71B-1122

Workplace dynamic question: Long ago, I saw a non-porn industry interview w/ an actress who said she got reprimanded by the production team one time for having sex on-set but off-camera with a male actor after they'd been simulating it as extras in the background of filming all day and getting bored/horny. That makes me wonder: as a workplace, what kind of separation is there between sexual activity being 'okay' and 'not okay' for the performers (either with each other or solo)? Like, at what point is it weird if an actor who's not in the middle of filming is just walking around naked? What if two actors are friends outside of work and are more 'comfortable' with their personal space than two who are just strictly co-workers and only interact on-camera?

Just trying to get a feel for what it's like in actuality as a workplace from an HR perspective as much as that might be applicable to the industry. It seems like there's a ton of ambiguous gray area between acceptable behavior vs veering into uncomfortable. Curious how that line gets drawn.

It seems like a lot of 'mainstream' porn put out by the big studios feels somewhat repetitive or interchangeable even when compared across studios. It feels like you could boil down most 20-30 minute scenes as well as collections of stills into a very small number of categories or formulas. My question is how is the specific action shown in a film decided? Like, the positions, angles, etc. I mean, besides a director making those decisions in the actual moment, is there any larger thought process there that's guided by industry trends, the studios themselves, data gathered from users' viewing habits on websites, etc.? It seems like even the studios that advertise their product as being 'different' (e.g. "female friendly") eventually regress to this average.

 

Some specific examples: even the romantic/female-friendly scenes often end up with the male actor just jackhammering away at the woman. Or, those times when in non-fetish porn the woman ends up in like a headlock, lifted in the air type move. Or, why almost every still set includes a woman in the starbucks logo position (on back legs up behind head).

How is the specific action shown in a film decided? Like, the positions, angles, etc. I mean, besides a director making those decisions in the actual moment, is there any larger thought process there that's guided by industry trends, the studios themselves, data gathered from users' viewing habits on websites, etc.? My rationale for asking has to do with the fact that most of the major porn videos out there feel fairly interchangeable apart from the actual actors in them and maybe some things like lighting/music/etc. But if you actually look at what's unfolding on camera, it feels like most 20-30 minute scenes can broadly be grouped into a very small number of general "categories" or maybe formulas. Even studios or film brands that present themselves as being different (sometimes "female friendly") ultimately seem to gravitate towards that same average (sometimes within scenes themselves as well as over time as their studio/brand/film line whatever exists for more time).

 

So yeah, long winded way of asking -- why are things the way they are at any given moment in major porn production? It feels very homogenized at any given instant and changes only seem to happen across the whole industry and over long periods of time (e.g. what is homogeneous now would all be very standout if you compared it to 15 years ago).

How are language issues handled on-set? It seems like a lot of big studio porn is an English market, but there seem to be a fair number of actresses who are from non-english speaking countries (eastern Europe + Russia, just anecdotally), especially in the 'glam' style videos (nubiles, etc.). I mean, I know they probably speak some english, but there have been a couple times where some of the big name actresses tried to do fan interviews like reddit AMAs and were not super-great at communicating in English. It just seems like things like direction and consent would get a little murky when the people having sex with each other might not be able to fully communicate with one another (native english speaking actor with not-fluent in english actor, or any other pairing of actor-director, etc. where they are not mutually fluent in the same language).

So yeah, it seems like people on big studio porn sets come from a variety of language backgrounds, especially with studios that have talent from both America and Europe and Russia, or when they're filming at international locations with those same people and varied languages. How does that get handled?