Coming Attractions
Stoller, Robert J. & Levine, L S.
For the performer with an active career, "a complete relationship" remains necessarily a fantasy. One improvises as much stability as one can. "I couldn't have been in this business if I hadn't had...
...The discussions of hygiene, in a business where unprotected intercourse is de rigueur, are not only revolting but scary...
...mants talk about health at all, they speak of an imminent plague with blasé fatalism...
...The trite plots and inane dialogue make an old Marilyn Chambers vehicle look like The Rules of the Game...
...The conversations range from the details of work on the set to the peculiarities of life at home...
...a footnote informs us that she "lives en menage with a man and a woman...
...Levine recalls the betrayal that ended one relationship: "If she was doing straight hard-core, I wouldn't have cared...
...she then moved in with an uncle who ogled her in the shower and gave her unwelcome caresses...
...Not surprisingly, those who make their living in porn have little use for the radical feminist critiques of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who see X-rated material as a form of sexual assault...
...They just aren't hard-core...
...They are even, says Levine, a growth industry...
...These proliferating cassettes do not of course produce themselves, yet the makers of this ever more accessible commodity are rarely the subject of journalism, let alone scholarship...
...And some, no matter how jaded they become, still find themselves prey to the green-eyed monster...
...He cites 9-1/2 Weeks, which Porsche points to as a model of the more sophisticated movies she would like to make...
...Yet all the interviewees, male and female, agree that things are worse for men, at least in front of the camera...
...And nothing about this book will make its principals more sympathetic—or at least less despicable—than the occasional elegiac tone of the interviews: words of reminiscence for a subculture being vanquished by a slicker, more respectable product...
...As Levine himself points out, "a woman doing straight outcalls can make just as much money without leaving behind a permanent public record...
...We could have gone downtown to Fourteenth Street, but none of us—Montgomery County suburbanites all and students in good standing at a Jesuit boys' high school—was comfortable in the neighborhood of such blatant vice...
...Says Sharon, the former actress who now works behind the camera: The only erotic fantasies I have are: being with a person that I am totally connected to emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually, so that there is a complete relationship...
...six sex scenes per tape is now industry standard, and readers of Coming Attractions will learn the prescribed number and configuration of men and women in each (three boy-girls, one boy-boy-girl, one girl-girl-boy, and one girl-girl...
...I couldn't have been in this business if I hadn't had a mate (I have two) and a firm home base," confesses Nina...
...Even in the shopping-mall multiplex, I resisted touching the sides of my seat, and sat with arms and legs crossed for the entire show...
...There is another puzzle to which neither author offers a conclusive solution...
...There will be more attempts to sex-up the mainstream products," he predicts, by which he means cases in which "they spend more money on production values and skip the hard-core, but it's essentially a sex movie...
...They speak of themselves as artists and fantasize about what they could accomplish if they were in charge...
...71 The American Spectator November 1993 75...
...And she can make the client wear condoms...
...Levine insists that pathological motives do not vitiate the result: "By modern standards, Mozart was an abused, exploited child...
...Nowadays "deluxe" productions take three days...
...I've been addicted to sex in the past, I've based relationships on sexual encounters...
...Somewhat longer shrift is given to another contentious social issue, pornography's degradation of women...
...This anecdotal evidence lends some credibility to Levine's theory that X-rated performers tend to be incest victims, whose experience as children has given them not only an advanced education in sexual technique but also an exaggerated sense of their own sexual appeal (since "god-like" adults fell under its spell), and the habit of receiving "material validation for sexual availability...
...The knowledge of his distress then does not prevent us from enjoying his music now:" This theory, though, falls short of explaining why these people would go into movies instead of prostitution...
...The best that the authors can manage is to talk vaguely about "exhibitionism...
...Today's curious adolescent can proceed with peace of mind, for revelation is as close as the family VCR any night his parents go out to dinner...
...The sex itself has become formulaic...
...COMING ATTRACTIONS: THE MAKING OF AN X-RATED VIDEO Robert J. Stoller and I. S. Levine Yale University Press /246 pages / $30 reviewed by FRANCIS X. ROCCA T o go see our first X-rated movie, my friends and I drove around the Washington Beltway to a Virginia theater we had heard would not card us...
...But that she was doing a bondage picture with someone other than me...
...On some, it has the entirely predictable effect of making the deviant boring and the normal alluring...
...Now they're my friends first...
...At one time men could count on the assistance of their co-stars, but it is now considered unprofessional to ask for "fluffing...
...Levine and Stoller think stricter enforcement of "community standards" discourages big investment, but according to producer Bill Holliday, few pornographers go to jail...
...The exploitation of female employees is another matter: one actress claims she was blacklisted for nine months after founding a woman's advocacy group for porn professionals...
...That was thirteen years ago...
...The fact is that expensive pornographic movies are being made...
...When the authors' inforFrancis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...
...Porsche Lynn (not her real name) was orphaned at age six, when her father shot her mother and himself...
...TELEPHONE: 812 332 7251 Providing the Best Radio and Television Service were shot over a number of weeks with budgets in the hundreds of thousands...
...Ira Levine, co-author of Coming Attractions and himself a sometime porn filmmaker, reports that housewives are also regular watchers: "They rent Cinderella for the kids, and Rain Man for everyone after dinner, and an X picture for after the kids go to bed...
...One of several things my teenage friends and I didn't understand as we sat in that suburban theater was that we were watching a relic of a "golden age" already past...
...According to Nina, star of Stairway to Paradise, "Dworkin is a prime example of a woman on a vendetta because no one asked her to the prom...
...It is because of these movies that I've been able to come back to that healthy space...
...And even if the law were being aggressively enforced, major metropolitan areas—where community standards are now practically nil—surely contain a large enough audience to justify an upscale product...
...With budgets of often less than twenty thousand, they are shot on videotape instead of more subtle film...
...Such a profession influences private life in special ways...
...S o why, if the X-rated market has in the last decade grown not only larger but more diverse and more cinematically sophisticated—with middle-class marrieds joining the ranks of "raincoaters"— has the product, far from improving to meet the audience's presumably higher standards, only gotten worse...
...Levine's account of relations with his own mom—a phone call home was more like a call to a 900 chat line—is disturbing to say the least...
...t is not as if all these people had normal lives before they got into pornography...
...All the people interviewed here, except for the producers, complain about the constraints on time, money, and creative freedom...
...The "boys" get lower pay and lower billing, and are expected to perform in ways that cannot be faked, at great length and under often stressful conditions...
...In the mid-seventies, hard-core classics such as The Opening of Misty Beethoven 74 The American Spectator November 1993 SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3, CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, .RENO, NEVADA WITS, 92 3 BLOOLilf L INDIANA WGCL, 1370 AM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WAJI„ 95.1 FM, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA CENTRAL OFFICE, BOX 62, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA x.710...
...This book is a collection of interviews, by Levine and the late UCLA psychiatrist Robert Stoller, of eight porn professionals—two producers, an actor, two actresses, a cinematographer, an editor, and an actress-turned-director—in connection with the making of a recent hard-core video, Stairway to Paradise...
...In this age of venereal valetudinarianism, what Levine calls hard-core's "utopian" vision of sex seems almost quaint...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
