anna span defending porn on radio 4 this morning

[Officer Dibble]

"I think theres room for everyone"

No there's not, the pie has been divided into far to many pieces already. As a consequence, in order to make a living, producers are forced to work quicker and cheaper - with no time to put any thought into what they are doing, using the cheapest production methods possible, and any scrag-end performer, sporting a lank, rat-eaten hairstyle, that walks in off the street. This has resulted in the devaluation of porn and porn performers. The public are now sated, they?ve had their fill. The feast of eroticism, unleashed by the video player, has now lost it's piquancy. The public have become blas? and they don't give a dam.


?but it would be nice if there was more experimental stuff?

I hate experimental stuff (in the sex arena, at least). Sex is sex. It?s basically fucking, sucking and the time honored fetishes. If you go beyond that you go beyond the bounds of sex, and what you are doing then becomes superfluous and irrelevant to the ordinary punter.


Officer Dibble

[one eyed jack]

I beg to differ Officer, the shops prefer UK amateur. It sells well for them...So I'm informed. I do agree though, there is so much of it that some good product gets crowded out of the market.

Even the titles with the rat eaten hairstyles. Either way we argue it, whatever anyones taste: It all comes down to pussy.

[Officer Dibble]

"I beg to differ Officer, the shops prefer UK amateur"

I wasn't dissing any particular genre of porn - just contemporary porn in general. I know about UK amateur, I discovered it back in 1993. It was a good earner, then - before the age of the chav, before we were inundated by a tidal wave of DV Cam dirge. Before we all became blas? about video erotica.

Yes, I agree, stick a Union Jack on the box cover and put 'British' or ?amateur? in the title and you will be assured of shifting at least few a few more units - in the UK, anyway. I'm afraid it's indicative of our parochial naffness. We love small, we love cheap, and we love tat. I regret that, as a nation, we are disoriented by the elevated, the sophisticated, the mysterious and exotic. We feel ill at ease and embarrassed by it. We just don?t understand it. And, in order to save face, to big ourselves up amongst more worldly exponents of the adult video arts, we chortle and slap each other on the back ?Wheyhey! We?re the lads! British is best! Who needs appealing, sophisticated, women, anyway?? But at the same time, inside, the more perceptive amongst us might feel a little uncomfortable, foolish and inadequate.


?Either way we argue it, whatever anyones taste: It all comes down to pussy.?

I whish it did, Tel. But the modern porno just doesn?t induce me to think of pussy (maybe I?m getting old?) More often than not, I find myself thinking how awful and pointless the whole exercise is.


Officer Dibble

[DanG]

"The trouble with porn is that it either consists of the above, or if its "Porn for women"....... in comes the tanned American arsehole-stud wearing bandana and tux, bearing a box of chocolates. Cue slo-mo and add some crap blue lighting, fade up eighties, Miami Vice reject music and we have have the setting."

-jimslip


So true, so very true....this also seems to be the MO for a lot of the American-produced made-for-TV softcore too. You did forget the obligatory ripped jeans though.....

[nachovx]

You're just watching the wrong selection of American porn ... American pro-am stuff is still streets ahead of most European products, bar maybe some of the material coming out of Budapest. And for a harder edge porn, it is the only real source of quality material.I agree the big studio productions with contract girls is really lame stuff (Vivid, Metro etc.). At risk of opening up an old debate, UK Porn sucks ... and whether it's legal/illegal/restricted/censored makes no difference, it's just bad. To balance the slagging, Dutch and French porn are also shite.

[Richas]

I love U.K porn. Beats American and European hands down to me. European is very cold clinical, and often bizare. American either too trashy, too glitzy, or too obsessed with pushing boundaries to ridiculous and often stomach turning levels. U.K porn is more real and those involved actually, quite often, look like they are actually having fun.... which is hot to me. Love Terry's stuff...Better than watching Max hardcore dress some poor girl up as a school girl or Rocco half kill a girl all in the name of 'adult' entertainment.

