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Ninn's kept his style since his first sex flicks - Two Sisters and Principles of Lust. "Like all the directors I admire, I keep making the same movie over and over again. I know who I am and what I want to say." Michael makes movies about himself. Sex is his Madison Avenue power statement, reflecting on his own brushes with success and failure. Like the Jon Dough character in Latex, Michael was a ward of the state who developed the ability to bring people's fantasies to life. Ninn says that the black and white scene between Dough and Jeanna Fine "represents all adult directors' true thoughts in relationships." "Ninn is a visualist from the Andrew Blake school of filmmaking where all sensory forms of expression take on stylized, self-conscious dream-like qualities." (AVN,10/92) "Just don't call me an esoteric Carl Jung fanatic," says Ninn. "I'm pleased with the comparison to Blake. Andrew does wonderful work, but my true inspiration comes from Robert McCallum - he's my mentor. "I saw things in Night Trips where Blake stopped short. McCallum takes it that extra step. I must have seen Truth or Dare eight or nine times before we began our project. "Porno is usually shot from such a small perspective. I try to make things grand. "These movies are a labor of love for me. I'm reaching inside of myself for something and bringing it out. If you don't like what I'm doing, then I'm hurt." Jim Holliday wrote in the 1/95 AVN: "I have seen and met and known the new wonder boy of the future, and guess what? He is my soulmate, although we come from totally polarized points of view. He is the future of the adult business if he is allowed to grow and expand and if others devote the same care and pride into their projects. "Michael Ninn reminds me of legendary cult dude Rinse Dream. Ninn is every bit as innovative and stylized as Dream, but his look is more '90s MTV high tech. He concentrates on the beauty and angles of the female actresses and not upon some post-nuclear sandpile that Rinse favored. "Rinse Dream - a dark side visionary, glib hipster, shock effect specialist, comes from out of left field and major shortcoming is lack of eroticism to accompany cold emotions. Andrew Blake - beautiful people, beautiful settings, beautifully shot, like a fairy-book romance, smacking at you with all the heat and passion of a dead fish or a limp wrist... Mix Blake's set-ups with Alex deRenzy sex and everyone else is in deep second place... Michael Ninn - superb style in a positive glitzy way, some deep character development...probing emotions deeper than Dream's and sex much hotter and more passion-sustained than Blake's." Fifteen years of age when she gave birth to him, Ninn's mother barely knows her son. "I wouldn't know my father if I stumbled over him," says Michael who grew up in a New York orphanage. "I was raised by an institution and I lived by its bells. When they rang, I knew it was time to eat, or sleep... I never knew love. I remember telling myself at age four, I will never cry again. "I was treated like an animal and I lived like an animal." At age 17, Michael Ninn became an art director for a New York City ad agency. He made ads for the Sheraton Hotel chain and Miller Brewing as well as creating videos for Capitol Records. Michael moved to the West Coast at age 21 and began directing a TV show for a leading cable company. In 1978 Ninn built a house in Las Vegas with help from his younger half-brother. At age 32, in 1983, he married and fathered two children. In 1989, his wife filed for divorce. What hurt Michael the most was the difficulty he soon had visiting his children. "It was the first heartbreak of my life; the first time I realized that I loved." By 1992, Ninn felt suicidal. "Western Visuals pulled me up by my bootstraps and gave me an opportunity. They found me, picked me up by the scruff of my neck, and cleaned me up." Ninn learned from the experience. Infidelity, he says, broke up his marriage. "Men like to jerk off to airbrushed fantasies of perfect women. Such women don't exist but many men waste years trying to find her. I did." Israeli Jerome Tanner (Tannenbaum) founded Western Visuals in the 1980s, producing "Tanner Vision" in such videos as Nymphette, Born To Run and Club Exotica. Tanner worked frequently with Gary Graver, better known as pornographer Robert McCallum, director of The Hot One, The Ecstasy Girls and Amanda By Night. In the real world, Graver performed the second unit directing for John Cassavetes' A Woman Under The Influence in addition to directing The Hard Road and Angel Eyes. (Journalist Dries Vermeulen) McCallum served as a mentor to Ninn who invented a computer generated device that added a flicker to video, making it seem like film, thereby "adding class to the despised video medium." Ninn first served as cinematographer on Robert's 1992 porno Black and White In Living Color, a take off of Madonna's Truth or Dare. Around the same time, Michael directed his first two pornos, Two Sisters and Principles of Lust. "…The casual video voyeur could quite easily be tricked into believing he is watching the Real Thing (film rather than video)," writes Dutch journalist Dries Vermeulen, "though in narrative terms they come across as decidedly anemic. Visually breathtaking and stylish to a fault, these features seem to content themselves with imitating the then-popular Andrew Blake aesthetics which consisted primarily