Good Vibrations Magazine

You know a genre has arrived culturally when people start making fun of it — not garden-variety, “Nyaah, nyaah, it’s stupid” type fun, but actual spoof or satire. By this measurement, porn est arrivee. Oh, sure, I know the argument can be made that much porn is already a spoof of itself — mostly not on purpose, though occasionally a porno director will have some fun at his or her genre’s expense, giving a movie such a goofy spin that you know s/he’s got to know what s/he’s doing. But we’re finally beginning to see a crossover from hardcore to the big screen that doesn’t rely just on the urge to simultaneously document and voyeurize. Instead of telling us about porn (with or without a pro- or anti-porn agenda), it assumes we know about it already, and proceeds to use that knowledge to make us laugh.

I’ve seen two movies in the past two weeks that do this sort of thing, and there’s another I know of in the Hollywood indie pipeline. This strikes me as especially interesting given that we have a newly hopped-up anti-porn administration. Will it be as easy for Washington to walk all over pornographers this time as it was when Meese was attorney general, now that softcore movies and movies about porn are cable TV staples? Sure, the average person hasn’t been on a porno set, but they may feel like they have after seeing Boogie Nights, Orgazmo, The Girl Next Door, The Annabel Chong Story, the just-released Full Frontal, and the not-yet-released The Fluffer. For that matter, even Linda Lovelace’s story has been depicted on cable, and it seems to revolve a whole lot more around the nightmare of an abusive relationship than it does the supposed horrors of porn.

Last week I flew to L.A. for the world premiere of Kyle Schickner’s Full Frontal: A Sexpose of Hilarious Proportions. This may not hit your multiplex right away — Schickner, an indie director, is looking for a distributor for his brand-new flick — but when it does, the wacky and incisive mockumentary will rip yet another veil from porn’s mystique. Most movies about the sex industry are on some level outsider views, as voyeuristic directors mine the business for cutting-edge visuals. Schickner’s take comes from inside — way on the inside. His spoof isn’t as broad as the goofball stylings of Orgazmo, the other recent porno satire (from South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone), although it has at least one moment that qualifies as over-the-top no matter how you slice it. (It’ll make everyone forget all about There’s Something About Mary — that’s all I’m going to say. You’ll just have to see for yourself.)

But Full Frontal has plenty of moments that will make porn stars themselves howl with laughter and recognition: the production assistant going through the drugstore check-out with his arms full of disposable enemas, the makeup artist rolling his eyes at the prospect of making a mousy out-all-night actress into a gorgeous sex bomb (and continually calling for more time to get her done), the clock ticking as the star tries to get it up or get off. Schickner plays the porno director who (along with his “cinematographers”) is convinced he’s making Art even as most of his cast can barely get through their lines. He lards his cast with plenty of real names from the porn world, although viewers who only watch the straight stuff won’t recognize everyone. Where Orgazmo has the predictable cameo with Ron Jeremy, Full Frontal features a lot of men from the gay and bi porn world, plus a few women who are well known in bisexual porn: Tina Tyler, Sharon Kane, and Candy Apples. The latter made me laugh out loud as she extolled the virtues of really nasty sex on screen — all while her male co-stars professed to like kissing best, “because it’s so much more intimate!” Schickner gets happy with everything from gender roles and sexual orientation to cheap lube and what porn stars tell their parents they do for a living. He lets us in on the secrets of “gay for pay” and illustrates why you sometimes just have to have a stunt dick to get the job done.

Though insider jokes abound, anyone who’s watched a little porn ought to find plenty to laugh about in Full Frontal — and as a matter of fact, I went to see it with a friend’s mother (not a porno-hound kind of mother, the other kind), who laughed and said she had expected it would be a lot sleazier. “Sometimes it is!” we all said in unison. But mostly, of course, making porn is a job, and Full Frontal explores what a funny job it can be.

I had lunch with Schickner the next day and we talked about the vicissitudes of getting unexpected little movies about porn out into the theaters. He hopes one of the distributors whose representatives he invited to the premiere will pick up his movie so he doesn’t have to run it around the country himself — in fact, one of the reportedly interested parties might even get it onto cable TV, though Schickner wants it to go the theater circuit as well.

I asked Schickner why he hadn’t taken it to Sundance. He said had finished it after the big festival’s entry deadline, so that wasn’t possible. However, he has a friend who’s just come back from Sundance, who told him that this year plenty of people showing their movies there spoke openly — and proudly — about the fact that they’d also made porn. The virtually unbridgeable divide, formerly crossed by only a few top sex directors like Henry Paris and Rinse Dream (and even then veiled by pseudonyms), is growing more and more permeable. Like New Wave Hookers badboy Greg Dark, a porn director who later made his mark in music videos, it’s possible to admit the formerly unspeakable: that you paid those student loans from film school by making hardcore.

It just goes to show, the times they are a-changin’. Sure, Washington would like to think they’re changing in the opposite direction, but I wonder how realistic that is when Greg Dark is directing Britney Spears, Traci Lords is openly discussing her past with Playboy, and film school grads head for the San Fernando Valley, porn capital of the universe, to find out what apertures are all about. Is porn going to seem like a social menace once it’s made us giggle?