Porn? Sure, it's wonderful when it's well-produced, but people don't care first and foremost about production value. They watch porn to masturbate in nearly all cases. That means that porn films benefit from shorter, more manageable scenes, and that quality doesn't matter whatsoever. The film industry has a subsection that operates based on quality. Porn profits almost exclusively from access: the easier access is, the more attention.

So TV still has some fight in it. So does the music industry, though I think in both cases there will be changes. Porn? I think that the professional industry is going to be gutted through-and-through. The porn industry can't compete with amateurs.

Most porn sucks (and blows), but one day pornography will be recognized as a proper art form and attract people who actually care about exploring the genre. Yes; porn is used exclusively for masturbation. But it's better to masturbate to a better product.

90% of mainstream pornography consists of dicks going really fast in and out of vaginas, punctuated by some guy blowing his load in the girl's face. It's hard to think of something involving sex that is less exciting and creative than this. The real fun comes from subtle emotional interactions, power play, fantasy and a million other things I haven't thought of. High budgets and production values are worthless if you're only recording cumshots, but there are no reasons deeper than inertia and lack of imagination that this money and power isn't put to better use.

Assuming that parts of the HN crowd, in fact, watches porn: have any of you, for instance, ever seen a believable reenactment of a sexual fantasy? I sure as hell haven't. There is so much that could be done here. Sex is one of our deepest drives. Pornography has the potential to be one of the most profound art forms we have.

Consider what the advertising industry (clothing, underwear, perfume) is doing. They usually get blamed for destroying the woman's role, setting unrealistic expectations for people's looks, etc. But some of the things these guys/gals make actually has some emotional impact, on a sexual level deeper than what I see in most erotica and pornography. Although a randy ad never conveys any meaning or realism, the writing and acting is so much better. Fine art nudes are rarely effective at getting its viewers horny...advertising is. The highbrow crowd is obviously doing something wrong. Shouldn't artists put their effort where the impact is largest?

The porn industry will, happily, never get bailout money from the government. I'm hopeful that some competition will set the commercial porn studios thinking, or at least drag them down far enough that they can be attacked by teams with less financial clout. YouPorn is good for us, because of its equalizing potential.

The pros follow the exact formula you described: too fast to be fun -> zoom in way too close -> finish while not even touching each other. FAIL.

Amateurs may not do it perfectly, and may forget to change position 5 times, but at least they are having a good time.

I hope the porn industry either learns or gets out of the way. =)

I'm not familiar with the industry, but I would guess the reason behind the inertia and lack of imagination is the social stigma which means that porn producers are very much self-selected.

Right now? I think the answer's no. The problem is that you're going for two audiences: the porn-watchers and the content-seekers. The porn-watchers pay for the scene. The more scenes you have, the better. The content-watchers are the ones who'd watch something straight through if it was worth watching. The problem is, a large part of writing-directing is a matter of taste. When you're writing a sex scene into something, you only keep what you absolutely need to advance the plot. Most porn scenes are 10-20 minutes long, which means even if you only have one per film, you're making a really imbalanced product.

I can see writing an interesting, compulsive scene if you've got great characters and great acting, and if you weave plot in. But the more of that you add, the worse the scene gets for the porn-watcher. It's much more a zero-sum game, where you can't win with both at the same time.

And that gets to the bigger problem: porn is not intended to be art. It's meant to soothe people who aren't getting something they should be getting. If you're getting great sex, you don't need porn. You can subsist entirely on art pieces that aren't erotic in that sense. I'd put porn in the same category as something like Office Space in that the main intent isn't artistic merit, it's helping somebody who's in a situation they don't like. The fact that it's no sex versus a dull job doesn't change the fact that neither one is quite as funny if you aren't in that sort of a situation.

(Art nudes, by the way, aren't meant to be erotic. Usually they're meant to capture the human body in its entirety, and there's nothing erotic about the human body unless it's actively teasing you. The novel Syrup has a great scene describing this. Nudes aren't sexy unless you've been teased with a partly-clothed body, and when the girl isn't deliberately denying you the sight of more.)

Now, I can see porn becoming more integrated with movies and TV. I can imagine, in a long-running TV show, a "moment of release" sex scene that literally climaxes seasons of building tension. But that's not the porn industry. That's a little porn added on to a much bigger thing.

Look at how porn is used in books. Pulp writers (Dean Koontz and kin) use it wholesale to raise reader interest during boring sequences. That's pornography in the current sense. Once you hit higher art, though, sex scenes are always used to portray something. You lose the full erotic impact. People aren't buying literature to jerk off: if anything, the jerking is incidental.

And so there lies the problem. Pornography is by its nature a low-brow product. If people pay for more, they'll pay for something that's not inherently pornography. And that means the current porn industry is screwed (ahahaha pun). If you want to masturbate, amateurs are perfectly fine. If you need a level higher, there's always piracy in the form of streaming legal videos, which the porn industry, shady as it is, can't compete with as easily as the RIAA can. They're fighting a battle with everything against them.

I don't think porn necessarily has to be low-brow. Exploitation films and other really violent stuff was pretty lowbrow at some point, but today the best films of these genres are as good art as anything. I'm not sure this analogy holds all the way, but at least it's a good argument that these things are worth exploring. It's surprising how culture and people can change.

I love to discuss this stuff with you guys. It's not really something you can talk about over dinner, or in any other 99% of social situations.

[Note that I'm using a liberal definition of art here - I prefer to use the word in its original sense, as "something really good" which provokes emotions, thoughts and daydreams.]

I agree entirely with your definition of art. I'm not certain about how sustainable porn is as an artistic medium, though. Money has to come from somewhere. And the problem is, most people who would appreciate it as a medium would be people less desperate for porn. I don't know if more artistic porn filmers would be able to sustain their craft.

But recently I stumbled on something completely different, and a lot like what you're describing: Fate/Stay Night, a visual-novel. Technically an ero-game, in reality it's a book, with image backgrounds and music. One scenario (out of 3 possible) took me about two weeks to read, and it had exactly 2 (two) scenes of sex. But they were worth every line/image, exactly because they were so embedded in the story.

One problem with doing the same in movies is that you can't be as free as in manga. Under-aged characters or incest are "like saying hello" in manga, but I doubt they'd be well received in movies.

Another problem is the quality of actors. To make what you're describing you'd have to start from the other end: have a good show, with good actors/story and put a real sex-scene in it. Otherwise you have with people who are willing to have sex on tape, but you lack everything else.

I believe the films Shortbus and 9 Songs attempt this to at least some degree.

Sure the end of copyright is hurting them. But they seem better off the say music studios. At least they're not acting like the world owes them a new business model.

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf