fascinating...

[lagilman]

What Women Want to Watch

August 29, 2004
By SUSAN DOMINUS





WHEN Mark Graff, a longtime veteran of adult entertainment,
founded Playgirl TV in 2003, he wasn't necessarily
interested in liberating women to enjoy the pleasures of
erotic entertainment; he was more interested in exploiting
them, as an underserved market.

Mr. Graff, who had created Spice Entertainment, a raunchier
alternative to Playboy TV, had always believed that women
were among Spice's loyal viewers, although the content,
like most pornography, was made with men in mind. "When we
moved Spice from 10 o'clock at night to the middle of the
day, the buy rates went nuts," Mr. Graff says, sitting in
his office the in the East 40's. "It couldn't all be
out-of-work truckers. It had to be a lot of housewives."

Never mind that these days, the name Playgirl is most
widely associated with a magazine of mild gay pornography;
Mr. Graff thought the brand was familiar enough that he'd
be able to sell cable distributors a video-on-demand
service under that title. In the meantime, he would revive
its initial intent, providing sexually provocative material
that women - and perhaps some gay men - would enjoy.

Mr. Graff, now 53, thought he had retired back in 1999 when
he sold Spice to Playboy TV for a neat $100 million, moved
to a small town near the Berkshires and took over an old
country store. "I sliced bologna, sold mice traps, penny
candy," he says. "It was my Norman Rockwell moment." And
then? "I got utzy," he says. "I got bored." And he got to
thinking. If women were watching Spice, then he could only
imagine how many more would be interested in a product
tailored specifically for them. Especially if the format,
too, was tailored specifically for them: video on demand,
which is less public than buying videos in a store, less
depressing than visiting an adult Web site. He approached
the publishers of Playgirl magazine about a licensing deal,
and they agreed. "So then we had to figure out, `O.K., what
does this look like?' " he says. "I had no idea what adult
films for women would even be."

And with good reason: there aren't a lot out there. Femme
Productions, a company started in 1984 by the adult film
actress and San Francisco-bred feminist Candida Royalle,
has answered that question with movies featuring more plot
and emotion than traditional pornography. (Characters have
been known to announce that they're in love midway through
the story). But though Femme has been a success, it has not
put a dent in the mainstream pornography market.

In any case, Mr. Graff, a bearish man in jeans, a gray suit
jacket and black Adidas, would seem an unlikely successor
to Royalle. (A copy of "My Secret Garden," Nancy Friday's
1973 collection of women's racy sexual fantasies, that he
keeps in his thoroughly unremarkable office looks more than
anything else like an unconvincing prop. "It's my bible,"
he swears.) But his profit motive and her political motives
are not so far apart as they once would have been. Today,
though some feminists still decry the dehumanizing products
of this male-dominated industry, others unabashedly declare
their love of the stuff and call for the production of more
material that women might enjoy.


After licensing the Playgirl name, Mr. Graff started
raising funds from a collection of private investors. It
took a year to get enough to start production. "Everybody
loves the money from adult entertainment," he says, "but no
one wants to tell their wife." From his home office
overlooking the hills of the Berkshires, Mr. Graff started
calling women off the Playgirl subscriber list to sound
them out about the kind of videos they thought they wanted
to watch.

"Porn for women," he says. "It's a blank page. So you ask
questions: What is it that you like? Are you orally
oriented? Do you want to see good-looking guys close up?"
Hetta Eisenberg, the marketing director of the new venture,
and Kelly Holland, a film director who also came on board,
were making the same calls, and eventually the three hit on
some basic themes. "We'd hear, `I want to see
better-looking guys, more loving, more communication
between the couples,' " Mr. Graff says. "They had to have
some involvement with the characters in advance of sex,
with a believable set-up, for it to work. `I want to see a
better set-up than the pizza man coming to the door.' For
guys, wall to wall sex is fine. In fact, the pizza man is
too much plot." He laughs. "Lose the pizza!"

