Category: Film
Internet Killed the Porn Star
Free porn is killing the professional industry reports Louis Theroux in the Guardian.
Fees for scenes, not surprisingly, have taken a hit. “Some girls get $600 [£390] for a scene now,” the retired performer JJ Michaels tells me. “It might be $900-$1,000 for a big-name girl. It used to get up to $3,000.” For guys, rates can be $150 or lower [25 cents for every dollar a woman earns, AT]
Musicians have adjusted to declining music sales by increasing the number of live shows and porn stars are doing something similar:
It’s an open secret in the porn world that many female performers are supplementing their income by “hooking on the side”…For many female performers nowadays, the movies are merely a sideline, a kind of advertising for their real business of prostitution.
Many porn stars are now ZMP workers says Theroux:
“The way it is now, within five years I don’t see how there could be a professional porn actor,” Michaels tells me. It’s not easy to sympathise with the porn companies, which made so much money for so long by embracing a tawdry business and a dysfunctional work-pool. But it is worth sparing a thought for the legions of performers, qualified for nothing much more than having sex on camera, who have no money saved, and no future.
A pay what you want model worked for Radiohead but will probably not work for porn:
…it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don’t want to pay if they don’t have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do.
Interview with a safecracker
Interesting throughout, here is one bit:
Q: How realistic are movies that show people breaking into vaults?
A: Not very! In the movies it takes five minutes of razzle-dazzle; in real life it’s usually at least a couple of hours of precision work for an easy, lost combination lockout.Most vault lockouts are caused by malfunctions. A bank employee over-winds the time lock, a technician makes a mistake servicing the vault, or there was no maintenance because the bank has initiated yet another round of cost cutting.
Another 10-20% of my income comes from law enforcement searches and seizures or estate, aka “dead relative” openings. They hire me and I drill it open, but these are not situations where I like to hang around too long.
Q: Do you ever look inside?
A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.
The full article is here, and for the pointer I thank Anton Radice.
*Marley*
I have to give this movie an A+. It is an outstanding treatment of the history of Jamaica, the Caribbean cultural blossoming after World War II, possible equilibria in individual human affairs, and of course the protagonist Bob Marley himself, as well as much much more. Marley by the way does not come off as a sympathetic character. The scenes from Zimbabwe and Germany are remarkable. The director is Kevin Macdonald, who also created The Last King of Scotland.
There are trailers here. Here is one good review. If you are seeking to normalize my review, in general I am not fond of “musical documentaries” and I do not consider Marley the peak of Jamaican music (I prefer Lee Perry, Desmond Dekker, and King Tubby, for a start). Think of this as a movie flat out and go see it on a large screen.
*Bad Religion*
The author is Ross Douthat and the subtitle is How We Became a Nation of Heretics. It is a very good and very serious book arguing that America needs better religious thinking and practice, excerpt:
The entire media-entertainment complex, meanwhile, was almost shamelessly pro-Catholic. If a stranger to American life had only the movies, television, and popular journalism from which to draw inferences, he probably would have concluded that midcentury America was a Catholic-majority country — its military populated by the sturdy Irishmen of The Fighting 69th (1948) and The Fighting Sullivans (1944); its children educated and its orphans rescued by the heroic priests and nuns celebrated in Boys Town (1938), The Bells of Saint Mary’s (1945), and Fighting Father Dunne (1948); its civic life dominated by urban potentates like Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and Denis Dougherty of Philadelphia; its everyday life infused with Catholic kitsch, from the 1950s hit single “Our Lady of Fatima” to the “win one for the Gipper” cult of Notre Dame football.
My main question is what could have become of most organized religion in an era of newly found television penetration — a competing source of ideas about right and wrong — and the birth control pill and sexual liberation of women? Not to mention gay rights. The recent evolution of American religion may not be optimal, but it is endogenous to some fairly fundamental forces. Non-religious thinking seems to offer especially high returns to successful people these days, and while American religion certainly has survived that impact (unlike in the UK?), what is left will seem quite alienating to much of the intelligentsia, Ross included.
