Anna Span-Observer Magazine

[pevian]

An article in yesterdays Observer magazine about women in the sex industry which is mostly about opening sex shops but also includes this,

Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of porn, which was suddenly made legal under the R18 certificate in the summer of 2000. The result is a brand new, burgeoning industry, respectable players setting up companies, all above board and scrambling to secure a place in what will clearly be a multimillion pound market. Anna Span, 31, is one of them. The daughter of a finance director, she grew up in Kent, then studied fine art and film at (surprise!) Saint Martins. Now Britains first women porn director, she runs a production company, Easy on the Eye, in the heart of Soho, above a shop up a dark set of stairs. Span is open and friendly, and very serious about her porn.
In the past three years, she has made 75 films (she shoots a scene a day, and its five shoots per film) and up until now , they`ve been shown only on Richard Desmond`s sex channel, Television X. Next month, however will see the release of her first DVD to be sold in licensed sex shops. A set of three, it is comprised of Anna`s Mates (porn actors pretending to be art students. Think this should be Sophie Studies Hard, Pevian.), A Pound a Punnet (fun with vegtables) and Uniform Behaviour. She`s working on this one right now.
`The first is set in an elite kind of medical school` explains Anna, who has spent the morning scouting locations for a hospital shoot. `A load of male students dressed in suits and latex gloves are lined up around a woman who is lying down, very confident, very smiley. A gynaecologist in a white coat shows them how to explore her body`. Others in the series include a policeman attending a burglary (`but nothing traumatic, she`d just had an iron nicked`), a fireman rescuing a women up a tree, and two nurses giving a man a bed bath. `Most of my work has been very naturalistic`, explains Span, so I`m trying to do uniforms in a non-stereotypical way. Women like uniforms.`
Span became passionate about female friendly porn as a student. Though she had enrolled at Saint Martins intending to make `political films from a feminist pespective`, she had a revelation while walking down Soho`s Old Compton St. `I felt really angry, as a women on such male territory`, she says.`Then I realised my anger was jealousy. Why isn`t there anything like this for women ? Making it seemed the positive way forward.`
So how are Span`s films different? `I try to make the caracters believable and three dimensional. I choose locations that are interesting to the eye. It could be a park, a derelict building, a flat in Notting Hill. Men`s fantasies focus on a women`s body, but women`s fantasies are quite epic. They`ll include the room, the furniture, the curtains.` She also has some sort of plot in her films, though it`s pretty basic. (`if you have too much, then you`re going to think about it instead of feel it.`) There`s also eye contact.`In a lot of porn, the people look into the corners of the room. Mine look at each other.` Her performers can be a size 8 or 16, most of the women are A cups, and Span`s most important criteria is `a pretty face.`
But though a third of the subscribers are women ( 80 per cent of whom watch it as couple), Span won`t find out what sort of following she really has until next month, when her work hits the open market. It`s interesting that none of the women`s sex shops has licensed itself to sell porn. Hoyle recently watched at least 30 R18 films, with a view to stocking them, but found `they always end in double penetration, and the women rarely look like they are having a good time.` Semler has no intention of putting porn in Myla because of `a sneaking feeling that people get hurt in the making of it`.
Although Span acknowledges that mainstream porn has become increasingly violent and misogynistic, it bothers her only from an aesthetic viewpoint. `The sex is getting harder, but you can only go so far before it loses meaning`, she says. `When you see them trying to make it more and more extreme - the grabbing of the head, the multiple facial cum shots - it becomes futile. My porn doesn`t have that misogyny. It`s unnecessary.`Still, she defends the industry from charges of exploitation. `You can bet your bottom dollar that behind the scenes it will be set out in a very amicable way. The director will be saying "Do you mind putting your head down the toilet ?" and the girl will be saying, " That`s fine."
Another passionate porn defender is Anna Kieran, 34, the co-founder of Hot Rod, which she set up with her partner to distibute R18 releases to licensed sex shops. A former convent girl raised in the Home Counties with a voice to match, she crossed from television production to the adult industry four years ago, mainly because the move `made good business sense`. Now set in London loft offices, Hot Rod has a turnover of more than ?1m, and owns the rights to most of the well known productions, including Deep Throat, Debbie Does Dallas, and the more recent blockbuster, mega-budget Private Gladiator.
At the same time, Kieran is on a mission to clean up the industry, and has just started her first private prosecution of a company which sold porn illegally. She has joined the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and is on the executive committee of the sex industry`s first ever trade association, the Organisation of Adult Trades and Services (Oats). `Until 2000, porn was pirated and sold under the counter,` she says, `so people still have this view it`s all about guys in macs.
`Every movie thats made R18 involves consensual sex. There are movies that push the boundaries, and I`m not interested in those because I don`t want to degrade women. I have three sisters and a very dominant mother and I take a lot of pride in the fact that It`s the only industry where women are always on top, metaphorically and physically. All the women performers I know love what they do. They are paid more than men, and the guys are only there so that women can sit on something`.
When Myla first set up, Kieran approached Semlar with some of her stock and was met, she says, with an outraged `No`. `I`ve a bone to pick with the likes of Coco de Mer and Myla and there diamond encrusted dildos,` says Kieran. `Everybody wants a bit of "porno chic", but it`s superficial, it`s titillation, it doesn`t carry through. When you get to the bare bones of actual sex, it`s "Ooh no, shock, horror." I like the fact that porn is straight -down-the-line instant gratification. It doesn`t pretend to be anything other than it is. I`d love porn to go the way of vibrators. Who`d of thought five years ago that women would be proud to have them by their bedside ?`

This article was written by Anna Moore.

There was also a good picture of Anna Span on the front of the Observer.

[joe king]

bollocks

[Frank]

Its a shame they didnt give her a plug for her book

Erotic Home Videos - create your own adult films



Its very informative and it has the only pics you will ever see of Valencia Diaz in sex positions with Tony Sergeo.