a semi-autobiographical tale of the rise and fall of John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes.  There was also a 2003 movie called "Wonderland" based on Holmes' purported involvement in the Wonderland (L.A.) murders that followed a drug deal gone bad.

were the golden age of porn..

IMO, in the 70's, the industry would have been seen as highly controversial, movies went straight to the adult theatres, often in the seedy parts of a town & there probably wasn't much, if any, home video market..

By the 80's, explosion of VHS cassettes and video rental stores gave the industry a new market for their films...But there were also significant challenges at this time with the rise of the religious right & culture wars...The Traci Lords scandal and the taxpayer travesty that was the Meese Commission didn't help either...

i think in the 1990's things were different...Video store rental places were on every corner, plus there were more cable channels offering porn and many hotels now were offering x-films as a selection on their TV's...The home market provided a comfortable atomsphere as opposed to the adult theatres....And there weren't the piracy issues that exist today..Plus, i think the indsutry was gaining acceptance at this time with adult stars going on the Howard Stern Show and other outlets..Porn had come a long way since its infancy in the early 70's...

In the present day, while the industry is certainly more accepted than ever, newer challenges like piracy and countless free porn outlets have certainly taken a toll on the adult biz...The video rental stores, much like record stores, have pretty much gone into extinction...

It's produced several girls I’ve been able to actually fuck instead of just watching them. Thank you TER and others.

Boogie Nights is a portrait of the porn industry in the late 1970-beginning of 1980s. Using John Holmes as the main 'character' the movie attempts to realistically display the up and down of a porn career, from the 'discovery' to the 'self-destruction' and perhap the 'recovery' at least morally. But if you take apart Holmes character, the movie had a more general feeling of what a 'career' in porn may look like. In my view this is the real beauty of Boogie Nights, and in this sense the movie is way superior to the self-portraits attempted by the porn industry in hundreds of flick (there is long list of movies that attempt to describe the 'behind the scenes - e.g the manipulation of the stars, the drug-infested atmosphere, the hype of the big (tits, penis, butts, etc.), the exchange of favoritism, the corruption of casting agencies, of the directors, and of the entire film productiion chains, etc. etc.

In this sense the movie is a portrait of the dark side of the Golden Age of Porn, but its validity as all good movies is behind its specific temporality. Holmes was the man who became a sensation not because of his big and long shaft, but because that it symbolically captured and incorporate what porn industry live on: namely, the craving for HYPE.

In regard to the Golden Age of Porn:
Temporally it started with Deep Throat (1972) and in my view it ended in 1985 when New Waves Hookers was released: The Dark masterpiece initiated the 'Wall-to-Wall' style of porn-making, completely destroying the 'plot-style' that was the high mark of the Golden Age.

New Wave Hookeers totally demolished the 'aura' of intellectualism, sophistication and social meaning that decorated so many Golden Age flicks and it opened up the gates of 'hard/fast and furious' sex, where the 'bodily action' it became the beginning and the end of any porn flick.

Sincerely,
BM

-- Modified on 6/10/2012 11:47:20 AM