David Foster Wallace has an essay on the p0rn awards (I forget what they're called, but the Oscar equivalents) in his latest book of essays that hits some of this stuff.
Joe?
Dude, I'd totally love to write for a show like this. And when I'm not writing blog comments, my sentences are usually coherent ant typo-free.
One arc:
A male lead who has trouble getting it up. After a while they bring in a new fluffer for him. It works, but then he falls in love with the fluffer. However--drama--the fluffer hates him!
They're called the AVN Awards. And they have a bazillion categories.
Also, "I'm not really a porn star, I just play one on HBO" is edging very close to pretend clown territory.
Sweet. You can get an AVN award for the "Best Non-Sex Performance."
6: Nah, you could do it with no more explicit sex onscreen than in a regular HBO series.
It's good to have goals, JM.
Another great thing about Ogged's proposal is that the dialogue is mostly written already.
"Family Business" is/was a regular series on either HBO or Showtime. It is about a producer who specializes in amateur anal. I didn't watch it.
"Thank you, but we can do better."
Can I write for it too? And/or star in it?
Sweet! I was just hoping for fluffer #4.
I read an interview with a guy who did live sex acts onstage. His highly original comment was something like "It's a job". There are certain tricks to keeping more or less aroused, as I remember.
The acting skills of the women in the pornography I've seen most recently can be summed up as "Are you done yet?" The acting skills of the guys are on the level of a guy trying to pump something up as fast as possible. It reminds me of the jokes about inflatable dolls.
Well, there was a reality show about pornographers a few years ago. They must have mined that stuff, and they could be x-rated too.
I guess I'm referring to the same show as McManus.
Porn anecdote from my wild youth:
Actor A is sitting in the kitchen, discussing Shakespeare with me - I'd just seen him in Shaw's The Dark Lady of the Sonnets at Columbia, where we are both students - whilst occasionally yelling air-chess moves to actor B, who is in the bathroom getting made up.
Actress C is sitting in the kitchen, eyes glazed over, finally asking why A & B are talking about bishops, are they going to confession after the shoot?
[I, for the record, am neither fluffing nor fucking, I'm cooking lunch.]
On a completely different subject: Do none of us have jobs where actually performing them is a requirement? Or do we all secretly shoot porn on the weekends and pretend to have "real" jobs, whilst frittering our time away on the internets? What if we fill all those tubes and Senator Stevens can't get his internet from his staff??
20, for Shaw's sake, reminds me of a party in grad school that was all about literary porn titles. "Cory's Old Anus" won.
My non-sex performance is excellent, thank you.
It should be a loose adaptation of Macbeth, surrounding Lady Macbeth's attempts to leave the industry - "nonsex me now", "out out damn spot" takes on a whole knew meaning, etc. Determining just what it is that the old man had so much of in him is left as an exercise for the reader.
Other lines to adapt: "Is this a dagger I see before me?" and "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly."
25 to 27 make me wonder about Lear..."I am bound upon a wheel of fire..."
But I guess that is a niche market.
Aw schucks...
Good to see the place kicking.
31.. an Austronorm for porn? knowing this country, there probably is.
3 could be extra fun if the best fluffer available happens to be a guy.
AGENT (on phone): Look, the contract says "women only"--Batch Handsen is strictly straight. His publicist will kill me!
PRODUCER: Unless his publicist is ready to drive out to the Valley and grease up, I don't care. Do I have to read you the fucking contract? The contract says a week of shooting, and the contract says he'll meet studio specs. So somebody's got to squeeze enough growth hormone out of the way to keep him at 9 inches for the rest of the day, or Marvin Hansen doesn't get paid to do anybody.
(PROD waves over an ASSISTANT teetering on 5" platforms, scrawls on a notepad. HE hands HER the note and she hurries off)
You're lucky this production can afford a real fluffer. You want your star so pumped full of "Canadian" boner pills that he goes blind on the red carpet at the Avies on Saturday, right in front of some family from Kansas waving crosses?
