POP CULTURE VS. PORN CULTURE

Big Business Pushes Porn Into The Mainstream

By PHIL KLOER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

From the nasty spam that clogs your e-mail account to the XXX video rental stores that have mushroomed all over metro Atlanta, the once underground pornography industry is now very much aboveground and impossible to avoid.

And profiting from that industry now are major corporations and mainstream entertainment companies, including network TV, movie studios and book publishers. Revenues for the porn industry -- about $10 billion a year -- now equal the domestic box office for all of Hollywood's major film releases.

"You're seeing a corporatization of pornography," says Blaise Cronin, professor of information services at Indiana University and a former consultant to the Justice Department on Internet pornography laws. "You have major corporations involved in the distribution, and the profits are very high."

Absolutely, says Jonathan Littman, executive producer of "Skin," a drama series airing this fall on Fox Television that is set in part in Los Angeles' porn movie industry. "It is a business, a very, very big business," Littman says. "And there's a fascination with the mechanism of how it runs, how it works, what's going on behind the curtain."

So mainstream entertainment is showing what's behind the curtain in the XXX industry, rolling out books, feature films and documentaries that cater to what is perceived as increased public interest in -- and acceptance of -- pornography. The result is that the line between pop culture and porn culture is increasingly hard to find.

Other signs of the blurring lines:

Recycling big names from porn's past has never been bigger. The movie "Wonderland," coming in September from Lions Gate Films, stars Val Kilmer as legendary porn actor John Holmes, with Lisa Kudrow of "Friends" as his wife; former underage porn actress Traci Lords' autobiography, "Underneath It All," has just hit bookstores and the New York Times Best Seller List; and an off-Broadway, PG-rated theatrical takeoff of the famous 1978 movie "Debbie Does Dallas" closed in February after a successful run.

A Porn Star Ball, sponsored by XXX company Vivid Entertainment Group, one of the biggest producers of hard-core sex videos in the United States, will come to Atlanta on Sept. 5 as part of a national tour. Women are encouraged to dress as porn stars and compete for best costume. Instead of holding it in a strip club, Vivid is renting the Riviera Club, a popular Midtown music nightclub.

Actress Jenna Jameson has a book, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," coming early next year from HarperCollins, which also is publishing "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," written by several Vivid actresses. Jameson was one of several adult actresses hired by Pony sneakers for an ad campaign this year featured on billboards and in mainstream magazines like Vanity Fair and Vibe.

"The breakdown of the wall between the pornographic industry and the mainstream industry has been going on for some time, but it's become increasingly acceptable," says Evan Lieberman, a lecturer in film studies at Emory University.

How far the mainstream will go is generally just this side of actual sex. Traditionally, sex in mainstream entertainment, from R-rated movies to "NYPD Blue" to late night on Cinemax, has been called soft-core -- actors pretending to have sex. Hard-core, also called XXX, shows real sex acts.

Adult Video News reports that rentals of hard-core videos in the United States soared from 79 million in 1985 to 759 million in 2001, an increase of almost 1,000 percent.

John Cornetta, owner of the Love Shack adult video stores, says his company has issued 15,000 video rental cards in metro Atlanta, about one-third of them to women.

"It's really difficult to tell, but it's safe to say there's probably more women viewing [porn] than ever before," says Adult Video News' Connelly.

However, cautions sex industry Web columnist Breslin, "the rap you get from the industry about appealing more toward women is mostly a lot of talk. There are not women in massive numbers going in and renting adult videos."

And as porn booms, the mainstream tags along for the ride. The idea of "porno chic" was negligible 30 years ago compared with today, when "Friends" devotes an episode to porn, or the popular rock band Blink 182 puts a XXX star named Janine on an album cover bought by millions of youngsters. But the original porno chic will be revisited next year in a documentary about "Deep Throat," in the works for cable network HBO. It's being made by Imagine Entertainment, the Oscar-winning studio co-owned by Ron Howard.

When it airs, society will officially be down to only one degree of separation between hard-core porn and "The Andy Griffith Show

excerpted from:
"Big Business Pushes Porn Into The Mainstream"
By Phil Kloer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 8/16/03