Writers can't find work in adult entertainment

As if it wasn’t hard enough to make a living as a screenwriter these days, now another market is apparently drying up. According to a front-page article recently in the New York Times, the porno industry is cutting way back on scripts for their features.

Sidenote: What does it say about the state of the newspaper industry when this is on page one of the Gray Lady?

Due to the internet the average attention span of adult entertainment viewers is three to five minutes. (Attention span or task efficiency?) Not that every story needs to have the complexity of THE WIRE but five minutes is a little thin for a feature length movie even by porno standards. You don’t have to lay out the real estate agent’s backstory but you do need to explain why she’s showing a house nude. Incredibly, audiences don’t seem to care.

So screenwriters who might otherwise make a nice living in pornos are forced to lower themselves and write mainstream studio films instead.

At one time the adult industry was all about making movies with plots. The success of films like DEEP THROAT and BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR created the illusion that porno films might be suitable for more general audiences. Decent people like you and I might be able to justify purchasing a XXX-rated film because it’s not a feature about a gangbang and hot girl-on-girl action, it’s a study of lust in the old west. Porno producers had this fantasy that women would be drawn in as long as there was a plot. Women love a good story they reasoned and what could be a better one than a 21 year old horny housewife letting in a hunky tatted-up pizza delivery boy?

But now porno production mills are gravitating toward just sex scenes (“vignettes" they delicately call them) strung together by a loose theme, like “girls in glasses” or “sluts of the Vatican”. Free YouTube-type porno websites are showcasing small clips. DVD sales have taken a nose-dive. The adult industry is scrambling, looking for new profit opportunities. Their best avenue to date is mounting websites that people must subscribe to. And this requires new material updated daily. So these studios are just cutting to the chase, going right to sex scenes. Who cares why a smoking hot Asian girl is a cantor?

And thus a long-standing art form is soon to go by the wayside. Gone will the subtlety, the nuance, the spellbinding narratives we’ve come to expect from skin flicks. And it’s not just writers who are suffering.

The Times article quotes reputed porn star queen Savanna Samson who laments the plight of actors. She claims she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles. An example is the rich multi-layered character she portrayed in 2006’s THE FLASHER. She played a psychotic who became a flasher and had hardcore sex in public due to mother issues. You just don’t find good roles like this for women.

Hopefully, the pendulum will swing. I’d hate to think my original notion about a psychotic pool boy who has sex on diving boards and doesn’t change the chlorine often enough will not go unsold, or worse, be adapted for Dane Cook’s next summer studio comedy.