Doing Better.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better. - Maya Angelou

Considering recent events in America, the team at IAFD would like to state unequivocally and firmly that black lives matter. The murder of George Floyd, along with the murders of countless other black folks at the hands of police in America is cause for alarm and concern. We stand with the protesters exercising their first amendment rights – the same right we enjoy by documenting and archiving adult film data here at IAFD.

We stand up for black performers who have been made to feel fetishized, minimized, and othered in these categories. We do not condone the racist pay gaps between performers in IR scenes. We are dismayed when we hear stories that black performers in group scenes need to mind who they come in contact with because a fellow performer “doesn’t do blacks yet” since performing with a black man can command a higher rate and is usually saved for later in one’s career.

In striving to be the change we want to see in the world, we are eliminating the IR (“Interracial”) tag on our site.

Internally among the editorial staff, we have believed that interracial porn largely serves to uphold racist stereotypes and imagery – stereotypes and imagery that inform acts of racist hatred. We feel its narrow definition – black men fucking white women – only serves to further a narrative started hundreds of years ago; one with deserves to be relegated to the history books. We justified tracking this information because the industry embraces and promotes it.

No more. We won’t be a part of it.

We have also eliminated race-based categories in our annual Spank Bank Awards.

In the absence of a fund to directly help adult film performers, we have made a donation to The Black Sex Worker Collective, an organization which seeks to address the needs of current and former Black sex workers by providing education, legal assistance, healthcare resources, and affordable housing referrals in order to successfully leave & maintain a life outside of the industry. Their goal is to create a safe space where the unique experiences and needs of Black sex worker voices are validated and responded with appropriate needs based resources.

This is by no means the end of IAFD’s commitment to racial justice. As always IAFD remains committed to ensuring that all customers continue to have free and available access to the most recent and accurate information about adult films and the performers who appear in them.

We are committed to doing better. We will continue to listen and learn and improve on who we are and what we put out to the world.

Sunday Funnies

Sunday Funnies 01

Woke up this morning to have this clip come across my feed.  Comedienne Nikki Glaser has a new Comedy Central show called “Not Safe with Nikki Glaser” – this clip is from her latest (third) episode, where she and Kyle Kinane feed lines to Jake Jace and Luna Star.

A highlight:

Jake: “I’m just going to lick everything down here and hope it feels good.”

Luna: “You’re really lucky I’m not suede right now – because my vagina would be ruined. Because you know how suede gets ruined when it gets wet.”

So, who shot this scene, and when is it coming out?  Where’s the cross marketing Comedy Central?

Your Guide to Our 2016 Awards Season Coverage

Award Noms

We’ve done a giant link dump over the past week or two of AVN Awards and XBiz Awards nominees, so we figured we’d make one post that had links to all the other posts, so you could find them.

AVN Awards

XBiz Awards

Tom Byron Breaks 3000 Titles on IAFD

Tom Byron as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars XXX: An Axel Braun Parody
Tom Byron as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars XXX: An Axel Braun Parody

With The Empire Strikes Back XXX: An Axel Braun Parody luring him out of retirement, Tom Byron becomes the first performer in the IAFD to break 3000 titles to his credit.  (He’s holding at 3004 titles right now, but I’m sure we’ll add more historical titles to boost that number… that averages 91 movies per year; almost two per week for the last 33 years.)

Tom’s first movie was 1982’s Anything Goes . In a May 2000 interview with Roger Pipe, Tom said of the scene:

TB: If you watch it now, it’s hilarious. My head looks like a fucking eggplant.

RP: Who was that first scene with?

TB: Some coke whore, a friend of Bobby Hollander’s.  [Ed note: that would be Laura Landers.]

RP: Were you nervous?

TB: Yeah, I was nervous. Not because I was about to have sex, but because I wanted to do it well.

And “doing it well” became his trademark.  Bravo, Tommy.

Rounding out the Top 10 Performers in the IAFD:

The Empire Strikes Back XXX streets in September 2015.

Empire-Strikes-Back-XXX-Poster

Our Thoughts on “X Rated: The Greatest Adult Movies of All Time”

X Rated List

This month, Showtime is running Eli Cross/Bryn Pryor and Paul Fishbein‘s documentary X Rated: The Greatest Adult Movies of All Time; overall, I found the documentary to be a little too self-serious, and I have some issues with the list of movies they chose – most notably, there’s a gap covering the Silver and Iron Ages — between 1984 and 1992 — which should not have been overlooked, IMHO.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I am excited that this movie got produced at all, let alone scored distribution on Showtime, the other major American cable network that isn’t HBO.

Chanel Preston hosted the proceedings, providing opening and closing stand-ups, connective tissue and some brief in-studio interviews with Christy Canyon, Wesley Emerson (Cass Paley), Kimberly Kane and Ana Foxxx

The format was pretty rigid – generous amounts of harder-than-expected footage from the films  in question, intercut with talking heads – usually people involved in the movie. Due to the size of the list and the length of the documentary, each movie only got a bit over 2 minutes of discussion each.

