Well, it's the opposite of "feature," which means you'll probably have your thread bounced over to the Porn Pool.
Basically, if "mainstream" porn tries to emulate Hollywood movies with the added attraction of sex, then "gonzo" is meant to emulate documentaries. It's effectively a take on "reality" sex. Originally, when John Stagliano (and soon after Seymore Butts who begat Shane, Rodney Moore who begat all the POV Blowjob movies, Ed Powers and Jamie Gillis, who begat all the pro-am "video virgin/new girl" movies, and so on ...) shot his first Buttman movies, they created the impression that the girls were really just hanging out, and let themselves be talked into a sexual adventure, shot either as a POV (or point of view) scene -- the guy getting his dick sucked is also the cameraman -- or as a regular scene with a male actor (like Rocco Siffredi) acting as a kind of surrogate for the filmmaker (who sometimes would get in on the action as well, narrating, participating, strolling around with the camera on his shoulder). Well, actually, the girls are all porn pros -- 95 % of the time -- and everything is carefully set up to create the illusion of spontaneity.
Gonzo was the name Hunter S. Thompson gave for all his wild scribblings and crazy twisted sagas of drugged out excess. So, in a way, the best gonzo aims to be a little crazy. But has become a kind of generic term for any type of porno that isn't strictly a feature (bigger budget productions) and has wall-to-wall sex. A true gonzo idea would be the midnight prowl website, where porn girls are paid to have sex with total strangers in a sex video store. (Originally, this was a Jamie Gillis thing in the early '90s called "On the Prowl.") "Shanes World: Campus Invasion" series actually DOES verge into real life because they'll get real college kids to have sex on camera (much to their parents' horror, and their later regret when the dean kicks them out of the dorm -- ha ha!!)
I tend to think the definition of gonzo has been somewhat abused. It seemed not long back that the term was used as mentioned in the Wikipedia link but nowadays any wall-to-wall sex movie (one without a storyline) is called gonzo and consequently the term seems barely useful as a descriptor anymore.
I agree, it used to be used more exclusively. Truly, most of RLD and Anabolic type films are "wall-to-wall," rather than actually gonzo. Except for Chico, who really is kinda gonzo.
I have always wondered what the difference is between gonzo journalism and New Journalism. Hunter S. Thompson is often cited when one talks about New Journalism. Is it the journalist's personal involvement in the story which determines?
Yeah. I mean, Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and Norman Mailer and HST were all "new journalists." Esquire magazine in the 1960s, New York magazine, Rolling Stone, all provided a platform for this. HST was the "gonzo" guy though. Most magazine journalism these days takes off from that tradition, though in a watered-down manner. Occasionally,, some writers manage to write a really great piece that is up to those standards. But it was such a part and parcel of the late 1960s.
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AlexPanzer Deactivated User
1593 Posts 6/03
Posted - Feb 16 2004 : 3:23PM
Gonzo = porn on a budget. With no plot or anything, just camera, probably some lights, and a couple fucking.
Quick set-ups, little if any plot, lots of "whackability" material without much need for fast-forwarding; and (as I opine in the Learning Annex classes I teach in LA and San Diego)"one where the talent recognizes the presence of the camera and sometimes even talks to it" (e.g., if I'm doing a doggy position with a girl and the phone rings in the next room, I look into the camera and say something like "There's no way I'm gonna take my dick out of this beautiful woman to answer that phone---and, I bet you wouldn't either"!!!!!!!!!!!
The phrase was originally intended to describe a piece that delivered a social commentary, a pathology of society, if you will, through the use of colorful, metaphoric verse intermingled with straight-forward reporting. When applying this "gonzo" terminology to adult film, you get AMERICAN GUNK. It's societal satire, parody, and protest, using uninhibited, hardcore sex as the platform.
"Gonzo" as it has come to be coined is now a rather petty and useless term. 95% of 95% of everything sold on the God Damn shelves is "gonzo"...Insinuating that "gonzo" has come to mean "mostly crap".
Gonzo is more likely to include a bowling pin insertion in the scene. (Actually, that's surprisingly rare.)
Gonzo is less edited than features, like what you get when the coffee filter breaks. (You get it all, swimming around in your cup.) And gonzo is more friction oriented, to the exclusion of most everything else. So while it shows you "more of what you want to see," at the same time it won't be as glossy a product. It's more diluted in the sense that the memorable moments are more spread out over time, unfiltered, with the "real" inbetween time left in instead of edited and condensed and concentrated into a series of erotic glimpses, which is what features supposedly try to do.
Norman Mailer, at the press conference for the movie he directed, "Tough Guys Don't Dance," quoted Jean-Luc Godard to something of the effect that, if he could, he would replace his penis with a camera lens. Maybe that would be "ultimate gonzo." Those wacky Frogs!
