SDC

"If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen and caries that form."

Michel Houllebecq

Edited by - SDC on 3/19/2004 8:58:37 AM

[Link]

$250K is a big porn budget. It barely qualifies as low-budget in the world of film and television.

-T.C.

[Link]

But plotting seems to be a function of the writing

So you're saying there's no room in the 250K for a quarter-decent (not even half-decent!) hack writer?

I agree. :-)

But in porn the old Hollywood joke seems even more pointed... How did the blonde try to make it to the top in Hollywood? She slept with the writer.

... but in porn there doesn't even seem to be one of those.

[Link]

-T.C.

[Link]

That probably explains a lot.

[Link]

-T.C.

[Link]

With regard to budgets, the point you make is perfectly valid, and you know more about the costs involved than I do, but there's more to it than that. For a start, if I were making a low budget movie - porn or otherwise - the last thing I'd be trying to do is remake a Hollywood blockbuster. Some of the major players have a tendency to confuse ambition with expenditure. If I wanted to watch explosions and special effects (which I don't) I'd go to my local multiplex. Of course, I could be barking up the wrong tree entirely. A cursory glance at the mainstream world indicates that conspicuous expenditure (and hype) help to generate revenue.

[Link]

-T.C.

[Link]

It's fun to see a "real" movie that has hardcore sex, but in the end I get annoyed by the bad sex scenarios, and it undermines the whole enterprise.

[Link]

In a movie with a plot that is specifically about sex, at least there's some hope of incorporating stroke-worth sex-scenes into the narritive.

-T.C.

[Link]

As to why sex scenes have to be 10-15 minutes, it comes down to budget. When compared to other types of filmmaking scenes are cheap and easy to shoot. If a typical feature is 80 minutes and has 60 minutes of sex (5 x 12 minutes), cutting those scenes to 5 minutes means making up 35 minutes of "real movie".

More importantanly, if I could produce 60 minutes of entertaining "real movie" I wouldn't fuck up it's distribution and income potential by putting in 30 minute of explicit sex, no matter how well incorporated.

-T.C.

[Link]

In a film with a tightly linear plot structure, everything should be subservient to the forward progression of that plot. Character, incident, milieu, dialogue, costumes; even the stylistic elements such as framing, editing, medium, etc. The audience is clued into the narrative structure (that is, the way in which the "story" is presented, which in the case of linear plots, has a particular sequence of events or actions, usually defined as conflicts, discoveries, reversals; all of which must be presented in a very particular order) as the single element to constantly keep their eye on. Any nonsequiturs from this forward plot progression will inevitably confound, irritate, or bore the audience, who has already been alerted by the narrative structure to await eagerly the next plot point.

(If you want an example of how this can work, consider Polanski's Chinatown . Using the old genre of film noir (famous for this type of plot-driven narrative structure) as a starting point, Polanski--a obsessively meticulous and detail-oriented director anyway--has constructed a film (with screenwriter Robert Towne) that has barely 60 seconds of wasted film stock anywhere.)

Of course most films don't do this very well, often because they have some other agenda to deal with. In porn, that other agenda is sex. And sex wipes everything else away in seconds. In a horror film, if a suspenseful scene takes place where a woman is running from a monster, the focus is on the chase and how it will resolve itself. But suppose we make the woman naked. Well, forget the chase and the suspense then--by taking her clothes off we have tipped the audience that the focus should be on her naked body, and everything else is just background music. Bombs and violence has the same effect. Soon, your audience no longer cares about the plot at all; they are just waiting for the nudity, and effects, the gore, or whatever. Whether 15 minutes or 5 or 2, you have broken the linear narrative up with some other obtrusive business and split the audience focus. So you have to make up your mind what you're in it for, really. Most action films are weakly plotted because it is simply not the point. As are most sex films. But there are all sorts of other narrative structures which can accommodate sex more easily. Exploitation films are a good resource (lets not forget that Metzger, who many people think of as the dean of feature porn films in the 1970's, cut his teeth making and distributing soft-core films for many years before he shot his first porno), as are many of the old classic comedies by Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. Why bother with plot-driven porn at all? Usually what we're after in feature hardcore is not story anyway; we're after situation . And, I might add, situation that doesn't impede voyeuristic sexual fantasy.

