egafd.com

I know from other interests I have, how annoying people can be who go on and on about how much better things were in the past, with no evidence to substantiate this. However I do believe this is true of porn, especially German porn, which had a golden period between 1975 and 1982 and, with the odd exception, has gone downhill ever since. Much the same can be said about French productions and although I have never thought too highly of films from the USA, can anyone imagine a porn film like 'Barbara Broadcast' being made today?

The UK is interesting, because I see no marked deterioration in standards. But it has to be remembered that UK porn producers in the 70's and 80's had far more legal obstacles than they do today.

I should be interested to know if this is a widely held view or am I suffering fron euphoric recall?

I am sure this has been invariably discussed in many topics in this forum.
It is a familiar "refrain".
People who have lived through the golden age of porn decry what has happened, but unfortunately we cannot bring back those times. Video changed all that and the various laws that applies to production, distribution, exhibition classification and censorship.
While we can all be relieved by the fact that we have the kind of freedoms today because of the pioneering spirit and guts of many porn pioneers to bring down those barriers, the quality of porn has somewhat diminished.
Plot driven porn is still mainly produced in European countries and only by a handful of big companies in the US (Vivid, Wicked Video, etc). Much of what has been produced in the last decade in the US is what can be described as "all-sex" or gonzo. European countries (France, Italy, Germany) still cling to their old traditions of churning out plot-driven movies. At least for the last half dozen years or so, France has reverted to practically all-condom porn production. A substantial part of what comes from Brazil is also with condom. There is a looming legislation in the Los Angeles area that makes condom-use mandatory, and people are very nervous as to what that may mean to production and consumption of porn.
In the late 1970's-early 1980's an average-above average porn movie in the US would cost easily $100,000-$150,000. And it took close to a year in many cases to be edited and released in movie theaters. When newspapers ceased accepting advertisements from movie theaters showing X-rated porn movies, and when many large cities started to chase away and close porn movie theaters, there was little reason to spend that kind of money if there was little chance of recouping the production costs.
As soon as video came into play by the mid 1980's, production had moved from east coast to the West Coast, production in nice weather and exteriors could be undertaken throughtout the year. Movie budgets fell to less to $20,000 for an average porn movie. Porn on VHS cassettes were very expensive (in the $80-$100 range). The only way to see them was by rental through a video store. Hardly anyone could afford a porn movie on VHS.
Quality went down. A couple of years ago the economic downturn did not help the situation and of course porn producers keep blaming it all on illegal downloads, but will never admit that their product is way too pricey and they have not adapted very well to the modern situation of delivery and costs.

I am not familiar with UK porn, and I will let more experienced individuals speak on that aspect of porn production. But as I understand it, for quite some time it was illegal to produce, or distribute porn in Britain so Britain has not had the same output (in quality and quality) that other countries had.
If movies were better in the old days, it was because there were filmmakers who knew their craft, actresseses and actors who knew how to relly act and deliver convincing lines and were even passionate about what they were doing. Today you shoot 4 scenes in a couple of days, edit it an distribute it on a DVD within a month or so. And unfortunately there is the question of glut. There is way too much of it for the demand that there is out there (and porn producers have been unwiling to cut down). So fewer copies of a DVD are sold, and within a month no one even remembers what that movie was. Legal download of scenes or the whole movie is still somewhat pricey. Everyone says DVD is dead or has been dead for some time (video stores have practically disappeared), but producers have been hardly supporting the format with the prices they demand and affix to the product. Blu ray porn was slow to roll out due to the high price of production and with Sony resisted giving them the technology for quite sometime. Very little porn is distributed in blu ray and it is quite expensive. So where do we go from here? Quite likely the internet, but so much of it there is free (you tubes and the like) and you need never spend a dime to view porn (and get your daily fix), even if it's poor quality.

DavidS wrote:

> I should be interested to know if this is a widely held view or
> am I suffering fron euphoric recall?

