Here I go again, stealing cyber-bytes from other sites and having my way with them—the cyber-bytes, not the websites.

Gene Ross’ site often seems to be the place where I ply my ‘ideas-for-an-essay-stealing’ practices, and today Gene’s done it again-- Gene’s given me a little cyber-byte that I can make some simplyjimmyd commentary upon.

Gene says he ran into Wicked’s head honcho, Steve Orenstein, and that fucking Wicked director, Jonathon Morgan, at some watering hole. Jonathon, by the way, has twice pissed me off by beating me out of AVN’s Best Sex Comedy award (when our flicks were simultaneously nominated). My nominated movies were “Shooting Sex,” and “The Sopornos.” I don’t remember the titles of Jonathon’s winning titles, nor do I care to.

Gene writes: “Ran into Steve Orenstein and Jonathan Morgan from Wicked Pictures over at The Bull this afternoon. Last time I checked, life is still good. But maybe not for Wicked where the rumor is they're losing their Erotic Media deal.”

Now Gene didn’t actually come out and say that Orenstein and/or Morgan told him Wicked is losing their Erotic Media deal, but there’s more than a little bit of inference in the way he cleverly worded that little cyber-byte. But that's what Gene does: he lulls us with his Hollidayesque dulcet cyber-orations and we come to believe what he would have us believe.

For those of you who don’t know what an Erotic Media deal is, and I’ll bet many of you don’t, I’ll tell you: Erotic Media (i.e., Erotic Media AG) is a Swiss-based corporation mostly made up of Germans. According to their official website, “Erotic Media AG specializes in marketing commercially interesting erotic film rights in all media. It is the only company in its trade in Europe that acquires the rights to erotic films at a high level and markets these for its own account.”

Interestingly, Erotic Media was founded by a woman, Beate Uhse, who was a German Luftwaffe fighter pilot during the Second World War. Frau Uhse, who has passed away, went on to become one of Europe’s most successful purveyors of smut. If ever a woman had balls, it had to be Beate. A female fighter pilot and a woman who built a porn empire out of the ashes of post-war Europe? You go girl! (Or should I say, "You went girl!" cuz, well you know, cuz she's gone.)

An Erotic Media deal can be worth some serious cash. But the problem is that Erotic Media is very, VERY anal about the technical quality of the media they license.

Now remember, I said “technical quality” which, for the most part, qualifies as a full-fledged oxymoron in the U.S. porn biz.

Now one would think that when companies like Wicked spend the kind of money they spend on their high-end features, their production funds would also be buying some decent “technical quality.” Sadly, this often ain’t the case. In fact, it seems that “technical quality” is held in such low regard in the U.S. porn biz that many movies seriously lacking in any kind of “technical quality” at all routinely receive high-accolades from reviewers and go on to win prestigious awards.

If you want to extrapolate from that statement that many reviewers wouldn’t recognize good “technical quality” from a blank screen, go ahead, you wouldn’t be too far off the mark. But that's the subject of another essay I don't feel like going into today.

An aspect of “technical quality” in porn flicks that is one of the most—if not *the* most—overlooked, is sound. It’s a rare porn set that I’ve ever been on, including my own, where a qualified, competent sound guy was on the crew. (Although I don't get those high-end budgets some of them high-end porn directors get; yet they still don't use pro sound guys!) It then gets worse in post-production where the editor (who may or may not have any real experience with sound, much less with editing) creates and edits the soundtrack. In fact, to say that most porn flicks even have a soundtrack (i.e., something resembling a competent, professional soundtrack) is a rare occurrence.

Why is this? Because even though George Lucas has been often quoted as saying “sound is 50% of the experience,” (and yeah, that would also apply to a a filmed or taped sexual experience) most porn company owners and/or directors either refuse to listen to Mr. Lucas, or simply don’t understand a fucking thing about sound, or consider it unimportant to their artistic visions. (I guess they only have artistic visions, but don’t have artistic soundings, or listenings, or uhmm, hearings, whatever.)

So then along comes a company like Erotic Media who wants to license a company’s big budget skin flick, and pay pretty well to do so, and lo-and-behold it won’t pass Erotic Media’s Q.C. (Quality Control). Why? Well, for many reasons, the least of which is that Erotic Media, (while being Swiss-based) is actually a German company and everyone knows how anal the Germans are about anything technical. And when that notorious Aryan-angst for making shit perfect comes into play, the technicians shout “Vhat dee fuck is deez Amerikanzer shit??” Vhen, I mean when listening to the soundtracks. Yep, that’s where an awful lot of the shit fails—it fails with the soundtracks.

So what happens next? These companies spend a lot of money with professional sound houses to “fix” the sound and then one of two things happen: 1) The sound is so fucked up that it still won’t pass Q.C. in spite of the best efforts of professional sound engineers, or 2) It takes so much money to fix the shit that it eats up all the profit.

Damn, I can’t believe I wrote all this shit off of such a seemingly innocuous little cyber-byte on Gene’s site. But that’s what I do. I expand on the little shit. I explain the unexplainable. I teach you with trivia. I leap on obscure minutia and expand your consciousness with it. In other words, I dazzle you with my brilliance, or more often than not, I baffle you with my bullshit. And I do it all with such humility!

You decide which I did in this little commentary.

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