be the first time I've skinned my knee. )

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I disagree with Lazerus, but I don't want to debate his points. If other people find his ideas convincing or illuminating, who am I to argue?

However, I DID briefly set forth some of own ideas on this topic in an older thread, which I'll reprint here:

If I were to identify the fundamental problem with feature-film porn, I'd begin by saying that, in a good "mainstream" feature film, ALL action (in the broad sense, including dialogue) serves to propel the plot and develop the themes. If most action in a porn feature-film is sex action, that's not going to make for a good movie unless the movie is itself about sex -- otherwise, the sex is going to be extraneous to the narrative, just a distraction. But because most feature porn films do not purport to be "about" sex -- even if they are "sex-filled" -- the resulting sex seems to hang limply on an extraneous plot (or the extraneous plot hangs limply on the sex, whichever).

In the rare porn feature, such as "FASHIONISTAS", that IS explicitly about explicit sex, the narrative style works because the sex is "meaningful" in the context of the whole.

If SEX is the thing in porn (is that definitional?), then maybe it would be best in the great range of cases to dispense with feature-length narratives and just employ the most simple and compelling ways to present the sex -- gonzo, "true" documentary, wall-to-wall, or (my personal favorite) vignette-style porn. In the last of those styles mentioned, the dramatic settings employed can make the sexual encounters more interesting and evocative without wasting the viewer's time, straining the available resources, or running counter to the unique abilities and limitations of the pornographers and performers.

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That doesn't change that porn is usually shit and could do with some major improvements, but it might provide a different explaination for the reliance on the FFW button.

Porn is lucky in a way that it's not released theatrically like Hollywood movies, so it can tailor it's experience more fully to the possibilities of DVD. That mean's the traditional feature doesn't have to exist, or that it can be altered in ways which take advantage of the extra space and chance to view things in a multitude of ways. What I mean is that instead of mimicing Hollywood DVDs and having a main feature suplemented by a few tangential extras, the feature could be seen as a starting point to get to the meat which could be stored in a similar way to extras. Giving people the option to chose how they could watch the disc might reduce the need for the FFW button.

It's occured to me that maybe pornographers are so keen to prove there's actual penetration going on that they relegate all other considerations to that end. Fantastic erotic fucking? "Screw that, get me a better angle." Guy really pounding into the girl while exploring her body with his hands? "Get your mits off, you're obscuring the cock shots." Proper straight on fucking? "Try to tilt your body and place your right hand on your left hip to 'open up' the action."

For myself this childlike need to reverify every instant that these people are having sex, and you the viewer isn't being conned is at the root of some of the missing eroticism in porn. At least I'm guessing that's the reason for the incessant closeups and oddly twisted body angles.

IMHO you shouldn't need to start moving your hand, when you have placed a porn feature in the DVD-player's slit.
Watching a porn feature should move you, forcing you to take a deep breath, and eventually force you to lower your pants and grab for some tissue.

I wonder what finacial situation would have to exist for the directors to start making films that didn't concern themselves one way or the other about showing the genital grinding, and concentrated instead on the heat between the performers? Let the cock and socket show when they happen to, and let them be obscured too when the action is natuaraly obscured. Would it really be so difficult to find a market for something like that?

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1st point: Mrs. RT & I enjoy watching movies in our bedroom. My preference is that it is something erotic however that doesn't always happen. When it does it need to keep our interests to move from the couch to the bed (we have a couch in our bedroom (large area) that we like to watch movies/tv on together once the kids are gone for the evening).

2nd point: Whatever backstory that you devised to create the film must be solid enough to keep us watching it while we are sitting there. If your idea of a story is "Hi, I'm Bambi, fuck me" & it goes straight to a fuck scene then you've probably lost Mrs. L. (losing me depends on how big her tits are ).

3rd point: After the story has progressed & has brought us into the story to the point where we are getting it on along with the movie, it needs to go to a plateau where we the viewers decide "enough" & turn it off or decide "hey, this is a good movie" & watch the rest of it because it is a good movie .

Fashionistas is one of my top movies but it is too long. As a couple, I don't think that we've ever seen the ending fwiw. We've been to the show in Vegas & have tried to watch the dvd to its end. The problem is the we get "distracted" in the middle (no complaints mind you ) and never get to see the end of the movie.

60-90 minutes does seem to be the maximum time frame allowed if everything is flowing together.

The biggest problem I see is will the core section of raincoaters still support the feature films that depend on their dollars to continue the genre?

RT

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Kierkegaard.

Edit typos: "I'm Mad @ the internet right now!"

Edited by - kierkegaard on 2/25/2006 9:06:56 AM

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As far a adult features go, I really think that it is VERY possible for the business to make more high-end features. They just need to make sure that the sex is good for the raincoaters and the story is good for the people who need more than just good sex.
The financial end shouldn't be a huge problem. There aren't a whole lot of directors in porn financing their own projects. It's the studios producing them, so it's the studio's call of how much the budget will be.
Fashionistas cost 500 thousand to make. It took just under 1 year for it to break even, and it's made a pretty decent chunk of change in the additional time since then. We estimate we'll be spending about that much on Fashionistas 2.

And I agree with juha that taking time to make the movie better is a great thing, but then when the movie is ready, slate it into your release schedule instead of sitting on it.

Lazerus - thank you for remembering John back to his days of movies like Bare Elegance and Mystic Pieces. He tries really hard to maintain the eroticism that he was working on in the mid-80s.
He had a lot of fun with gonzo in the 90s, but he didn't feel the same sense of creative satisfaction from it that he did with his features. Buda was a small version of that, but he's worked hard in his life to be able to spend a lot of time making movies that he really wants to make. For what it's worth, Fashionistas has probably made quite a bit more money in 3 1/2 years than the average porn director makes in that time span.
So instead of killing himself to pump out 2 gonzo movies a month, John labored for over a year on one feature. Then he spent almost 2 years on the dance show, and now he's been working on Fashionistas 2 for about 6 months and will start shooting in 10 days.

Personally, I'd rather make one great movie a year than 10 average ones and 2 pretty goods.

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