As someone who has been interested mainly in cinema in the broadest sense of the term, for more than 30 years, then only secondarily and subsequently in porn movies, I couldn't agree less.

Let me first state where my position is in terms of broadest cinematographic values. I agree with those - from Flaherty and Grierson onwards - that consider documentary the purest and more honest form of cinema. I share Werner Herzog's opinion that the most interesting thing in theatre's representations is more often than not the building's chandelier and that there's no such thing as good acting in absolute terms. Acting is only good in relative terms as far as it nears the performance of someone doing the same thing for real. In other words, the best subjects to shoot are those that you can shoot without their knowledge (ie animals in a National Geographic documentary) or that can be put inside a movie while doing what they do in their everyday life (ie a professional butcher playing the part of a butcher in a movie with non-professional actors).
More, while I studied a lot of montage theories (Porter-Griffith, the soviets, classic 'invisible' Hollywood, nouvelle vague etc...) I came to the conclusion that Bazin was right when he said that they are all forms of dishonest manipulation of the viewers and that the best editing is 'non-editing' ie long tracking shots loosely put together.

Given what stated above, it should come to no surprise that - in my opinion - the so called 'golden age' of porn is far from being my favourite period to pick from. For reasons that will become clearer reading on, I think that the best period in the history of porn movies was from the advent of digital videocameras and avid editing (late 90s) to the downfall in output caused by the diminished porn industry revenues (around 2007).

The 'golden age of porn' in my opinion had a series of structural drawbacks that heavily hampered those products:
- the cost of film; even if porn's favourite format (16 mm) was significantly cheaper than mainstream movies film (35 mm) it still remained a major - probably the main - cost chapter of a production; those 70s producers simply couldn't afford to shoot a full fledged copulation as it naturally happened, the simple cost of so much film would have outbalanced their budgets
- the distribution in movie theatres; this represented a problem in two ways, first it meant that even the printing of positive copies was a non trivial cost and second that theatre owners would favour shorter movies just above the minimal time definition for feature films, in order to increase the number of shows per day; both those problems meant that directors and editors had to stuff a half dozen sex scenes or more in an hour of movie length or little more
- the reliance on non porn-specialized technical personnel, particularly camera workers and editors and in particular in personnel moonlighting from the 'B movies' milieu instead of the 'off-Hollywood/arthouse' one (ie Roger Corman's style of shooting instead of John Cassavetes' one); these technicians worked in a way that was consistent with the goals of 'B movies' (in particular horror, SF, crime and other forms of exploitation cinema) ie make the spectator believe what would have been simply impossible or extremely rare in everyday reality and that had forcibly to be staged in front of the camera, not realizing that in fact the porn movies subject was something that happened daily in millions of households, hotels, workplaces and even hidden public places
- the heavy reliance on plots when the subjects and the performers should and could have spoken mainly with their bodies

As time passed, most of those constraints relaxed or completely disappeared.
The advent of video in the early 80s as a substitute for film abated the raw material costs of shooting, since professional Betamax tape costed only a fraction of even the cheapest negative film. These still existing costs almost disappeared when the digital cameras were introduced a dozen years ago, now not even tape was required. This made more and more feasible the shooting of a complete real sexual meeting, instead of one reconstructed by ellipsis.
The market switching from movie theatres to home fruition in VHS cut the cost of the positive copies and rendered sustainable the commercial success of much longer final products, since the late 80s the number of porn flicks passing the 2 hours in length and representing all the sexual scenes in real time increased exponentially. The further switch from VHS to DVD not only decreased the distribution costs even more, coupled with the digital shootings it also recovered that image quality that was lost in switching from film to VHS.
The easier handling of videocameras and later digital cameras compared to traditional film cameras and the switch from Moviola film editing to flatbed Betamax editors and then to Avid digital editors all made the technical skills of the job easier, this allowed new generations of technician to be trained specifically for the porn tasks, replacing the make-believe techniques with minimalistic ones stressing the realism of what was really happening in front of the camera ('more is less'). This also implied that these new cameramen and editors were on average more interested and enthusiastic in what they were doing than those B-movies tech people who picked up the loot with the shortest possible time effort and run.
The take-over of gonzo story lines replacing the heavy plot ones made justice of all the (inherently) bad acting and allowed the porn performers just be themselves, ie people paid to do in front of the camera things that most of them were doing off camera regularly anyway (let's not delude ourselves, in the last few decades porn recruiting has come mostly from the worlds of night clubs, prostitution, swinging circles and alternative lifestyles, not from the environment of failed actors and wannabe entertainers as it could have happened in the 70s).

