I watched a movie last night on Netflix instant queue that made me think…A Lot.
The movie title is “Starlet” and Netflix has the unrated version. The movie was a rich character study about an aspiring young adult film starlet and a cranky and hermit-like elderly woman. I don’t want to give away anything about the movie because it is worth a look, particularly from a character development standpoint.
And it has explicit sex, not much, but it is certainly there and it is hardcore by anyones definition.
The movie made me think of porn’s golden age, when porn was made by people with backgrounds in theater.
I saw my first porn movie in 1976, I was 19 yeas old and the movie was “Deep Throat”. In some ways that movie is likely responsible for me getting into porn, because had it just been the typical uninspired porn that you see so much of these days I likely would never have seen another one, but it was fun and it didn’t take itself too seriously yet it still told a story and the characters were people you could identify with. Movies like Barbara Broadcast, The Devil in Miss Jones, Behind the Green Door, Debbie Does Dallas, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, they explored sexuality in a way that it had never been explored on film and they always did it in a way that the viewer could identify with the characters. Sex wasn’t the contact and often violent act that it is now, it was a little clumsy yet very realistic. The Male actors were mens men, and most of them were classically trained in Theater. Paul Thomas for example was in a very popular and controversial Broadway Play called “Jesus Christ Superstar”, PT played Judas. Likewise John Leslie, Jamie Gillis and Randy West (as well as others) could actually act, as could many of the females.
Back then the focus stayed on the female during the sex scenes, she was more realistically portrayed, she was almost always submissive and care was taken to accentuate her femininity in the camerawork. The guys were just average guys like most of the guys watching the movies. In his private life Jamie Gillis may have been bi-sexual but you wouldn’t know it by watching his character in most of his movies, he was every man’s man.
Even the ones that were somewhat short on good acting like the infamous Johnny Wadd movies by Bob Chinn had real stories, real character development and provided for an escape from reality into a fantasy (as a movie should do). These days the escape is more of a ten or fifteen minute break to rub one out while watching two (or more) robotic performers compete for who can overpower the other in terms of volume, preening for the camera and the result has al of the eroticism of two stray dogs fucking.
Getting back to Starlet why is it that we in porn can’t do that? The same movie with more hardcore would have made for a great movie as well, “9 1/2 Weeks” is another story that could have been a great carrier for for a movie with explicit sex.
One reason we can’t do it is because we have precious few people in porn that have even an inkling of how to tell a story with a camera, they have no comprehension of even the most basic things like the rule of thirds, crossing the line, conflict etc. And when it comes to writers that can write a real screenplay with character arcs and all of that we have even fewer, matter of fact we may not have any, but I would bet there is no shortage of people who could and would.
Starlet had a few cameos in it from porn actors and actresses, namely Asa Akira and Manuel Ferrara but they were just very short minimal dialogue ( Manuel was in the explicit sex scene.) But the Female lead, Dree Hemingway, can act and does a great job of it, I dunno if they used a body double for her sex scene but it didn’t appear so. There are a few people in porn that can actually act but even our best would need to really step up their game. We don’t have real actors anymore, like Jamie Gillis or Paul Thomas and as for the girls Melissa Hill was a damn good actress, I don’t know of anyone currently in the biz that could pull off a serious female lead but I do know that for a project like this shot in L.A. there would be no shortage of real actresses that would likely want to.
I would say to Steven Hirsch or Steve Orenstein to can the parodies stop remaking “The Devil In Miss Jones” or whatever and try for something that really is award worthy, try to make a real movie, I’m betting you would find there is a real market for it.
38 Responses
Why Can’t We In Porn Make Good Movies http://t.co/5cEPcHGWHm
@MikeSouth1226 I think it was what the market has demanded for some time. This idea may save the porn film indust from the ubiquity of porn.
well that has beenone of the oldest agruements in porn to date. is porn art or not and really i think thats where the line should be drawn in court. art has to be something created before you that can be observed by any and all 5 senses and provokes discusion between to or more people, thats pretty much the the root definition all true artist difine themselves by. well reality kings and bang nus and cherry pimps and kink.com thats not art. all the older stuff and alot of new thing micheal ninn is working on that art and thats real porn and those in the indusrty that do true art in the form of porn need to stop asscotating themselves with all these fools and band together and make a porn film festvial via invite only and block all the smutt then you find a true safe indusrty to work in that the public will not be offended by.