For most mainstream religions, for most urban and suburban intellectuals circa 2012, it is hard to live a religiously observant life during the ages of say 17-25. American religion is left with late convert intellectuals and proponents of various enthusiasms, all filtered through the lens of America’s rural-tinged mass culture. Where is the indigenous and recent highbrow Christian culture of the United States?
Ross’s close comes off as voluntarist (“That quest begins with a single step…”), but in an economic model which change might nudge the United States back toward a more intellectual Christianity? Your suggestions are welcome.
“After ten years they let you cook the eggs…”
That line was from Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Think of this film as a learning by doing model. Bosses would like to invest in training workers, but they fear the workers will leave them high and dry, unable to recoup their investments. Bosses therefore train workers excessively slowly, keeping them as apprentices in the meantime. Only in the end stages of training do the workers learn how to handle the high-margin items, namely the sushi itself. Furthermore Japanese customers demand high quality, which make it difficult for an incompletely trained worker to open his own sushi bar. As long as there are many very good sushi bars, this equilibrium with well-informed customers can persist and sustain long-term worker training. Quality is inefficiently high, and productivity in the service sector is inefficiently low, while personal service quality is inefficiently high (let him greet and bow to customers before he learns how to shape the rice), but training occurs and the elderly retain lots of social and economic bargaining power.
Young workers earn not so much, but can cash in on equity (i.e., open their own sushi bar) later in their lives. They are not promising marriage prospects for young women.
Imagine a shock which limits the future profitability of sushi bars, such as fish depletion or greater competition from foreign foods or from cheaper sushi produced by lower-skilled workers. This will shift the composition of apprentices toward somewhat older individuals, and indeed the movie suggests this has happened under Jiro.
Jiro: “I have been able to keep at the same line of work for seventy-five years.” The viewer does not expect anyone else in the movie to be making the same claim, years from now. In the meantime, such an economy is not good at reallocating labor in response to sectoral shifts.
At age 85 Jiro holds three Michelin stars, although his restaurant has only ten seats and the bathroom is outside and down the hall.
They serve slightly smaller portions to the female customers, so that everyone in a party finishes their portion at more or less the same time.
Addendum: The new “SushiBot” makes 3,600 pieces of sushi an hour, albeit at lower quality.
What (and how) Whit Stillman reads
You have a lot of freedom in reading a book. I’m unable, for some reason, to read books from beginning to end. I have to go to what interests me most in the book. And if I like that, I start going backwards and forwards. And it starts to become a really complicated endeavor of just reading the parts of the books once and not sort of overlapping. I don’t know why I have to sort of re-edit the books myself. I don’t know why I can’t read a prologue and read a first chapter. I mean, if I really love a book I’ll get to them too. For some reason, I usually find them deadly dull, the prologues.
And this:
And my favorite reading of all is the unabridged Boswell’s Life of [Samuel] Johnson. It’s my favorite thing because it’s interesting and has no import or forward narrative momentum. So you’re interested and edified but it doesn’t keep you up at night.
Here is more.
*Mirror, Mirror* (paging Leo Strauss)
Not often does Hollywood put out movies romanticizing tyrannicide and the assassination of foreign leaders of friendly countries, in this case India. Julia Roberts is the wicked Queen, witch, and false pretender, but actually the stand-in for Indira Gandhi, with an uncanny resemblance of look and dress in the final scene (I wonder if anyone told her?). This movie presents a romanticized and idealized version of how her assassination should have proceeded and should have been processed, namely in a triumphal manner with no reprisals but rather celebration and joyous union and love. As the plot proceeds, you will find all sorts of markers of Sikh theology, including numerous references to daggers, hair, mirrors, water, immersions, submersions, bodily penetrations, transformations, the temple at Amritsar, dwarves who enlarge themselves, and the notion of woman as princess, among many others; director Tarsem Singh knows this material better than I do (read up on Sikh theology before you go, if you haven’t already). The silly critics complained that the plot didn’t make sense, but from the half dozen or so reviews I read they didn’t even begin to understand the movie.
Without wishing to take sides on either the politics or the religion, I found this a daring and remarkable film. The sad thing is that no one is paying attention.
The movie’s trailer is here.
