Take a look behind the scenes of the PORN BUSINESS. Insider interview

The Job

All photos in the text were taken by Jo Broughton, who photographed empty sets built for pornographic films after consecutive days of her work.

GF: What exactly was your job?

Toby Heigh: In the beginning, I oversaw the production of pornographic films. However, it was not about their content, but about the production process itself, i.e. keeping track of deadlines and all other issues that had to be taken care of after post-production was finished. My task was to release a certain number of titles per month, which we had planned in the schedule. Later – as the head of the branch – I was basically just pointing out what people should do and managing the online store. It was one of the first online stores to offer porn movies, back then on VHS and DVD.

So you just ordered a cassette or a CD, only via the Internet?

Exactly. We had to move to the Netherlands because the law in the UK changed and it turned out that you can’t sell films in the country via the Internet. There were two options: moving to France or to the Netherlands. For obvious reasons, Calais was a much worse option than Amsterdam, so we moved to the Netherlands and continued our sales to the UK market there. We were still the same company, only that we operated in a different territory, it was dictated strictly by legal requirements. We wanted to avoid the heavy penalties that threatened us at the time.

How do you start working in porn business? Are you sending your CV for a normal job advertisement?

Depends. When it comes to actors, big companies usually take them from the base. When we come up with an idea for a movie – whether it’s going to be teenagers, moms, etc. – we pick the actresses we think are right. We also did compilations very often and that’s why these movies have such idiotic numbers on the titles, like Anal Invaders 18. It was that four scenes were cut out of four footages, so we had a lot of different movies – it wasn’t just one girl, for example and one boy, we had different actresses on one record. It didn’t mean that we had four girls on the set, very often we just shot a scene and then put together a movie from these materials.

We had this side company that was producing movies from the beginning. We came up with a patent for a very underground label that would reverse the traditional porn roles. As part of it, pornos were created in which girls decided with whom they had sex.

Did the actresses really decide or was it acted from start to finish?

played. The script has changed, not the production process. We wrote the story of several girls who go out, meet guests in a pub and decide who they go to the bathroom with, who they have sex with on the bus or who they demolish cars at an old junkyard, chopping with guys on the hoods of wrecks. We gave the impression that it was a bit of girl power.

The film was a great success, we made four parts. Then a little more material was created based on this idea, we made four more films – two parts from each title. Unfortunately, the director we worked with went crazy. The girl who acted in his films and with whom he was involved became pregnant and miscarried. He accused us of not carrying the pregnancy to term. It became a very unpleasant situation, because the director was extorting money from us and wanted to trick us into some kind of huge compensation for moral damage. If you’ve been working in pornography for so many years and at some point you find out that you’ve suffered a moral injury and you want compensation, you must be a real moron. Our cooperation ended, until now I have not heard that he filmed anything. I’ve never heard of this girl either.

I rarely meet people who acted in these movies, and the course … Jesus, how bad it sounds … but the porn actors’ record is limited and most of these girls are rather porn retired. I don’t know what they do, I don’t really care.

What was your average working day like?

As in any office, except that in the room where I was sitting, my colleague was processing video material for ten hours a day, so the noises were funny. He was rewinding these scenes so we could hear the same noises all day, for example, which was a bit of a torture. A dude is working on a gangbang scene, for example, and you listen to it all the time. Some of the texts were entering our jargon. For example, we had a collaboration with a German label, so all day long I heard lines from a film with German housewives: “du ju wont sam kok, babe?” such rude pseudo-English. It was impossible to listen to it and that was clearly the problem with this work. Few office workers have to listen to someone getting hacked all day. Because it was hard to call it sex. But other than that, we had the same schedule as any other product release. There were deadlines for the end of production, deadlines for sending to post-production, deadlines for completing editing, supervision over cover designs. An office like any other: HR, management, production department. There was nothing there that I didn’t have in the corporation I later worked for.

In fact, it was one more peculiar thing, apart from the noise – sending to censorship. In the UK, every film that gets distributed has to go through censorship. There is an organization called the BBFC. We had to send each film to them for evaluation, which always amused me, because I couldn’t imagine what a person who watches these films looks like and tries to approach the subject matter-of-factly. There were bizarre situations. For the German film Magma Brutal, for which we were working on the English version, we received a request to remove a scene in which a man puts a woman’s head into a urinal during sex and flushes the water. The director had this idea and the BBFC said it was something that might suggest violence against women. We couldn’t find an argument that it was just rough, vulgar gonzo sex – no endearing words, just throwing your partner against the walls. The BBFC was very sensitive about this, as was the whole British legal system.

The UK is probably the last Western European country where porn movies go through censorship, right?

Yes.

Have you ever been banned from distributing a movie altogether?

No, but they cut the film so absurdly that it ended up being a story about a woman looking for love. And in the end, she doesn’t find it, so she’s sorry.

How did it sell?

It didn’t sell, we took a very honorable approach and said if we can’t release our vision for the film then let’s not do it at all because it doesn’t make sense. But that was one situation. Generally, we were in very mainstream pornography, we didn’t make any videos for fetishists, because we assumed that once we found a niche in which we feel good, we should stick to it. To make films for fetishists, you need to have the right knowledge. I had a lot of fun with it, making a video for foot lovers.

