From www.sfbg.com – Yesterday saw an interesting piece in the New York Times on the slow disappearance of plot-based porn flicks in favor of films comprised solely of sex scenes, without any narrative structure, that can easily be broken up and presented online.
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According to the Times, the DVD sales and rental industry was $3.62 billion in 2006 (a number estimated by Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network) but has fallen as much as 50% since then. Rather than solely filming feature length, plot-based movies, like Pirates XXX, which was released in 2005, studios are focusing more attention on filming vignettes instead — series of sex scenes that occasionally share a theme, like “Girls ‘n Glasses”.
While some are alarmed at the changes afoot in the industry, it’s a fact that studios are focusing less and less attention on making feature DVDs and that interest is only going to decrease from here. In this NYT video, Steven Hirsch, chief executive of Vivid Entertainment, states that while it wasn’t that many years ago that all of Vivid’s income was dependent on DVD sales, now, less than half of their income is generated from DVDs, largely due to the nature of the internet. Vivid now offers an online membership that users can subscribe to, that allows them to view video clips and photos simply by logging in.
I sent an email to Ben Leon, a director at Raging Stallion Studios, a major gay porn studio located in San Francisco, and asked for his perspective on these changing trends. The NYT article doesn’t discuss gay porn, which has historically been much less attached to the plot-paradigm than straight porn. [You couldn’t fit much more on those old Super8 one-reelers! -Ed.]
He made an interesting point linking the new web model of porn with the uptick of interest in fetish material, which the NYT article didn’t really touch on either. Said Leon, “I also think that porn is changing as the culture changes. A new trend in porn is a heavy swing toward fetish material. This trend is not that different than the wider trend toward making internet content. The new fetish stuff and the internet sites are marketed to a very specific audience. This specialization is both a widening of the market but also a contraction in certain ways. Like mass media-as it becomes more pervasive it also becomes much more targeted. People are now able to find the information (or porn) they want filtered through whatever bias or glass they choose.”
Leon continued, “At Raging Stallion we produce a mixture of films with plot and films that are strictly sex. I myself tend to work more on projects where sex is really the focus but as a studio we have made a commitment to continue to produce movies with plots and character. As the DVD market shrinks and the internet becomes dominant I think this trend will continue. Successful sites like Randy Blue really focus on bringing in new faces and focusing on the sex. This allows smaller budgets and less intense production. There are advantages to that approach for sure.”
The advantage seems to be convenience and ease. The internet makes it easy to access and consume explicit material, no matter how specific, through simple keyword searches (as opposed to painstakingly ordering DVDs online or digging through extremely limited selections at the videostore). So has the web made it easier for people to find exactly what they want down to the very scene, eg typing “anal” into a search bar, as opposed to arduously fast-forwarding through a DVD to arrive at the scene in question.
The disadvantage seems to be the increased rarity of narrative-based pornos that actually feel thought-out and considered, as opposed to a bunch of random sex scenes thrown together. Just because feature length pornos don’t generate the same sort of capital as “Girls ‘n Glasses” doesn’t change the fact that, for many, watching movies like Pirates XXX has its own appeal, despite the questionable acting. This whole discussion makes me nostalgic for the days of movies like Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy. Sadly, I think those days are long gone.