Project Nim
I highly recommend Project Nim, the documentary about the life and times of the chimpanzee Nim who was raised as a baby in a human home and taught sign language.
There are a lot of strange moments in the film but perhaps none stranger than this: Stephanie LaFarge, Nim’s adopted mother who breast-fed him as a baby, is eager to reasure us that as Nim grew older and more interested in sex:
I never felt sexually engaged with him. There was a sensuality but Nim was a pre-teen.
Do think about that for a moment.
Nim is later taken from her but she sees him once again when she is now a much older woman. She describes her first thoughts and reactions:
He wasn’t particulary attracted to me now that he was an adult chimpanzee. I wasn’t beautiful or anything like that.He wasn’t particularly attractive to me now that he was an adult chimpanzee. I didn’t have a, “Oh, isn’t he beautiful,” or anything like that.
Project Nim is from director James Marsh who also made the great Man on Wire.
Addendum: Lots of great comments in this post. See especially Belle Ball who knew Nim and who corrected my quotation.
Correlations on porn
Firstly (using the General Social Survey) I found no relationship between being pro the legality of porn, or propensity to watch porn, and pro social behaviors e.g. volunteer work, blood donation, etc.
We can dismiss the feminist (and sociological) charges of porn increasing sexual violence and leading to sexism. The USA, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands (2) and Japan were just some of the countries that suddenly went from no legal pornography to quite widespread availability and consumption of it. These studies all found that greater availability of, and exposure to, pornography does not increase the rate of sexual assaults on women, and probably decreases it (3). Japanese porn is quite frequently violent and yet even there rape decreased from an already very low base. It’s interesting that an increase in porn exposure decreases sexual violence only, and has no effect on other crime. Economists would put this down to a substitution effect.
Several countries have sex offender registers – mainly of pedophiles. A wide variety of professions are represented on these registers. Members of professions that supposedly promote morality e.g. clerics or teachers, are quite common on it yet conspicuously absent from such registers are men who have worked in the porn industry.
This study (1) found no relationship between the frequency of x-rated film viewing and attitudes toward women or feminism. From the GSS (controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that those who are pro the legality of porn are less likely to support traditional female roles, more likely to be against preferential treatment of either gender, and to find woman’s rights issues more frequently salient. Although I found that women’s rights issues are less salient to male watchers, and female watchers are less likely to think women should work, I also found that watching porn is unrelated to negative attitudes toward women and feminism.
In short exposure to and tolerance of pornography does not cause anti-social behavior (and may even reduce it in relation to sex) and does not get in the way of pro social behavior either.
The sociological and religious charge that pornography undermines monogamy and family values does however receive support. From GSS (and controlling for IQ, education, income, age, race and ideology) I found that men who are pro legalizing porn are less likely to marry and are more pro cohabitation. There was no such association for women. A higher propensity to watch porn movies is also associated with a lesser likelihood of marrying but is unrelated to cohabitation attitudes – in both men and women. So a pro porn attitude is consistent with a reduced respect for marriage.
Both genders also tend to have fewer kids in marriage, if they are pro the legalizing of porn. However, for men, a higher propensity to watch porn movies is associated with having MORE children within marriage. Note that pro legal porn attitudes and porn movie viewership is not associated with having children out of wedlock – for men its associated with a lower chance of that happening – so porn doesn’t lead to that kind of irresponsible behavior.
Possibly part of this general pattern, I found that both being pro the legality of porn and watching porn are related to lower voting rates in general elections.
I found no relationship to a variety of ‘family values’ type questions e.g. importance of family, or to the value of relationships and friendship.
Being pro the legality of porn, and porn viewing, are associated with unhappiness with the family or marriage – especially for men. Those who are pro porn also tend to have a greater number of sexual partners and are more likely to have a sexual affair. This supports the 1984 and 1988 discoveries of Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant (4) that the effects of repeated exposure to standard, non-violent, commonly available pornography includes: increased callousness toward women; distorted perceptions about sexuality; devaluation of the importance of monogamy; decreased satisfaction with partner’s sexual performance, affection, and appearance; doubts about the value of marriage; and decreased desire to have children. Later research studies further confirm their findings.
Garth’s excellent and underrated blog is here. I have put it in my RSS feed.