of soft focus, slow motion shots of gorgeous women decked out in either shiny leather and latex or frilly lingerie, topped off for some reason with a pair of RayBans." Ninn, who took his porn name from the literary pornographer Anais Nin, calls 1992 "a time of rebirth." He began educating himself through reading, and found spirituality and meaning from the works of mythologist Joseph Campbell. "Prior to my divorce, everything in my life was a hustle. God didn't exist for me." Michael convinced Western Visuals producer Hector Castaneda to shoot the company's first 35mm film, the 1993 masterpiece Black Orchid. Wealthy eccentric Johnathan Morgan reaches out to madam Ona Zee to find him the writer Steve Drake of the book Black Orchid. Johnathan offers him money to write chapters that become live sex shows. "Michael Ninn hits a major-league home run with one of his first at-bats in hardcore. A riveting 35mm film that combines equal influences of Andrew Blake, John Leslie and Ninn's own ultra-hardcore/horny intellectual slant, it's a classic piece of porn art that has more than a thread of a story, electrifying visuals and orgasmic sex in every encounter." (AFW) "In the rich tradition of Cecil Howard's exquisite Neon Nights (1981) and Richard Mahler's flabbergasting Corruption (1983), Black Orchid stands as one of the most cryptic adult films of all time," writes Vermeulen. "The deliberately vague yet infinitely compelling storyline can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, none of them very uplifting as there is no escaping the film's all-embracing atmosphere of undiluted melancholia and regret. It's hardly surprising to learn that Ninn penned the downbeat script during a bout of depression following his divorce." Later in 1993, Michael left Western Visuals for the bigger budgets of VCA. He poured himself into his work, routinely clocking 100-hour weeks. A solitary soul who likes to be left alone with his machines, Michael describes himself as "a traditional Italian man. I go out into the world to slay the dragon. My wife shouldn't ask me about my business. It's my duty to provide for my family, which I do. My kids go to private school. I value education and I want them to have what I didn't." Michael's love since 1995 works with him behind the scenes of his movies. Ninn met the slim Italian blonde when she managed the bank branch he frequented. Michael's platonic love is his production manager Jane Hamilton AKA Veronica Hart who's produced every movie he's shot. Jane protects Ninn from the messy logistics of a shoot. "She's so good that I never know what's going on." He's becoming a better actor's director. "I never spoke to Juli Ashton or any of the talent on Latex except those who sought me out, such as Jeanna Fine." AVN: "Its not true that the Great Wall of China was erected in less time than it takes director Michael Ninn to shoot a sex scene. But it comes close. God forbid if you're merely stepping out of a sports car. That's at least four hours shot to hell right there." Sometimes ten hours can elapse on a Ninn production without shooting a sex scene, unusual in a genre where a lengthy shoot is two days and virtually no feature has fewer than five sex scenes. "I can't make a Movie-of-the-Week," says Ninn, referring to the glut of one day wonders in X-rated fare. With 1997's Decadence, however, Ninn allowed VCA to manipulate him into directing a typical porno. For the first time in a Ninn movie, he didn't write the script. Instead, he left essentially unchanged the mediocre story written by Victoria's boyfriend. Paris is particularly distant in her sex scenes and only does girls. She insisted on removing various sections of her scenes whose heat she thought would upset her boyfriend. At the end of February 1997, Michael shot New Wave Hookers 5 for VCA. Ninn's friend Gregory Dark made the first four versions and feels annoyed with VCA's decision to carry on the series with another director. "I have to walk a fine line between continuity with what Greg's done," says Michael, "and shooting my own vision. I'm placing little things in this movie that only Greg will notice. I'm doing it to tweak him. He'll laugh when he sees it." Rarely watching films, Ninn's addicted to the Discovery Channel. "Sex is all about power," says Michael, and the imagery of domination and submission flows through all his work. VCA released Sex in 1994 which patterns itself after the life of its star - Australian Gerry Pike. He plays a self-absorbed small town lad who heads to the big city and sells out for a shot at fame, "realizing the price he pays is greater than the sum of who he is. Director Michael Ninn has created the most significant sex film of our time. Technically beyond anything we have ever seen in this genre, erotically superior on every level, it is the most emotionally powerful adult film ever created. The characters all become real in Ninn's hands, making each sex scene a visceral as well as intellectual experience. This movie grabs you and won't let go. From the opening encounter between Sunset Thomas and Pike through the last gasps of his grope with Tyffany Million, the eroticism touches as deep as first sexual experience with your truest love. Michael Ninn's Sex sets a new high standard for quality filmmaking in the hardcore medium." (AFW 96D p.266) Most reviewers raved about Sex including AVN who gave it a rating of ten out of ten. "There may never be a perfect adult