Part 29 (2/2)
”Then maybe you shouldn't have agreed to shoot a scene t.i.tled a.n.a.l Action,” the older guy shouted.
”Okay, everybody calm down,” Sal said. ”Obviously, there's been a misunderstanding. Doreen, no one is going to make you do something you are uncomfortable with.”
”That's for d.a.m.n sure,” she said.
”Would you be willing to do the scene if we paid you an additional five hundred dollars?” he asked.
”No f.u.c.kin' way, Sal.”
”All right, then.” Sal rubbed his chin and thought for a moment. ”Chet, why don't we just change the t.i.tle to reflect Doreen's most appealing feature? Maybe we could call it Black b.o.o.bs or something. Doreen, would you be okay with Dwayne e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. on your nipples?”
”I can do that,” she said.
”Great. Back to work, now. And Chet, please close the door on your way out.”
”Actors,” I said as the door clicked shut. ”Always complaining about the size of the dressing room, the brand of sparkling water, or somebody trying to shove something up their a.s.s.”
”Story of my life,” Sal said.
”So tell me,” I said. ”How's business?”
”Lousy.”
”Really? I thought p.o.r.n was recession-proof.”
”It is,” he said. ”That's not the problem.”
”What, then?”
”You really want to know about this?”
”I do.”
”Off the record?”
”Sure.”
”Then let me give you a little background.”
”Okay.”
”I saw you looking at my vintage posters.”
”Hard to miss them.”
”They're from the 1970s, when Cecil Howard, the Mitch.e.l.l Brothers, Howard Ziehm, and Gerard Damiano were making feature-length hard-core films. People went to the theater to watch them. They attracted the raincoat crowd, of course, but some guys went with dates.”
”So I've heard,” I said. ”I was in diapers then.”
”The VCR changed all that,” Sal said. ”Once people could rent or buy videoca.s.settes, they preferred to watch p.o.r.nography at home. But the industry still made feature-length films. We employed scriptwriters. Our movies had plots. Then p.o.r.n went online, and things changed again.”
”How so?”
”Attention spans got shorter. n.o.body cared about plots anymore. Ninety-minute feature films mostly disappeared. We still shoot a couple a year, but they don't make any money. We just make them to maintain our self-respect.”
A half-dozen smart remarks ran through my mind, but I decided to keep them to myself.
”The thirty- and sixty-minute DVDs that replaced them were just compilations of ten-minute s.e.x scenes that could be chopped and posted separately on Internet pay sites,” Sal said. ”Turned out even they were too long. Guys just watched the first penetration, fast-forwarded to the money shot, and jumped to the next video.”
”But it was profitable,” I said.
”Very.”
”So what went wrong?”
”The market got flooded. Cheap handheld video cameras made it easy for any fool to shoot a p.o.r.no. The number of online pay sites exploded. A price war broke out. We used to charge forty-five dollars a month for a subscription to one of our sites. Now we're asking nineteen ninety-five, and it's hard to get people to pay even that.”
”Because?”
”Because our videos are being pirated. People download them and then post them by the hundreds on p.o.r.n-sharing sites where anyone can watch them for free.”
”Like what happened with music,” I said.
”Exactly. Then it got worse. Now guys are shooting videos of themselves having s.e.x with their fat wives and s.k.a.n.ky girlfriends and posting them online.” Sal looked at me and shook his head. ”I never dreamed people would be giving this stuff away.”
”Sounds like you're in a dying business,” I said.
”I don't think so. There are still people out there who want to see beautiful women having s.e.x, and who want their videos to be in focus and well lighted. There's still a market for our product, but the margins are smaller now, so we have to keep our costs down.”
”Which is why you opened the studio here,” I said.
”That's right. The rent is lower, and the actors we've recruited locally work cheaper. In Southern California, we competed with Vivid, Digital Playground, and a dozen other studios for the best talent, so we had to pay the girls three to five thousand for each s.e.x scene. Here, they take a grand and are grateful to get it.”
”What about the men?”
”In the Valley, they get five to eight hundred per scene,” he said. ”Here we're paying them two hundred, and they're so glad for the chance to f.u.c.k girls like Doreen that they'd probably work for free.”
”Know what all this reminds me of?” I asked.
”The newspaper business?”
”Yeah. Aggregators pirate our news, readers don't want to pay for something they can get for free, and we keep cutting costs to keep our heads above water.”
”One big difference, though,” he said.
”What's that?”
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