My Dad Wrote A Porno - Footnotes: Jon Ronson

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Journalist, author, filmmaker, and fellow porn podcaster Jon Ronson joins the gang to talk Belinda and his crazy experiences in the world of adult entertainment... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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to be here. Thank you. I feel like you guys and I are, we're the two porn podcasts. Exactly. The premier porn podcast. Yes. We're in a niche, I think. We are. But maybe we're going to start a wave. Right. It's us and then the odd like guy who just does a podcast about how much he loves porn yeah yeah and that's valid too ah yeah but yeah so I do feel like this is the first time we've met but I feel like we're intertwined in a way you guys have done you know insanely well and and I'm a little bit of a sort of um jolly cum lately when it comes to porn podcasting. We're the old pros, don't worry.

Yeah, when I listen to yours, it's like, it's really complicated stuff about interpersonal relationships happening in, like, factories and in photocopying rooms. And I'm sort of trying to concentrate, but I'm drifting a little bit. And then suddenly they're fucking. It's like, if you don't know what happens, I'm really laughing. There's quite a lot of, like setting up isn't there there's infrastructure of a place that maybe the the hierarchy and the staffing store and then but he uses that word all the time it's disgusting yeah exactly. I love the fact that it's so parochial. Yeah.

And obviously that's part, you know, that's a very big part of the charm of it, that it's so British. And there's no, although he's Northern Irish, right? Northern Irish, yeah. Okay. But that sort of generic thing. Yeah, UK-ish. UK-ish, yeah. Whereas, of course, you know, there's sort of embarrassments and the weird little cultural oddnesses that make sexual stuff so less sexual.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, your podcast, The Butterfly Effect, tackles porn, but should we say from a very different angle to ours? Yes. So it's a show that we made about the consequences of the tech takeover of the porn industry so the butterfly effect like the flap of the butterfly's wings is this kid in brussels called fabian who has a fascinating character fabian so interesting and his idea was to give the world free porn that was his kind of brain wave and he got so rich that he ended up with an aquarium with its own diver. You know, you know you're doing well when you get your own diver. But I love when you're like, how rich are you? He's like, I wouldn't say I was rich. How many cars have you got? Like 18. Exactly. And two McLarens. Okay, cool. You're rich. I like the sound of his pool that kind of

self-filled as he pressed a button. That's amazing. Yeah, that's very Bond film, right? He's definitely on the breadline. Yeah. So the way that Fabian got enough money is by 18 cars and a diver, his own diver. Is it his own diver? Is he there all the time? I would be lying if I said it was his own diver.

But he comes like... Is it like how we would have maybe a cleaner like once a fortnight, once a week? Yeah. Okay, right. But unlike, you know, I mean, your cleaner presumably doesn't put on a wetsuit and then dive into the coral you have not seen alice's flat believe me i'm never there when she's there but maybe that's why maybe that's why she likes me to vacate which makes you suspect that you know at one point

you get enough money that you just don't know what to do with it and that's when you exactly yeah that's when you get the diver he's definitely reached that point yeah um and where did his money come from it came from the pockets of an entire community of of porn people uh to explain uh porn hub which was his brainchild its business model was it was was facilitating the illegal uploading of pirated porn. Just checking, have you heard of it, boys? Pornhub. How do we spell that? What I didn't realise was that all of those sites are run by him.

But it's such a monopoly. It's not just all of your favourite sites. So you thought you were shopping around. It's basically my favourites tab. I'll tell you where you can go if you have a sort of ethical imperative to not give fabian any more money oh yes please ex hamsters that's a free porn site that fabian does not own okay is it still sold on content um i'm sure okay yeah my morality will only go so far as long as it's free porn yeah so we made the show which was all about tracing the consequences of Fabian's business

plan. And some of the consequences you can imagine are kind of pretty obvious. But what my producer Lena and I discovered was that there were these incredibly interesting, unexpected consequences. One of my favourites was the custom porn. Yes. Well, the reason why custom porn came into existence is because everything's keyword searchable now. Like in the old days days porn films would have titles like belinda blink or women of influence or the billionaires blonde those were the days they were the days mike quasar who's like one of the great porn directors so he was the one who who made um

the billionaires blonde and women of influence and he was reminiscing about those golden days while we were on the set of stepdaughter cheerleader orgy of course how do i forget stepdaughter cheerleader orgy that's a classic isn't it yeah and he explained that the reason why his films these days are all called stepdaughter cheerleader orgy or my stepfather you know likes into it it's all keyword search they've lost a bit of the poetry yes yeah there's no creativity now it's just literally sell sell sell or steal steal steal yeah so what they do what people like matt quasar have to do so they have got no other option is to see what the most searched for keywords are and then make films that are based on those most searched for terms, like stepdaughter, cheerleader and orgy.

