Image: Angelica Alzona/GO Media
A porn shoot used to mean a day on a professional set with a crew and cast. The makeup artists, lighting technicians, camerapeople, and co-stars that once buzzed around a set have disappeared. Now, performers are filming in their own bedrooms, by themselves or with a significant other, while a director joins remotely via Zoom. It’s an attempt to adapt studio shoots amid an indefinite hold on traditional on-set productions in response to the covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, performers have increasingly turned to camming, clips sites, and subscription platforms like OnlyFans to produce their own content, which can range from stripteases to winking moments of domesticity.
“I make quarantine cookies with things I have in my cabinet or I’ll take a quarantine shower and show how to wash up all of your germ parts,” said performer Maitland Ward, laughing, of her premium platforms. Recently, she shot a humorous skit for her subscription Snapchat in which she met a man on Tinder but couldn’t go out on a date with him because of the pandemic, so they had to resort to FaceTime instead. She used a filter to turn herself into her own co-star.
The sudden comprehensive shift to at-home, DIY performances has many wondering about the future of the industry. The question isn’t just when things return to normal, but if the norm changes. What will the porn industry, and porn itself, look like on the other side of a months-long shutdown? Speaking with over a dozen industry members, many near-term possibilities were floated: socially-distanced crew members, small hubs of performers who exclusively work together, and covid-19 screenings folded into industry-mandated STI tests. Several people raised the possibility of gang bangs temporarily disappearing, given the increased number of performer interactions. For some, though, this feels less a passing event requiring temporary accommodations and more like a historically catalyzing moment, with reverberations that will be felt for years.
“At the end of the day, this seems like a bigger inflection point than the last recession. It seems poised to change the industry as much as iPhones and tube sites did,” said Mike Stabile, spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the adult industry’s trade association. “This is the porn equivalent of climate change.”
It’s undecided when the voluntary production hold, which was called for by FSC, will be loosened. Several directors anticipate a return this summer to traditional shoots, at least in some capacity. Director Kayden Kross of Deeper previously booked shoots for the end of May, but says, “It’s pretty clear that I’m losing those shoots. I’m hoping now for June.” Axel Braun, a director known for big-budget parodies at Wicked Pictures, says, “I don’t think it’s gonna happen until at least July.” It is clear that future shoots will look very different. Kross suspects that crews will be smaller and those behind the cameras may be wearing masks and making efforts to keep their distance. The nature of the content is likely to be different, too. “I tend to go for lots of bodies in my big projects,” she said. “In the wake of corona, that’s not a smart move.”
Speculation abounds about the potential to fold in covid-19 screening to the industry’s pre-existing system for bi-weekly STI testing. Talent Testing Service, one of the labs in the industry’s network, announced it was beginning covid-19 testing last week. The FSC, however, states that covid-19 tests “are not yet effective for establishing safer sets,” given that “the results could become invalid any time after the test.” Stabile says that testing will be a “significant element of resuming production, but we need to determine what type of test and how often it would need to be administered.” Given the virus’s ease of transmission, he says, “we can’t rely solely on testing, but need to establish a full roster of protocols.”
By the time the production hold is lifted, some may not return at all. Braun suspects that people who work behind the scenes, like makeup artists, videographers, and production assistants, who don’t have ready access to income through subscription platforms, may be forced to leave the business entirely. Smaller studios will struggle to stay afloat, according to Jacky St. James, a director for Bellesa Films and Mile High Media, since they need to provide “regular content to justify memberships to their sites,” she explained. Without a backlog of content, they “might be in trouble.” For the time being, bigger studios are managing alright, said St. James, but she suspects this may be the final nail in the coffin of DVD sales. Once on-set production returns, “some producers will likely be tighter on budgets,” she says.
It may be that remote shoots will persist even after the production hold is lifted. Bree Mills, a director for Adult Time, says she won’t entirely abandon the new styles of shooting that she’s had to experiment with over the past weeks. Recently, she shot an orgy via Zoom, and soon Mills plans to remotely shoot a feature with a pandemic plot using teleconferencing software. She’s also developed a handful of live-streaming series and a network of performers who will conceive of and shoot their own projects. “I definitely don’t see us just dropping all of this and going back,” she said. “This is the start of a new way forward, not just for us but probably the adult industry in general.”
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