For all these reasons I think that movies like 'Seymour Butts meets the Tushi girls', 'Buttman's Anal Divas', 'Euro Girls Never Say No' or 'Rocco: Top of the World' are widely more satisfactory efforts than the 'Barbara Broadcast' mentioned by the original poster.

Then, has everything improved from the 70s? Were the top echelon gonzos from ten years ago the ideal porn movies, the best ones any director could ever shoot? Of course the answer to both questions is no.
Some things went indeed downhill, first and foremost in terms of censorship and different legal regulation of the sector in various countries. Censorship - both through judicial sentences and the self regulation conduct codes that the industry adopted as a consequence - heavily affected American porn movies from the early '80s to the present day. The movies I mentioned above contain no fisting or golden showers in their widely available versions (R: TotW does in its Italian cut) and that's not because of the unwillingness of the performers - we all know Sandra Romain would do anything even borderline legal for the right money - or for any stylistic limit of the directors. All the directors of the aforementioned flicks shot harder, uncensored stuff, but whenever they tried to distribute that to the widest public they incurred in personally and economically damaging fines and penalties.
European produced porn with local markets as its main target didn't experience such wide censorship problems. In Germany only extremely violent or demeaning BDSM can lead to prosecution and because of this a golden age of extreme porn flourished in that nation from the late 80s (establishment of companies like DBM, Videorama, Magma) to about a decade later. But just when the US productions boomed in terms of production values (budget, number and quality of performers involved, length of scenes and final product, improvement in shooting smoothness and editing output) the German one shrinked noteworthly. Why did this happen? Because of the German legislation about distribution of adult material, the most restrictive of any country where porn is legal. While the Americans could benefit of the reduced costs forwarded by the digital revolution to reach more effectively and directly a higher number of customers worldwide, the Germans were prevented to do so by their local laws. This ultimately made them unable to stand the US competition.
In France something similar happened with the TV distribution rules. Since French laws state that only 'condom protected' porn can appear on cable, pay-per-view and other form of television broadcasting and such appearances always represented a substantive form of revenue for a majority of French porn producers, then most French porn productions switched to the all condom format, making nowadays Gallic porn far less palatable for international audiences than the 90s one.

I could go on and on with this subject for pages and one day maybe I'll write an essay, but I think that for now I made my position clear with just what's written above.

Very wide-ranging.... I wouldn't presume to discuss your analysis, on grounds
of sheer ignorance.
However [and I think I speak for a significant fraction of the viewerage]- the
last thing I want to watch is 'real' sex. I want a [relatively] quick fix, with
lovely girls and nice lingerie. I don't want three hours of monotonous pumping,
with a side-order of farts, belches, wildly-panning cameras and street-noise.
Rocco and Butts, from your examples, seem to me too often merely self-indulgent
and too ready to believe their own publicity. Too many 3hr-plus flicks get VERY
boring mid-scene; the nature of the beast [here, with two backs], I suspect.......

For me the vital thing is fantasy- and suspension of disbelief is one of the
hardest things to, um, pull off.

jj wrote:

> However [and I think I speak for a significant fraction of the
> viewerage]- the last thing I want to watch is 'real' sex.

