I recently replied to a thread, jokingly, about the Oh!Ah!OMG! in porn literature, but you know, it got me to thinking.
Porn video is biiiiiigggg business. Where do they get their scripts? Why are the movies such crap?(This, from other’s opinions, as I never watch the stuff)
Surely, there must be room for some folk who write truly erotic scripts for these movies. But it seems that something like a carefully-scripted, kick-butt turn on scenario is just not done. It’s like they get some actors together, say “OK, you two get it on, act sexy, then you three join in. Make it up as you go. Action!!!”
Is this it? Or could someone who can write truly erotic stuff actually market their scripts? And where?
They don’t have scripts. They make them up as they go along. They probably come armed with a premise of some kind, because they found a prop or location (or fetish) that might suit, but apart from that, it’s just totally made up.
Filming a scripted story takes too long, probably as much as four times longer than a non-scripted porn film, and time is money. Plus, very few viewers care about story, anyway, unfortunately, so there’s no real motivation for it.
GuanoLad got it. In the '70s and into the '80s people made porn films, with scripts and everything. (Nobody’s going to believe me of course, but I’m not a big fan of porn. I’ve done webpages and shot video and have seen videos, but it’s just not my bag. Anyway even as someone who’s not a porn fan, I can say I really enjoyed Nightdreams. It’s very surreal and has an extended version of Wall Of Voodoo’s version of Ring Of Fire.) Films were shot on film, usually 16mm. Even though 16mm was originally envisioned as a ‘home movie’ format, the lighter weight equipment made it ideal for newsreels and other ‘real’ films. And it was quite a bit cheaper than 35mm. Porn filmmakers tended to use it as well. But as comparatively inexpensive 16mm is, it’s still expensive. That’s why they came out with 8mm and super-8. Currently a 400-foot roll (11 minutes) of 16mm Fuji 125T costs over $100. And not all of that is in the finished product, as not all takes can be used. There’s also processing, editing and printing – not to mention the cost of the crew necessary to put together a film. So it made sense to write scripts and have actors that had at least some acting ability.
Then came home video. Enterprising porn filmmakers discovered that shooting on video was less expensive than shooting on film (once you bought the equipment tape was cheap), and they discovered that many consumers were more interested in just seeing people having sex than seeing people having sex in a good story. So the videos went from movie-like, to having bare-bones (heh) stories, to perhaps just having an initial set-up such as ‘Hi, secretary. Let’s have sex!’ They could shoot hours of action and release a product that was jsut sex.
And people would buy it. That’s the key. Consumers are generally not interested in a story. They want to see the action. ‘Cut to the chase’, as it were. So even though the cost of making a ‘film’ on video might lead one to think that there would be more videos with stories, it just wasn’t worth it. People are still going to buy the cheaply produced, all-sex video so why bother with the expense of a script?
There are some scripted porn “films” being made. I saw one recently that really, really tried hard to be a movie. It was about pirates and starred Evan Stone (I can’t believe I know that guy’s name…). It actually had a decent story and you could tell that the actors were trying hard and enjoying it- like a porn costume drama! It was also pretty funny, not for the bad acting (the acting was actually okay) but for some funny scenes and hilarious lines.
Generally, if I’m gonna watch porn, I don’t want any story at all- that’s not what I’m watching it for. But that one was okay.
There are still porns with actual scripts and a story-line, with a beginning, an end, conflict, and everything. Of course, it’s gay porn, so I guess it’s not for everybody. But ChiChi LaRue’s movies generally try for a little something besides endless, monotonous sex (and imho they succeed).
Softcore as opposed to hardcore porn typically features actual scripts, but they’re so badly done you have to figure the director is writing them himself, if not the stars. If there was any actual interest in script quality among softcore filmmakers, you have to figure they’d have better scripts occasionally. Thgere are a very few halfway decent softcore film, and that’s all they are, halfway decent, and you have to figure that’s an accident.
Interestingly, sexy comics and Japanese anime are sometimes very very good.
Your best bet if you want to do quality is to become a directof and do them yourself, or seek out a like-minded director wannabe and team up with him or her. Good luck with that.
I’ve seen the live action version of “La Blue Girl” and it is so awful compared to the animated version, that it makes me despair for live action remakes. It mostly conssits of a bunch of Japanese hotties in superhero costumes wandering around a warehouse district, mostly in the dark. There’s an egg that sends out tentacles. Now, as to the tentacle scenes, did you ever see the tentacle scene with Martin Landau playing Bela Lugosi in “Ed Wood”? Now, imagine something not nearly that well done techically, but involving a naked hottie who’s pretending to be sexually assaulted as she wrestles with a clearly inanimate tentacle.
Oh, it was bad. Very bad.
I’m CERTAIN you could do better, merely because you want to.
To borrow a line from Simon Cowell (I think he was referring to the skinny redheaded kid a few seasons back singing rock, not porn) porn and plots “go together like chocolate ice cream and raw onions”. I much prefer the amateur “natural” flow, and think Exapno is 100% right in his cause and effect pinpointing of when and why it changed.
That said, what I’m surprised there hasn’t been more of is “Reality TV” type porn. I have some ideas, but I don’t want to reveal too much of yet (other than saying Sanjaya, Diane Keaton, and Lukas Ridgeston are attached).
OK, we got **Johnny L.A. ** on board as director. I’ll do the script.
Now we need a film crew and a distributor and a producer.
…You’re really gonna laugh at this, but I am not Googling it in advance…what does the producer do? Is he/she the money person? The person who is the go-between between the suits and the studo?
<<Edited tp add: OK, I just realized that there sure as hell probably won’t be any studio suits involved in this…it would be an independent production, right? I can’t see MGM getting involved here. Please excuse my brain fart, but I’m still curious as who we would get for the producer and what he or she actually does…and how we line up a distributor. Financing is no problem. I have a video camera and a thingie to burn DVDs from disk. Probably need to get a few dozen more of them to keep up with the extreme demand, but that’s no problem.)
A producer’s job is generally to make everything happen, see to it that everyone gets hired, that film gets bought, filming space is rented, and provide a schedule and framework in which to complete the production successfully. The director is just concerned with the quality of what goes on tape, the producer handles everything behind that.
I’m not exactly sure where that falls in the Hollywood hierarchy though.
Higher than the Director, actually. But they don’t get the glory.
Unless some potentially crappy movie is made, in which case they’ll have a “From the people who brought you (something kind of similar that made lots of money)!” tag line on the DVD box.
Huh. What’s with scripted porn movies and pirates? The only other big budget one I know of is also about pirates, this one starring Jenna Jameson. I had high hopes for that one, but it was pretty much crap.
I think one big problem is that porn actors aren’t picked for their acting skills.
I expect hardcore guys are more auteur, & won’t buy your scripts. Well, except for the odd case like that “pirates” movie. But I’ve seen some clever softcore movies, where the plot was part of the sexy fantasy-they had to be written by somebody.
