Porn stars are complaining that their competitive industry is forcing them to eliminate the acting and get down to business.

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread — “vignettes” in the industry vernacular — that can be presented separately online. Other major studios are making similar shifts.

The industry’s interest in scripted scenes has waxed and waned in recent decades because of changes in technology. In the early 1970s, movies with loose story lines, like “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door,” won a mainstream audience, and others tried to copy their success, selling plot-centric movies to couples watching at home with the VCR technology introduced in 1975.

The falling cost of hand-held video cameras gave birth to a generation of pornographers with little interest in drama beyond a clichéd plot involving a pizza delivery boy, said Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.

Mr. Fishbein said plot came into vogue again in the late ’90s with the boom of the DVD. Big studios, he said, figured plots would make their films more appealing to women and encourage couples to bring them into their homes — whether on disc or pay-per-view.

Plot-centrism was in full bloom in 2005 with the release of “Pirates,” about a ragtag group of sailors who go

Pirates $1M Porn

after a band of evil pirates.

That movie, with a budget of more than $1 million, had special effects (pirates materializing from the mist), and, yes, lots of sex. Two years later, the movie’s studio, Digital Playground, spent $8 million on a sequel — a remarkable sum in an industry where the average movie costs $25,000, according to the director of the two movies, Ali Joone.

But interest in DVDs has fallen sharply, Mr. Fishbein said, because the Internet has made it easy to watch snippets of video.

Mr. Fishbein estimated that pornographic DVD sales and rentals in the United States generated $3.62 billion in 2006 but had fallen as much as 50 percent since then. He says the slump has made some companies reluctant to share sales figures, so his estimates are getting rougher.

The big studios, like Vivid and Digital Playground, have turned to a subscription model, charging monthly fees for access to their Web sites and advertising the frequency with which they add new clips.

Mr. Joone said that of Digital Playground’s 60 productions this year, roughly 30 had little or no plot, up from about 10 two years ago. At Wicked Pictures, which averages one production a week, one-third are essentially just sex, twice as many as a few years ago, said the company’s president, Steve Orenstein.

“The feature is not as big a part of the industry today,” Mr. Orenstein said. But he says he still plans two to three bigger-budget releases each year, including the recently shot “2040,” which is about the pornography business of the future. Mr. Orenstein described the movie as “an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story between an aging porn star and a cyborg.”

In lieu of plot, there are themes. Among the new releases from New Sensations, a studio that makes 24 movies a month, is “Girls ’n Glasses,” made up of scenes of women having sex while wearing glasses.

“It’s almost like we’re back to the late ’70s or early ’80s when the average movie was eight minutes and just a sex scene,” Mr. Hirsch said, sounding wistful.

Some in the industry would prefer their sex with a little more character development.

Ms. Samson, for example, said she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles, like the character she played in the 2006 movie “Flasher.”

She said she played a psychotic who, because of the way her mother treated her, “had an obsession with flashing and doing things in public.”

“I used to have dialogue,” said Ms. Samson, whose given name is Natalie Oliveros, and who is one of the industry’s biggest stars.

“Getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn’t as much fun,” she added.

From NYTimes

The adult porn industry is in crisis, with major brands collapsing, and legendary companies making desperate attempts to compensate for crashing revenues.
For more than three years now, the adult entertainment business has been looking for something to help it survive.

The industry is in crisis, with major brands collapsing, and legendary companies making desperate attempts to compensate for crashing revenues.
While some are looking to mobile internet solutions as the hope for the future, other companies are tinkering with the basic formula of the business.Since the late 1980s, the number of porn titles has increased substantially from one year to the next. Even after 2005, when the adult DVD market began its free fall, the numbers kept getting bigger; last year, production peaked at more than 15,000 new movies.

This year, it’s time for a change. Production companies are (finally) cutting back on major features, and moving toward smaller scenes that are more compatible with online viewing.

Imagine that — the porn industry is getting ready to break into the online porn industry!

Despite what the folks in the San Fernando Valley may believe, it’s unlikely that this will lead to a substantial increase in revenue. However, it could potentially lower production costs and slightly increase profit margins in a shrinking market.

What the mainstream media folks – and, for that matter, the porn producers trying to save their businesses – have failed to grasp is that the industry has been on the brink of this development for a while. For years, the number of major features, such as Pirates or Corruption, has been falling, while gonzo and wall-to-wall films (basically sex scenes stitched together without even a token effort at a plot) have been flooding the market. When a DVD consists of nothing but several unrelated sex scenes, the only thing that ties them together is the physical media. Simply pushing them to the web, which seems to be the plan now, seems to be the logical next step.

While it’s too early to know what the results will be, it may already be too late for the industry. Although there are some incredibly strong, well-run companies in the space, the industry as a whole has been slow to adapt to changing consumer behavior. This new trend will probably feed the few with the strength to pull through the porn recession, while the rest wouldn’t make it regardless of how they change.

source

“The Girlfriend Experience.” – Steven Soderbergh Cuts Sasha Grey’s Sex Scenes
“Steven never really said if there was going to be a sex or scene or not, but in the outline it did say for three different scenes, “Sex Scene with Chris,” “Sex Scene with Client B,” “Sex Scene with the Hobbyist.”

By Hollie McKay FoxNews

Steven Soderbergh Hires Porn Star But Cuts All Sex Scenes

"The Girlfriend Experience" Sasha Grey

After initially “discovering” Sasha Grey in Los Angeles Magazine, veteran director Steven Soderbergh was determined to hire the X-rated film star to play her first mainstream role: a high-class NYC hooker in his new drama “The Girlfriend Experience.” But oddly enough, Gray didn’t have to bare too much of her body or even do a sex scene.

“Steven never really said if there was going to be a sex or scene or not, but in the outline it did say for three different scenes, “Sex Scene with Chris,” “Sex Scene with Client B,” “Sex Scene with the Hobbyist.” I never really knew,” Gray recently told us. “But I knew he (Soderbergh) wouldn’t have a sex scene for the sake of sex.”

Soderbergh later told Tarts that he looked closely at the script, but decided “it wasn’t necessary.” But even despite her rave reviews in her first non-adult film, Gray is far from parting from her porn ways.

“It is great to do both, it’s unprecedented that a woman from the adult industry has been able to really juggle both at the same time,” the 21-year-old said. “If people enjoy what I do outside of adult films, there is room for growth and opportunity. I don’t think ill be playing Zac Efron’s girlfriend in anything soon or be cast in a teen movie but I’m okay with that. At the moment I’m actually shooting my directorial debut in the adult world.”

And is Academy-Award winning Soderbergh, who has directed/written/produced over 30 films in his 20-year career, getting ready to retire?

“I have a few more issues to explore on the checklist for the next five years and then I might be done,” he admitted to Tarts. “I can feel myself running out of ideas.”