Career Moves
The San Fernando valley is the Hollywood of the adult movie industry. When you drive north on the 405 and crest the Sepulveda Pass you can actually see the heat rising from the vast sprawl before you, and that's on a cool day. Pornography is the elephant in the living room, chalking up annual sales of CD's and video far in excess of what the mainstream film industry is responsible for, and that includes theatrical releases. When you think of the budgets of virtually all of those "adult" movies you realize the profits are astronomical. I mean, what do they need? A bedroom, a relatively inexpensive videocam, videotape (which can be reused), a couple of cheap lights, a hot manicurist and a hunky bartender. Somebody's buying and renting all those movies, and they're not all in blue states. When I drove cross country I was astonished to see the plethora of Adult Movie outlets along the interstate in Missouri, windowless shed-like buildings with huge parking lots out in the middle of nowhere. The best comment I ever heard about pornography was made by radio psychologist Dr. Toni Grant back in the 80's, before talk radio had been hijacked by loudmouths. "When you watch a dirty movie," she said, "for the first five minutes all you ever want to do in your life is have sex, and after five minutes you never want to have sex again."
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:26 AM
4 Comments:
Way, way back, when talkies first came on the scene, says she laughing (1964), a fellow female student and I went to a porn house in Dublin on a bet. You have not been to a sleazy porno theater until you have visited one in Ireland. The seats were sticky so we took blankets to toss over them. (We had been forwarned) Forgot what the title of the so called film was but think it was something concerning the man's throat or something like that. We were scared to death when we went in the so called theatre. We were two of maybe 8 women in the whole theatre. We had connned two male students into going with us (bet they thought they were going to get lucky that night) so there were the four of us, no popcorn or juju beans sold, in fact no treats at all sold. That was our first hint that maybe this was not a good idea. However, we were liberated woman of the 60s ( I am woman, hear me roar) so we adopted a blase attitude and started viewing the film. After the first shock (we were both good Catholic girls,) it started to strike us as funny. One comment after the other fell from our lips during the boring dialogue and the more the comments, the more we laughed. Finally there was a scene where a black man began to shuffle down a runway. I could not help it, I began to sing' I'se sees thum acomin, Old Black Joe". Off tune of course, as I am tone deaf. Needless to say, we were evicted from the theatre and told not to come back again. No, the guys did not get lucky that night but we did treat them to a couple of pints in sympathy for their embarressment at being thrown out of the porno theatre. However, my fellow female student and I considered ourselves women of the world at that point.
Very funny story, Lee. Thanks for posting it!
Don't know if this is what inspired your cartoon, but one of the broadcast networks (ABC, perhaps?) just last night aired a magazine piece about a young woman whose career as a teen-aged ice skater has now evolved into that of a twenty-something porn movie queen specializing in passing for an underage school girl. Her parents are her managers and claim they fast-forward through the sex scenes, being most concerned about her hair and make-up. My, My!
Interesting brought that up, Xvthus. I usually have a four or five day lead time, and was amused to see this story after I'd done this cartoon. I even considered mentioning it in my commentary. It's precisely the kind of thing that would have inspired me had it been the other way around. Life imitates art.
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