Michael Ninn

In the nearly 10 years since Michael Ninn's first XXX feature - Black Orchid - few adult directors have had a greater impact on the direction the Xbiz has taken than Michael Ninn. Even such highly respected mainstreamers as Martin Scorsese and Drew Carey have said publicly that they admire Ninn's work. "When I first started," Ninn recalls, "no one was making pictures with the girls looking into the camera and breaking that wall that separates viewers from the action. When I delivered Black Orchid, the head of Western Visuals said to me, 'Michael, what the fuck is this? She's lookin' right into the camera! What the fuck; you know, you cut away from the hardcore! You can not cut away from the hardcore!'" That action was the genesis of the shot that has become known throughout the industry as "BJ eyes" - and Ninn invented it. Ninn also had the honor of having his Shock be the first adult DVD release - an event that occurred so early in the DVD game that Ninn is thinking about getting the disc reissued as a "director's cut," with better imagery and sound, and even a commentary track. In all, Ninn and his body of work, which at press time comprises just 17 features, have won 51 AVN Awards (including back to back Best Video and Best Director - Video honors in 1996-97 for Latex and Shock, and Best Video kudos again in 2000 for Dark Garden, all from VCA Platinum Plus); more awards than any other single director - and one hell of an accomplishment for an orphan who dragged himself up from poverty as a ward of the state; who, with almost no formal education, became a highly paid art director at a Madison Avenue advertising firm, and later, a respected director for a national news program. Ninn admits he's never been a "people person" - while under contract to VCA, he always used to arrive at work after everyone else had left the building - but after a performer has worked with him, he or she is unlikely to care. “I am becoming a better talent director," he notes. "I did say, on the set of Latex, 'Do not treat me as a pimp, because I'm not your pimp. You're acting today. Your acting may include sex, but don't be looking at your watch and thinking that you are going to give me an hour of your time for the money that I've paid you. Because I am going to take all the time I need to get my shots.'" Ninn credits his work in advertising with teaching him how to "tell a story in 30 seconds" - though he's come a lot farther artistically since then, both in his technique and his choice of imagery. "Not all men jerk off to heat," Ninn explains. "Some men jerk off to beauty. I would more jerk off to a Vogue magazine than I would a Penthouse or a Hustler." In fact, Ninn recalls one of his earliest sexual inspirations, which occurred when he worked one summer "walking hots" - horses which had just finished racing - at a racetrack. "I was working for the Whitney Stables, which is - the Whitneys are probably one of the wealthiest families in America," Ninn reminisces, "and up pulled this '65 Mercedes convertible, a 450 or one of those little coupe models, and inside of it was one of the Whitney daughters, and I was just stunned. I mean, everything that you could imagine, every cliché that you could imagine in a film hit me.” “She pulled up with the scarf and the sunglasses and the gloves and the impeccable woman's suit, and opened that door, and that leg hit the ground and went forever and ever and ever, and I mean, that's the first time that I realized what tweaked me,” he continues. “I just stopped in my tracks to watch this woman get out of this car, and every frame I was taking in of her movement, even though she was moving in real time, it seemed like slo-mo to me; that run-down-the-beach that just blew me away. "And I've always tried, in my adult films, to get back to that shot; always tried to get back to her; her standing there statuesque and the glasses coming off, and just as the glasses came off, there was a soft breeze that sent her perfume my way, and it was like 'Wow!' I mean, I think I was 12, and I think I had probably just started masturbating, and it's an image that I've taken with me my entire life." But now, having just completed a brief contract with Private North America, Ninn is taking his company, Ninn Worx, which originally was intended simply as a high-class special effects provider for the industry, full bore into video production. "We now have the best crop of directors in adult video since budgets were a quarter of a million dollars," Ninn opines. "We have been funded for 32 pictures for next year. I am going to be the guiding force for those pictures, and we are putting together a production team to handle them. "We are going to develop a thing called 'artcore,'" he continues. "We are going to develop the smaller picture to be watchable too, and not to put style over substance, but to make style important to what we do."