Los Angeles- THERE ARE certain activities I prefer to do alone. Though most people probably feel the same way, the Digital Playground production company nevertheless decided to hold a premiere of its new pornographic film, “Pirates,” at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theater last Monday. And I wasn’t going to miss the discomfort.
Joone, the film’s director and the owner of the production company, got the idea to show a new adult film in a mainstream theater when he was editing the film and realized how good it was. He said he was surprised when the Egyptian said yes. “People now are so conservative, so I was like, ‘Wow, you’ll let us do that?’ ”
It turns out the Egyptian will let you do anything. Margot Gerber of the Egyptian said she didn’t know about the explicit nature of the film because the theater was being rented just for the night, much like it was a few weeks ago when a man showed his wedding video for his anniversary.
When I asked Steven Hirsch, co-CEO of Vivid, the country’s largest porn company, why he’d never thrown a premiere, he said he had considered doing it for the upcoming movie, “The New Devil in Miss Jones,” but “we couldn’t dismiss the embarrassment factor for some of our guests.” When a guy who owns a porn company is worried about embarrassment, I figure it’s worth leaving home and skipping a night of VH1 reality shows.
I brought my wife, Cassandra, who I realized dresses like an 18th century witch-burner. Goodie Stein kept looking around and making comments such as “I’ve never seen so much makeup in my life.” I kept looking around saying, “What did you say, honey?”
In addition to the fire dancers and the band of pirates playing pirate music, there was a red carpet for interviews by the media, which seemed to consist solely of Playboy TV and a couple of guys with their own video cameras. Gary Gray, a Playboy producer, brought an enormous crew. “This is our Katrina,” he said.
After Cassandra got her free buttered popcorn, which to be honest kind of grossed me out, the lights went down in the packed theater and a talking plastic penis dressed as a pirate told us to turn off our cellphones. Unlike every Broadway show I’ve ever attended, not one cellphone rang for the entire show. You want something done right, you get a penis dressed as a pirate to do it.
The movie was a lot like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” but answered a lot of questions that the Johnny Depp film left unanswered, such as, “What does it look like when two girl pirates have sex with one boy pirate?”
The discomfort, however, never arrived. For the first 20 minutes, the very young, exceedingly tattooed audience kept yelling back, “Rocky Horror”-style, at the screen. They also enjoyed clapping wildly at the climax of each scene. The audience members not only weren’t squirming, they were bored. An hour in, the yelling and cheering died off and everyone felt fast-forward-deprived. Cassandra got so bored she left. Remember when they made the mistake of super-sizing “Friends” into 40-minute sitcom episodes? Imagine that in porn time.
The weirdest part was that the cast was there. I kept trying to see if they were uncomfortable looking at strangers looking at them having sex, but they seemed fine too.
“I was dreading it for the last couple of weeks,” said the film’s co-star, Janine Lindemulder. “I have a hard time watching my movies at home alone. When you’re in the moment, you let go. When you’re sitting there having a cup of tea and watching yourself, it’s a whole different ballgame.”
This woman leads a life so exciting she’s having porn tea parties. If she needs caffeine for porn, I can’t imagine what she does during those Alan Alda science shows on PBS. Mainline a speedball?
Janine said she was taken aback at how comfortable and polite and blase the audience was. “I don’t know how and when this happened. But it’s been turning that way in the last decade,” she said. “I don’t want people to get too comfortable. I think there’s a time and place for it. I’m a mama of two children. I’m the first one to want to keep that stuff locked up.”
Steven Hirsch of Vivid, it turns out, is wrong. They’ve underestimated just how eerily comfortable the Internet generation is with explicit material.
And even though I understand what Janine means when she says it was better before the Web, when people knew they were doing something wrong by pushing through those Old West saloon doors in the back of the video store, I think that being so open about it all may be healthier. It takes away some of its power. It makes it, somehow, boring. That’s why they add the swashbuckling.