Sherlock Holmes v. Sherlock
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is ok so long as you are expecting a comic book adventure along the lines of Captain America or Iron Man (natch) and not a detective-mystery ala Sherlock Holmes. A smart character requires smart writers and in this movie the producers saved the money for special effects.
In contrast, the British TV series Sherlock is a must see. Sherlock reboots Holmes into our world. Yet despite advancing in time some 130 years when Sherlock first meets Watson he says, exactly as in the original, “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” A shiver ran down my spine.
Sherlock is fast-paced but clever. It’s written by two Doctor Who vets who invest Holmes with wit, originality and intellect, rather than the quasi-magical powers found in the aforementioned movie. The chemistry between Holmes and Watson is clear – one understands in this version what is lacking in many others, these two need each other.
The first season has only 3, 90 minute, episodes but a second season just ran in Britain and I expect it will soon be available in the U.S.
*A Separation*
It’s hard to review this movie without introducing spoilers, I’ll just say I would be surprised if it doesn’t end up as the best movie of the year, if we count it as a 2012 film. One trailer is here, the film is in Farsi with subtitles.
Assorted Movie Reviews
Warhorse – stilted acting, cliche ridden in word and image and without a single honest emotion. Some people will love it.
Mission Impossible -Ghost Protocol – proves that Tom Cruise can still deliver the goods and director Brad Bird is bankable for live action even if his animated greats (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) had more plot and humanity. Great scenes on the Burj Khalifa (esp. in IMAX). Drags on in a peculiar effort to connect with story elements from the previous MI that no one cares about or remembers. For plot reasons, the final scene should have been in San Francisco not Seattle.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Overall, Daniel Craig doesn’t James Bond it, although at times one wonders whether he is just pretending to be scared. Rooney Mara is good although I prefer Noomi Rapace who was both tougher and more beautiful, as the moment required. Fincher is the better director and the supporting cast is excellent. Lisbeth Salander rings strong in my imagination and I would watch more adaptations.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – excellent performance from Gary Oldman as Smiley. At something like 8 minutes in I realized that the lead character had yet to speak. It was good but I defy anyone to make a great movie from the Le Carre book, too much is interior. How many viewers will know, let alone appreciate, that many people once did prefer communism for aesthetic reasons?
The Descendants – George Clooney has limited emotional range but it suits him in this role where part of the point is that his character is too boring, methodical, and unemotional for his thrill-seeking wife (why did these two ever marry?) and his now needy children. Excellent performances from Robert Forster and supporting cast and a plot that is involved without being contrived. The contrast between external paradise and internal misery was delightfully disconcerting.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – started out strong but by the time it ended I hated it. Every element of the movie is manipulative; 9/11 is used as a prop (like using 9/11 to sell life-insurance), the parents are perfect even when the story demands imperfection and the kid is weirdly unlikable. Finally, the movie has a happy ending, which made me sad.
What kinds of movie stars marry each other?
Marital sorting on education is an important but poorly understood source of inequality. This paper analyzes a group of men and women who do not meet their spouses in school, are not sorted by education in the workplace, and whose earnings are not correlated with their years of education. Nevertheless, movie actors marry spouses with an education similar to their own. These findings suggest that male and female preferences alone induce considerable sorting on education in marriage and that men and women have very strong preferences for nonfinancial partner traits correlated with years of education.
Hat tip goes to Steve Sailer. And here is another paper by Bruze:
US middle aged men and women are earning in the order of 30 percent of their return to schooling through improved marital outcomes.
Why is there uniform pricing for movie tickets?
So how come we’re still stuck with $12 tickets for both blockbusters and indie flicks? A few theories:
1) Theaters do price discriminate already, kind of, but they do it with space. At the multiplex, not all theaters are alike. Bigger movies get more theaters with better technology. Smaller movies get older theaters with smaller screens.
2) You can’t consistently cut prices after a successful opening weekend. If people knew that ticket prices would fall after a big opening, many more would wait until the second or third weekend to see it, which would, ironically, destroy the meaning of opening weekends.
