More on the hilarity of the porn industry from the Guardian, this time an article titled “Money-saving tips for Hollywood”

[F]ollow the lead of Steven Soderbergh with Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, and cast more hardcore porn stars in leading roles. They already perform the most degrading feats for a fee ranging between $1,000 and $6,000 per day, the top end of which is half the hourly craft-services bill for John Travolta. They may draw a lot of water over in Porn Valley, but here on the other side of the hill they’re nobody. And they’ll be grateful for the promotion – usually when they show up in mainstream movies they’re playing dead (Kobe Thai in Very Bad Things), playing strippers (Nautica Thorn in Knocked Up) or just playing themselves (Asia Carrera in “Logjammers”, the porn movie in The Big Lebowski).

He’s being disingenuous (to say the least), porn performers are paid by the ‘sex act’, not by the day. This is the International Union of Sex Workers (you can Google them yourself) own estimates of pay:

At the time of writing (2007) typical pay for a female performer is £250 for girl-girl, £300 for boy-girl, £350 for anal and £400 for double-penetration. Pay for male performers in boy-girl porn is £150-300, with slightly higher rates in gay male porn. A typical scene will take around four hours to shoot.

So, if one could physically manage (survive) it, doing two double-penetration scenes in an eight hour working day would get you £800, which is approximately US$400. I don’t want to imagine what one would have to do in a day to earn US$6000.

And journalists are just so lazy

The sex bits of porn films are so mechanical – and so completely interchangeable – that it’s only the beginning that gives you any idea of precisely how badly made the film you are watching really is. The acting is uniformly terrible and the dialogue is worse (“Would you like a cigarette? They’re quite excellent.”) Taken together, these scenes resemble nothing so much as a compilation of failed auditions.

The opening moments of a porn film may provide the only opportunity for artistic invention, but they aren’t usually what you’d call inventive. The situations are formulaic and rarely hampered by any flirtation with realism. Plumbers can always come out straight away, and in office scenes every day is dress-down Friday. Gay porn, judging by the evidence here, takes the least trouble with its opening formalities: two guys, a desk, a chair and a clipboard; five dudes and two sofas; a couple of young men and a chessboard. Shorn of their context, the pictures have about them a creepy, cheerless innocence, like little slices of purgatory.

But let’s not ask any questions about how it was made, or who was used to make it; the only acceptable mainstream criticism of porn is that it’s tacky.