Have you read Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screen Writer by Eric Spitznagel?
I haven’t, but a friend of a friend named Allan MacDonell wrote Prisoner of X, about his time at Hustler. I’ve read a few of these books and it’s hard to understand how they feel about this period. If I’m looking for a silver lining from having all of these day jobs it would be that you learn that you go in thinking that they’re creative but the people in charge of the money don’t see your part in it as creative or any part of it as creative. They happen to be selling films, magazines, or books, but they view them as the proverbial widget. They could be selling curtain rods or televisions, but they just happen to be selling movies. “Okay, we have thirty minutes of hardcore sex and sixty minutes of dialog. Here’s a bold thought: let’s get rid of the dialog and get sixty more minutes of hardcore sex in there.” And, of course, they’re right. It’s all a business. Every writer is in the business and every writer needs to make their peace early with the fact that it’s a business that you don