3) Price can repel as easily as it attracts, because it’s a signal of quality. If your a theater showing one movie for $6, one movie for $10, and another for $12, perhaps fewer people will see the $6 movie because they assume it’s garbage.
4) Cheaper tickets lead to higher policing costs. I’m a cheapskate, so I might buy a ticket to see cheap, cheap Iron Lady and sneak into Sherlock Holmes. This would create a fascinating incentive for art-house studios to release smaller, cheaper films the same weekend as blockbusters, knowing that thousands of canny consumers might buy fake tickets to their show to sneak into the more expensive blockbuster.
5) Price discrimination offers more opportunities for other movie theaters to steal each others’ audience. Once again, I’m very cheap, so I don’t mind taking the metro way across town to see Sherlock Holmes for significantly less money if one multiplex starts to mark up its blockbusters.
That is from Derek Thompson. A related research paper is here (pdf). I would rephrase the question to be a little more specific. Especially in the days of robust DVD sales, why did they not offer first weekend modest coupon bonuses — as distinct from price discounts — for the most popular movies? That would drive up attendance, without damaging the gross (as a lower p would), and boost “advertising” for the DVD and the subsequent foreign openings. Movie markets have changed a bit since then, but that to me is the biggest puzzle. I would expect some unpopular but cultish movies to have higher prices, not lower prices, much like Edward Elgar books.
Addendum: Here is my 2005 post on same, and Alex’s brother.
IP Feudalism and the Shrinking of the Public Domain
Creators of intellectual property used to be granted up to 56 years of monopoly before their works entered the public domain. Since the 1976 copyright act (which came into effect in 1978) copyright has been progressively lengthened so it now extends to the life of the author plus an additional 70 years, i.e. an author’s heirs now get significantly more monopoly power than an author did prior to 1978, truly a kind of IP feudalism.
It’s hard to believe that the extension of copyright for decades after an author’s death can appreciably increase artistic creation and innovation, thus the public has gained little from copyright extension. What has been lost?
If the pre-1976 law were still in place then as of Jan 1, 2012 the following books, movies and music would have entered the public domain (from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain):
- J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the final installment in his Lord of Rings trilogy
- The Family of Man, Edward Steichen’s book of photographs showing the diversity and universality of human experience
- Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 8–September 30, 1945, translated by Warner Wells, md
- Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, the second book in his Sword of Honour trilogy
- C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth volume his The Chronicles of Narnia
- Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
- Jerome Lawrence & Robert E. Lee’s play about the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” Inherit the Wind
- Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity.
- Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers
- The Seven Year Itch, directed by Billy Wilder; starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell
- Lady and the Tramp, Walt Disney Productions’ classic animation
- Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly
- The thriller The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton; starring Robert Mitchum and Shelley Winters
- Two of James Dean’s three major motion pictures: East of Eden, directed by Elia Kazan and co-starring Raymond Massey and Julie Harris; and Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray and co-starring Natlie Woods, Sal Mineo, and Jim Backus
- Hollywood versions of major Broadway musicals such as Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls
- Richard III, Laurence Olivier’s film version of the Shakespeare play, co-starring Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, Nicholas Hannen, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud
- Unchained Melody (Hy Zaret & Alex North)
- Ain’t That a Shame (Antoine “Fats” Domino and Dave Bartholomew)
- Blue Suede Shoes (Carl Perkins), Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash)
- The Great Pretender (Buck Ram)
- Maybellene (Chuck Berry, Russ Fratto, & Alan Freed),
- Tutti Frutti (Richard Penniman (aka Little Richard)
Under the old law these works and many others could today have been read, seen and played at low cost throughout the world. Consumers have certainly lost from copyright extension. What about creators?
We typically frame copyright and patent strength as an issue between consumers and creators, with consumers assumed to favor weaker rules and creators stronger. But, as I discuss in Launching the Innovation Renaissance, that is the wrong frame. A vibrant public domain can be good for consumers and for creators.
Under the old law, the above works could not only have been consumed they could also at low cost and without requiring the express permission of the original copyright holder have been remixed, reworked and extended in new directions. Under the new regime, innovators will not be able to easily build on these works until 2051 and it could be well into the 22nd century before we get Star Wars prequels worthy of the name.