[andy ide]

As usual Terry talks a lot of sense. But I don't agree that it's quite so black and white. As he says, he is who he is and I'm confident that he speaks for the vast majority of men who watch porn. But there are other men out there, myself included and I'm sure I'm not the only one, who would like something else from porn -- a greater degree of humanity, of three-dimensionality, of eroticism, and of originality. This isn't to do with a 'female' part of our character. It's to do with our masculinity.

There are two types of porn scene that do it for me. The first is when the true character of the woman (because legally, guys, they're all women, not little Lolita girlies) is allowed to come through and she finds herself having a beautifully erotic experience. There remains something very private about what the audience is being allowed to watch -- through her 'generosity' -- because it's so honest and personal to her. The ultimate in voyeurism. (Such was the case in a recent scene I shot with a young married couple. She was gorgeous, full of fire, and they were actually -- whisper it -- making love.)

The second type of scene is one where the director puts together a piece of drama that actively seduces me. He (because it's rarely a she) has come up with an erotic scenario, rich in tension, he's cast it well and he's got good dramatic performances out of his players, and he's shot and edited it in such a way that I'm teased, I'm played with, I am ENTERTAINED. (Interestingly, for me anyway, it can often be the case that although you know that the woman is faking it -- albeit pretty well -- the psychological charge of the scene acts as a very effective counterweight.)

What both these types of porn scene share is eroticism. Not in the sense of some boring Vivid movie for couples, some XXX Mills and Boon nonsense, but in the sense of genuine drama, be it a piece of fiction or a piece of gonzo documentary. And if the key to eroticism is uncertainty (which it most certainly is), how can a porn scene be erotic if you know exactly what you're going to get in advance?

This stuff does exist out there, although it would be nice if there was a whole lot more of it. For the first, check out the work of John B Root, a French director, all his stuff is on a site called www.explicite.com. It's not all perfect but he's got an excellent approach and it pays dividends. His stuff is a bit like Anna Span's in tone. For the second, have a look at some of the classic Italian movies of Mario Salieri -- loads of no-no taboos being broken in those, loads of incredibly beautiful and classy Italian women getting very, very dirty indeed.

So why can't I buy either of these types of erotic entertainment in a licenced British sex shop? Well, it's certainly not because the market is not out there, I'm convinced of that. There are two reasons.

The first is that there isn't enough creativity, vision and drive on the part of producers. Money doesn't come into it. Talent will always find a way. (And I'm not sidelining gonzo here. There are some excellent gonzo directors here in the UK with talent and creativity to spare in the way they 'manage' their performers, it's just that the 'blokey' tone of their work pushes a scene in the opposite direction to where I'd personally like it to go.) Distributors aren't a barrier either. The UK hardcore market is still sufficiently small for ambitious producers to become their own distributors, as exemplified by Terry and Anna Span.

The second thing, partly intertwined with the above (and you've got to have that first), is the censorship imposed on producers and distributors by the BBFC. It might be very admirable that there are certain things that they don't allow. It may likewise be that all censorship is bad. But what it does practically is to limit, firstly, the erotic potential of all the hardcore porn that we can legally buy in this country and, secondly, the maturity and intelligence of that porn.

As regards erotic potential, well, you're certainly never going to see Salieri movies on sale over here. Religion? Incest? Non-consensual sex? Under-age sex? In the right hands, these are subjects that offer enormous erotic potential. Just go into your local Waterstones and take a look at the erotic fiction section. It's not called 'erotic' for nothing. It plays by no rules of censorship. And the breaking of taboos, such as those above, is the absolute bedrock of its success. (By the way, which sex, male or female, do you usually see browsing these shelves? That's right. So much for the fact that men aren't interested in erotic entertainment.)