@lawofficeofjaj @MikeSouth1226 I agree. Just look at the popularity of the Parodies being released constantly.
@illsnidiotic @MikeSouth1226 good point. Those seem very popular.
I am on it Mike…don’t you worry…I have a 12 dollar budget, some blank VHS tapes, and an add out on Backpage looking for actors. Shouldn’t be long before I roll out the red carpet.
Jay Mckenney liked this on Facebook.
zoe voss was the body double in that movie
It takes real talent to make good art, that is why most porn could barely qualify as art. I can take a shit on a piece of canvas and call it art, but in reality its just a piece of shit.
A simple analogy, real movies are like the NBA, the very best porn is like the six year old park basketball league. (I would have said two year old league, but two year olds dont play basketball, but it would have been more accurate.).
“I dunno if they used a body double for her (Dree Hemingway) sex scene”
Zoe Voss was her body double.
You’re so right about Melissa Hill… not to mention the woody she gave me. Oops. I guess I just mentioned it. Oh fucking well. 🙂
It would be kind of hard to make a porno while trying to figure out how to artistically shoot the female lead having her head shoved into a dirty toilet and then eating cum off the floor.
Mainstream porn isn’t what it use to be and artistic movies would probably be seen as completely boring by today’s porn standards… The sad fact is most porn stars aren’t necessarily respected as any sort of “actress” as they were in the past. They’re normally viewed as a couple of holes in today’s market instead of an actual human being because they are expected to do just about anything imaginable for a few dollars. It’s just the way the industry has evolved primarily due to the constant access to internet porn and the consumers lack of attention span when it comes to porn.
An artistic movie could very well be made by a porn director, but many consumers would probably have a hard time accepting the fact that it was made to be considered “porn.” Currently, most porn is something to either laugh at or quickly jerk off to… It’s one of the main reasons parodies are so popular.
Outside of the industry, there isn’t much appreciation for the porn shot today. It’s pretty much go jerk off to whatever you can find for free and that’s about it… The industry isn’t going to put in much effort if they know the consumers probably wouldn’t appreciate it anyway. They’ll end up just going to find it for free on a torrent site and add it to their huge collections of free porn stolen off the internet.
I mean at this point you have mainstream porn stars fucking random strangers in hotel rooms and professionally shot with bullshit claims of being leaked celebrity sex tapes that include anal sex and squirting.
The main question then becomes is the porn industry just trying to evolve with the consumer demand or are they just so desperate they can’t afford to produce something artistic knowing there’s a good possibility it wouldn’t sell? I would say the answer is probably a little of both?
I have liked and been a porn fan for years, but over the last couple of years have been more and more getting away from it. Most of this is due to the vast number of porn girls no longer being beautiful women with beautiful bodies having sex on camera.
Its mostly girls now full of tattoos and piercings (ruining a great body) with tons of surgery like implants, facial surgery and even butt implants (butt implants for fucks sake!!!). So many pretty girls just became cartoon characters with all the BS. Girls like Aletta Ocean, Janine Lindemulder, Eva Notty, Haley Cummings, and many more would be so much hotter without all that destruction of their looks. Why don’t we see girls like Seka, Annette Haven, Christy Canyon, Lisa DeLeeuw, or Deseree Cousteau any more?
I watch porn to jerk off to, if I wanted to watch people act I’d go to the movies or see a play.
Thank you FF button, wait now the attention span of the porn viewer is lower and you can just use the scroll button to get past the crap.
The difference between scrolling through the crap and using the FF button is that people actually BOUGHT porn and THEN used the FF button… Meaning they had a little more incentive to actually watch “the crap” after they actually paid for the DVD which contained “the crap.” 😉
Company owners didn’t give a fuck if you could make a movie that played, at least in part, like a real movie. They cared about sales. Money. ROI. Period. And yes, some of us could pull off, to some extent given budgets, acting abilities of the cast, writing skills, number shooting days, etc., making flicks that were marginally like a real movie, albeit a low-budget real movie. When there were still plenty of features being made — and I’m not talking about the parody trend — what many of those company owners really gave a fuck about was cable sales, domestic and foreign, and, to a lesser extent, hotel sales. That meant fuck-flicks with stories. That meant fuck-flicks with production value. That meant fuck-flicks with dialogue. David Sturman (who owned Sin City) sat me down one day and said to me, “You’re not making a hard-core movie with a soft, cable version. You’re making a soft-core movie with a hard version.” Course, that was then and this is now.