Particularly... PhD, feminist, confident. Particularly anything to do with any step stuff. Okay. Step further. It's incest. Everybody other than us sitting around this table so it seems um are obsessed with incest porn that's like the most searched for porn but

they can't call it incest porn because of course that's illegal and gross um so what they do is they call it stepdaughter cheerleader orgy and in fact when we were on the set of stepdaughter cheerleader orgy like we were there for the dialogue scene. You were there for the story. And all these guys were like, oh, I like the look of your daughter. And Mike from behind the camera was going, stepdaughter. Through marriage. Otherwise, it's gross, guys.

So I said to Mike, so are there people who just aren't keyword searchable, who kind of slip through the net? Like if you're kind of obsessed with everything being keyword searchable, are there women who just can't get work because they're not keyword searchable? And the answer is yes. If you're not a teen and you're not a MILF, you're fucked. Or not. If you're 25, it's kind of impossible to get work in porn because you're too old to be a teen and you're too young to be a milf so i said what what do people do then in those fallow years between

teen and milf and the answer is um custom porn custom porn do you want to explain what well yeah your most famous example in the show is that uh a guy in norway wanted his stamp collection burning and destroyed by some female porn stars. Yes, he had 10, it turns out he had 10 books of stamps that he collected over a lifetime. And yeah, he makes the, you know, he commissions these bespoke porn films that are just for him of porn stars destroying his stamps, first by grinding their high heels into them, and then by throwing them in the fire and then they all start chanting burn burn i can't believe that's niche i can't

believe that that's custom surely there are loads of people want to watch that yeah but what's so amazing about stamps man is that he uh has become this incredibly mysterious figure in the valley like like all of these bespoke porn people are like you know have you had an email from stamps man so stamps sound like a lie than the whole bunch of people's lives one time i was with a bespoke porn woman and i said to her have you ever you know did you ever get a guy um asking you to destroy his book of stamps and she looked at me and she said are you stamps man because i wear glasses sorry we booked you because we thought you were stamps man if you're not this whole process is just a waste of time i feel like we could do like a custom porn for belinda blinked i feel like

there's definitely like recreating a scene through custom porn we should email them we actually got an email i can't confirm if it was from porn hub i think it was porn hub are you sure asking us if they could make a belinda blinked sex scene with our permission and what did you say we i don't think we ever replied hey i'll tell you what if you ever want to go for that we can put lena and i can put you in touch with some great bespoke porn producers who would love that oh my god really I mean would that be legitimizing my dad a little bit too much though for his his awful erotic to suddenly be an actual porn film do you think this whole thing was just about getting a custom porn made has he just done the script for a custom porn it's basically like the biggest

kickstarter in the whole world really creatively done dad well done we're on to you um has anything else you've listened to belinda blink yes i mean that you know the thing that galvanized me the most by far was was about the kind of relationship between you and your father and you know the fact that you are having to grapple with your father's in life or a life that he wishes he had that never he never had is that do you think that do you think that's in the life or a life that he wishes he had that never he never had is that do you think that do you think that's at the root of the show's popularity yeah i mean i think i think there's something about me discovering that my dad is more than just a father you know he is no longer this kind of cipher of a human being he's a real person with desires and wants and

passions i just say i love that this is turning into a john ronson documentary he's a real person with desires and wants and passions. Can I just say, I love that this is turning into a John Ronson documentary. It's quite amazing. And yeah, it is. Do you think that's the reason? So what was it in your childhood, Jamie? You've been Ronson. What was it? I have been well and truly Ronson.

