I see a few people have popped in andasked questions and while i do drop in from time to time I didnt answer in a timely manner so i figure there are prolly a few new readers here and last time was fun so lets do it again.
I will subscribe to the thread so I get email alerts and can answer in a timely manner.
Since the last one CNBC named me one of porns ten most powerful players
Ive had lots of interviews, quotes and stories from The Daily beast and Huffington Post to Girls and Corpses magazine.
Welcome back, given the free content on the net and consuming patterns now show mobiles as a consumption device allowing low definition how the heck does pron make money these days?
–How much “true amateur” (unsolicited video that gets sent to the studios) porn is there? Do you handle at all unsolicited videos?
–In the “golden age of porn”, it was common for European flicks to be more explicit than American flicks. Do you bother anymore with this practice anymore?
–Outside of the obvious one of underage performers, what is the biggest legal worry in the adult film world?
–Where do you find behind the scenes guys like cameramen and soundtrack guys?
Do you think technological change is speeding up or slowing down now? I know the move to HD was seen as a big deal but it seems like there’s much less enthusiasm for 4K and things appear to have mostly stabilized now.
Do you think there are any large niches of porn that are currently extremely underserved? It seems contradictory to me that the porn industry seems relentlessly entrepreneurial yet, at the same time, people often complain about how hard it is to find porn that matches their tastes.
How is porn still profitable and what do the unit economics look like nowadays? For a typical porn video, how much does it cost to make and how much is it expected to earn and from what channels? With so much new content being produced every day and being distributed for free, it’s hard for me to truly come to grips with how they break even on most of them.
There have been a number of mainstream films about porn (**Boogie Nights, Wonderland, Lovelace, **likely a few I’m forgetting like the one starring Charlie Sheen and his brother). Any of these strike you as truer than the others? Any of them ring false?
Not really…Its a job like any job it has pluses and minuses like any other. for me the most enjoyment comes from meeting new people who seem sex the same way I do…as fun.
Its not easy thats for sure. The way i do it is by catering to a niche market. The content I shoot, while available on some free sites isnt pirated as much and what is tends to be old. Customers will pay for fresh content on a regular basis.
true amateur is almost none. and when i do get it I am very suspicious of it. In order to get any response from me it must include the IDs of everyone involved as well as a model release…way too many teens with cell phone cameras these days.
These days thats not as true, American porn girls will do pretty much anything, some American companies will shoot in Europe though, mainly because as a rule it costs less and there are fewer regulations to deal with.
as for my crew I get a lot of guys in film school looking to “midnight” thats where I get my crew as a general rule, I also remind them that porn is not always done the way theu are taught to do things in class, sometimes thats good, sometimes its not.
Moores Law states that computing power will double every 18 months or so and I find that to be holding pretty true. To me it seems the DVD fad came and went in a hurry but truth is it lasted about as long as VHS did. right now, even though 1080P is the most common resolution my customers want I am shooting in 4K and will no doubt move to 8K fairly soon. The idea is that the content will still have value if and when those changes come.
You are correct, there are under served niches and thats how guys like me are surviving these days is by serving those customers. Porners aren’t as entrepreneurial as we once were. It seems that we have undergone a shift to where we are marketing driven and most porners try to serve the lowest common denominator instead of specializing. It is why Digital Playground is losing their ass right now while kink.com is thriving.
consider a very low end product can be made for around 10K and a higher end feature will run 50K. Average first month sales these days is 500 units on the low end to 2000 units on the high end with the average price per unit being about 10-15 bucks it becomes pretty obvious you cant make money off of JUST the DVD market anymore if you dont have internet sales or cable TV sales you lose your ass. I remember back in the days of my Southern Belles Series I was doing 8000 units in the first thirty days at an average of 12 bucks per…my cost was about 12K I was doing alright but those days are long gone. The internet is where you make up the difference, for every video store that closes you have new customers on the internet and these days thats where the real money is. Cable TV helps support the high end features,
Boogie Nights was pretty accurate, the one with the Sheens called Rated X was a bio pic about the Mitchell Brothers from San Francisco who directed and distributed “Behind The Green Door” and took on the mob when they pirated it. was accurate.
Wonderland and Lovelace were both biopics and were accurate.
The ones that start to stray tend to be the ones like Zack and Miri which is total fantasy. Usually when the industry is portrayed against the backdrop of central story that isnt about the industry thats when we really get portrayed incorrectly…Like in the old George C Scott movie “Hardcore” we have never produced a snuff film.
I actually get asked that a lot…that she has done a commercial porn is pretty low, that she has or will do it in the privacy of her home with a husband/boyfriend/girlfriend…pretty high…Id say better than 50%
Recent trends in porn - spitting and slapping - have caused me to retreat to “classic” and “golden age” porn where violent and (to my tastes) degrading acts were limited to “roughies”. Hey, it’s fine for those who are seeking it, but those things have become the default behavior and are seemingly unavoidable today. Even my favorite “friendly gonzo” producer Ben Dover has started doing that.
Is this stuff the choice of the director or the actors? Is your average porn starlet genuinely into that, or is it just the style?
Is there an explicit attempt to be more “timeless” now?
By that I mean in the old days, it probably didn’t matter so much if something done in the 80s looked like it was from the 80s because the videos are only going to be on the shelf for a certain amount of time.
But nowadays, costs to have older videos/picture sets/whatever available to download are pretty trivial, so I’m curious if there is any thought to make things more style-neutral to make things seem less obviously dated a decade down the line (other than technical things like resolution)
That would be a shame. I remember reading something, possibly on Salon, about a university interior design department with a large collection of classic porn that they used as reference material for what homes actually looked like. Hollywood has always presented a fantasy environment, while porn producers simply didn’t have a budget for sets and decoration and shot anywhere they could.
If you want to see the true horror that was early seventies interior decor, you need to look at the Swedish Erotica films, not old copies of Home and Garden.
