Debunking bad porno

Plenty of porn with awesome plots (compared to today’s standards) have been made back in the 70’s. So that disproves you first point, provided you have big enough budget and a line of veterans to star in a movie. Seka has just said in a recent YNOT interview that she thought in her day porn was bad. She says today’s porn is fucking unbelievably bad - makes what she thought terrible look downright awesome.

So what’s changed? One thing imo - it’s way easier today for virtually anyone to shoot porn.

If you ever decide to do it again, I’d be interessted in seeing what the learning curve did for the next produciton.

100% agree with you, and it’s so hard to explain these things to someone until they have actually gone through the experience. The commercial realities of making porn force a certain set of constraints on the director wherein 2 to 3 people talk in one room, fuck, and then the movie cuts to a different 2 to 3 people talking, fucking, rinse-lather-repeat. Shooting porn entails a learning curve where you either strive to divorce yourself from the formula as you gain confidence, or you get lazy and settle into the formula. I hope that you and I a.) get more work as directors in the future and b.) move farther away from the formula as we go.

Art does not yeild to focus groups. People don’t have a clue what they want until someone shows it to them. That means doing something different in the necesarily commercial medium of film (which includes low-budget porn) means taking risks.

People are inherently risk averse. Corporations more so. This aversion is overcome (in some people and some corporations) by a perception that there may be something to be gained by taking risk.

The current economics of porn make it hard to entice people or corportations to take risks.

“There are too many blowjobs, not enough cunnilingus” - From the perspective of female friendly porn, I understand this complaint. However, though its partly a male-centered thing, this is also another film thing - blow jobs just look beter on film, because the cock is all out there and shit.

See, here I disagree! It’s just that no one as of yet has been creative enough to do a special effects shot with a VEV (aka Vagina Eye View), giving us a point of view from inside a women showing a humongous tongue doing laps. It would just be a matter of fast cutting between the VEV, the exterior (standard view) and the reaction shot of the women on the receiving end.

One of the most effective (and economical) ways of doing dialog is to try for two long takes of the scene, each from a different camera angle and then just cut back and forth in editing. This KISS formula has worked well for many no-time, no-money indie productions.

All good points, Dacia. I mentioned the other day how I thought cumshots always seemed out of rhythm with the rest of sex in porn. Hearing you say they’re also stressful and time consuming to produce only confirms what’s pretty obvious on screen.

I swear if I ever do a porn film (heh) it’s going to have an orgasm-denial fetish theme so that no matter how long the film or how many scenes, there’s only one cumshot at the end. :-)

Take care,

figleaf

I know you didn’t mean it this way, but when I read “pornula,” I keep thinking “porn + granola”…

Benny wrote:

100% agree with you, and it’s so hard to explain these things to someone until they have actually gone through the experience. The commercial realities of making porn force a certain set of constraints on the director wherein 2 to 3 people talk in one room, fuck, and then the movie cuts to a different 2 to 3 people talking, fucking, rinse-lather-repeat.

You know, I don’t think it has to be this way, really. I can’t recall why we were talking about it, but I have heard enough people talking about regular film that I said, well you’ve got to figure that one aspect of the “porn gaze” is simply the nature of the beast that is ‘film.’

And it really shouldn’t be a surprised to anyone who thinks about capitalism, commercialism, etc. — just making money — that hardly any enterprise gets anywhere without playing the game and number one is, you need to make money.

And then there’s the other thing, something again not from porn, but just from a person who used to write for Hollywood. To paraphrase what he’d said, “No one tells you that the script has to make money. they tell you that the script has to make people happy. No one wants anyone walking out of a film depressed. Crying cathartic tears, fine. But depressed? Angry? Not a chance.”

There are ways to do porn that don’t end up being bad, stereotypically or no, and they involve creative cinematography, enthusiastic actors and a fine balance between smut and transitional plots. I think many of those criticisms you mentioned end up being misdirected because consumers aren’t sure what exactly they want so they fall back to the “there’s no plot” default that they’ve heard so many times, instead of being able to articulate that they want something fresh, hot, and visually pleasing.