I've never seen him actually answer this question. This is very exciting. No, it is interesting though, isn't it? Because it's something that we don't ever talk about as a society when actually it's the most natural thing in the world. You don't want to be confronted by your parents' fantasies necessarily, but when you are, it does actually reveal quite a lot about them. And it's actually brought me and my dad way closer, actually.

I don't know whether that's because we've told it through a podcast and the success of the show has been so exciting a journey to go on. Or because your fantasies tally. Shut up, you. We've got so much in common. I have a pots and pans fetish too. Oh, God. No, I don't understand him, but I'm trying to.

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as you said, a dialogue scene. And I was just wondering if the dialogue of, what was it, bad? Because you've obviously been on porn sets. As you said, a dialogue scene. And I was just wondering if the dialogue of, what was it, Bad... Stepdaughter, Cheerleader, Orgy, Bad Babysitters, Volume 2. 2. Was the dialogue in that as good as the dialogue that my dad writes? Could dad actually write a good porno? Or is my dad just so far away from the mark that it's embarrassing? I would say the latter.

Oh, no. He can't even fit into the algorithm, Paul. It does make me laugh because it's incredibly, obviously, you know, it's incredibly complicated. It's very hard to keep up with the plot. It is not brilliantly written. What's the last phrase I heard? Breast tit. Yeah, breast tits.

Yeah, they are definitely not a thing. As you know having been in the valley for so long actually we embedded ourselves mainly with matt quasar who's actually very funny and he writes the dialogue the night before and you can't tell but some of it's really good he had a really good joke which i think he mad of nick from the simpsons actually but there was a good joke when we were when we were watching the filming of amish girls on rumspringer volume two um which by the way he said he was surprised as anybody that there would be a call for a volume two but he said maybe volume one uh left too many

unanswered questions right sorry what sorry what's it called uh amish girls on rumspringer so for people who don't know because obviously amish is much more of an american thing than a bit of shang so the amish as you know are these you know the carts and the beards and the old-fashioned dress but then when the kids are what 17 approximately they go on this thing called rumspringer i apologize if any of your amish listeners are getting annoyed with me getting things slightly wrong but But I can tell you it's only slightly wrong if it is wrong. The Amish famously love podcasts, so it's fine. Well, the Rumspringer ones are big listening to podcasts

because the whole point about Rumspringer is that they go out into the world and they have sex and they party. And they go clubbing and they do whatever they want to do. And in that year, they decide whether or not to continue or not. Exactly. And I think the Amish are pretty cool about it. And it's like if their kids decide, no, I'm all about partying and sex, the parents are like, oh, fine.

And having buttons and frills. They're like, I just love these frilly collars. I can't go back. Exactly. Right. Yeah, so that's right. So Mike came up with the idea of having a porn film based on the Ram Springer experience.

To be fair, very smart. I mean, that is brilliant. Because they're all, you know, because the women are all dressed in like the Amish stuff and, you know, what's going on underneath. The bonnets. Of course. People go wild for bonnets.

What are they suppressing underneath those bonnets, Alice? So one line of dialogue that he wrote was a guy knocks on the Amish girl's door and she says, her dad, her father's not in. He's on the wagon. And the guy says, what? Is he trying to give up drinking? And she says, no, he's actually on a wagon. I thought that was a solid Amish line.

Four out of ten 10 I'd say Something that my dad would have written but sure The Amish go wild for that though In like Amish circles Oh that is wild So there's an awkwardness to Blinderblink that you don't see in the valley Like in the valley everybody's very fine You know with sex they don't feel the need to dress it up in any way.

It's all about this. I'm quite slick, I think. Whereas there's sort of a lot of, well, there's just a lot of times when they don't have sex. Like he sometimes gets a bit carried away. Not necessarily with the story, but just like you say, with those kind of extraneous details. Whereas I feel like you kind of get down to business in porn, right? Like people don't want to have to skip through 17 minutes of like back block no one enjoys the dialogue like none of the actors enjoy the dialogue scenes oh really yeah

no they all want to just you know have the sex why do they still insist on the storylines I mean Mike's a dying breed and that you know he is making the porn that you're watching hotel rooms and that you'll buy on dvds and of course almost nobody watches watch in hotel rooms and that you'll buy on DVDs. And of course, almost nobody watches porn in hotel rooms or on DVDs anymore. But 10 years ago, that's how, well, I guess 15 years ago, that's how everybody would watch porn. So Mike is basically making porn for a massively shrinking market.