“people actually BOUGHT porn and THEN used the FF button… Meaning they had a little more incentive to actually watch “the crap” after they actually paid for the DVD” 🙂 LOL! Touché
So you have John Stagliano to praise and blame at the same time.
In a sense, yes. What Stagliano originally had, or should I say didn’t have, was money. He made POV flicks on the cheap. Real cheap. He shot single scenes, not movies with a beginning, middle, and end, and put them out with 5 scenes per title. He developed a character, Buttman, and from there went on to great success. The people I worked mostly for, people like Sturman (Sin City) and Russ Hampshire (VCA) and a few others all wanted story-driven features. But then, there were others who wanted to spend less so, instead, they wanted overall themes for their flicks, rather than story driven stuff. Some of those themes became long-running series. I shot, for instance, a crap load of “Girl’s Affair” titles for Fat Dog and other theme-driven series for companies like Legend and others.
What rawalex said– The fall of the porn industry in a nutshell.
The music industry evolved and got back to making money with sites like Amazon, itunes, and others selling mp3s. The porn industry fucked so many consumers over the hot coals back in the day and now they cry about piracy and dream of the days when they got $40-50 a video. No one wants to pay big money for a DVD with one hot chick (on the box cover) and 4 skievers. They need to evolve with the rest of the world. Kinda like what myfreecams is doing.
Whats ironic is that the porn business really started out with just loops. Regular sex scenes that were shot on 8mm film, that u could view a couple minutes worth at sex shops for 25 cents. That all changed when Johnny Wadd and Deepthroat were produced and released in the early 1970s. It was the first time that hardcore sex films had an actual scripted storyline, actors doing dialogue, with cinematic photography, soundtracks and locations. The financial success from those first 2 films were so good, that the genre of adult filmmaking was born and lasted till about 1985.
During those 14 years or so, many of the adult films were shot on 35mm film just like the Hollywood productions did. Using film school graduates that were cinematographers, sound mixers, directors. The male talent were real actors that thought at the time being in porn would just be a stepping stone to cross over to mainstream. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case for them (except for Sonny Landham, who was in Predator, 48 hours, Lock Up) But many camera operators and crew were able to make the transition from porn to Hollywood films, along with some directors like Wes Craven, who made hardcore films and then became the God father of horror with the Freddy Krueger and Scream movies.
When I recently heard the podcast of adult filmmaker Bob Chinn (who was immortalized in the film Boogie Nights that was played by Burt Reynolds), he went into full detail about his life in the adult film business. From his pioneering days shooting sex ed documentaries in the 1960s, to his shooting on Panavision film cameras with John Holmes as the lead on big budget features. In the end, he said that he got out of the business once video tape took over. He said he liked to shoot on film and that he didn’t want to go back to making loops. Like Jack Horner said in Boogie Nights, “Im a filmmaker, I shoot on film. Not this tape, video tape..”
After viewing the films Prisoner of Paradise and Pizza Girls Bob Chinn talked about in his interview, I was blown away about how good they were. It was very cinematic with cool story, decked out sets, good humor thrown in here and there, excellent soundtracks and beautiful natural women. Yes, some of the sex scenes would be considered tame by today’s standards, but at least there was a reason people were getting it on that the average viewer could relate to. Instead of the current numbing formula of “I pay the tattooed, pierced hooker to do circus acts, that’s the same as the last and next scene shot”.
Watching those Bob Chinn classics for the first time were really fun. But it also reminded me of the adult filmmaking genre that died in the mid 1980s, that never came back.. Video tape did destroy film in the adult business, but in the year 2013, the industry can no long use that as an excuse. The industry is right back to where it started and all that is are loops. The average consumer is sick of just fucking loops..
@Lacey
You are right. A lot of 70’s stuff had things that porn today doesn’t even get close to, but there was a story behind it. It wasn’t mindless jamming a head into a toilet. I think Evil Angel did a film with Rocco Sidfreddi where he was doing that. It was really out of place and just made us watching it laugh. Take for instance Shaun Costello’s Forced Entry. The actions overall in that film were really violent, but the sex really wasn’t that out of line minus some dialogue and endings. It was a plot-based film. The director included violent stock footage from Vietnam in the middle of the sex scenes. He used a lot of outside footage to induce shock. It worked and performers didn’t have to be harmed. It was a film with a violent plot. It didn’t contain actual violence to the performers from what I have seen or read.
