Hey Mike, first off, you don’t need “sources” to tell you there’s a new guy over here – just check the masthead of the March issue, which has been out for over a week now. Oh, but right, you’ve been “cut off.”
Secondly, I assure you you’re dead wrong when you report that Tim’s involvement is now limited to budgetary and hiring issues. Tim’s the publisher and as such pro-actively runs the magazine, is more involved on the editorial side than ever, implementing a fresh, exciting vision he has for AVN which involves many new ideas he’ll be instituting in coming months. My job, and that of managing editor Peter Stokes, is merely to assist him in implementing his vision of the magazine. He, not me and Peter, is running the show. So now you know.
-Mike
Mike has also assured me that AVN didn’t cancel me and that I could resume looking at the pictures and reading Kernes next month. Thanks Mike!
He Ain’t a Director, I’m a Director:
I have been watching the little tiff between two of porns hottest “Directors”, Jules Jordan and RobbyD, with a high degree of amusement.
It all started when RobbyD commented along the lines of “What does Jules direct, what does anyone in Gonzo direct?” To which Jules got annoyed and went on to explain how he does indeed direct by naming everything that he does that a real director doesn’t do.
It’s funny when people in porn try to take the high road.
Let’s face the truth people, in terms of what a real director does, nobody shooting gonzo can call himself a director. The further truth is that precious few people shooting story driven porn are real directors either, and the ones who are, aren’t very good, but then they aren’t exactly working with real scripts or real actors either.
A real director has a very simple job that is massively complicated. He or she must very simply, tell a story, often the director helps to write the story but not always. The most important thing a real director needs is vision. The story must come to life in the directors head in such a way that he can visualize the story from reading it, and he must visualize it in intimate detail.
A director must also make the actors fit into the story both visually and from the standpoint of dialogue, a good example would be a movie about pirates, there were in fact female pirates (think Jenna in Conquest here) but they didn’t have fake tits and they didn’t have tribal tattoos, and while they might have said “avast”, “maties” and “scurvy dog” they most assuredly did not say “yo”, “posse” and “what up dawg”.
The Director must work closely with the screen writer so that the characters come to life, what brings a character to life is called the character arc. The mechanism through which characters make decisions throughout the life of the story that create sub plots as well as conflicts for the character. How many times have you watched a movie and said to your self “You shouldn’t have done that” or “That’s what I would have done” that is exactly what you are suppossed to say to yourself, if you do then the director has done his job and if he makes you think what he wants you to think he has done his job well. The detail with which he must do the job is staggering. The camera distance from the subject, the angle, the placement, the sequence of shots all must be correct, not to mention the actors body language, emotion, eyes, mouth, tone of voice all must be true to the directors vision. Just one little flaw and the audience can detach from the story immediately, either because they were confused mentally, visually or intellectually by what they witnessed.
We haven’t even gotten into story boarding, editing, sound design, character motivation, communicating his vision or the finer points of the art of direction.
A good director will leave his brushstrokes all over his work, same as any artist. Look at Sergio Leone. His movies always have his handprint all over them, minimal dialogue, letting the pictures tell the story, larger than life characters, heavy use of dramatic, big closeups of eyes, he used all of these things and more to make movies that are identifiably his.
By the same token a bad director leaves his fingerprints all over the movie as well, just in an unpleasant way.
So what we have in essence here is a guy who is a star little league pitcher arguing with a first string little league quarterback about which of them will be the Lakers starting forward next year.
Now what they should be doing, is enjoying their relative success because they do both arguably have talent as pornographers and until they land a gig as a real director, telling a real story with real actors….well you get my drift.
Both of them might consider this:
Give Peter Jackson a budget of 10,000 dollars, a script, and five days to shoot it. Tell him he has to have 5 sex scenes and the story has to come in at 120 minutes or less. Welcome to what RobbyD and Jules do Peter…
That’s the way I see it.
