CHATSWORTH, Calif.—A panel of four top directors moderated by AVN Senior Editor Peter Warren delved into the past, present and future of the porn featurette, the short (30 to 60 minutes) feature that has become a prominent part of the adult industry. Participating in the Adult Entertainment Expo panel presented by MyFreeCams were Joanna Angel (BurningAngel), Ricky Greenwood (MissaX, Sweet Sinner), Kayden Kross (Deeper) and Jacky St. James (Bellesa). Angel and Kross were accompanied by cute canine companions.
Warren started off with a history lesson. AVN coined the term in awards voting two years ago. But it was first used way back in 1984—the year of the first AVN Awards—when there was an award given for Featurette - Film, with Featurette - Video added the following year (only for both categories to be discontinued two years later). But, he said, “it didn’t mean what we mean it to now.” It was actually a precursor of what would soon become known as Gonzo (another AVN-originated term).
Joanna Angel was doing it “way before I learned what to call it,” with BurningAngel’s Re-Penetrator, a 2005 parody of Hollywood’s Re-Animator, featuring her and Tommy Pistol. It mixed sex with ample gore and other bodily fluids.
Angel’s company was only on the web at the time. She didn’t have the know-how to make DVDs or, more crucially, the distribution. But the 27-minute scene became an internet hit and launched the company, as well as her performing career. “It put me on the map.”
She said she was “way ahead of the curve in making featurettes,” adding, “I didn’t know the Porn Rules—like, every movie must have four scenes.” Re-Penetrator was “a scene and nothing more.” She pointed out that in features there’s always one or two scenes that “make sense in terms of the story.” The other scenes are just added on.
Greenwood and St. James agreed that the advantage of shooting featurettes is “time.” “You get more time to spend with the actors, with the emotion of a scene,” said St. James, whose just over one-year-old Bellesa House label (a gonzo sister to Bellesa Films) was crowned Best New Production Banner at Saturday night's AVN Awards ceremony. “That’s the advantage.”
Greenwood agreed. “You have more time to work with actors, to work with lighting. ... It’s more fun for me to do those scene instead of feature-features.” A big advantage is the contact with performers. “I have time to sit down with the actors.” He said that in a full-length feature an actor may be working over several days but not every day, so they get involved in other projects. The shorter format concentrates their work.
St. James said she relies on others to assemble the featurettes she's released online for DVD, while Kayden Kross related that she takes a more hands-on approach, looking for “four scenes with a common thread” when packaging DVDs for Deeper. This has resulted in collections like Sodom, Femme Fatale, Lewd and Dance for Me—which just scored the first win for newly-minted AVN Awards category Best Episodic Movie or Anthology.
For Kross the featurette is her natural territory. Her work in the genre includes classics like 2018’s “Who’s Becky?” (Angela White, Markus Dupree), a perfect example of a two-character short story with wide appeal and resonance.
Warren pointed to another major such project, Kross and Angel's 2019 collaboration “Valley of the Fuck Dolls,” first released on Deeper.com and later included in the Sordid Stories DVD, going on to win Best Featurette at the 2020 AVN Awards. “That was a really cool project,” Kross recalled. Angel added, “Kayden has a way of thinking visually that is incredible. I’d love to do it again sometime.”
On the question of finding an audience, the panel agreed that the featurette owes everything to the internet. DVD production has been superseded by digital distribution, to which the format’s shorter length lends itself.
Featurettes are “more fun to watch online,” said Greenwood. “The featurette is right now, right here. It’s more practical. Nobody really likes DVDs anymore.”
St. James prefers featurettes to shooting features “when you don’t have a ton of money behind you.” She added, ”A simple story between two people can be more inspiring.”
For Angel the format is made for performers. “Performers are the stars of the show in featurettes. When it’s their scene, it’s their show. It’s all about them. They are going to perform better, want to do better. The day is all about them.” Another advantage is “you don’t have a ton of people in different locations.”
Warren mentioned that Angel got a rare Non-Sex Performance nomination this year for her role in the featurette “A Step Too Far” from Adult Time—part of the spoof anthology UnrelatedX.
Asked if they wanted to plug upcoming productions, Greenwood said that later this year he’ll be working on “a project I’ve wanted to do for years.” Angel told her fans to check out her new comedy Backseat Driving School.
The panel’s consensus seemed to be that the featurette is not only a gratifying artistic challenge, but may indeed be the way of porn’s future.
Watch the full "Rise of the Featurette" panel here.
