Vivid Entertainment: Encyclopedia - Vivid Entertainment

Vivid Entertainment

Vivid Entertainment Group is one of the world's largest adult film producers, featuring a popular catalog of VHS and DVD titles and internet content.

Vivid specializes in high-production-value movies, filmed in exotic locations and shot with professional lighting and quality cinematography. Vivid also produces gay porn movies under the names "Vivid Man" and "Vivid Video".

Vivid Entertainment - Vivid Girls

The company is best known for its "Vivid Girls", a collection of porn starlets such as Briana Banks, Jenna Jameson, Devon, Ginger Lynn, Sunny Leone, Kobe Tai, Tera Patrick, Sunrise Adams, and Savanna Samson. All of these women made their names in other companies' productions, then moved to Vivid once they had become famous. The Vivid Girls are retained on exclusive contracts much like those of bygone days of the Hollywood studio system. They reportedly command a higher salary than do free-agent performers and produce only a handful of films per year (in 2004, Jenna Jameson told an interviewer "you probably have more sex than I do - I only film a couple of scenes three or four times a year").

Vivid Entertainment - Policies and production values

Vivid has a strict policy mandating condom use, and the sexual activities shown are generally "milder" than those of Vivid's competitors. Anal sex is never depicted, and scenes of bondage are rare and particularly mild. Vivid did not follow the path taken by much of the rest of the U.S. porn industry in the late 1990s toward more explicit and extreme activities (for instance, anal sex scenes are quite common in many other porn companies' productions today). Intercourse almost always involves a heterosexual couple; larger groupings or orgies are never depicted. These policies are intended to appeal to a wide, mainstream market (including women and heterosexual couples) that may not rent or buy pornographic movies frequently.

Vivid produces relatively few titles per year, and each film is aggressively advertised and promoted. This is different from many other San Fernando Valley production companies, who routinely film, edit and release a two-hour title in less than a week, spending relatively little on advertising or promotion.

Its titles are sold to the rental market and direct to consumers through its online mail-order site. Vivid also distributes the films to cable and satellite channels and offers its Internet subscribers pay-per-view access. Steve Hirsch and David James, who together started the company in 1984, control Vivid.

Vivid Entertainment - Criticism

Vivid has drawn some criticism for the lack of racial diversity among their performers. Nearly all of the male actors in their sex scenes are white; in contrast, many other porn companies (or at least, those that do not "specialize" in one ethnicity) frequently use, at a minimum, both black and white male actors. Vivid has produced few scenes featuring a black woman having sex with a white woman or a black woman having sex with a white man, and even fewer with a black man having sex with a white woman. Vivid employs relatively low numbers of Hispanic male actors and virtually no Asian male actors.

Similarly, the majority of Vivid Girls have been white and blonde. Many other (more prolific) companies offer not only films featuring mixtures of ethnicities in their casts, but often also produce series in which all of their actors (or actresses) are Hispanic, black, Asian, et cetera.

Also, concerns have been raised on how Vivid treats its employees, as well as accusations of "draconian" security measures towards possible bad PR.

See also

• Category:Vivid Girls
• List of pornographic movie studios

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