This is probably what separates fans of 'golden age' porn like you from fans of gonzo porn like me, just like it separates fans of Hollywood movies from those who like documentary style (non-porn) moviemaking, people that listen to overproduced hits from those indulging in lo-fi, slow-core or minimalistic music, those that look for 'nouvelle cuisine' from those preferring to taste traditional recipes.
Personally I always tend to the representation of reality, to the non-suspension of disbelief, to the prevalence of non-fictional elements, to real time frames, to the most honest trick-free approach as possible. In the end it's probably just a matter of taste.

soljARis wrote:
> In the end it's probably just a matter of taste.

Absolutely. And I'd stress that my taste is more catholic than the above might
suggest- for example, I'm not against gonzo per se, only [what I judge to be]
bad gonzo : -)
All the so-called 'eras' have IMO their good and bad points [and thus their good
and bad exemplars], so I find attempts at comparison a little arid.

Soljaris: The 'golden age of porn' in my opinion had a series of structural drawbacks that heavily hampered those products:
- the cost of film; even if porn's favourite format (16 mm) was significantly cheaper than mainstream movies film (35 mm) it still remained a major - probably the main - cost chapter of a production; those 70s producers simply couldn't afford to shoot a full fledged copulation as it naturally happened, the simple cost of so much film would have outbalanced their budgets
- the distribution in movie theatres; this represented a problem in two ways, first it meant that even the printing of positive copies was a non trivial cost and second that theatre owners would favour shorter movies just above the minimal time definition for feature films, in order to increase the number of shows per day; both those problems meant that directors and editors had to stuff a half dozen sex scenes or more in an hour of movie length or little more
===========================

I agree with most of what you said in your post, but I take issue with some of your propositions in the above section.
=While it may be true that early porn movies were of short length [DEEP THROAT (1972) was 62 minutues, BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR (1972) 71 minutes, RESURRECTION OF EVE (1973) was 82 mintes, DEVIL IN MISS JONES (1973) was 67 minutes, ODYSSEY (1977) was 87 minutes, Carter Stevens JAILBAIT (1976) was 80 minutes] directors were quite prepared to make films longer when the circumstances and plot required it.
=It is not correct to say that the preferred film format for porn was 16 mm, either. Many directors were frequently shoting in 35mm, and Caballero was shooting in that format well into the 1990's. Kirdy Stevens shot his first two TABOO movies (late 1970-early 1980's) on 35mm.
=the reasons for plot-driven porn from early 1970's to well into the1990's was somewhat more complicated that it would seem at first sight. Porn directors and producers were trying to make their product more palatable to the general population (we will get to the other major reason in a minute). They had to make the product plot driven like mainstream movies. They had to inject drama and comedy while at the same time satisfy the porn consumers with some explicit sex. The other way they accomplished that was by having the movies exhibited in more upscale movie theaters (away from the sleazy side of town where the general population would not dare go).
What was there before explicit hardcore? Either the more or less plot-driven "nudies" (like Russ Meyer used to churn out), and later the so-called called "beavers" where girls (with full bush) would squirm naked on a bed. There was not plot there, and none was necessary. From there in the very early 1970's you had the pseudo-documentaries (either american-made or imported from Europe and Scandinavia), where filmakers could insert brief explicit sex scenes here and there throughout the film and wrap it up like it was documentary. Plot driven movies like MONA (1970), DEEP THROAT (1972), BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR (1972) pushed the envelope further, in that you had drama and/or comedy, a discernible plot and more or less an hour running length, in color and sound andbeing exhibited in upscale movie houses. Why did they stick for plot-driven movies initially and for so long? For no other reason that to show that the content was "serious" and sex was not the only overt content of the movie to unnecessarily titillate the masses. This was to get around the thorny issue of "obscenity". The Justice Department and local courts could not get a sucessful conviction for "obscenity" against movie theaters or film distributors just because there were a couple of sex scenes in the movie (only lasting a few minutes), the WHOLE movie had to pass the test of "prurient" content.
Making a porn movie in those days was a criminal offence, and the female performers would be charged with "prostitution". The films had to be shot on the sly. It was not until the late1980's that the situation was corrected and so filmmakers were free, if not necessarily all over the USA, at least int he L.A. area, to shoot porn without fear of arrerst or reprisals. Then all-sex and gonzo started with Ed Powers (pro-am style), John Stagliano, who had no need for much of a plotline. Movies shot by such outfits as Anabolic got longer and longer.
Certainly the video revolution in the mid-1980's was embraced by porn filmakers not only because it rendered the filmmaking process simpler and cheaper, but because movie exhibition had basically shriveled because of two important developments: the majority of newspapers refused to accept ads for porn films (so if the public could not be informed about a film that was being shown who would know what was playing where and when), and many large city mayors began clamping down on movie theaters, not renewing business permits etc. Video was the perfect solution to this problem. Porn became an "indoor" viewing sport, it was cheaper to produce and distribute. At the beginning Hollywood was not interested in the formnat and only saw it as a a form of pirating their product. The majors sued Sony and lost. In those years porn producers went all out with the video format and in the early years, the porn product on the shelves of a videostore was mostly that. Even later before the VHS format disappeared porn product in a videostore was in the 35-40% range.
Since porn was a form of speech, and that the only thing that was of major concern to them was the question of "community standards" a lot of the more extreme and controversial subject matter had to be ditched (incest, fisting, pissing,etc), and so they went with the "all-sex/gonzo" content.
Would one prefer watching a plot-driven movie or "all-sex" (whether shot 20-30 years ago or now)? I wish I had some polls I could cite to make a case either way, but a lot of the younger generation watching porn now seems to prefer the "all-sex" variety. The older generation seems to be somewhat more nostalgically attached to the golden age plot-driven porn. I would agree with you that if I had a choice to watch BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR or a Lexington Steele "all-sex" move, I would prefer the latter.