Ms. Holland started working with writers in Los Angeles to
conceptualize the company's films. She used a lot of the
phone survey results - but not all. "Women say they want
more plot, but there's plenty of plot out there," she says.
In fact, she believes that plot is the downfall of many
supposedly couple-friendly films: the more plot, the more
pressure on the actors to make it work. "You know, what's
embarrassing to women about porn isn't just the sex," says
Ms. Holland, a tall, professionally dressed woman with long
red hair who worked in documentary film before turning to
editing, then directing, adult films to make money. "What
makes people blush is also the bad community theater
acting, the tripping-over-the-stairs amateur thing that
goes on. These actors aren't Strasberg-trained - they're
sex performers. Rather than try to get them to do something
they don't do with these elaborate scenes, we thought we'd
just add a little more context instead."

Ms. Holland, who says she's "passionate about women's right
to erotic imagery," has started using her real name, for
the first time since she started working in adult film, on
the Playgirl projects. She oversees production and script,
with Mr. Graff signing off on the basic plots and premises.


Rather than add too much plot, Ms. Holland wanted to make
the sex scenes more natural. "All the sex scenes you see in
Hollywood films are artificial, in the sense that you have
all this buildup, and then for the most intimate, truthful
moments, when people are sexual, we sort of contrive the
sheets in this artificial way to hide the body, to hide
that reality," she says. "With porn, it's the opposite
contrivance - she has to lie with her legs spread like
this" - she splays her arms open - "and he has to lean back
like that so the camera can get there. I just want to shoot
sex as I see it, as it is."

Neither Ms. Holland nor Mr. Graff was happy with their
early results, however. "It's really hard to get people to
move away from what I call P.O.P., plain old porn," Mr.
Graff says. "You know, everybody's been doing it in a
certain way for so long, from the lighting to the actors,
it's kind of like a factory, like watching people in a
bakery. It's very blasé. And it's very hard to get them to
do new things." An early segment, featuring a man and a
woman who start out playing strip poker on a porch,
reveals, in Ms. Holland's opinion, too many "gynecological
shots" to be of interest to women.

Mr. Graff and Ms. Holland began gathering their friends for
informal focus groups and learned that they had been
overlooking some very big concerns. "It turned out art
direction was incredibly important," Mr. Graff says. "From
the headboards to shoes to his haircut, her haircut,
everything that was in the room was being closely examined
- whether or not her nails were done, whether or not the
bedspread was pretty. `Why is she wearing those shoes?' was
a big thing. Not why was she wearing shoes or not wearing
shoes, but why is she wearing those shoes? Shoes were like
- a big deal."

For the next round of films they produced, Mr. Graff and
Ms. Holland passed over stylists who worked exclusively in
adult films and instead hired an art director who also
works in theater, a wardrobe person who also designs hats
and handbags. "Women were telling us they were really into
lingerie, and it has to be at least Victoria's Secret, but
better you have Prada. And they complained a lot about
over-the-top jewelry, so we paid attention to that," Ms.
Holland says. The results are "closer to where we're going,
if not there yet," she adds.

Like most pornographic movies, they feature pat scenarios:
a woman alone with the man behind the counter in a diner
after hours; a woman making moves on the guy at the grocery
store. But some differences are striking: the female
actresses look a lot more like real people, with normal,
natural bodies, than like porn stars. There are fewer
close-ups on actual genital contact (in one, there's almost
none). To eliminate awkward, off-putting dialogue, the
characters interact very little before they make physical
contact. The attention to detail shows up in the short but
manicured nails, the hand-stitched lingerie and the
specificity of the wardrobe: for a scene set in a 50's
diner, a vintage dress was brought in from a Los Angeles
wardrobe shop. Although Mr. Graff would not give specifics
on budget, he says the cost of the average Playgirl film is
higher than the cost of his old Spice productions. "Those
shoes are expensive," he explains.

