porn
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2005
The smart and charmingly edited Fleshbot — part of the Gawker empire, a reliable source for Paris Hilton T-mobile hack links, and truly the only “adult” Web site you need to bookmark — notes today the “porn star documentary craze” and links to a doc produced by the Swedish Grindhouse pictures that tracks down the legendary ’70s pornstar Seka.
Titled Desperately Seeking Seka, the pic details a trio of Swedish filmmakers trying to locate and interview perhaps the biggest female porn star of the 1970s. While I wasn’t aware that Seka had pulled a Betty Page-like disappearing act, the filmmakers apparently mine some suspense from their quest. And since Fleshbot spoiled the ending, I will too: the filmmakers find Seka, aka Dorothy Patton, cooking pasta in her Chicago kitchen where she proceeds to regale them with stories of the porn’s “Golden Age.”
.… Read the rest
Thursday, January 6th, 2005
From a story in Variety:
“The porn industry’s AVN Adult Entertainment Expo has always been a colorful, if slightly tawdry, event, a reliable resource for camera crews looking to goose news ratings in the name of covering the multibillion-dollar adult entertainment industry.
However, in what is the AEE’s seventh year since splitting away from Las Vegas’s concurrent Consumer Electronics Show, the porn event has begun to look a little more like Park City…
Like the Sundance Film Festival of a decade ago, the once scrappy trade show has begun to make big deals with corporate sponsors. It’s attracting celebs who aren’t scared to show their faces.”
The article goes on to talk about how AVN publisher Paul Fishbein is an Endeavor client and the various mainstream music acts like Smashmouth who are performing at the awards. Pam Anderson is reportedly launching a line of cruelty free clothing there on Saturday night. And the article speculates that next year the AEE will be cablecast and sponsored by mainstream corporations. It closes with a quote from inexplicable NYC cable show host Robin Byrd:
“‘I’ve got respect from Time Warner,’ said former porn star Robin Byrd, host of New York’s long-running cable access talkshow that features porn stars and strippers. She’s also made a deal with Verizon to sell a package of Robin Byrd ringtones.
‘They do not hassle me anymore,’ she said. ‘You work within the system.’”
… Read the rest
Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
On Nov. 18, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation quietly convened a hearing in order to decide whether to establish Congressional financing for the study of “porn addiction.”
Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), chairman of the Science, Technology, and Space Subcommittee, and a right-wing Christian, arranged for the hearing.
Four “experts,” all with ties to conservative organizations, presented testimony. No one from the adult entertainment industry was invited to contribute.
The hearing represents an interesting tactic by the religious right in their ongoing war on adult entertainment. The First Amendment Free Speech provisions of the U.S. Constitution have frustrated efforts to supress porn in the United States. By presenting pseudo-scientific theories that pornography has a drug-like effect on viewers, anti-porn activists hope to pull an end-run around the Constitution.
Dr. Judith Reisman, Ph.D, testified, “Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process.” [emphasis added]
… Read the rest
Thursday, December 2nd, 2004
Richard Kern will be signing copies of his new book SOFT on Thursday, December 9 from 6-8 p.m. at Feature Inc. — where Kern’s photographs are on display through December 11 — followed by an after party co-hosted by Universe, a division of Rizzoli, and index magazine at the Happy Ending Lounge, at which Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore will d.j.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
As Nick Paumgarten reports in the Talk of the Town section of this week’s New Yorker magazine, “In 2001, after a seventeen-year quest, Rudloph Grey, the author of the Ed Wood biography Nighmare of Ecstasy (which became the basis for the Tim Burton film Ed Wood), found [Wood's final film,] the triple-X Necromania in a warehouse in Los Angeles.”
Wood wrote, produced and directed a soft-core and hard-core version of the film in three days under the name Don Miller; the soft-core version was discovered in 1992 and has since been available in limited release.
Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (1971) — “one of the first skin flicks to have what, technically, could be called a plot,” according to the New Yorker — is now available on DVD. It’s the first title released under the newly launched Fleshbot Films imprint.
As described on the Fleshbot site: “The plot involves a coven of witches, led by the mysterious Madame Heles, who concoct a series of ‘lessons’ for a couple whose sex life is less than satisfying. Their teaching methods involve topless chanting, simulated intercourse with painted skulls, and a lot of oral sex. Madame Heles was to have been played by longtime Wood collaborator Maila ‘Vampira’ Nurmi, who took one look at the script and withdrew herself from the production citing concerns of ‘professional suicide’.”
… Read the rest
Sunday, October 10th, 2004
Variety has a short article up (sorry, subscription only) on Island Fever 3, the first hardcore porn movie to be shot on HD and released on a high definition DVD.
Writes Variety‘s Claude Brodesser, “Much has been made about the changes ultrasharp HDTV will wreak on newsdesk anchors — every nick and blemish magnified, foundation that looks like pancake makeup — but no one spared a thought for the plight of porn stars — until now.”
The piece goes on to note the sudden importance of highly skilled makeup artists when shooting in HD, and ends with some cryptic comments by director Joone about the relationship between porn, HD and indie film: “The way I see it, independent film sort of died in the early ’90s when Miramax got bought by Disney. HD is changing that. I’m hoping people see sex as just the commercial that pays for the movie.”
Huh?
… Read the rest
Thursday, September 30th, 2004
In case you haven’t already heard: “Val Kilmer is Moses!”
Starring in The Ten Commandments at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood, “Kilmer’s passive Moses appears to be following the commandment, ‘Thou shall not express passion,’ since he responds with somnabulistic detachment to every situation, even underplaying in the face of killer plagues and the parting of the Red Sea,” writes Variety.
“This bland, static, overproduced and underdirected musical,” adds the New York Times “all but submerges the famous episodes from Moses’ life in an oily sea of pleasant but unremarkable pop music. The lengendary journey unfolds like a long, lumbering fancy-dress episode of American Idol.”
Those looking for spiritual entertainment on a grand scale would be advised to look elsewhere.
… Read the rest
Wednesday, June 9th, 2004
In the late sixties and seventies, foreign films and foreign-film distributors found themselves sharing theaters with a burgeoning porn industry. In fact many serious European art films were promoted by enterprising theater owners in lurid and lascivious ways, suggesting some heady cinematic brew was actually a steamy orgy.
Of course, art theaters — and porno — have gone the way of DVD. But China has now revived this cinematic bait-and-switch.
Reuters recently chronicled the history of one small film, Maiden Work, which was pushed it into the realm of pornography by the Chinese company that purchased it for distribution.
… Read the rest
