CYBERSPACE—With a name intended as an homage to "old Times Square," new pay-per-scene adult website Trenchcoatx.com implements the creative partnership between top stars Stoya and Kayden Kross in crafting their own platform for what they term "curated smut."
Soft-launched March 3, Trenchoatx offers episodic adult series that may be purchased at a low per-scene rate comparable to the iTunes model, as entirely hand-selected by its two founders. Initially available through the site are Kross and Manuel Ferrara's entire co-directed opus Misha Cross: Wide Open, a sampling of scenes from the Dana Vespoli-directed Fluid series, and the first scene of Stoya's directorial debut, Graphic Depictions. The site will be updated each Thursday, and soon to be added is the Kross/Ferrara co-helmed and much-hyped Screwing Wall Street: The ArrangementFinders IPO.
"Stoya and I have the same general vision regarding how porn should be created, the same feeling that it often is made with a flair for carelessness, and the same feeling that a lot of porn content delivery options are obnoxious," Kross told AVN. "It's porn. One should be able to see something visually appealing, and purchase specifically the content that one wants to see at any given time. Why complicate it?"
Kross went on to explain that one of the biggest catalysts for the creation of Trenchcoatx was the distate she and Stoya shared for the way adult content is typically peddled to the public. "We believe that even with a boner, the consumer is not dumb," she explained, "and yet we dumb consumers down by baby-talking them with dirty search terms and primary colors and really rather unbelievable storylines and try to trick them into thinking they're getting a deal by bombarding them with more content than they can watch in a lifetime, among other things. Stoya and I bitched to each other enough about it over enough heavily caffeinated Starbucks sessions and slowly grew to the conclusion that the alternative is not more difficult or costly. So why not try? At least we'd be putting our money where our mouths were (insert joke about how we proceeded to line penises with dollars)."
For Stoya's part, an at least equal impetus behind Trenchcoatx was to establish a distribution avenue for Graphic Depictions, which she shot in early 2014 and funded herself. "I funded it with my savings—which was mostly from Fleshlight royalties (thank you Fleshlight and everyone who buys their product)," Stoya disclosed. "The fact that I'd put so much of myself into it made the idea of, say, leaving unnecessary footage in to meet a DVD distributor's time requirements or submitting it to the standard categories we tend to carve adult material into in the internet era really difficult."
So how would she describe the uncategorizeable project? "Graphic Depictions is purely visual. It's a porno about being porn, glorifying the natural performative reaction to observation. Sometimes a thing needs to be said in a 2,000 word essay or a 140 character tweet, and sometimes it needs to be said in an 80 minute adult film. Graphic Depictions is the latter."
Revealing that the idea to direct was first planted in her head by Digital Playground co-founder and director Joone in 2010, Stoya said that at the time, "I just wasn't ready yet. There's a lot of boring biographical context involving declining working conditions with the company I was performing for and the various economic and structural pressures on current adult entertainment, but the short version is that I was considering retiring.
"I had the chance to work with Rocco Siffredi in [John] Stagliano's Voracious 2 (and I did, and the movie was an amazing experience)," she continued, "and when that was over I realized how rarely scenes were being made that I would be as excited to perform in. And then I realized that one of the skills I use most is navigating risk. So I decided to take a big risk, aim for the exact production that I wanted to be performing in, pay for it myself, and deal with how to distribute it later. In retrospect most of the creative choices I made are some kind of pushback against what feels like a homogenization of what a casual adult consumer sees. There's a ton of amazingly creative and diverse adult work being done with solid production values, it just isn't what your average person runs into when they type 'porn' into a browser."
Given her lofty ambitions with Graphic Depictions, how does Stoya feel it ultimately turned out? "I'm really proud of it," she gushed. "About 80 percent is perfectly what I wanted and the other 20 is a bunch of tiny details no one else seems to notice or things that were just learning experiences. But also it's just pretty and at least one person who saw a late rough cut jerked off to it, so I feel like it has fulfilled the simplest function of adult video—which wasn't guaranteed."
The next Stoya-helmed offering soon coming to Trenchcoatx is Around the World in 80 Ways, which she sums up as "Kayden's way of monetizing my wanderlust. It's an open-ended series where the scenes are shot basically anywhere outside of L.A. The first two were in Tokyo, there's one waiting to be edited that was shot against the New York City skyline. Way more gonzo than Graphic Depictions is, but so far a little more Hunter S. than Buttman."
As one might expect, Kross has plans to direct her own fare specifically for the site, but added, "I plan to direct projects with Stoya. I plan to see Stoya direct more of her own. I also plan on one or both of us collaborating with any number of interesting people for one-off or ongoing projects, and on soliciting others who are creating damn cool porn to hopefully be able to bring it to Tx as well."
Asked for a general encapsulation of the type of content with which the two partners hope to fill Trenchcoatx, Stoya submitted, "Interesting, innovative, beautiful. These words are all subjective though, so I guess the best answer would be we'll know it when we see it. It doens't need to cater to my tastes, or a generalized idea of an audience or consumer base, but it should look like whoever directed it cared and really gave a fuck."
Trenchcoatx.com is officially open for business now.
