There's No Business like the Porn Business

To the naked eye, the town of Chatsworth is the epitome of a faceless, anonymous Los Angeles suburb. This is a landscape of sub-bleached cinderblock apartment complexes, of strip malls and industrial parks, Armenian auto body shops and Michoacan taco stands. Nothing marks Chatsworth as the capital of sin, the ground zero of a place that has come to be known as Silicone Valley. Yet it is here, behind the doors of bland-looking warehouses and sound stages that border on junkyards, where a handful of people generate product that brings in close to eight billion dollars a year. The product isn't microchips or space-age weaponry. It's porn, America's most prosperous industry, which generates more revenue than Hollywood and professional sports put together. Not bad for an industry that 25 years ago made silent 8 mm loops and lived in constant fear of the law.

In the last several years, thanks in large part to the emergence of the internet, porn has gone mainstream. The boundary between the worlds of jizz biz and legitimate entertainment has become so blurred as to be virtually nonexistent. Porn divas like Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords host prime-time talk shows and star in A-list films. Meanwhile mainstream celebs like Pam Anderson and Paris Hilton have become inadvertent porn stars after explicit video tapes of their private frolic have scored an instant hit in cyberspace.Beltway politicians decry the moral decline of the new generation weened on internet porn while profiting handsomely from porn video rentals in major hotel chains across America. And the Oscar-winning producer of A Beautiful Mind and Apollo 13, Brian Grazer, has spent two million dollars of his own money to make a documentary called Inside Deep Throat, about the most successful and scandalous adult film of all time.