John Cassavetes*
There is a (as DTG puts it) a multi blog discussion of porn aestetics taking place at Freya’s House and Virgin Slut’s blog, trying to unravel the meaning of the deluge of truly bad (badly concieved, badly made) pornography that more and more has come to define moving imagines of sex. Missing from this discussion is the detective’s maxim: follow the money; or as is the case in pornography, the lack of money.
Lack of money you say? But isn’t a porn a multibillion dollar a year industry? Surely the the state of porn today is a conspiracy born of greed and misogyny!
If only this were so.
Each year the IFP sponsers the Independend Spirit Awards, a rough equivelent of the Oscars for films made outside the Hollywood studio system. These are small films, which is to say they have seven figure budgets – that’s right, even a small film still costs millions of dollars to make.
Because five million dollars is still a rediculous amount of money, the Independent Spirit Awards has a special award for truly low-budget filmmaking: The John Cassavetes Award. This the award for films made on a shoestring; films fueled by hope and devotion. You can’t qualify for the John Cassevetes Award if you’ve spent one penny more than $500,000 to produce your feature. That’s right, the low-budget award at the low-budget Oscars is for films that cost a half a million dollars to produce.
Now let’s compare that to porn.
Jenna Jameson told me the budget for Jenna Love Bella was $60K. The budget for the widely celebrate Fashionsistas is reputed to have been about $500,000. A couple of multi volume costume drama “epics” are said to have topped a million. These are the Titanics and Ishtars of the porn world. And for the most part, the investment made in them wouldn’t even get them into the big leagues at the Independent Spirit Awards. Hell, the last figure I read was that an hour of Canadian television drama cost a million dollars to produce. Even if those are Canadian dollars, that still beats even the biggest budget porn on a dollar/minute basis.
So yes, the male gaze and the rest of gender politics matters. Our sexophobic culture matters. 2257 matters too. But the biggest limitation on what porn can be, or can even try to be is money.
It would be nice to think that a simple act of will could result in better sexually explicit art. This can and does work for writing, and there’s a wealth of beautifully written and arrousing writing about sex. Perhaps it can even for photography, but the sex photographers I know take plenty of “straight” commissions to finance their sex work. But film (even if you shoot on video) is an exponentially larger medium, a medium that is first and foremost the art of spending money. It’s not a medium that yeilds to good intentions, so merely wanting to make better porn is not enough. It takes money, and lots of it.
-TC
*John Nicholas Cassavetes (December 9, 1929 - February 3, 1989) was a Greek-American actor, screenwriter, and director. Cassavetes created an American form of cinéma vérité with his innovative camera use, bleak outlook, and emphasis on improvisation. Film critic Ray Carney called him “the father of American independent film”.