But he's just holding on. He's just holding on. He just loves to write those scenes and is that because he's financed by the people that want those scenes because he knows it's all going to be stolen anyway yes uh so it isn't really and they bear that in mind it's right it's like just about it's like there's just a tiny razor thin profit margin there's still enough hotels that will pay for it there's still enough people who for some insane reason that even mike can't understand will still go to a dvd store

and buy a dvd we were on tour earlier this year and we were driving down the motorway and we saw a huge kind of it was like a big warehouse of porn like a sex emporium wasn't it yeah and it was just this really... At a service station? Yeah, at a service station. Just quite a sad building with just loads and loads of DVDs of porn. We were like,

who comes here and buys this stuff? But it was quite busy, actually. But the DVDs weren't cheap. It was like five for a hundred pounds or something. Bloody hell. Yeah. You know, I think I've just thought of another reason why they have the dialogue scenes.

And I think it's because the other way Mike makes money is through softcore. So there's certain markets in certain countries where softcore's okay, but hardcore isn't. And I reckon if it's softcore, then you just need to fill it up with something. So the dialogue really helps, you know. Like those movies that they'd show on Channel 5 then you just need to fill it up with something. So the dialogue really helps, you know.

Like those movies that they'd show on Channel 5 at like midnight in the late 90s, which I never watched. No, yeah. Well, do you remember the old pink, you're probably too young to remember the pink triangles on Channel 4. Yeah, I am maybe. What's that?

Well, when Channel 4 first started, they would show, you know, risque risque erotic films or you know sort of transgressive films made by people like ken russell you know that kind of thing and they would have or like you know i know carida like they're sort of art set porn art films and they would have pink triangles in the in the corner of the screen to basically warn people that there's about to be it's a commons yeah and um it was never straight out porn it was what when i started journalism it's what editors used to call legit tit because it's not like an outporn it's like it's arty yeah like national geographic is legit

tit and uh yeah i always remember that bleak phrase and when i lived in manchester but you wouldn't say about a person you wouldn't be like oh that's some legit tit walking past And yeah, I always remember that bleak phrase from when I lived in Manchester. Oh my God. But you wouldn't say it about a person. You wouldn't be like, oh, that's some legit tit walking past. That wasn't like a sort of like a way of saying like, that's a highbrow lady with a great rack. That's some legit tit. She's the marrying card. No, they would say that Japanese film that happens to have unsimulated sex.

That's legit. Has a bag load of legit shit. Right, yeah. Obviously, we all here do porn podcasts, but is there a market for audio porn? Because I've heard of ASMR. Have you heard of ASMR? Yes.

Is there such a thing as audio porn? Audio-only porn? Yeah, I think, well, there's telephone porn. In fact, I know a lady who who does um phone sex for a living so that works yeah there must be a bit of story there you've got to build up to that on the phone it's got to be a bit right i've become quite good friends with monica lewinsky so and i was listening to slow burn quite recently it It's fantastic, yeah. Yeah, and they, you know, Monica and Clinton had telephone sex. So obviously audio sex is a thing.

Right. Yeah, because they keep bringing it up in Slow Burn, which is a fantastic podcast if people haven't heard it. But they talk, yeah, they talk about having phone sex a lot. And they kind of say it in a bit of an offhand way where they're like, and then they had some more phone sex. But I'm always like, what? What do they say to each other?

What are they saying? Yeah. But you know, so tell me. No, I don't know. i don't know i don't know what i've discovered with monica is that you've got a very like you can't just blast her with questions about it because people must never ask her about it so like i tend to wait i've known her for a few years and i like her very much um but what i tend to do is is wait and if she brings it up herself then you get your notebook out and you're like i've

got some questions press record what what is the etiquette when you go and watch a porno being filmed because if you go to the theater and you see a play and you're not really that into it you obviously wait till the interval and then you maybe don't come back i guess is i mean i've never done it but if you if you were enjoying it so little that you wanted to leave that's probably when you would go because a walkout feels rude. So it's a walkout on a porn set. Is that not a bit of a snub? You know what?

