The above image for AlphaFemmes looks amazing, yes? I was surprised when I got an email from the Oakland-based director, Anna Devia, sharing it with me and finishing her very wonderful email about women and porn by saying that AlphaFemmes is looking for distribution. I would have thought that a tasty morsel like this would have already been locked and loaded into some company’s channel, ready for DVD deadpools around the nation.
It made me think about when Eon worked at Vivid and he’d see his DVD films go up on Bittorrent while he was at the office waiting for them to be released. Wryly, he’d Tweet the links. It reminded me of every discussion I’ve had with porn industry peeps who are frustrated out of their minds at the entire situation, making great content only to watch it get lost in offensively worded shouty all-caps press releases that everyone deletes, not having anything shareable (trailers, stills, goodies) to give to blogs and friends for promo, never having a decent landing page to send traffic to for the project, and then seeing the final movie die, overpriced, on a dusty shelf in some jack shack in a jewel case.
So the world walks away from DVDs. And studios cry foul at Bittorrent. And tube sites, who have partnered with online content creators around the world to give porn away for free, cashing in on affiliate signups. The studios forgot that no on ever wanted to pay for porn in the first place, that the system of controlling exclusive distribution and price based on a physical product (VHS>DVDs) was all they really had. They forgot that people were paying for distribution, not product.
They were paying to get the paper delivered to their house, not because they felt they should pay for news.
They controlled the distribution channels so tightly that when the revolution came and people could choose porn other than what they were being forced to buy in hotels (cable) or in the jack shacks, they didn’t innovate their distribution channels. They circled their wagons, as they always did, and turned against each other with the same fervor as they turned against the outside world.
Silly.
I promise! Anna Devia is a porn genius. I think we need an army of Annas.
That trailer is incredible.
I feel like I won’t be able to rave about it enough.
I think this is the first time since I discovered Comstock I’ve ever said “That! That’s a porn dvd I would buy” And this has the perfect amount of kink.
Keep us updated on this?