» Tonight: CNBC’s Look Inside the Porn Industry [Updated]

porn business of pleasure It must be sweeps week because CNBC’s documentary special, Porn: Business of Pleasure premieres tonight – Wednesday, July 15th – at 9pm, 10pm and 1am EST. Much like CNBC’s other sensationalistic specials, the program claims to give an insider’s view on the scandalous world of porn.

According to the website,

CNBC takes an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look inside the multibillion dollar pornography business, from the threats to its profitability to exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews with the industry’s biggest stars to the one issue that could bring the adult industry to it’s knees.

AVN’s Mark Kernes was able to get a preview of the special and felt that it was pretty even-handed overall. CNBC interviewed a lot of industry heavy hitters like Steven Hirsch (founder of Vivid), Joy King (Wicked’s VP of Special Projects), and Samantha Lewis (President of Digital Playground), as well as stars like Jesse Jane, Ron Jeremy and Sasha Grey.

I always feel compelled to watch these sorts of things, so I’ll be checking it out. If you happen to watch it, I’d love to hear your opinions on how good or bad a job CNBC did at portraying the industry and its fans fairly.

Update: This special turned out to be pretty boring. A few thoughts:

No one pays much attention to the Cambria list anymore.
The gentleman from the DOJ who feels that most porn producers are breaking the law and says that “you don’t have to accept that porn shop in your community” was wrong on both counts.
Joy King is just great. She represents the industry very well and she’s a super nice person in real life.
The amount of sensationalistic garbage the program spewed outweighed any interesting points it may have made. (And if anyone heard any, please let me know)

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Tags: documentary, porn industry

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Tonight: CNBC’s Look Inside the Porn Industry [Updated]”

July 16th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
nawj says:

Interesting, no, but I’ll admit to laughing out loud during the Sasha Grey interview. I’m not one to cast aspersions on how a women does her make-up, but I thought the interviewer could of toned it down a little bit during that segment:) I fell asleep during the special fortunately I did record it on the DVR so perhaps I’ll attempt to get through the last 15 min or so. I love how the fact that the Max Hardcore incident was a set-up by the U.S. Government and that’s just glossed over, only mentioning the conviction and the sentence. For the record, I’m no Max Hardcore fan, but his only crime was making shitty porn and if that’s a crime, a lot of people should shitting bricks right about now.
July 17th, 2009 at 11:16 am
alison hart says:

nawj,

Did you end up watching the last 15 min? I think the fact that you fell asleep is telling It’s funny that you mention Sasha’s makeup in that interview because I remember thinking that Sasha looked really shiny/oily or something. I agree completely about Max Hardcore – both the way he was treated by this program and by the government. On a related note, I hear Janine just got out of jail and has transferred to a halfway house.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
HotScooter2 says:

Alison:

could it be that nobody pays attention to the Cambria list as it appears to be outdated. most covers today would be in violation of these standards
July 20th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
alison hart says:

HotScooter,

Pretty much. Over the years since it’s been written, producers have pushed the boundaries little by little.

Back when the Extreme Associates obscenity case started, I was working for an online DVD retailer and we had to comb through every movie one by one and pull anything that had:

- food used as a sex object
- peeing
- penetration while in bondage
- fisting
- extreme bdsm

Some of the stuff on the list is just so commonplace that there’s really no way to avoid it (tranny, interracial, squirting, etc).
July 25th, 2009 at 6:02 am
nawj says:

nope, just deleted it from the dvr. Just wasn’t worth it at the end of the day.