[Link]

There are a number of potential explanations for the presence of narrative in adult features - historically it has helped to counter charges of obscenity and has also served to reassure new customers. Today I fear it exists primarily for marketing purposes. Perhaps a premise - a context for the action - is sufficient for adult movies. Perhaps those of us looking for engaging, intelligent, narrative-driven adult features are looking for something that doesn't exist . . . something that can't exist.

I've almost given up on contemporary features because, however careful the selection process, the disappointments still outnumber the successes. But history has shown us that a degree of artistic success and narrative coherence is possible within the constraints of the genre. And I think the word genre is crucial here. As a fan of exploitation movies and adult movies, I don't really look to films for profound insights into the human condition (although it's always pleasant to find them) but I still struggle to accept banality. Perhaps that the problem I have with so many of today's adult features.

SDC

Edited by - SDC on 3/21/2004 5:07:34 PM

[Link]

Some don't agree with this sentiment however , as you can see from Mlyon's impressive review .

Echoing the opinions of several others here , I also think that exploitation or action movies would be a good basis for porn features . There's a reason that action movies are often condemned as the 'pornography of violence' .

[Link]

If you wanted mainstream inspiration for feature style porn; I'd recommend musicals. However, I think what you'd find is that the same problems that ham-string modern musicals apply to feature porn as well.

-T.C.

[Link]

It seems like in the old all-feature days, every big movie had a porn counterpart (with a funny title). Nobody does that anymore, and even though those movies were almost always terrible, I kind of miss that.

Edited by - obibong on 3/22/2004 4:16:10 PM

[Link]

I miss the fun titles more than anything , Obi . ET : The Extra Testicle , and The Sperminator spring to mind .

[Link]

An aside...TC you make my heart beat faster at the thought of "Chicago" turned into a hot sex romp. OMG, sequins, high heels, butch prison scenes, lawyers and vice galore...what more could a girl want?

:) LC

[Link]

As far as modern features are concerned, they are mostly made for cable distribution, and attempt to imitate the soft-core formats of Zaman King, etc. The sex CANNOT be integral to the action or plot, because it often has to be edited out for distribution purposes. Likewise, a feature that edited a careful continuous montage of hardcore action into the storyline (as Metzger did, for example, in sections of Misty Beethoven ) would be impossible to censor for softcore cable in any coherent way. So the hardcore stuff is shot as meaningless inserts, to be dropped into the film at the appropriate junctures, and then removed for distributors and channels where only soft-core is permitted. Often, if you watch some of these hardcore "insert" features, you can clearly see the edits--often the grain of the video itself looks a bit different during the sex scenes.

TC is right also; musicals work in pretty much the same way as porn, with the same problems. I would steer clear of romantic comedy as a genre, since the essentially realistic nature of the relationships in that type of film work at cross-purposes with porn. Slapstick comedy, including parodies (as Obilong has mentioned) were one of the most common forms early features took--look at Deep Throat , to cite only the most famous example. Conversely, if there is one thing that characterizes practically all porn these days, whether feature or wall-to-wall, it is the complete lack of any sense of humor. Sometimes I think this is a particularly male thing regarding sex; if you have been to a male-strip club, and seen the girls screaming, laughing, throwing money, and generally having a loud and hysterically good time--then been in female clubs where solitary men peer through the darkness; serious, quiet, expressionless, as the girls parade around in front of them; well, you get the general distinction I'm making. In this environment, laughter seems prohibited. I have experienced this same phenomenon watching porn in mixed company--the girls think its all pretty silly (it almost always is), but the guys look like they're trying to comprehend Plato or something. Very odd.

[Link]