As regards maturity and intelligence, Tania Kindersley mentioned in the Radio 4 interview that you never see the personal consequences of sex in porn. Well, I'll posit the view that if a director wants to address the reality of sexual relationships in an intelligent, creative and responsible way (with all the potential for eroticism that comes with that) then that director would want to have a free hand in seeking to address the full spectrum of life. And as it stands, the BBFC will not allow that to happen because it has set up its rules in a very black and white way. Which is unfortunate because it still views each movie on a case-by-case basis.

I did a scene for TVX recently which would never have got past the BBFC if I'd presented a hardcore cut of it to them. (The performers in my shows have real sex but I shoot it soft.) This involved dressing up Elle Brook in Agent Provocateur lingerie and G&C shades, putting her in a cattle-pen and gaffer-taping her wrists and ankles to the bars. Upon which Pascal fucked her mouth and then fucked her pussy from behind. The key for TVX censorship-wise was that Elle's 'character' had to come across as being totally ok with it. And that's the only way that I wanted to play the scene anyway. I told her to imagine that she was there with her boyfriend, no matter how non-sensical that might have been, that they were playing out a fantasy of his and that her attitude to it was one of amusement and strength, that boys will be boys, but that it was turning her on nevertheless. I also shot a sequence which I'll splice into the start of the finished show in which Pascal is seated on a bench in the larger enclosure of the pen while Elle walks around him, staring at him. Now a scene like this doesn't really have anything to do with maturity and intelligence I'll grant you. But it has everything to do with psychological horniness, with powerplay, with the kind of bondage fun that any mildly adventurous couple would play out in the privacy of their own bedroom. And it fucking rocked. But, guys, I just wouldn't be able to sell you this scene in a UK sex shop. L.A. beefcakes coming onto some teeny babe like they're about to storm Bagdad yeah, you can buy that, that kind of nauseating mindset gets through (albeit in some edited-down way maybe). But horny European taboo eroticism, forget it. (I'll post a couple of pics up if you'd like -- just need someone tell me how to do it.)

I was struck recently by a comment that the comedian David Baddiel made in a newspaper interview. He's always been open about the fact that he's a porn user. Now that he's in his 40s he says that the thrill has gone but it's become such a habit that he still has to feed it, now and again, no matter how empty and unsatisfying he finds the experience to be. I'm exactly the same -- a middle-aged body and brain still going through the motions from time to time. But whilst I can't speak for him, I do know that audio-visual pornography still has the potential to excite me. It's simply that my needs are not being met. I've grown up. I want more.

And it is all possible. I can counter all of the predictable negative comments that might result from this posting on the basis of practical technicality and creativity. ("I can", however, is not to say that I will). Likewise, by and large, I have no bones to pick with the UK producers whose work bores me and indeed dispirits me. Live and let live. Loads of people like loads of different types of porn and it's important to remember that the consumer market never remains the same if only for the fact that it's generational -- tired old punters die out and brand-new pumped-up kids come in to fill their place.

But there are some men out there whose needs are not quite so one-dimensional as others and porn can, by one way or another, be produced to feed their desires. And it most certainly will be, of that I am sure.

Finally, I feel the need to qualify the knock that I gave Anna earlier on in this thread. She is a superb self-publicist and an accomplished businesswoman. And I love the way she's marketing her movies under her own brand, the packaging's great. What annoys me is that she talks about so much of what is right but actually delivers so much of what is wrong. She actually does women a disservice. Even the ones who shop at Anne Summers.

[joe king]

In the interview Anna Span says she is selling 1000 units to Ann Summers.
Ann Summers isn't a legalised sex shop.

What she is selling is soft core shite.

[andy ide]

I know, Joe. But just because it's softcore doesn't mean it has to be, as you put it, 'shite'.

[DanG]

Actually Joe, Ann Summers does have some licenced stores, including their 'diffusion' stores, but I can't remember the name of them ('Soho' possibly?), so Anna could be selling h/c stuff to them.

Then again, you could be absolutely right and it might just be the aforementioned soft core shite....