AGENT: Shit, I told you I don't like to talk about Eddie...So O.K., fine. Your studio handles crew hiring. But you make sure Wanda doesn't hear about this, you fucking hear me? She bet me five hundred Hansen's a closet case...
PROD: Why should I start nasty rumors about my own lead?
(Returning ASSIST makes a face at PROD, then sits on HIS desk to wait.)
Wanda won't believe anything Sandy Crack tells her, and--look, are we done here? I think my assistant is trying to tell me Sandy's trying to score a bump off the sound guy again.
(ASSIST shrugs)
Other lines to adapt:
"Screw your courage to the sticking place and we'll not fail."
God, Lady Macbeth is teh sexxay.
In the "not really porn star, just play one" area, Natalie Portman played a stripper without actually stripping.
Apparently Mike Nichols took a paternal interest in her. That's so many levels of sick I don't even want to talk about it, and it's also directorial malpractice and conflict of interest. Nichols should be in jail.
Nichols, BTW was born in Berlin and met famous people like Pasternak before he came to the US at age two.
The thing about porn is that almost all of the sex is truly awful. I'm sure someone shooting better sex could make $$$. I'm sure I could direct better sex. But, alas, I don't feel that's my future. I'll remain poor.
We should have an anonymous poll, broken down only by gender. "Would you have sex with a porn star", or "Is there a porn star you would have sex with."
36: Dial it back a bit, please. Portman was at least 22 when Closer was filmed. If Nichols's interest in her was "more than paternal," which is what I suppose you meant, it's creepy not criminal (he is a few months shy of 50 years her senior).
No, she said "paternal". I think that most film guys his age are happy to show off their pretty young honeys to the world.
37:The thing about porn is that is produced and directed to sell, and if you think the sex is awful, you are obviously not the intended audience. I am presuming "awful" means unerotic and non-entertaining.
37: The porn market is pretty undiscriminating. The pattern seems to be to watch 5-10 videos a week.
Well presumably Nichols wouldn't, since he's been married to Diane Sawyer for almost 20 years. But if "paternal" is what you meant, it's neither criminal nor creepy--and certainly not "directorial malpractice". It's entirely appropriate IMO for a director to be protective and loyal and otherwise dad-like toward an actor whose caharacter takes lots of emotional rough usage. Frankly, acting all stuffy and "professional" in such circumstances would be creepy--especially in a movie with so few actors (the play it was based on had four characters).
My own work with actors was pretty limited and very low on the food chain, but I think "directorial misconduct" should be reserved for assholes like Oliver Stone, who cast a Vietnamese medical student with no acting experience to play the lead in Heaven and Earth and who (reportedly) shot the scene in which her character is gang-raped with a gun to her head without rehearsal.
Sorry, I couldn't forestall the rant. And I'm trying to get the porno Macbeth out of my head.
John I am not following the Portman thing. If you really mean "paternal", well 72 yr olds probably should not engage in nurturing relationships with 22 yr olds, or at least not in the same way as 42 yr olds, but I do not find that particularly disgusting.
If the creepiness is in having the platonic paternal relationship, and then directing Portman in a stripping scene...that's show biz. Change some genders around and see if the problem persists.
It's like a Jehovah Witness doctor refusing to give blood transfusions. Nudity is one of the main reasons ever to go to movies, much like blood transfusions are among the main reasons to go to hospitals.
And this was a movie about a stripper, for God's sake. He shouldn't have cast a daughter-surrogate in the role; Portman could have played a nun, for example, with one of those cute outfits, and then converted the stripper in the last scene.
No ethics in the film biz.
Back to MacBeth: "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much _____ in him?"
Dario Argento directing his daughter Asia Argento in nude and sex scenes was somewhat controversial. If you follow Howie Stern's, that famous advocate and protector of women, theory about porn stars and childhood abuse, there may be a horrific story there. Not that Asia appears to be anyone's victim, however controversial and wild.
