Porn Valley- Nautica Thorn was strolling the aisles at Blockbuster one night, just browsing for a video, when she did a double take.
There, on the shelf amid the action films and romantic comedies, sat a sex-laden adventure on the high seas starring porn stars Jesse Jane and Janine.
"I was just getting a movie to watch and I saw `Pirates.' I thought, `Wow, that's cool,"' Thorn said. "When I was a kid, I remember staying up late at night with the cable box, watching the little squiggly lines, hoping you could see something. You were like, `Ooh, I think I can see something."'
Thorn's shock is surprising, seeing as how she's a porn actress herself. And she knows firsthand how the adult industry flirts with mainstream appeal and exposure.
The 23-year-old star of "Teeny Tarts 4" and president of Hollywood-based Nautica Thorn Productions made a name for herself getting naked on camera. That name pushed her into mainstream consciousness recently as she appeared on the Fox reality show "My Bare Lady," which featured four porn performers trying to make it in London theater. Produced for a major network and now available for sale on iTunes, the series completely relies on the idea that people like to watch sex on TV.
In previous decades, when smut used to be hard to come by, men watched documentary films of nudist camps for a thrill. These days, you can get your porn, or at least semblances of it, on regular TV, at the local, family-friendly video shop and even at the grocery store.
Gone are the days when adult entertainment was hushed up and ignored. Porn actors show up on talk shows and in bit parts in mainstream movies, teens wear T-shirts emblazoned with the Hustler logo and Playboy Bunnies hawk workout tapes on how to build up one's rear and abs. Teen idol Lindsay Lohan, once featured in wholesome movies such as "The Parent Trap" and "Mean Girls" has been pictured out on the town - sans panties.
And in reverse, there's Dustin Diamond, former child actor and star of the teen sitcom "Saved by the Bell." Known originally as the uber-doofus "Screech," Diamond's career has been fading for years. So last year, he released a homemade sex tape culminating in a particularly crude act. All of a sudden, he's been seen partying in Vegas alongside Thorn and her friend Tera Patrick.
As Hollywood offerings get sexier - three years ago, Fox released "The Girl Next Door," in which the 19-year-old title character makes a living in skin flicks - porn has begun adding more intricate plots and special effects. It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference between what's pornographic and what's run-of-the-mill.
"There really is no underground anymore," said Samantha Lewis, president of Van Nuys-based Digital Playground. "When we go to conventions, they're mainstream with men and women. There's no taboo, ... there's no prejudice, there's no stigma."
In 2005, her company released "Pirates," a two-hour epic adult feature that borrowed sets once used to shoot Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean." The company claims sales of several hundred thousand copies, making it so successful that the filmmakers edited down to an R-rated, soft-core film. It now sells at Albertsons, Best Buy and Blockbuster, a far cry from the scummy video arcades that showed crude 8 mm films.
"If you're an evangelical Christian, you think it's because our morals have just fallen in the toilet," said Chris Mott, a UCLA English professor who teaches a class on pornography. "If you talk to libertarians and progressives, they'd say it's a culture becoming more enlightened and that frankness is much more healthy than repression.
"And from an economic point of view, ... Jesus, anything that makes that kind of money won't stay hidden for long."
The exact amount of money is subject to argument, though most observers agree it's billions of dollars per year. Companies as mainstream as News Corp., Marriott, AT&T and General Motors have all played a role in porn distribution over the years, making it a lucrative and widely distributed commodity.
Porn lite, such as the "Girls Gone Wild" videos that feature intoxicated teens flashing body parts at the camera and making out with their friends, rings up sales to the tune of $40 million a year. The controversial line embroiled company founder Joe Francis in a long-running legal battle over whether he kept appropriate records on the ages of his subjects and inspired a phenomenon Newsweek called "The Girls Gone Wild Effect."
This wildly upfront sexuality, which Newsweek also links to Lohan and her fellow panty-eschewing party pals Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, pushed sex well into the public eye. Young girls, who once looked to Spears as an all-American Mouseketeer, now discuss her breast-baring attire, French kiss with Madonna on MTV and head-shaving, arm-tattooing public meltdowns.
This trend has seen a slow burn up to its current boil. As far back as the early 1970s, porn advocates predicted it would become an acceptable form of entertainment right alongside traditional movies. It wasn't until fairly recently, however, that it began taking on a legitimacy parallel to its Hollywood counterparts.
"Mainstream's getting more raw, trying to appeal to people's sexual instincts," said Brad Armstrong, an actor, director and producer for Canoga Park-based Wicked Pictures. "We're creeping up on the other end, where we're trying to get the consumer who's teetering. We want to be their first adult movie. You always remember your first time, right?"
Perhaps so, but who remembers their 100th time? When Jenna Jameson, the industry's top performer and Armstrong's ex-wife, first showed up on Howard Stern's radio show in 1995, it was a big deal, both for Stern and for the adult industry. Now, porn actresses appear with such regularity, they barely raise an eyebrow.
That's the inherent risk for the industry as it tries to assimilate its way into American DVD collections. When consumers start placing "Buttman" alongside "Batman" on their living-room shelves, part of porn's appeal begins to fade.
"With no taboo, there is no industry," said Tom Hymes, publisher of XBiz Magazine. "The day Sony makes porn, the industry's out of business."
There's a term for this overexposure in the business: shot out. When a performer shows up in too many movies, working with too many companies, they lose their appeal. Once they've worked their way through the business, their market value plummets and they can't find employment any more.
And as the industry itself verges on getting shot out, low-budget pornographers are flooding the market with cheap-to-produce, cheaper-to-buy fare that has much of the industry fearing a slowdown. At the same time, it's more mainstream than ever, it's also made itself too ubiquitous and faces a contraction.
"You're getting it on both ends," said Renaud West, vice president of Live Entertainment, the Sherman Oaks-based company that hosts the twice-annual Adultcon, a consumer showcase of porn actors and companies at the Los Angeles Convention Center. "There's a glut that brings prices down and there's so much out there, people don't care.
"But TV didn't kill the radio. VCRs didn't kill TV. There will always be porn, but it may just have a different name or different form."
What that form will be provides the industry with considerable debate. West notes that while porn actresses have been able to cross over into mainstream forums such as late-night talk shows or movies, it's still tongue-in-cheek.
And that's fine, said Armstrong, who broke into the business in the late 1980s and has watched his company's contract stars land parts in regular movies and cable TV. They may still be playing roles of strippers or hookers, he said, but that exposes them to new consumers who might be more inclined to check out their pornographic offerings.
"When you look at all the magazines, all the TV shows doing something on porn, you're moving to the point where it's more acceptable," said Bob Christian, director of new business development for Adam & Eve Productions, which co-produced "Pirates." "You can say at the watercooler, `I saw a great adult movie last night' and it's OK."
But only so far, he noted. While people might feel confident revealing their porn-viewing habits, it's not to the point where they feel comfortable discussing why they're watching. That, he says, may be still a long way away.
