Last year, porn legend Nina Hartley revealed the secret formula for making boring porn.. But Nina was talking about the creative side, and no discussion of the creative side is complete without looking at the business side. Like any good detective will tell you, follow the money and you’ll usually find out why people do what they do.

Well as it happens, the same day the New York Times declares that porn is a $13 billion/year business, over at Adult DVD Talk Oren from Anarchy Films blows the lid off the business side of the skin biz. Says Oren:

An average gonzo cost about $13,500. Than editing hard and soft is about $1,200. Design a sleeve is about $600, authoring is about $700, sleeves are about $500, replication is about $1,500 for 3000 pcs. So if you do the math right you looking into a $18,000. A good distributor will bring you back about $19,000 in the first 45 days of release. To keep a company going you need to release about 50 movies a year with an invesment of at least 1,000,000 in cash. (do the math).

Do the math indeed!

If the average gonzo flick (the mainstay of the industry) costs $18K out the door, with 12,000 +/- titles/year, that puts the total annual production, post-production, replication and packaging costs somewhere around $216M/year. The Times is asking us to believe that $216M investment is generating annual revenues of $13B. How’s that for a return on investment! Even with promotion and overhead you’ve got to like those numbers!

The only problem is, the figures that actually make sense and are supported by any evidence are Oren’s. Look at any porn video and it’s easy to see the producers didn’t spend a lot of time or money on it.

But the numbers reported by the Times are complete fabrications that have be reported as fact without the journalist even taking the time to run them through a calculator.

If Americans are spending “90 cents on porn for every dollar they spend on Hollywood movies” where are the $12M/picture stars with homes in Malibu and East Hampton? Where are the the $10K/day cinematographers or the $2000/day steadicam operators? Where’s the craft-services table piled high with an endless supply of Heineken and Perrier? They’re nowhere to be found because there’s not enough money in porn to pay for them.

Yes, I know, I know. The money flows to a secret cabal of ultra-discreet distributors. As PBS reported, “That’s why you don’t see most of them running around in the Rolls they keep that in the garage and take out on weekends.” Talk about a porn fantasy!

The simple fact is, even Jenna Jameson — porn’s biggest superstar ever — doesn’t make as much as an ensemble player in a run-of-the-mill network sitcom, let alone rake in $1M/episode like each cast member of Friends did — for six seasons! “Big budget” in porn means high five figures. The budget for an “epic” like PIRATES still doesn’t top a million.

And if you think porn is making 60-fold returns on these films, just stop and think a minute. Do you think Hollywood (or Wall Street!) is so encumbered by ethics that they could resist a 6000% return? If there was that kind of return on investment in porn, the “mainstream” would get over its squeamishness pronto, and every single studio, including Disney, would have an “adult” division.

So why do the New York Times, and PBS, and the AP keep reporting this nonsense? For the same reason people make porn; because it’s fun to go slumming, because it’s titilating to take an “unbiased” look at the “adult industry” because putting something “trashy” in the business section spices it up a little. And mostly, because no one’s checking the facts.

Lately, for every entry I’ve posted to this blog, I’ve got one that I’ve archived. These shelved posts are all of the “angry man, why are they all so stupid” variety. I haven’t posted them because they don’t really reflect how I’m feeling these days (which is mostly very optimistic), but I didn’t throw them away because they had some solid observation or ideas about the current state of affairs in pornland.

Then yesterday Violet Blue posted a Hooray for Independent Porn writeup to her Web site and between that and some good instant message chats and a phone call with El, it felt like something broke free. Maybe it was just getting the chance to laugh so much with El that I thought I might piss myself, or maybe it’s just that the days are longer and warmer, but suddenly a side of my creative self long dormant bubbled back up to the surface - humor.

Believe it or not, people who know me well regard me as a fellow with a pretty good sense of humor. It has, in the long distant past, even found a place in my work. I hope that it might again find a place there soon. (Ask El about the romantic comedy we’re working on.)

In the meantime, I posted the below to the Modern Gonzo is Rehashed, Boring and Unimaginative thead on ADT this morning, but I think you, dear reader, might enjoy it more:

LIVING IN THE ASHES
What Will Follow Gonzo Gold Rush?
March, 2007

Still others feel gonzo will rise again. Says Cumstick, “I still think the gonzo approach is still the most sensible way to produce sexually explicit material. Gonzo elegantly solves problems of budget, context, and craft that are part and parcel of working in what is, and likely will always be, fringe genre. Gonzo will rise again. It may have a new name, but gonzo will rise again.”

Aside from rediscovering my sense of humor, I’m also doing work on Matt and Khym.

We’ll have something to show you very soon!

-T.C.

This week, on a site I frequent called Adult DVD Talk, a porn company called 3rd Degree anounced the release of video featuring asian women which they cleverly entitled Slant Eye for the Straight Guy.

Porn has a long tradition of riffing on mainstream titles; things like On Golden Blonde, Forrest Hump, or Edward Penishands. These are gems of wit compared to the trend in contemporary gonzo titles, featuring catchy titles like Big Black Wet Asses, Cumfart Cocktails,or Teenage Anal Princesses. And these beauties are positively benign compared to countless titles that reflect a profound fear and hatred of women or sex or both; titles like Cum Dumpsters, Throat Gaggers or I Never Knew Kendra Jade was Such a Cock Up Her Ass Gang Bang Slut. (Doesn’t that just roll off your tongue?) It’s against this backdrop that there’s a now long running thread on ADT dicsussing whether or not Slant Eye for the Straight Guy is an offensive title.

The defense of the title goes something like this: it was an asian, female staffer that came up with the title; no offense was intended; and anyway, it’s just porn. Quoting Mike Quasar a director for Zero Tolerance, “I still can’t believe that this is still an issue. Do any of you have any clue as to how incredibly insignificant porn is in the grand scheme of things?” To me, Mike’s comment is a sad half-truth.

I think of porn as the collision of sex and the moving image, and no one could describe either sex or the moving image as insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet somehow, in this collision, both sex and the moving image emerge diminished. It is difficult to find good sex in porn, and near impossible to find good filmmaking. Instead, the universal human experience of sexual desire and the most important art and communication medium of our time are combined to produce work that rarely even rises to the level of mundane.

Yet in spite of this, if anything, porn seems to be overly significant in the grand scheme of things. It’s significant enough that a little over a year ago, and in the midst of a war, our Commander in Cheif saw fit to declare Protection from Pornography Week. It’s significant enough that the mainstream media routinely freebases the porn industry; no sweeps-week is complete with some sort of porn exclusive. (These come in two flavors, either Porn Is More Mainstream Than Ever! or The Real, Ugly Truth Behind the Flesh Trade!) For something so insignificant, porn sure gets a lot of press!

At any rate, it’s a school day, which gives me seven uninterupted hours to work on syncing Damon and Hunter’s scene, seven hours to match the images of sucking and fucking and loving to the slurping and smacking of lips and the firm gentle thud of bodies joyously colliding (there’s that word again.) Certainly there are folks who will be at least as offended by what I will do with Damon and Hunter as anyone is by Slant Eye for the Straight Guy. Hopefully I’ll have the good sense to say nothing. Hopefully the work will speak for itself. But if I can’t hold my tongue, one thing you can be sure I won’t say is, “It’s just porn.”

-T.C.