I think the opposite is true. I've never had this conversation with anybody, but my instinct having been on, I don't know how many porn sets I've been on, maybe eight, ten, something like that. My instinct is that the less attention you pay, the better. I actually managed to end up in a porn film. I was in Public Disgrace where I got too close to the action. Peering in, you see a bespectacled, tweedy journalist. No! Peering, yeah.

You're in a porno! Yeah, I'm in Public Disgrace. Which volume? That I don't know. But I remember the name of the porn star. She was called jodie taylor um and she was being you know it was like a gangbang in a bar sure um you're just drinking there this was a happen to find yourself in that particular bar that night this was the very first porn film i ever went on um so how did you end up in it i just got a little bit too close and

drifted into shot so there is a moment but of tweedy because i was wearing quite a quite a tweedy jacket there was a tweedy biscuit like owl like the spectacle journalist suddenly creeps into shot and writes things down in a notepad which i kind of think is going to like spoil the erotic ambience for most people um but a tweedy journalist that might be someone's thing well that's what you would think i said i mean i think it would be a niche quirk but you know it'll be someone out there much work at the minute we're gonna make a whole movie on bespectacled owl like journalists i tell you my big memory of that night though was just how late the filming went on before it was

like 2 a.m and i was just standing there thinking please ejaculate so i could go to sleep you sound like belinda is that your main objection you're like i could work in porn but it's such late night yeah which is why mike quasar who who we embedded ourselves with it was such a blessing because he shoots during the day he's not interested in late nights he just wants to like get in he is so sick of watching people have sex i mean that's all he's done since the 90s is watch people have sex and he is he i've never known somebody to hate sex and yeah so he just wants to get in shoot it he doesn't want to keep himself or anybody else waiting for any longer than they have to he does like four scenes a day um pretty much how many of like five or six days a week yeah mike quasar will be what will be

filming somebody have sex now um you know whatever time anybody listens to this that's gonna be true that's an evergreen comment right there yeah it really is the audience had to improvise in public disgrace because the the narrative was more simpler than than your dad's narrative right okay basically wow that's saying something yeah a woman is pulled into a bar by the dominatrix princess donna sure yeah donna and um the the people in the bar have to act surprised like oh my god you know what's going on and then when they're into it they were supposed to like call things out the audience was full of hipsters like for some reason they ended up getting a whole bunch of hipsters for the crowd uh and then you obviously yeah that was like

and um my big my great memory of it was everybody was like trying to help out by like shouting things out that would be helpful but none of them were very good so at one point somebody shouted out um because they were trying to like humiliate the woman and so somebody shouted out put ice on her tooth so embarrassed put ice on her tooth i mean you've got to like credit him for giving it a try i mean just go with an ad lib. Just try it. But I didn't try. I didn't do anything like that. I just crept into shot to get a closer look.

Do you think it made it in? Put ice on her tooth. I know that I made it in. Because I know that for sure. Because I asked Twitter whether, like, has anybody ever watched Public Disgrace and had seen me in it? And somebody, like, within 10 minutes sent me screenshots of myself. So I'm definitely in it.

So were you like with Family Ronson, were you like gather round kids! Daddy's on screen! Daddy's in a porno! I feel like searches are going to go up for that now. People are going to find that. Comment on it with something Belinda Blinked related. Please. Please. So yeah, the hints

are Princess Donna, Jodie Taylor, Public Disgrace. John Ronson. You know what to do. John Ronson. You know what to do. John, thank you so, so much for coming and imparting all your knowledge about porn. We feel much more learned now, I think. No, thank you.

This has been like an honour. And I'm glad it feels like the time I first met Louis Theroux. Because we were like these two distant people that were constantly being compared to each other. So it's like that all over again. We're brethren. We are. Be honest. When was the last time you thought about your current business insurance policy?

Here's the thing. If your business insurance coverage renews on autopilot each year without checking out zensurance.com, you're probably spending more than you need. That's why you need to switch to a low-cost policy from Zensurance. Zensurance does all the heavy lifting, ensuring you're only covered for what you need. And coverage starts at only $19 per month. Visit zensurance.com and secure your new policy online in a matter of minutes. Zensurance. Mind your business.