I am on the set of the porn film Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy. There’s a little trouble outside. The director, Mike Quasar, is trying to shoot an establishing scene – cheerleaders arriving home from practice – but even though we’re in a secluded house (in the San Fernando Valley, southern California), some neighbouring teenagers have positioned themselves up on a nearby hill and are catcalling, jeering and hissing. Until now, this had been a happy set, a kind of familial bubble, but these mocking outsiders are making everyone self-conscious. The girls pull on their short skirts and crop tops to cover up. Unsettled, everyone goes back inside, and that’s when I get talking to Nate, the second cameraman.
It is very unusual to find second cameramen on porn sets these days: the internet is killing porn-makers who take pride in production values. It’s because the money is now in the pockets of the tech giants in faraway cities such as Montreal, owners of sites such as PornHub that are crammed with pirated content illegally uploaded by fans; PornHub is currently the world’s 38th most popular site.
Over the past 18 months, I’ve been tracing the consequences of all that free porn. It’s laying waste to the Valley, compelling some actors to take up escorting, and putting crews and production companies out of business. But today nine people are all to have sex simultaneously, so Quasar has needed to hire Nate. They’re old colleagues from the pre-PornHub days, but now barely see each other.
“This is a rare day,” Nate tells me, “working for Mike, shooting real porn.”
“What do you normally do?” I ask.
“Customs,” he says.
I give him a quizzical look.
“Fans write their own scripts and pay us to shoot exactly what they want,” he explains.
He explains that customs – bespoke porn – is a new growth industry in the Valley. In houses all around us, teams of professional porn-makers are staying afloat by conjuring into life entire films for just one viewer.
“What happens in these films?” I ask.
“There was one guy who wanted us to buy a van,” Nate says, “and have my wife and a couple of other girls drive around in it for a week, and smoke cigarettes in the van, and pee in the van, and at the end of the week, we’d drive it out into the desert and blow it up. He sent us pictures of the van.”
“Why that particular van?”
Nate shrugs. “Maybe it was similar to a van he had in high school? Maybe there was a memory attached to it?”
He says he and his wife priced that request at $30,000, given that they’d have to buy the van, acquire a permit to blow it up, hire a fire marshal for the day, and so on. That one proved prohibitively expensive for the client. Even so, “It’s predominantly what I do now,” Nate says.
A few weeks later, I get to view a selection of custom porn films. The producers Dan and Rhiannon of Anatomik Media have brought them to my hotel room in West Hollywood. Dan and Rhiannon are a married couple in their early 40s. She is from LA and he’s from Illinois. They met when they were in a band in the 1990s. The most striking thing about them is how much they love their work.
“It can be really neat,” Rhiannon says. “We end up – especially with our regulars – getting to really know them. We learn more about their fetishes and start to get them down. With most of them, there’s something really endearing.”
“Some of them are crazy, because they’re just so normal,” Dan says. “Like the flyswatter.”
“Oh, yes, the flyswatter!” Rhiannon says.
Dan plays me the flyswatter video. In it, a fully clothed woman becomes exasperated because there’s a fly and, to make matters worse, she’s misplaced her flyswatter. Eventually she finds it and spends the rest of the video swatting flies.
“Did you ask the client what it was about fly-swatting?” I ask.
Rhiannon shakes her head. “Maybe he watched his mom swat flies?”
It is very unusual to find second cameramen on porn sets these days: the internet is killing porn-makers who take pride in production values. It’s because the money is now in the pockets of the tech giants in faraway cities such as Montreal, owners of sites such as PornHub that are crammed with pirated content illegally uploaded by fans; PornHub is currently the world’s 38th most popular site.Over the past 18 months, I’ve been tracing the consequences of all that free porn. It’s laying waste to the Valley, compelling some actors to take up escorting, and putting crews and production companies out of business. But today nine people are all to have sex simultaneously, so Quasar has needed to hire Nate. They’re old colleagues from the pre-PornHub days, but now barely see each other.
“This is a rare day,” Nate tells me, “working for Mike, shooting real porn.”
“What do you normally do?” I ask.
“Customs,” he says.
I give him a quizzical look.
“Fans write their own scripts and pay us to shoot exactly what they want,” he explains.
He explains that customs – bespoke porn – is a new growth industry in the Valley. In houses all around us, teams of professional porn-makers are staying afloat by conjuring into life entire films for just one viewer.
“What happens in these films?” I ask.
“There was one guy who wanted us to buy a van,” Nate says, “and have my wife and a couple of other girls drive around in it for a week, and smoke cigarettes in the van, and pee in the van, and at the end of the week, we’d drive it out into the desert and blow it up. He sent us pictures of the van.”
“Why that particular van?”
Nate shrugs. “Maybe it was similar to a van he had in high school? Maybe there was a memory attached to it?”
He says he and his wife priced that request at $30,000, given that they’d have to buy the van, acquire a permit to blow it up, hire a fire marshal for the day, and so on. That one proved prohibitively expensive for the client. Even so, “It’s predominantly what I do now,” Nate says.
A few weeks later, I get to view a selection of custom porn films. The producers Dan and Rhiannon of Anatomik Media have brought them to my hotel room in West Hollywood. Dan and Rhiannon are a married couple in their early 40s. She is from LA and he’s from Illinois. They met when they were in a band in the 1990s. The most striking thing about them is how much they love their work.
“It can be really neat,” Rhiannon says. “We end up – especially with our regulars – getting to really know them. We learn more about their fetishes and start to get them down. With most of them, there’s something really endearing.”
“Some of them are crazy, because they’re just so normal,” Dan says. “Like the flyswatter.”
“Oh, yes, the flyswatter!” Rhiannon says.
Dan plays me the flyswatter video. In it, a fully clothed woman becomes exasperated because there’s a fly and, to make matters worse, she’s misplaced her flyswatter. Eventually she finds it and spends the rest of the video swatting flies.
“Did you ask the client what it was about fly-swatting?” I ask.
Rhiannon shakes her head. “Maybe he watched his mom swat flies?”
by Jon Ronson, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Anatomik Media
