In my job as a movie critic for a weekly magazine here in NYC, I just got to review SHOOTING PORN, Ronnie Larsen's documentary about the gay porn biz. I'm a het guy, and a big fan of het porn, who's never really checked out the gay stuff before. But I loved the documentary, because it offered a really interesting technical look at gay porn as a workplace, without the prurience of most docs and/or journalism (in mags like DETAILS, etc.) about straight porn. Director Gino Colbert makes a lot of great points in his interviews, and he's now one of my heroes.

A lot of the other critics here, though, panned it for not thoroughly digging into the issues of drugs, stars turning tricks (which Blue Blake and Hunter Scott fess up to, but don't discuss at length), and how much money the guys make.

What I realized reading the other reviews when they were published is that I liked the doc because it was made by porn fans, for porn fans. Even though I'm not a gay porn fan, I loved it because it was a documentary that had intelligent, curious porn fans as its intended audience.

I don't think other critics got that point, especially not Stephen Holden in the NY Times--or rather, they seemed to think that that aspect of it made it an inferior film. My question to you all: is a porn documentary made for fans a priori a worse documentary than one made for general audiences? I don't think so. But a lot of the other NYC critics seem to have decided that that's the case, which is too bad (either that or they're ashamed about being porn fans).

In any event, I encourage anyone in this newsgroup--even if gay porn really isn't your cup of tea (hey, it ain't mine!) to check out SHOOTING PORN if you want to see an intelligent doc about the industry that respects porn fans instead of pandering to them. It's in general release in NYC now, and is hitting a lot of gay/les film festivals around the US and Canada.

According to an interview with Larsen that ran in the gay/les section of our magazine, the eventual video release will have, at the end, the full 12 minutes of Hunter Scott's hilarious douching demonstration, which was edited down in the film because Larsen didn't want to gross out some viewers. Even in the bowdlerized version, it's one of the film's true highlights, and funny as shit (no pun intended).

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