Going beyond that, yes, the female orgasm is frustratingly difficult to capture on film, but not as bad as one might think. I’ve done it a handful of times and I’ve seen other people have for-real orgasms with no real problem. It depends on finding the right girl. And of course, the “real orgasm” criticism is easy enough to address if the fake orgasm is truly convincing.

That’s my $0.02, anyway, and surely my opinions must reflect those of the general public!

Anna hits the nail on the head. There’s definitely a need for creativity in porn, but it has little to do with making a movie with a strong narrative plot.

Just a few minutes of thought into what one expects from porn and what one expects from a good film will tell you why its wrong-headed to expect that porn will ever be just like a regular movie but with sex. Think about regular movies with sex scenes – the sex scenes are pretty short. That’s not just to get it past the MPAA – a 10- or 20-minute sex scene is going to completely take you out of the narrative, not to mention the fact that you can’t fit many such scenes in a 120-minute movie. Traditional film needs to deliver a certain story arc in that time, and that limits the amount of sex you can put it. (And this is not to mention the fact that porn actors are almost never trained dramatic actors, another huge limitation.)

On the other hand, porn absolutely needs to deliver on the sex scenes, long and in detail. In fact, some of the best porn are the kind of videos produced by Abby Winters or Tony Comstock – one long scene of two people having sex for an hour. Obviously not much room for narrative there!

Rather than look to narrative film as a model for porn, I think it would be better to look to music videos and sports documentaries – the kind of film where you’re documenting a physical performance by non-actors. There’s been some great work done in these genres over the years, and pornographers can probably learn a lot from them.

Figleaf said:

I know you didn’t mean it this way, but when I read “pornula,” I keep thinking “porn + granola”…

Being from the West Coast, you and I know all about that particular combination, don’t we, Figleaf? Certainly there’s a goodly amount of it created in San Francisco.

It could mean other things, though. Maybe a reference to pornographic vampires?

Anyway….

The plot thing is an ongoing dilemma for those of us who want something more, and it’s a dangerous tightrope. Too little, and the scene just seems anonymous. Too much, and the thing just drags itself under its own weight. Plot-based porn also sometimes sacrifies eroticism to the needs of the plot. An extreme example of this was (I think — reaching back into the murky recesses of my pornographic memory here) in the Mitchell Brothers’ film Sodom and Gomorrah, where some guy is punished by the Ruthless Puritanical Dictator for having sex by having his dick inserted into an anthill. Um… no thanks. My erection went away for about three days after that one.

I think that a lot of the time, when people complain about wanting more plot in porn, what they’re really asking for is more personality. In the scene, and in the actors. I really like some build-up, some time when I’m straining with anticipation for the moment when they finally strip and fuck each others’ brains out. I also like knowing that there’s a reason that they’re fucking, other than the fact that Vivid needed to get something down on tape.

One of my big complaints about porn is no sense of rhythm. That is, they build the energy up gradually, to a high point and then flatline it. It stays at the same level with no respite or change in pace for the next twenty minutes. It’s hot for maybe the first five or six, interesting for the next five, and after that, I start thinking I might go get a coke out of the fridge. I (sort of) jokingly say that this is a sign that the people responsible for establishing modern porn listened to too damn much prog-rock in the seventies. Time to make some punk rock or free jazz porn.

Given the worthwhile:shit ratio for regular feature films, I can imagine how hard it is to make good porn.

I mean, how hard must it be to find really good writers who are willing to write scripts for porn movies?

Even moreso with actors. There are lots of shitty actors around, and not that many good ones. How many of those good ones are likely to be interested in being in hardcore films? Chloe Sigivny? And she’s not even that great an actress.

These problems could, perhaps, be overcome, and certianly mitigated to some degree by a generous application of money. However, given that you can get porn good enough to get yourself off with free on the internet, really good porn would need to be financed as art rather than business. I’m not sure that’s real likely