Why All The Plot (Patreon)

When I was a young teen in the 1980's I had an Atari 1600 Gaming System. The system had a power cable that plugged into the back of the console. Cable in America had a cable box that descrambled the cable signal. There was one adult channel. To keep kids from accessing it, you had to insert a special key in the back of the box. One day I discovered that the power cable from my Atari was nearly identical to the adult channel key. For good or for ill my life changed with that discovery. I became introduced to the world of pornographic videos. Thus began a lifelong love of porn.

If you've followed my work at all, you know that my work is heavy on plot and character development. I have plenty of sex scenes and I love creating them, but I really love plot and character development. I'm almost 50 and came of age in the middle of the Golden Age of porn (1970's to mid 1980's). What really characterized that period was that the porn fims were heavy on plot. That contrasts sharply with porn from both before and after the period, which is incredibly light on plot within the scene and devoid of plot connecting scenes - just a series of 4 - 6 sex scenes thrown together.

During the Golden Age, they were actually trying to make legitimate movies that contained explicit sex scenes. My favorite movie from this period was Eruption staring the Susan Hart, Lesllie Bovee and the legend John Holmes. It was a porn version of the black and white film noir Double Indemnity. It was a big budget film shot on location in Hawaii, at a time when Hollywod wasn't making many big budget on location films. There weren't that many sex scenes in the movie, but it was awesome! The plot was strong, the sex scenes were great and they were organic to the plot.  Although the acting was B-Movie level, a group of porn stars and a porn director proved they could pull of a solid B-Movie. 

Legal changes in the mid-seventies combined with 1970s/1980's feminism killed the profitability of big budget porn, and the Golden Age came to an end. The late 1980's and 1990's saw some attempts to bring back big budget porn, but it didn't stick. Crucially these new big budget films didn't try any serious plot or character development.

This period of porn has always stuck with me and now as a porn artist, it impacts my work. I'm trying to create stories with real plot and character development, that have great sex scenes. If it weren't for that Atari 1600 I might be creating poerty.