The following figures are for a shoot in Los Angeles arranged by a relatively large production company. Tarrant is reluctant to talk about average rates-in this industry, “there’s no such thing as average,” she says-but she laid out what it might cost to produce a video that a typical viewer would see on a big-name porn site. So, one of us (Andrew) made some graphics out of them. In the interview, she walked through the financials of producing a porn video, but those statistics were edited out of the Q&A before it was published. One of us (Joe) published an interview with Tarrant earlier this week, shortly after her book, The Pornography Industry, was released. “It’s the only industry where you can do one shoot and be called a star, whether or not you’re good at it,” says Shira Tarrant, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Cal State Long Beach.