The Devil In Miss Jones had a twist at the end that even made me think about it. Plot rules in porn and in sales. Can’t the industry realize that they are just making tube-only material? John Leslie once did a film called Nothing to Hide which I think is one of the greatest porn films ever made to me concerning plot. The bonus DVD of Pirates 2 had the best lesbian sex scene I’ve ever seen. It all can be done. One just cannot point and shoot. It has to be thought out.
These films back then weren’t even that great as a whole. You’d think by now people would have mastered the art. Nope. They took 5 steps back. Look at Elegant Angel films within the past 3 years. Do they all need to require bright white backgrounds? I honestly think they feel as though getting the hottest star and shooting them within a really white and bright background makes awesome films. No. It is sex in a room with a lot of white in it. I see little to no variation. Yeah, the orifice of choice may change, but who cares?
A lot of porn today has really poor stories thus making them unwatchable. It is like trying to give an independent film on cable a chance and then regretting it an hour later. At least you didn’t have to pay 30 bucks for it.
@Skirm
Thank you. You summed it up the best.
So true, Skirm. BTW welcome to MikeSouth.com.
I have to agree on the tats and piercings, Karmafan. Now that we have Bonnie Rotten performing with almost 100 jail tats taking the bad girl thing to its logical conclusion maybe people will go back to wanting smooth, beautiful women in their porn (yes, Janine did it before her but only after she quit porn and Janine actually did prison time whereas Bonnie hasn’t to my knowledge). I can live with the “tramp stamp” in the small of the back but nowadays the tattoo thing is ridiculous. Bonnie may be the best performer sexually (I don’t really know) but I just can’t get it up to a chick that looks like she belongs at San Quentin.
I remember when porn tapes were on Beta, cost $80 and actually had trade-in value. Of course that was split up six different ways as the Mob controlled the biz back then but then movies were from a cinematic standpoint better made. Now you pay $30 a month to watch a backlog of scenes dating back to 1997 in some instances. No wonder the cinematic quality of porn has went through the floor at some second-tier companies. I have read that the first-tier companies such as Vivid and Wicked depend mainly on cable and hotel sales these days — on Dish Network you pay $10 for three hours where you can pick from eight channels or $35 a month per channel (haven’t ordered dish porn in years, half of the channels are owned by Manfuck anyway). I used to subscribe to the Playboy Channel years ago but won’t now that Manfuck owns it — once Hef gets it back I might subscribe again.
For some reason this post has been bothering me in a weird sort of way… I know there is some artistic porn out there, but it’s pretty hard to find in today’s market.
And, then I remembered X-Art. It’s generally a little too pretty and slow for my tastes, but I have to admit if someone asked me where to find “artistic” porn I would probably go with X-Art.
Just a thought….
@lacey
Checked out X-art. New Sensations has some directors that shoot in soft lighting. That’s about it for art stuff aside from unique and creative stuff. Soft light.
Then again, the only difference between porn and erotica is the lighting.
It has long been said that the difference between porn and art is the lighting but I was actually talking more about a story driven vehicle for the sex , it doesnt have to be soft lighting or even soft sex but it does need to be less like two stray dogs fucking and more like two human beings…just sayin
You mean dogfucking wouldn’t count as REAL artistic porn?
@Lurking –
It’s better than watching 3 guys rub dicks together in one hole… hahaha.
At least the dogs seem to be enjoying themselves… 🙂
I was once asked by someone if I’d be willing to shoot dog porn. (Not hypothetically but actually.) Without hesitation, I declined. But I had to ask, and with more than a small amount of incredulity in my voice: “Where do you find girls willing to fuck dogs?” The guy’s answer: “Finding the girls is easy. A good dog, that’s hard to find.” (True story)
And that is why we so miss Jimmy D’s posts!
@jimmy
Ty for laugh…
That’s why I always liked Zalman Kings work….”Red Shoes diary”, “Two Moon Junction”, “Wild Orchid”, “91/2 Weeks”….maybe a little chick flicky, but always in depth stories and character development…by the time the sex scenes came around (pretty light erotica) I was already invested and worked up…..
RT @MikeSouth1226: Why Can’t We In Porn Make Good Movies http://t.co/5cEPcHGWHm