The innovations of early feature directors, some who came from musical theatre backgrounds, compares the cinema verité style of New York films, and their historic relevance in documenting the post-Stonewall/pre-AIDS 'sexual revolution' - to the story-structured videos produced by California directors.
The multiple roles porn actors take on, and the differences between their work and the fantasy 'scripts' (literal and theoretical) they assume are defined and examined. In the paperback review copy's 217 pages (29 of them footnotes), Escoffier parses out the history of cinematic porn, its growth and rise in popular culture and the economy. While academic in its approach, multiple interview excerpts offer a look behind the scenes of how porn directors and performers constructed what are now familiar tropes and clichés of documented sex acts.
For the sapiosexuals among us (those turned on by intelligent people), historian and LGBTQ scholar Jeffrey Escoffier's Sex, Society, and the Making of Pornography: the Pornographic Object of Knowledge explores how sexual acts have been documented in various media and how it effects culture and even behavior.
