HOLLYWOOD – With new governmental regulation, the widespread availability of free porn and other forces running porn studios out of town (if not out of business), the Los Angeles-based component of the porn industry is turning to a “new trend” according to the Los Angeles Times — a cutting-edge creative form called the “motion picture.”

Wait, wait… That’s wrong, obviously. Sorry about that. Just had my head in the wrong century for a moment there.

What I meant to write is the porn industry is turning to a new trend called “webcamming,” which is a lot like “web caning,” only instead of beating someone in Singapore with a narrow wooden stick, the person beats himself or herself with the stick while broadcasting the event in real time over the internet, allowing viewers to masturbate while giving the performer pointers and instructions to guide their erotic self-flagellation.

According to industry insiders, this hot new trend got its start just a few months back, somewhere around the summer of 1997.

“It seems like only yesterday, but I’m pretty sure yesterday was when the porn industry invented mobile porn, not webcamming,” said Alecky Helmex, publisher of XJIZZ, a trade magazine on which dozens of porn industry executives rely as a shim for their office furniture. “Webcamming is now the engine of the porn industry. Or maybe webcamming is just the timing belt and traffic is the rest of the engine. These porn industry metaphors do get a little confusing sometimes.”

In years past, porn performers would often sign semi-lucrative contracts with studios like GARISH Entertainment or Iniquitous Pictures. Under the agreements, the studios would pay the girls not to show up at trade show booths on time, or send them on “feature dance” tours, during which they would perform to standing-room-only crowds in small, privately owned topless bars with comical names located throughout the American Midwest.

The old business model began to fall apart, however, with the rise of pornographic “tuber” sites like SmutNucleus, PlookTube and XXXFuckGerbil, which attracted large audiences by not really caring too much about the provenance of the videos uploaded to their sites.

Instead of relying on subscription sales or dimwitted porn fans buying the same scenes over and over again in the form of compilation DVDs that claim to feature “exclusive new footage” despite many of the performers depicted therein having been dead for several years, tuber sites make money off advertisers who haven’t yet realized their traffic is complete crap.

As the tuber sites attacked the porn industry on one front, regulations were introduced in California requiring porn producers to wear condoms during “screen tests” of performers, even if all the performers are doing is reading lines from a a clipboard.

“After ruining several pairs of perfectly decent slacks, a lot of producers will decide to either move their studios out of California or migrate into the camming business model,” Helmex said. “In addition, every so often one of these producers finds God — which actually doesn’t help their bottom line nearly as much as you might think.”

The current transformation of the L.A. porn industry into a webcamming industry has been spurred on by an unlikely porn magnate: A Serbian muffin baker named Imgur Zahmboney.

Several weeks ago, Zahmboney opened a new studio on San Julian just south of 5^th Avenue, one of L.A.’s swankiest areas, as determined by the number of discarded copies of Swank magazine found in a nearby dumpster following the closure of the publication’s local distribution office.

According to Zahmboney, possessing good looks or a nice body is less important a qualification for his models than “simply knowing how to relate to people.”

“Some of our girls are flat-out nasty-looking skanks,” Zahmboney conceded. “But they seem to have been born with a gift for larceny that can’t be taught. They have amazing intuition and empathy, so they can absolutely tell when a man’s loneliness is stronger than his concern for his credit rating. More importantly, they also know exactly what to say to keep him drooling in his chair instead of just logging off the paid private chat and jerking it to free porn.”

Zahmboney said a popular cam performer can earn as much as $6 billion Serbian dinars a day, roughly the equivalent of a grilled cheese sandwich from Huckleberry when translated into American dollars. The studio takes half the gross revenue up front while the model keeps the rest, ideally inside a refrigerator.

In contrast to the sleazy reputations that have been earned by models working for some other studios, Zahmboney said his performers are prohibited from engaging in sex acts with others while on camera and cannot meet customers in real life unless they know how to arrange a meeting without telling him about it.

“Escorting and prostitution are whole other areas of business we are not into,” Zahmboney said. “I mean, sure, we do make some money off such things, but I’m not into them the same way I’m into listening to classic Led Zeppelin or driving Italian sports cars or eating sushi off naked chicks.”

Whatever Zahmboney’s formula might be and regardless how much dead fish he has eaten off nude models, his approach to the market appears to be succeeding where so many traditional porn companies are falling by the wayside. Zahmboney attributes his success to the unique lure of American girls.

“People everywhere want to talk to American girls,” Zahmboney said. “Everywhere else in the world, we figure if American girls are foolish enough to have sex with American men, who on average are about as seductive as the idea of having a root canal without anesthesia, the rest of us can get some action from them without even breaking a sweat.”