It was a production we spent a lot of money on. My idea of foot fetishists was that someone gets turned on by feet, but then there has to be sex. So we spent some money on girls’ pedicures, the movie went into distribution and appeared in sex shops. What we did was that a postcard with questions to the client was attached to each record or cassette. If you filled it out and sent it back, you got a free DVD in return, a compilation of the best scenes and trailers. On the card, however, we asked for a rating of the film, information about how the client found out about our film, what he would like to change in it, etc.

Fetish

Have you done market research?

Absolutely, it was free market research. The answers were bizarre, and to this day I regret that I don’t have the box in which we kept these postcards, because there were situations where the question “how did you find out about our film?” someone replied “from my father’s boyfriend.” Or that someone in response to the question “what would you like to see in our films?” he scribbled in psychopath’s handwriting – a bit like Seven – MORE Midgets.

People sent us very specific letters. Someone asked, for example, why there is no undressing moment in pornographic films, why the woman first flexes in her underwear, and in the next scene there is no underwear and oral sex occurs. The guest suggested using velcro underwear instead of zipper underwear, so that the girls would undress gracefully and not be – quote – “naked as chickens in a butcher shop.”

People had a lot of typical life questions – for example, whether in the scenes where there is abundant ejaculation on the woman’s face, there are men with an exceptionally large sperm pool, or is it collective work? One lady sent a very dramatic letter asking if we could stop producing gay movies because she had read that gays get unhealthily excited while watching these movies. As an example, she cited a story in Soho, where two drunken homosexuals allegedly tried to persuade a young boy to have sex. Interestingly, she signed herself as Suzanne Jakaśtam “with her family”.

It turned out that this market research was a bit of a bait for the nuts. One of the letters began with the sentence “I have been masturbating since I was twelve. Now I am 78 years old. I’ve seen everything in my life, from seedy German productions to lavish American films. I have a few comments”. His list of ideas was six pages long. He even described what he thought close-ups of lips should look like.

What happened to the foot fetish video?

It was a total flop because it turned out that there should be no sex in foot fetish films at all. People wrote, “It was great, and then they started fucking.” Only later did I start to delve into the subject and found out that for foot fetishists, sex itself is not even the icing on the cake, but something tiring and unnecessary. They meant the mere sight of the foot as an object that excites them. The rest didn’t matter.

I only found out about it later, when I met people who made pornographic films to order, based on scripts sent in by clients. You could describe anything and send them your fantasies, although this particular company operated in a niche related to objectification and paraphilias, which we would probably not associate with sex at all. Some of their videos had no sex at all, just bizarre scenes that I still can’t quite understand.

Give an example.

You have a glass floor with a camera mounted underneath. Cooked tomatoes lie on the glass, and the camera films a woman’s foot from below, kneading these vegetables. Apparently, the principal wanted the same close-ups of vegetables crushed between the fingers.

Wait… was this a company you could send any script to?

Yes, and they valued it to you. If you agreed to the proposed amount, you got porn on demand. For example, if you wanted a dude in a porn movie who looks like you and wears the same clothes, they would find one and make any movie for you.

So if I wanted a girl to eat overcooked pasta and sing Leonard Cohen songs while a guy takes her from behind, I could order it?

Yes, the only problem would be the taking from behind, because they focused on those paraphilias where there is no sex. Let me give you another example: in one video, the source of excitement was a woman pumping a car wheel with a foot pump while the camera zoomed in on her calf muscles. Someone got excited just by flexing their muscles. The same woman then walked up the stairs in high heels, and the camera followed her and showed the tension in her leg as she took each step.

And that’s what the whole movie was about?

Yes, that was the entire sequence. She was going up and down those stairs, pointing her calf to the camera and that’s it.

No sex?

No sex. A lot of the time there was no sex in these movies. This is something I only understood when my friend – a director of gay films – made a series of films about paraphilias. Then I found out that there are people who only have an orgasm when, for example, they rub themselves against balloons. There was one guy who had gigantophilia. He was turned on by women the size of Wonder Woman. But it wasn’t about Małgorzata Dydek who shot it, but about women who are ten stories tall. The problem, of course, was that such women did not exist. So what did he do to quench that thirst? He built a mock-up of the city in the garage – pretty good – and his wife would put on her boots once in a while and do Godzilla’s march through the city while he filmed it from below.

I didn’t expect that.

I didn’t expect a lot of things, and as long as I worked in the mainstream porn industry, I knew a pretty simple pattern: there’s oral sex, then – depending on the contract – there’s sex in different positions, sometimes anal or with multiple partners. The director plans the sequence of items according to his own whims, but the model remains the same – beginning, development, climax and cigarette. And with these made-to-order porn, you don’t really know what the climax is. At what point do viewers get excited? I have never learned how such excitement is graded. Many years later, when I was already working in a completely different industry – but also dealing in part with pornography and eroticism – I still could not understand it. I had a rather classic idea of pornography: that it’s supposed to be a movie where people have sex.

