The End Of Porn Plots

The NY Times takes note of the internet's effect on porn production as studios now mostly create three minute vignettes suitable for net viewing.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks. "On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes," said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. "We have to cater to that." Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread - "vignettes" in the industry vernacular - that can be presented separately online. Other major studios are making similar shifts.

The industry's interest in scripted scenes has waxed and waned in recent decades because of changes in technology. In the early 1970s, movies with loose story lines, like "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door," won a mainstream audience, and others tried to copy their success, selling plot-centric movies to couples watching at home with the VCR technology introduced in 1975. The falling cost of hand-held video cameras gave birth to a generation of pornographers with little interest in drama beyond a clichéd plot involving a pizza delivery boy, said Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, an industry trade publication.

Same as it ever was. I remember when porn came on a Super-8 reel, was at most six minutes long, and had titles like Fuck Truck '74. Hey there's a guy in a truck! Fuck him! The end.