Kimberly Kane agrees. Without creativity, “fucking all the time” can quickly become “mundane.” Yes, getting off is the reason people buy porn, but sales trends clearly indicate that today’s buyers also respond well to creative kinkiness, good production values and bigger-than-life characters. Is it easy to do? No way. It’s hard to scale the heights of the adult film business, too, but it can be done. Here’s how a handful of todays hottest are doing it.
B. Skow
B. Skow (with a long o, as in “scope”) has “shot for about every magazine out there, ‘Penthouse’ and ‘Playboy’ and all of them. I’ve been shooting girls since I was 19.”
Good photographers work hard for those pretty pictures. To get the best shots, they build relationships with the models, “make them really comfortable,” says Skow. It’s the same with porn stars, and Skow ascribes his film success to his ability “to make everything comfortable and smooth on the set, to get a good vibe. Fact is, I’ve actually cancelled shoots because of weird vibes on the set.”
With a narrow creative range imposed by the very nature of the production — hey, it’s porn, OK? — clearly the best approach is to elicit natural, convincing portrayals of arousal and consummation from the actors. “If they don’t enjoy it,” Skow asks rhetorically, “who else will?”
“Right now,” confides Skow, “I love our new amateur series, ‘Brand New Faces,’ with real newcomers. There’s a 100 percent money-back guarantee if you’ve seen these girls anywhere, even in a magazine. That’s the future right there, the unending stream of beautiful women. It’s not like the supply will run out.”
Chris Streams
Until someone starts a trade school for porn directors (you heard it here first), there’s no other way to learn the business except, well, by working in it. For Chris Streams, that meant really learning photography, color and composition, all that great theoretical stuff, while working at anything, for anyone, at any time. It’s the only way, he says, to develop your own signature style.
“That’s another thing I like about Jules [Jordan],” Streams says of his current distributor. “He lets us be who we are. I’m nothing like his other directors. I’m similar to Jules, but a lot harder.” With his biker-bred, no-nonsense approach, Streams just goes “on autopilot” and trusts his senses when it’s time to work.
If this practical porn-maker is worried about any of the digital doubletalk, the changing business models, the “death of DVD” and all that, he certainly doesn’t give any indication. “I do what I do, and if you dig it, I’m happy. If you don’t,” Streams adds, “I’m still happy. There are a thousand other people out there whose stuff you can check out.”
Being a fly on the wall for the red-blooded male masses, bringing the average Joe into the same bed, bathroom or backyard as the finest women in the world, sounds like a great job description to Streams.
“Bottom line? I’m a voyeur for hire,” Streams shrugs — and a damn good one, too.
Dyanna Lauren
Dyanna Lauren has come a long way, baby, from being a Vivid Girl.
Lauren is a few titles into a directing career with Spearmint Rhino Films, but she’s no ingenue. This wily, willowy veteran has done everything in this business except drive a forklift in Larry Flynt’s warehouse, and takes evident pride in being “old school.”
“I’m not one of these little girls,” Lauren says. “I am definitely the ‘take charge’ kind.”
In a career that has seen her take charge on both sides of the camera, she has learned that good films come down to authenticity, and authenticity depends on good relationships among the actors and the crew. “I surround myself with people who know what they’re doing,” she adds, “and I give them all the respect they deserve, like they give me.”
Lauren knows “it’s all about relationships in this business, like any business.” With the help of new friends Moby and Marilyn Manson, Lauren has crossed over big-time. She and Kobe Tai sang on one of Manson’s albums, and Lauren’s hilarious “Silent Night” duet with Moby was a hit of the 2007 holiday season on YouTube.
Perhaps the real measure of media popularity is how much exposure one can get without even trying. There’s a two-second clip at YouTube of Lauren (just her face, mind you) evincing clear signs of post-coital bliss. No tits, no ass. Just Dyanna Lauren looking good. For two seconds.
It’s been viewed almost 8 million times. Now, how hot is that?
Jay Sin
Jay Sin started to garner critical and fan acclaim during his tenure at Sineplex where he directed the series “Winkers,” “Pushers” and “Young and Stacked.” Moving onto Evil Angel, Sin worked camera for Belladonna, Nacho Vidal and Jazz Duro.
He began working first for the Buttman Magazine Choice imprint before being elevated to fulltime Evil Angel status in January where he’s continued his “Anal Acrobats,” “Gape Lovers” and “Milk Nymphos” series.
Sin’s success and growing acclaim comes from “shooting perverted, nasty scenarios while not sacrificing beautiful natural lighting and camerawork that brings the fan directly into the scene,” Evil Angel publicist Karen Stagliano said. Sin’s work so straightforwardly chronicles the director’s search for the limits of depravity that it can feel like documentary filmmaking.
If it weren’t for the evident (and highly original) thought going into the sets, set-ups and scenes, one could pretend a Jay Sin production was either a spy tape or an instructional video from “The Sexercise Workout Plan.”
Sin’s actors really do get a freakin’ workout, but they obviously enjoy it. And so do porn fans.
Kimberly Kane
For six months after making her directorial debut with “Naked & Famous” for Vivid Alt, Kimberly Kane says she suffered from an acute case of “penis overload.”
She seems to have balanced that out recently with a boatload of hot girl-girl action with the likes of Tera Patrick, Mandy Morbid and Belladonna.
Kane keeps things fresh and real with a wide variety of activities. In fact, it takes five or six different websites (Klub Kimberly Kane, KaneArmy, KaneReport, etc.) to keep track of this hottie’s sexual shenanigans. But she never forgets who “signs her paychecks.”
“I think the fans appreciate a higher quality of pornography but they don’t want the sex to suffer for it. I give my fans just that. My movies have a cool look and the sex is as dirty as a JM comp,” Kane laughs.
Moreover, Kane is also a porn consumer, and uses her own fan tastes to judge trends, like the “DVD is dead” thing. “As a porn fan I love my collection of DVDs and VHS tapes. Somehow I feel dirtier ripping open a movie box than I do downloading porn — but I do a lot of that, too!” Now there’s a real Third Millennium Woman for you.
