AEE Panel 'Rise of the Featurette' Examines Short-Form XXX Boom

CHATSWORTH, Calif.—A panel of four top directors moderated by AVN Senior Editor Peter Warren delved into the past, present and future of the porn featurette, the short (30 to 60 minutes) feature that has become a prominent part of the adult industry. Participating were Joanna Angel (BurningAngel), Ricky Greenwood (MissaX, Sweet Sinner), Kayden Kross (Deeper) and Jacky St. James (Bellesa). Angel and Kross were accompanied by cute canine companions. Warren started off with a history lesson. AVN coined the term in awards voting two years ago. But it was first used way back in 1984—the year of the first AVN Awards—when there was an award given for Featurette - Film, with Featurette - Video added the following year (only for both categories to be discontinued two years later). But, he said, “it didn’t mean what we mean it to now.” It was actually a precursor of what would soon become known as Gonzo (another AVN-originated term). Joanna Angel was doing it “way before I learned what to call it,” with BurningAngel’s Re-Penetrator, a 2005 parody of Hollywood’s Re-Animator, featuring her and Tommy Pistol. It mixed sex with ample gore and other bodily fluids. Angel’s company was only on the web at the time. She didn’t have the know-how to make DVDs or, more crucially, the distribution. But the 27-minute scene became an internet hit and launched the company, as well as her performing career. “It put me on the map.” She said she was “way ahead of the curve in making featurettes,” adding, “I didn’t know the Porn Rules—like, every movie must have four scenes.” Re-Penetrator was “a scene and nothing more.” She pointed out that in features there’s always one or two scenes that “make sense in terms of the story.” The other scenes are just added on. Greenwood and St. James agreed that the advantage of shooting featurettes is “time.” “You get more time to spend with the actors, with the emotion of a scene,” said St. James, whose just over one-year-old Bellesa House label (a gonzo sister to Bellesa Films) was crowned Best New Production Banner at Saturday night's AVN Awards ceremony. “That’s the advantage.” Greenwood agreed. “You have more time to work with actors, to work with lighting. ... It’s more fun for me to do those scene instead of feature-features.” A big advantage is the contact with performers. “I have time to sit down with the actors.” He said that in a full-length feature an actor may be working over several days but not every day, so they get involved in other projects. The shorter format concentrates their work. St. James said she relies on others to assemble the featurettes she's released online for DVD, while Kayden Kross related that she takes a more hands-on approach, looking for “four scenes with a common thread” when packaging DVDs for Deeper. This has resulted in collections like Sodom, Femme Fatale, Lewd and Dance for Me—which just scored the first win for newly-minted AVN Awards category Best Episodic Movie or Anthology. For Kross the featurette is her natural territory. Her work in the genre includes classics like 2018’s “Who’s Becky?” (Angela White, Markus Dupree), a perfect example of a two-character short story with wide appeal and resonance. Warren pointed to another major such project, Kross and Angel's 2019 collaboration “Valley of the Fuck Dolls,” first released on Deeper.com and later included in the Sordid Stories DVD, going on to win Best Featurette at the 2020 AVN Awards. “That was a really cool project,” Kross recalled. Angel added, “Kayden has a way of thinking visually that is incredible. I’d love to do it again sometime.”