Good NY Times article about what's happened to movies these days in the industry. Click link for full article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/bu...n.html?_r=1&hp
Lights, Camera, Lots of Action. Forget the Script.
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: July 7, 2009
The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.
There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.
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.