The Rich Pornocopia

Despite the nation's economic difficulties and tightened household budgets, the pornography business is wallowing in pay dirt. The market for erotic books, films and paraphernalia, which are sold mostly to the middle class and middle aged, has increased by an estimated 300% in the past five years. Police experts figure that annual sales of pornography are about $500 million, and some put the total as high as $2 billion.

Pornography's outsize profits are attracting many investors. Stock in Grove Press, a pioneer publisher of salacious books and U.S. distributor of foreign sex films, is now sold on the open market. Trading is scheduled to begin next month in the shares of another purveyor of erotica, Olympia Press; its latest skin flick, Barbara, cost $32,000 to make, grossed $ 11,700 in its second week in Manhattan and is scheduled for national distribution.

Weighing the Profits. In New York City, members of the Mafia's Colombo, Lucchese and Genovese families are muscling in on the rich pornocopia, bringing new money and organization to the fractionalized trade. Since the syndicate took over the two-bit peep-show machines, the grainy amateur films featuring fading strippers have been replaced by slick color productions with sound, stories and attractive young models. Each movie is twelve minutes long, but in most machines viewers must drop in a fresh quarter for every two-minute segment. The 69 peep-show emporiums in midtown Manhattan bring in an estimated $5,000,000 a year. Bookkeeping is wildly informal; some distributors split the take with the shop owners by weighing bags of quarters on a scale that they carry from store to store.

Full-length feature films make up by far the most profitable and fastest growing segment of the porn business. There can be big money in the shoestring "sexploitation" flicks, which are ground out in backyards and garages by youngsters with hand-held cameras. Man and Wife, produced in Los Angeles 18 months ago by Matt Cimber for $32,000, has grossed $4,500,000 so far. Alan Roberts, 23, a partner in SAE Productions of Los Angeles, reports that his company recouped its $45,000 investment in Zodiac Couples within three months after its release. In San Francisco, two brothers, Art and Jim Mitchell, dropped out of college to produce their Cinema 7 nudie flicks and show them in their own theater, The O'Farrell. They now earn an estimated $500,000 a year. So busy are the makers of porn films in San Francisco that they have depressed the market for imported sex movies, and are now selling their own products abroad--a small victory for the nation's trade balance.

In terms of profits on invested capital, grime pays even more handsomely for producers of stag films for the home. The male "actors" in these movies are often paid nothing--they do it for the sport--the women usually get no more than $25 or $35 for the whole show. The biggest expense is processing the film. From a single master copy, the producer can make 250,000 prints at a cost of about $2 to $4 each. Black-and-white stag movies retail for about $25; in color they cost $50.

Shorting the Author. The growing mail-order trade is still something of a cottage industry made up of small dealers, many of whom operate out of warehouse offices and lofts. Ads for their wide assortment of items--vibrators, costumes, imitation sexual organs--appeal to every kind of sex fantasy, but the promises are not always matched by the product. Printed matter is still the most common form of porn, much of it supplied by such relatively new publishing houses as Los Angeles' Oxford Bindery and Manhattan's Olympia. San Diego's Greenleaf Classics churns out 36 titles a month, each with a 30,000 print order. "I have never lost money on a sex book," says Bill Hambling, Greenleafs chief. Many smut books are printed in regular union shops during the slack early-morning hours; shops sometimes charge five times as much to print hard-core porn as regular books.

Even so, the average porn paperback costs no more than 25-c- to produce. The publisher then sells it for about $1 to wholesalers like Cleveland's giant Sovereign News Co. The shortest end of the take goes to the authors--some of them teachers, housewives and journalists--who are lucky to clear $250 a book. Chicago's Loop now has about 20 "adult" bookstores, which also sell records, playing cards and other assorted forms of erotica; San Francisco has 60 stores, and Los Angeles 100.

About three years ago, as a result of court decisions liberalizing what could legally be put on sale, the market for salacious magazines picked up swiftly. Total nudity is now common. Some of the more explicit publications, showing sexual acts, sell under the counter for as much as $10 and $15. Sex tabloids are also cashing in --usually at 50-c- a copy. Screw, the genre's prototype, was started by two young journalists and the wife of one of them on a $350 investment. It grossed $650,000 in the first year.

The latest development is the live sex show, in which a naked couple perform before viewers, who pay up to $15 to watch, often in dingy, airless backrooms. At least half a dozen live showplaces have opened in Manhattan. In Los Angeles, four bars and three moviehouses have started live shows within the past two months. One bar owner there sums up the economics of the trend: "I had a regular beer bar here, and I was lucky if I took in $80 a night. Now I get a couple onstage, pay them $10, charge a $3 cover and $1.25 for a glass of tap beer that costs me a nickel. Even on a bad night I come out with $600."

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