THE MONEY SHOT

With most up-and-coming filmmakers turning to camcorders to make their movies, isn't it high time we paid our respects to cinema's most enduring, unsung yet seminal influence?

Let's hear it for the adult entertainment industry.

More profitable than Hollywood, masters and mistresses of the world wide web and the mobile phone, the porn biz has always been ahead of the game when it comes to technology. What's more, they turn their movies into money without multi-million dollar marketing budgets. They don't test, they don't hold focus groups or schmooze the press - they already know who their audience is.

People talk about guerrilla film like it was invented last year, but way before the end of the last century, when digital filmmaking was getting jumped on by skint and/or washed-up moviemakers, the enterprising folks in porn were busily shifting tens of millions of units.

Just as polaroid cameras allowed everyone to shoot their own private parts, porn bought into video - in any old format - and mass-produced tapes at the very same time the legit movie business was crying over slashed profits. Then look what happened.

When the internet first went wide, porn made up around 80% of the traffic. Same goes for premium rate phone calls, giving many a bored housewife some pin money. One-on-one online chat puts a lot of girls through college/university. Call it exploitation if you want, but here's the reality - demand, supply and fulfillment. It's what porn has always traded on. The people who do it may or may not like it - but neither do they like the minimum wage. We can't all be CEOs or politicians or professional somebodies.

Or overpaid industry-machined filmmakers.

So when commentators blah about the long tail market, how niche will make you riche, how your camcorder-made DVD can be up there with Universal's latest stiff, they're not wrong. But they ought to know that whatever the tech-heads spring on us next, you could do worse than check out what our porn pals are up to first. No 2000 print runs for these guys. It's a little ironic that Hollywood, that monster of Mammon, who can't top porn's 10,000-plus titles a year sold mostly on DVD, now ape the same tactic. So much for the prestige of theatrical releases, red carpets and starry, starry tantrums. What's even better is this: thanks to porn's inspiring business model, like Amber's legs, what's open to Hollywood is open to me and you.

That's not egg on your face, is it?