More directly on topic, which is one I find interesting, I tend toward amateur and couple porn. The Seymour Butts stuff is just brutal, and I actually like affection in my porn. Which may be a different kind of sick, but whatever.
But as I watch these videos made by husbands or boyfriends I get the very strong impression that they have been told to remove affection, intimacy, humour as much as possible in order to make their home movies marketable. Part of the fun for me is watching the mask slip and giggles, caresses, affection slip in by accident. Actually that was part of the fun for when I watched "professional" porn.
I believe this show exists already. It is called Entourage.
If we're done with porn for the day, may I suggest a promising candidate for official game of Unfogged?
Before the days of cable TV shows (1974 to be precise), Richard Dreyfuss starred in a movie with something like this theme. It's called Inserts and it's pretty funny if you like your humor black.
Anyway, ogged, I just hope your mom doesn't walk in on you.
I have long thought that MacBeth was ripe for pornifying, based primarily on "is this a dagger", etc: come, let me clutch thee; in form as palpable as that which now I draw ... I mean, come on.
I think there were other bits too but now I can't recall them. I also think that Hamlet would make a good rock opera.
I'm not sure where else this would go, so I'll just link it here.
NSFW.
Nah, you could do it with no more explicit sex onscreen than in a regular HBO series.
Damn straight. I don't have HBO but caught a couple of episodes of Real Sex while out of town. Whoa. I had *no* idea they could put that stuff on HBO. Ogged's porn series will be no problem.
Jesus, where was Real Sex when I was a teenager? Just as well, actually, considering how much I was already masturbating.
See, I don't know where else I can share these and they'd be appreciated; from 23, I just remembered another: "A Pair for Owen's Weenie."
55: Now we know what to put in the googleyahoohole!
hermit greg: those are great.
You'd think literary cock-jokes would be perfect for this crowd.
But, Unfogged already has a massive porn titles thread (although with movie titles), so maybe that's why your efforts here aren't catching on.
M/tch M/lls, there were many others, though those two were most memorable, and there is a list somewhere; if I find it, (by golly, I have my own damn blog) I wil publish, for posterity, of course.
I'm fascinated by the idea of pornographic versions of Frank Capra films. The titles would be really good: Eat John Doe. Mr. Smith Does Washington.
I've heard about real life porn versions of Its a Wonderful Life. But I'm really looking for people to branch out into other parts of the oevre. Crazed Lesbian Sex Happened One Night. Etc.
Several of them work as is, e.g. Forbidden, Ladies of Leisure.
So do Long Pants, That Certain Thing, The Younger Generation, Platinum Blonde, Lady for a Day, and Here Comes the Groom.
Actually more of them work as porn titles than don't.
Mr. Deeds Done Dirt Cheap?
I vaguely recall trying to do the pornification thing with opera titles. "Dido and Aeneas" seems to just beg for it.
I vaguely recall trying to do the pornification thing with opera titles. "Dido and Aeneas" seems to just beg for it.
Plus it is also called "The Trojans".
I would only like to see the pornification of opera titles if the movies were actually made and people sang the whole time.
I know there is some musical porn out there, but the possibilities of operatic porn are totally unexplored. I'd really like to be able to begin a sentence with "The blowjob aria in act II..."
(Don't blame me if your browser can't handle it.)
Actually, that's right, Unfogged already has two massive porn titles threads.
It's sorely lacking in tribute band threads, alas.
I am sad that I missed that thread. Sins and Sven's Ability--gone to waste!
Only for the time being, Jackmormon. Only for the time being.
Of course there's also the original porn titles thread, from back when breaking 100 comments was exciting, and exceeding 200 was unheard of.
If Kerouac wrote pron:
On the Choad
The Kram Up Bums
Mexico City Blows
Visions of Me Hard
Doctor Sex
The Town and the Tity
Maggie Asstitty
Desecration Angels
Big Sir
Peni All Sizes
74: Apparently I need to search Unfogged's vast archive before I comment. All these years out of school, and still oppressed by the canon...