In the UK, around 2004-2005, we did a market study to see what niche was the most popular. It turned out that piss and pregnant women.

More popular than, say, MILFs?

More. We had a problem, we didn’t know what to do. Rebrand into “water sports” and hire pregnant women? We decided we weren’t going to do that, that since we’re doing well in the mainstream, we’re not going to do niches. There were smaller companies for that, which were doing great with it. I guess it still works that if you need something very specific, you don’t look in the mainstream, because it’s mostly pumped-up dolls and guys with radiators.

Porn blockbusters

Okay, let’s get back to the mainstream. The company you worked for is famous for expensive, lavish porn films with budgets of up to two million pounds. How is the production process of such a film different from a normal live-action film? Besides sex, of course.

Nothing, actually. There was a belief in the company that you need to reach young customers, because people under 30 are also interested in sex – then you are the most horny, testosterone makes you a monkey. We started with – as it turned out – a wrong assumption that if we make films in a youthful way, young people will catch on. The Triple X Sports series is born – the crew goes to the Alps, girls have sex with snowboarders. But it didn’t work. Now I know that in mainstream porn it works in a much simpler way: if you like the girl on the cover, you don’t give a shit whether it was filmed in the Alps or in Radom. This girl is supposed to do what you fantasize about and all the rest is unimportant.

Our films differed from each other in terms of budget and the sets in which they were shot. The girls who had contracts with us became stars, many of them became famous, not just Jenna Jameson or Briana Banks. An interesting case was Michelle Wild, who, after retiring from porn, started acting in the Hungarian equivalent of For Good and Bad. Anyway, she’s a very nice, nice girl.

If we put money into a movie, we also usually put money into an advertising campaign – for centerfolds in pornographic magazines, etc. We did a pornographic version of Braveheart, an adult version of horror, and finally Cleopatra with 3D modeled ancient Rome. Usually these porn parodies also had cool covers, and at the film fairs we had big booths with actresses walking around. It was all impressive, but the key to success, in my opinion, lies elsewhere – we were lucky that when our films came out in Europe, everyone wanted to see them, because it was something unusual compared to semi-amateur scenes shot somewhere on a pissed-off couch in basement. The girls were cool and tanned, the guys didn’t look bad, and Seychelles beach is a much better backdrop than Brighton beach.

But you say that in the mainstream it all comes down to whether you like the girl on the cover.

I don’t think so, I’ve never caught the key by which people choose movies.

Then why put your money into Cleopatra or Porn Wars when it’s all in addition to sex?

In order to boast. This company was so big and made so much money that I never heard “we can’t afford it” in my work. If one of the employees came up with something interesting, we shot it – a flop of one film was not a big problem. I don’t know what the company’s situation is now and I don’t care, but back then we had obscene profits. What we did in my first job, with the first distributor, was several times smaller amounts, and also smaller profits, because the moment when Private achieved success, everyone wanted to watch it; that was the moment when boobs were enough to sell a movie. Now we are picky and blasé because we go to thousands of porn sites and we can choose any fetish or paraphilia. Everything is one click away from you. It was still new then, we were selling cosmic amounts of VHS, we kept three hundred thousand tapes in one place.

So this was the golden age?

Yes, the beginning of the 21st century was a golden age. We suddenly became very rich. Turns out we bring quality because they’re not sleazy movies – that was actually the only difference that you felt a little bit better watching porn because it was pretty. But there was no golden mean there. For example, we signed a contract with the German company Magma. You know, German porn movies – the actors didn’t look good. The first movies we took were with German housewives. I tapped my forehead, convinced that it wouldn’t pass, that these women were unattractive and it didn’t make sense at all. We have sold a huge number of these films. Someone then said to me, “Dude, if you fantasize about Jenna Jameson, you know it’s never going to happen. But if you fantasize about your neighbor who looks like the grandmother in the movie, you might succeed.”

I remember that everyone in Poland was excited about Dreamquest with Jenna Jameson. It was fantasy, which I thought was rustic and sugary because I hate fantasy. But it turned everyone on. You never know. How many people, so many tastes, how many people, so many fetishes. I knew companies that specialized only in films about coprophilia. We went to their headquarters, I couldn’t look at any of the covers normally, but these guys were making a lot of money. Not only that, they also made mega price cuts, because the more fucked up the paraphilia, the more expensive the movie is. Shabby titles cost three times as much as regular DVDs. People made a lot of money off of it.

This was in the early days of legal distribution of pornography?

It was a turning point between VHS and DVD. Cassettes were great, and DVD became a cheap medium. The market exploded. But at that time, there was no online distribution yet – there was only one company in the UK that started doing it. I remember we were at a conference where a dude was saying that the future of porn would be the internet and mobile, and everyone laughed at him. So do I, because two days earlier I sold several containers of tapes and CDs at the fair. Meanwhile, two years later, we have to close the business, and those who entered online distribution had money like ice.

Grzegorz Fortuna

See other posts from this author >>>