The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] A Downturn in Feature Porn?

For the last ten years, there have been two forces battling for the soul of porn.

First, on the good/evil side, there are the heavily-produced features with storylines; the best of these generally come from major studios like Wicked, Vivid, Digital Playground and (more recently) Penthouse Video. Digital Playground’s Pirates seemed to be proof that this model of porno entertainment was a great idea, quickly becoming the best-selling porn DVD of all time. Features usually have some overheated potboiler plot similar to what you’d see in a late-night made-for-Skinemax feature, and that’s no accident — often these feature titles are recut for softcore release in hotel pay-per-view systems. The plots are usually crime-related, occasionally have a fantasy or sci-fi aspect. They’re often knockoffs of mainstream entertainment.

I frequently find myself lapsing into the belief that in market terms, porn features exist solely for the purpose of helping frat boys convince their girlfriends to watch porn with them. “It has a story, see? It’ll be good, promise!” But then I have conversations with “average” porn consumers — and many of them seem to love the brilliant stories and highly developed characters of movies titled things like Conspiracy of Lust and Dangerous Kisses. That’s my sarcastic voice. Send me hate mail if you like feature plots; feel free. But I defy you to convince me that any genre can routinely deliver a tightly-plotted story arc when every ten minutes they have to break off the story for fifteen minutes of sex.Porn features are also expensive to produce, because they require a script, a story, sets, costumes, etc. They require actors and actresses to say lines, which means when they flub the lines the scene has to be reshot, then edited — all this in addition to having to get a requisite number of cumshots plus one anal and one girl-girl, to fulfill all the market requirements of the porn industry.

Quite a different thing, fighting the battle for the evil/good side, are the quick-and-dirty gonzo titles, which have names like “Big Butt Spooge Bath.” These do not attempt to resemble mainstream entertainment at all. The theme here goes something like this: You like big butts, you like spooge baths, you like big butt spooge baths. It’s pretty straightforward, really. Someone points a camera at a girl with a big butt, and somebody bathes it in spooge. The same simple formula is true, essentially, for, say, blowjob titles (point camera, get blowjob), anal titles (point camera, fuck ass), and gangbang titles (recruit friends, dispense beer, point camera, gangbang). These titles are cheaper to produce, and generally sell less per title than feature releases, because let’s face it, there are a lot of big butt spooge baths out there to compete with. Furthermore, these titles get so specific with particular fetishes (big butt spooge baths on girls with glasses, big butt brunette spooge baths, spooge baths on freckled butts, etc) that any given DVD title is considered fantastically successful if it sells 4,000 units.

Gonzo, for the most part, has been winning this good-evil/evil-good battle. Gonzo has dominated the market precisely because it’s so inexpensive to produce. Features are usually the “prestige” titles a label puts out to prove that it’s a player in the quality market. Occasionally feature titles like Digital Playground’s Pirates end up taking the industry by storm — and that’s the promise that a feature holds. Features sometimes win 8 or 10 or 12 AVN Awards at the end of the year, resulting in huge publicity and rampant sales. That almost never happens with gonzo titles, but assuming the distribution system is solid, gonzo produces more reliable, predictable returns for any DVD label.

If you’ ve been reading the papers lately, you may have noticed that all industries are currently encountering an economic crunch. The adult industry is no different; scuttlebutt has it that this past year’s DVD sales are down by a third over the previous year. My guess is that the economic downturn will translate to less investment capital for producing feature porn — which, as I said, is expensive, and a bit of a gamble when it comes to returns.

Does that mean we can expect to see an even bigger upsurge in gonzo porn, and the industry offering a trimmed-down list of features? My guess is that unless the economy turns around rapidly (and I’m not holding my breath for that), we’ll see fewer and fewer “classy” feature titles with plots, exotic settings costumes and, er, acting. I doubt we’ll see “more” gonzo titles, because the industry overall is hurting — porn is far from the “recession-proof” industry the mafia used to brag that it was. But I do believe we’ll see fewer features in the year to come.

If you want a story to your porn, you’ll be left with a few choices. You can make do with the porn features that are released, you can watch the old film classics — or you can read a book. As a book author, I’m far from objective on this topic, but I do believe one thing — stories are great for porn, but features aren’t the places you usually find the good ones.

Thomas Roche blogs about drugs, dope and science fiction at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 9 December 2008 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.