film, but Michael Ninn's Sex comes as relentlessly close to the technically flawless pinnacle of eclectic, sexual cinematic expression as one can hope. "From the sprawling isolation found in Mad Max [The Road Warrior] to the urban glitz of Madison Avenue, Ninn's frames of reference in Sex march before the judges' stand, spit and polished, in full parade regalia. Ninn's film, a pine-tingling noir poem, plays like a hypnotically elegiac. Within an audio track that sounds like the Gregorian chanting Santo Domingo monks in barbershop quartet form, we witness the fortune and fall of Gerry Pike. As the film develops, Pike's a guilt-charged set of muscles and mane from the sticks who, through being at the right sex scene at the right time, makes it big as a male model in the sacred world of show biz." (AVN 10/94 p.56) Latex, 1995, tells the story of a lunatic, played by Jon Dough, who sees people's darkest secrets when he touches them. "…Ninn has achieved that rare balance of technical perfection and excellent directorial style which imparts a real statement from every level of the production, working with a first rate script that metaphorically attacks that which is hidden in all of us. We see that hiding one's fantasies is a way of lying, and for lying, there is always a price to pay. Latex is the most innovative adult movie ever made. It's hot, technically perfect and light years ahead of most of what is being done for millions of dollars in mainstream Hollywood." (AFW) I thought Latex an unreal film with an unreal story about unreal persons who have unreal sex. Along with its successor Shock, Latex symbolizes what I dislike in American cinema generally - the triumph of style over substance, of technique over humanity. Bill Margold classes Ninn with such pornographers as John Leslie, Eric Edwards, Joey Silvera and Paul Thomas who supposedly want to go mainstream but don't have the talent. "They buy off their consciences with big budgets, twisted stories, special effects, good press and glossy AVN ads," says Bill. "Michael's sex is basic," says Paul Thomas who voices a widely held view of Ninn's work. "His sex scenes just go by the numbers. I know Michael. He's not a sexual person and he doesn't get into people's sexual psyche. His visuals are terrific but his sex is not involving. There's a veneer between you and the performers." "Why are you watching porno movies?" asks adult critic Patrick Riley. "For the great drama? For the Gone With The Wind type plots? For the brilliant comedy? For the terrifying horror? If you are, you're in the wrong section of the video store. The only reason that you should be watching them is to get sexually aroused. That's not to say there aren't some porno movies that make you laugh or intrigue you with the characters or story but that aspect is peripheral, never gets above a TV movie or sitcom and is done much better by the mainstream genre with their big budgets." "The whole notion of analyzing the artistic value of f--- films is absurd," says Lenny Wilde. "Nobody watches porn for dialogue scenes unless he's a complete basketcase. If a porn flick doesn't catch my interest, I skip through the dialogue until a lovely chick starts slurping a dick or she sticks her squirmy cunt on a cock." (Erotic Video 8/90) In a long and thoughtful essay, Dries Vermeulen found meaning in Ninn's films. "Though initially introduced as some sort of misunderstood Messiah in Latex (a paragon of good, if not virtue), Stevens [the Jon Dough character in 1996's Shock] comes across as more of a devil this time, although ironically those physical aspects which made him look demonic in the first feature are now largely eschewed in favor of a deceptively angelic appearance. He shows his true colors once he has entrapped a defenseless soul in the spider's web that is his omnipotent mind. Set in the near future, evil rules simply because we have stopped believing in such staid concepts as good and evil…" 5/99 AVN: Michael Ninn: "There ain't enough good actors in our business to carry a story." Ninn says VCA has cut his budgets and pushed for more sex scenes per movie. "There's not time to put production value in. I can either do the art direction or I can sit and listen to Shayla say lines. I know I'm good at art direction so..." Andrew Blake: "We've got a generation of people that have been watching MTV... We just respond to a visual shorthand. People smokes dope, they do a line...whatever goes through their mind is...what turns them on." Ninn: "We all do the same thing... We all show f---ing, but it's what we hang on the two minutes before and the two mnutes after the scene that works... If I put up my movie, Greg'smovie, anybody's movie...and I run them together...you're going to see the same thing... If you're commercially successful, it's the same f---ing thing. "As an editor of a sex scene, I'm looking for three things. I edit it in a triangle. I go to the face for a response; I go to the genitalia, and I go to the wide and medium shot... This is what I do for a living, and that's the formula. "I don't even tell people that I work with [porn]... If they ask, I say I'm editing in LA, but I work in Georgia; I work for a big company an directed a show, and I wouldn't tell them what I do because it's unacceptable still... It's okay in our clique but it's not okay in the real world... Just one picture of me in AVN and I went nuts."
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