Long Island bids to become Porn Valley East

Until recently, the only porn residents of Long Island could lay claim to was a flash of Margot Kidder’s nipple in the original Amityville Horror. Now with Amy Fisher and startup company Real Passion Productions, America’s Most Phallic Peninsula is asserting itself.

Woody West started Real Passion Productions with an investment of $60,000 and a few ads in Craigslist and a Chinese language newspaper in New York. His mission statement is similar to that of most companies that shoot couples’ porn: “to create hardcore adult entertainment a guy can enjoy and share with his wife or girlfriend” and as such there is an utter lack of choking, slapping, tears, flaying, gaping, semen in goblets, running mascara, or Jodi the Pig in the five videos the company has created.

“We shot five scenes in five days in our house in the Southhamptons,” West said, and as such the company’s output of five scripted videos with titles like “Adult Toy Story,” “The Intruder,” and “Forgive Me” appear to have been shot by a repertory company.

“We were all in the house together for five days,” West said. But there was one casualty: an actress named Jean Laconia left after her first scene, and her roles in the other scenes were divvied up among the other women.

Laconia, aka Jean Jacobs, is a striking brunette who would later shoot for Harmony Films in Las Vegas and for Vivid in Los Angeles, both times claiming that she hadn’t been in a porn film before, though her August, 2007 Real Passion Productions outing predated both.

Of the starlets and “Gentlemen Wolves” in RPP’s catalog, only a few had done porn before. The women do not look particularly porny, only attractive, and the guys have a certain Wicked Pictures look; average but agreeable, untatted, maybe a little paunchy, none wearing sunglasses. There is a lot of kissing.

The talent had to consent to the mission statement.

“We wanted talent who would appreciate the kind of adult videos we were trying to create,” West said. “The men in addition to the phone interviews were also asked to come in for in-person auditions, which were an hour long. The interviews were in two parts: the first part was just talking to them about their personalities, attitudes towards women, what they love about women, how they feel about sex with other men in the room, etc. If we were happy with the first part of their auditions (and there were guys we were not happy with) we continued to the second part of the audition where we checked out their physical abilities, like being comfortable nude in front of people, getting hard on cue, staying hard, and their money shots.”

For people accustomed to Porn Valley interiors, and those include talent as well as camera styles, anything shot elsewhere is a nice change of pace, even if the couples’ theme is universal; couples’ movies tene to be characterized as much by the presence of a script as the lack of the type of extreme elements mentioned above.

The company now hopes to make enough money off the sale of the first five videos to finance a second set. Some of the performers and crew accepted smaller stipends for the initial shooting in order to get a bigger cut of the expected profit and/or a stake in the company.

West, a former film student, learned digital editing on a $200 piece of software. In addition to shooting porn for the first time, he learned to hunt down porn world distributors and DVD replicators, all part of the landscape for nascent porntrepreneurs.

West’s product might have more in common with its Valley counterparts than differences so, like any business working within small margins, mini-tempests like the Jean Laconia scandal helped.

“Our traffic spiked when people started following the links from the Vegas stories,” West said.

His summation of the past year illustrates the differences between mainstream and porn startups.

“We were still able to create a production company from a mere concept to a website and five titles on the shelves of adult stores in just eight months,” West said. “With all the experience we have gained during those eight months, I am very confident that our next set of videos will be even better.”

Previously: The Prime of Miss Jean Jacobs; Postcard from Porn Week; Brand New Faces exposes innocence, boobs
See also: Real Passion Productions