Shamama said that NSFW accounts for about 1 percent of the site's content, yet pulls in about 10 percent of their monthly viewership.īaran had previously worked as a programmer for NYC LGBT Film Festival NewFest and saw the opportunity as a chance to promote great filmmaking to a new audience. London-based critic Ben Walters, writing for Time Out London, coined the term "mumblehardcore" to describe the result-and he deemed that "the gambit works."Īfter a few more one-offs, Naked Sword brought on filmmaker Adam Baran to curate NSFW, with an eye toward distributing or producing one new film every month. In 2011, they produced the full-length version, which garnered a 70 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It saw more than 2 million views within a month of its debut on the site. To test their concept, Shamama and Matthews produced an excerpt of a planned film called I Want Your Love. Leather Bar, the 2013 film that recreated lost, explicit scenes from Al Pacino's homophobic masterpiece Cruising), Shamama decided Naked Sword would try something new: partnering with indie filmmakers to produce films that didn't look like porn but packed an erotic wallop. Shamama was interested in distinguishing Naked Sword from competitors by pursuing things that might "keep people on longer." As he put it, when it comes to pushing the envelope in terms of what porn can be-especially in a beleaguered industry, where other studios' offerings have grown extreme to court clicks-"we're as progressive as the market will allow." So when he met filmmaker Travis Mathews (who would co-direct Interior. "I could see that things were going to be bad." "In 2008, the industry was starting to get hit hard by tube sites and piracy," Jack Shamama, the website's product manager and one of the creators of NSFW, told VICE. The studio is making a claim that porn can be diverse, experimental, emotionally contemplative, and grapple with complex questions of power and social relations-while still delivering hot, balls-deep sex. The studio's latest offering is the short film Alfa, about a porn star's first day on set after his lover's death, which launches today.
Its productions mix erotic and often hardcore sex with funny, moody, and contemplative moments: Nova Dubaiis a 50-minute meditation on gentrification, incest, and suicide in Brazil Brontez Purnell describes his 100 Boyfriends Mixtape as "one hundred failed relationships condensed down into one " and Hattie Goes Cruising is a documentary following Hank Major, a 70-year-old black gay man from Philadelphia, as he remembers a life of public sex.
NSFW may be the most prominent effort by a major gay porn industry player to date to blur the line between art film and pornography. That's the question at the heart of a new initiative by Naked Sword, the Netflix-like site that bills itself as "the largest collection of gay porn on the net." While primarily a distribution house for other studios, this February, Naked Sword expanded its original production wing with the launch of Naked Sword Film Works (NSFW for short), an indie arm aiming to "produce and showcase new work from independent film directors with an eye toward the provocative, the experimental, and the explicit."