Industry News

The Colonel on Porn’s Downward Spiral

Times Are Changing

Opinion/Editorial

By The Colonel

 

 

I think I can say with confidence that the best is over, we’re running out of time and options faster than we can wipe our asses. No longer,  the color of your skin, the god you worship, or the size of your dick matters, and as a nation, individuals, or industry, we’re all in this together, and we’re up shit creek without a paddle. Now for a second, let’s forget about the war and poverty and declining environment and global economic meltdown and terrorist shootings in Mumbai and  Ebola outbreak in Zimbabwe, let’s talk about the god forsaken smut business. Over the course of 36 years, since the debut of Deep Throat in 1972, blue movies, dirty movies, porn, or whatever the fuck you want to call them, have changed so drastically that it’s sometimes hard to recap the entire process. In a nutshell, the monster that Gerard Damiano created with a dismal budget of $25000, has evolved into something that Damiano himself in one of his final interviews admitted he could no longer comprehend; and it’s not just shaved pussies instead of hairy pussies or ugly transsexuals or double anal fuck fests, it’s the whole nine yards, specially from a business perspective. Allow me to explain:

In early years, when the whole thing was underground, directors had two options: they could work for a director’s fee with no further royalties and sales profit share, or they could produce the movie with their own money, and then sell it to a studio, again, with no further royalties and sales profit share. They could not maintain rights to their movie. In the mid 80’s, after the adult industry became more acceptable and legit, a new beast was invented by no other than John Stagliano: distribution company. Basically, the idea was that you could produce your own movie with your own money, give the finished product to a middle man to sell it for you, give him a chunk of your sales profit, and maintain all rights to your movie. And for a while, it worked, until the early 90’s when John Stagliano came up with another brilliant idea, but this time, nobody knew eventually it’ll come back to bite us all, including himself in the ass.

Again, the idea was simple: pick up the camera, take some whore to a motel room, fuck her up the ass, film it, and boom, you’ve got yourself a movie. Who needs the lame pizza delivery boy set up, ridiculously cheesy lines and awful acting, anyway? I gotta tell you, at the time the idea was so exciting, so fresh and so accessible that almost everybody embraced it, and that was the birth of the Gonzo sub-genre. Little did we know, that in a few years  the technology became so affordable and so available that every masturbating Joe Schmoe will buy a fucking camcorder from his local electronic store and becomes a fucking film maker by shooting his drug junkie girl friend sucking his limb little dick. You may ask what could Joe do with his shit quality garbage?  By the late 90’s every con artist, cut throat, scumbag, mother fucking thief had became a distributer, all it took was a rental garage, a desk, and a land line to play the middle man, sell someone else’s movies and leech off their work and investment. And the best part, is that many of those Joe Schmoes hardly saw a dime in profit, because those small time distributers took their stuff, sold it for dirt cheap, took the money and told them we are having difficulties collecting payments from the stores and vendors, you’ll get paid whenever we get paid, which of course was never.

 

Alright, so Joe Schmoes didn’t really make money, instead, they oversaturated the market and drove down overall wholesale prices from $8 to $10, to $4 to $5 or sometimes even lower. Add internet piracy to the menu, a generation of brain dead, low life, masturbating idiots who see themselves entitled to free porn, free music and free dildos. No wonder we’re in a world of shit.

 

You may ask where do we go from here? Well, it’s hard to tell, but many small timers are going belly up, which is a good thing, I’m glad to see that, because that creates more space for the rest of us, also the entire content delivery is evolving. DVDs are becoming obsolete, these days you can count on DVD sales to cover some of your production costs, and as for making profit, you have to rely on several alternative sources including but not limited to cable TV, video on demand, and clip sales. There are some companies like Vivid and Wicked which tend to release their movies in collector edition formats with booklets, behind the scenes and extras, but even they don’t make a significant profit, because porn is not comparable to classic cinema. Porn has little or no collectors value and by it’s nature is equivalent of junk food: satisfying but disposable. Regardless of box cover design, costumes and the amount of DVD extras, porn movies usually become irrelevant in about 6 months, and porn whores end up quitting, fucking up on booze and drugs, locked up in jail or dead, which in any case, lose their stroke value. So why should anybody pay $29.99 or more for a porn movie, while they can get The Maltese Falcon or The Godfather for the same price which can and will be a part of their DVD Library for the rest of their lives ?

 

This is a defining moment, the adult industry is in the process of filtering itself, many will fail and few will succeed. It’s hard to imagine anybody can get into this business and makes a fortune anymore, like many people did in the 70’s and 80’s, and it’s hard to imagine Joe Schmoes can or want to become pornographers anymore, like many did in the 90’s. Times are changing, and the best is over.

 

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