PARK CITY, Utah – Without having seen Hot Girls Wanted, a documentary being screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, I’m confident I already know everything I need to know about the film.
Being a documentary designed to “raise awareness” about a hot button issue — in this case, young women getting exploited by the sketchiest available amateur pornographers the filmmakers could find via Craigslist ads — it will present a thoroughly one-sided take on the subject.
Like the works of activist documentarians such as Michael Moore, Dinesh D’Souza, Robert Greenwald and many others, Hot Girls Wanted won’t be a thorough, objective dissection of the world of amateur porn. It will be alarmist, a shrill and harsh indictment of a very particular breed of so-called “amateur” pornographer — and a very particular breed of adult performer too, for that matter.
Reportedly, the film revolves around a Miami-based producer who uses Craigslist ads to find performing talent. No doubt he’s thoroughly repulsive almost to the point of cartoonish, and in every way precisely the sort of contemptible antagonist a good, agenda-driven documentary needs.
“Every day a new girl turns 18,” our designated villain surely says — no doubt while sporting a menacing smirk, perhaps accentuated with a gold tooth or two.
Jordan Hoffman of The Guardian summed up the documentary’s hat-tip to contrary viewpoints thusly:
“The one gal in the low-rent Miami home that seems to have her head on straight … doesn’t get much of the directors’ focus. She doesn’t really fit the movie’s alarmist agenda, which is rife with intertitles of terrifying statistics and absurd montages of the Kardashians and Justin Bieber, suggesting that our modern culture has created this market of sexual exploitation out of whole cloth.”
Don’t confuse Hoffman for a defender of porn, an industry he says is undeniably “built on exploitation.” His gripes are the documentary’s heavy-handedness and “abrasive bombast,” not its thesis concerning amateur porn.
Off the bat, I can think of several problems with the film’s thesis, myself, the first among them being it’s not about “amateur porn,” at all.
I don’t care if you recruit people off Craigslist, run a fly by night operation, and otherwise appear to be anything but a “professional” — if you are paying people to perform, and selling the proceeds of your filming sessions for a profit, you are not an “amateur.”
You might be a piss-poor professional pornographer, but you’re still a professional. This is true by fucking definition, all you evidently dictionary-averse journalists out there insisting this documentary is about “amateur porn.”
Second, if the filmmakers wanted to do any kind of service beyond trying to convince prospective porn performers they’re better off slinging burgers than subjecting themselves to the myriad and manifest evils of the world of low-rent porn productions, they could have mentioned the existence of companies like Homegrown Video.
Homegrown has been distributing “pro-am” porn (shot by amateurs, distributed by pros) literally for decades, and has earned an absolutely stellar reputation among performers, other adult companies, and essentially everybody whose opinion about this industry is worth even the smallest unit of excrement.
No agenda-driven, anti-porn documentarian would ever mention the reputable producers, of course. They would never put a guy like Spike Goldberg on camera. Spike’s palpable reasonableness would simply do too much to undermine the “Pornographers Are Uniformly Terrible People” headline they want their film to communicate. Besides, why make an effort to demonize guys like Spike when you can omit their existence and pretend the entire adult industry is just like your detestable Floridian quasi-pimp?
Of course, this is also why documentaries like Hot Girls Wanted generally fail to accomplish anything except becoming more hymnals for the anti-porn choir, so to speak.
No doubt organizations like Morality in Media and Citizens for Community Values will recommend Hot Girls Wanted as a harrowing, must-see account that rips back the veil and exposes the porn industry for exactly the demon they have always proclaimed it to be. The film will be cited by Donna Rice, referenced by Gail Dines and evangelized by Shelley Lubben.
Just about everybody else, however, will summarily ignore it.
Porn’s critics will say the public’s lack of concern also can be blamed on the porn industry, and to a lesser extent, on Hollywood and Madison Avenue, too.
“The general hyper-sexualization of our culture has made people numb to the horrors of porn,” they’ll say, in some form or another. “Hapless consumers have been blinded by the glitz and glamour of the porn industry, and of Hollywood. They refuse to acknowledge all the exploitation, because to acknowledge the exploitation would mean they are complicit in it, and porn viewers can’t force themselves confront this fact.
“P.S.: Jesus loves you and would really, sincerely appreciate it if you donated a significant amount of money to my decent, God-fearing organization.”
The other possibility, of course, is the public knows a line of unadulterated, one-sided bullshit when they see it.
Not being entirely without the ability to reason, the average documentary viewer might watch Hot Girls Wanted and say to himself or herself, “Sure, this dodgy prick luring girls to Miami is sleazier than Jeffrey Epstein on six tabs of ecstasy, but there are lots of actual companies to work for in porn, too. Why don’t these girls go work for one of those?”
In other words, viewers are likely to feel the same way Hoffman did about the film, whether or not they agree with him about the nature of the adult industry.
“Were I to advertise on Craigslist,” Hoffman quipped, “I’d write ‘Better Filmmakers Wanted.’”