In mid-July, the Playgirl service made its debut. For
$8.95, subscribers to Cablevision, which serves parts of
the New York metropolitan area, have the choice of several
90-minute combinations of five to seven different short
films. (For now, those segments are either sexual scenarios
or profiles of male stars, featured mostly naked and in the
act of self-stimulation; Mr. Graff intends to add sex
advice and shopping features in the future).

He also struck a deal with two companies that distribute
adult entertainment to hotel chains. He says he's
optimistic about signing deals with other major cable
service providers within the year.

Dennis McAlpine, the media and entertainment analyst for
McAlpine Associates, agrees that women are an underserved
market. "But it's hard to sell the cable service providers
on more adult entertainment," he says. "It's too
controversial. My guess is the major players will wait and
see how he does with Cablevision before signing on." Mr.
Graff will also be facing competition from the upstart
producer Inpulse TV, another new video-on-demand service
hoping to corner the market on erotic entertainment for
women.

Asked their reaction to the films, Emma Taylor and Lorelei
Sharkey, sex advice authors who publish under the name Em
and Lo, responded right on cue. "I was noticing how cool
her hair was," Ms. Sharkey started out, referring to the
film shot in the diner. "There was a 50's element to her
look that I really liked. And she had this cool outfit on,
and cool undergarments - and the kissing seemed to last a
full five minutes, which is an eternity for porn."

Ms. Taylor immediately commented on the brevity of the
conversational build-up. "At first I was thinking, I wish
there'd been a little more conversation to make it seem
like something that actually happened in real life," she
said. "But then the dialogue would have been forced and the
acting would have been bad. Improving the sex is probably a
much more attainable goal than trying to get the actors to
turn in Oscar-winning performances."

The filmmakers still say they have a few aesthetic choices
to work out, including the display of male genitals. In
those initial phone surveys, Playgirl readers said they
wanted to see as many as possible. But as Ms. Holland
herself admits, the preferences of the female Playgirl
reader may not represent the average American woman's
tastes. "I have to take women at face value when they say
they want to see more penises," she says. "But I factor in,
how much of that is just because they want their MTV, so to
speak - their right to media and their right to those
sexual images? It's sort of an expression of their process
of sexual liberation. It's like those rowdy women you see
at a male strip club - it's almost like they're acting out
some male construct of what sexual desire is supposed to
look like. You have to balance what they really want with
what they feel socially compelled to say."

SHE adds a personal comment that's practically
revolutionary for directors in her line of work, like
hearing Quentin Tarantino say there's too much on-screen
violence: "As for me, I could probably not see male or
female genitals at all. To me it's not a priority." She
suspects that if and when adult films for women become more
widely accepted, and they have a broader sample of consumer
feedback, the films may get less explicit.

Mr. Graff admits that early on they created the "male body
worship segments," the male model profiles, in the hopes of
capturing a gay male audience, a relatively high-income,
high-buying demographic. "It's the mothership for
advertisers," he said. "But now I think that most gay men
will tune in once and then not come back. It's really not
for them." And trying to split the programming down the
middle, he says, "would be cheating, so to speak." The
material hasn't been on the air long enough to yield
reliable impressions of women's response to those segments.


Mr. Graff says the most difficult thing has been finding a
way to wrap up the sex scenes without getting quite so
explicit as male-oriented pornography. "You know, this is
all part of the process, to create a set of characters and
circumstances that are intriguing and make you want to come
back and that also deliver the goods," he said. "After all,
this ain't the Oprah Show."

Susan Dominus is a contributing writer to The New York
Times Magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/arts/television/29DOMI.html?ex=1094773152&ei=1&en=52a24fe9874fedb5


Fascinating. I've been playing around for years with starting "On Top: a magazine for women who know what they want," to do what Playgirl totally failed to do -- interest heterosexual female readers. Sounds like this guy has been noticing the same thing...