What I neglected to mention in my previous posts was the importance of Viagra in modern porn production (from the late 1990's to the present). The all-sex/gonzo style of filmmaking would not have attained such predominance and quantity of product if it wasn't for Viagra. It extended the porn life of many aging porn performers and allowed a sex scene to have a longer running length. You only need to compare porn movies/scenes prior to Viagra and after Viagra to fully appreciate its impact.

So, Viagra is to blame for Ron Jeremy?
I'd ban it at a stroke : -))

10 Viagra pills could not hold him/it up.
The man could stick it and out without touching his dick. He could cum on a dime. He could even suck his own dick (which he did on a few occasions). He even did scenes with she-males (I think pre-op and post-op). He even worked in Europe. He even delivered some funny lines. He was fun to watch in the beginning.
He directed dreadful movies under a variety of aliases (why?).
By the late 1980's he had gained a lot of weight. In a scene you would not even see him wearing clothes. Just a towel around his waist. He started to squeeze and choke his dick to make it look it had some life. His hair got longer and unkempt, very hairy, he was balding at the top. His mustache looks like whiskers. Most of what he gets now is non-sex roles (mostly in porn parodies), and the occasional sex scene for Jurassic Cock that are just too painful to watch.
He knows what people are thinking and saying about him, but hardly cares anymore. I don't know whether it is really fun for him anymore (he's not saying) and just capitalizes on his porn name and fame. I don't think retirement from porn is what is on his pressing mind or agenda right now. Perhaps there is really nothing else out there that interests him or that he believes he might be good at. Perhaps people around him are too shy or embarassed to have serious discussions with him about it, or perhaps he has heard it and just shrugs it off.
Viagra perhaps is not for everyone (especially those involved in porn) and when your body goes there is not much Viagra can do for you to improve other physical attributes. It has certainly exceeded the career span of many porn performers, and it has kept performers keep a woody longer than could physically be possible under those filming conditions (and allowed them to shoot a sex scene practically every day of the week).