(Speaking of the interviews, some of them were presented waaaay over-exposed.  I’m not sure of the stylistic choice of presenting it this way, but I found it distracting, when correctly exposed footage seemed to exist.)

cm1

In addition, when participants in the movies couldn’t be found, they relied on recent starts to offer opinions or summaries – for example, Skin Diamond (Best Oral (get it?), 2014 AVN Awards) was used to do the heavy lifting summarizing Deep Throat, since pretty everyone involved in that movie is dead now; Riley Reid talked about Blonde Ambition; Casey Calvert spoke about Nothing to Hide 1

But, BUT! They did get some great modern-day footage of performers Constance Money, Georgina Spelvin, Kay Parker, Eric Edwards, Richard Pacheco and Gloria Leonard from her final interview (courtesy of Steven Morowitz of Distribpix – Steven’s blog posting about his participation)

We talked about the doc during the latest episode of ThisAintNotTheViewXXX and how the makers completely skipped over The Silver and Iron Age of the adult movie — just off the tops of our heads, we had to wonder where was New Wave Hookers (1985) or Night Trips  (1989) or Chameleon (1989) or Adventures of Buttman (1989) or  Dog Walker (1994).  (1989 was a really great year for porn!) We couldn’t find a list of the movies, so I put my own together.

Major directors are overlooked – where is Bob Chinn? Robert McCallum? Carter Stevens? Svetlana? Alex DeRenzy?  Henri Fucking Pachard? The Dark Brothers? John Leslie?  Cecil Howard’s great, but does he deserve three movies on the list?  No mention of Seka except for an appearance in a coming attraction that ran under the credits?

Any list will have its omissions, so I wonder if there were outside forces influencing some of the choices – was Johnny Wadd passed over because Chinn didn’t  want to participate?  (I have no clue; just using him as an example.)  Could they not get the rights to show clips from New Wave Hookers?  (Same caveat.)

Here’s their list, ordered by year of release, which is how the documentary was structured:

  1. Deep Throat (1972), directed by Gerard Damiano
  2. Behind the Green Door 1 (1972), directed by Artie Mitchell and Jim Mitchell
  3. Devil in Miss Jones 1 (1973), directed by Gerard Damiano
  4. Opening of Misty Beethoven (1975), directed by Henry Paris
  5. Barbara Broadcast (1977), directed by Henry Paris
  6. Debbie Does Dallas 1 (1978), directed by Jim Buckley
  7. Blonde Ambition (1980), directed by John Amero and Lem Amero
  8. Taboo 1 (1980), directed by Kirdy Stevens
  9. Neon Nights (1981), directed by Cecil Howard
  10. Cafe Flesh (1982), directed by Rinse Dream
  11. Scoundrels (1982), directed by Cecil Howard
  12. Roommates (1981), directed by Chuck Vincent
  13. Nothing to Hide 1 (1981*), directed by Anthony Spinelli
  14. Firestorm (1984), directed by Cecil Howard
  15. Hidden Obsessions (1992), directed by Andrew Blake
  16. Justine: Nothing to Hide 2 (1993), directed by Paul Thomas
  17. Latex (1995), directed by Michael Ninn
  18. Flashpoint (1998), directed by Brad Armstrong
  19. Looker 1 (1998), directed by Nic Cramer
  20. Seven Deadly Sins (1999), directed by Ren Savant
  21. Dark Angels (2000), directed by Nick Andrews
  22. Fashionistas 1 (2002), directed by John Stagliano
  23. Masseuse 1 (2004), directed by Paul Thomas
  24. New Devil in Miss Jones (2005), directed by Paul Thomas
  25. Pirates (2005), directed by Joone
  26. Corruption (2006), directed by Eli Cross
  27. Upload (2007), directed by Eli Cross
  28. Fallen (2008), directed by Brad Armstrong
  29. 8th Day (2009), directed by Ren Savant
  30. Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody (2012), directed by Axel Braun
  31. Underworld (2013), directed by Brad Armstrong
  32. Wasteland (2012), directed by Graham Travis
  33. Submission Of Emma Marx (2013), directed by Jacky St. James and Eddie Powell

* A quick note on years: According to the US Copyright Office, Nothing to Hide has a date of publication of December 18, 1981. The AFAA and CFAA gave it awards in 1981, it won “Best Film” at the 1982 Adam Film World awards, but AVN didn’t give it any awards until 1984, and in their book “AVN Guide to the 500 Greatest Adult Films of All Time” they list the date as 1983; which the copyright office lists as the date of registration (not the date of creation). IMDB also lists its release as 1981.

What are your thoughts on the list?