NYT on Porn

For Short Attention Spans,
More Sex and Less Plot

by Matt Richtel

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said,because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.
The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue.But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.
“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

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Vivid, one of themost prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread—“vignettes” in the industry vernacular — that can be presented separately online.
Other major studios are making similar shifts. The industry’s interest inscripted scenes has waxed and waned in recent decades because of changes in technology. In the early 1970s,movies with loose story lines, like “Deep Throat” and “Behind the Green Door,” won a mainstream audience, and others tried to copy their success, selling plot-centric movies to couples watching at home with the VCR technology introduced in 1975. The falling cost of hand-held video cameras gave birth to a generation of pornographers with little interest in drama beyond a clichéd plot involving a pizza delivery boy, said Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.
Mr. Fishbein said plot came into vogue again in the late ’90s with the boom of the DVD. Big studios, he said, figured plots would make their filmsmore appealing to women and encourage couples to bring them into their homes—whether on disc or pay-per-view. But interest in DVDs has fallen sharply, Mr. Fishbein said, because the Internet has made it easy to watch snippets of video. In lieu of plot, there are themes.
Among the new releases from New Sensations, a studio that makes 24 movies a month, is “Girls ’n Glasses,” made up of scenes of women having sex while wearing glasses. “It’s almost like we’re back to the late ’70s or early ’80s when the average movie was eight minutes and just a sexscene,” Mr.Hirsch said, sounding wistful.
Ms. Samson said she took her acting seriously and used to prepare studiously for her roles. “I used to have dialogue,” said Ms. Samson,whose given name is Natalie Oliveros, and who is one of the industry’s biggest stars.
“Getting it on in one hardcore scene after another just isn’t as much fun,” she added.