Greg Lansky
A star is porn

With his beard, his Cartier’s sunglasses, his golden watch and his designer’s tracksuit, Greg Lansky has a style of his own that is the symbol of his success. In few years, he became the star producer in LA, but you won’t hear from him in cinema magazines. His field is porn on online platforms, that sometimes makes this genre’s esthetes regret 70’s films. Yet Lansky is today the reference in this industry, the Californian porn’s golden boy. Producer, directed, boss of a studio, he collects awards. At Las Vegas’ AVN Awards (Adult Video News), he was elected best director of the year in 2016, 2017 and 2018. And his three main sites: Blacked, displaying interracial relationships, Tushy specialized in sodomy and Vixen, more eclectic and mainstream, haved gathered dozens of satuettes. Just like the pornstars with whom he’s used to work, French Manuel Ferrera and Jean Val Jean, or the American Mike Blue; but mostly the perofrmers Riley Read, Adriana Chechik or Carter Cruise, who have in common natural physiques closer to top models than to the stereotype of the siliconed sex worker.

Esthetically, Lansky’s films evoke a dream California, borrowing in tackiness 80’s as much as in the fashion magazines’ pages. Huge immaculate lofts with a few design furniture items, infinity pools, sports car, men with ties and women in designers’ dresses, elegant lingerie… We can think of Sofia Coppola’s or Tom Ford’s films, of a serie like Nip/Tuck or of novels written by Bret Easton Ellis. Or even of the 90’s chic porn (Andrew Blake or John Leslie), which were tossed onto the garbage heap of history because of a cheaper and cheaper gonzo. The picture is well-made, with long focuses, saturated colours, glorified skins…

Lansky sells to Americans a fantasy image of their reality. The dream of a Parisian boy born in 1982 who, after short studies in marketing and a few internships in TV production companies, launched into porn films industry without knowing a thing, with his friend Mike Adriano who became the king of trash gonzo, poles apart from his own style. Landing in the US in 2005, he learns the ropes at Reality Kings, one of the first studios that bet on the Internet, and he ends up creating his business in 2014, whereas the industry was in crisis because of free clips.

If porn industry is known for being a system of male domination (and it’s sometimes the case, sometimes not), Greg Lansky’s productions turn out to be really feminist, and promote the minorities. Whereas interracial scene usually staged black actors changed into bad boys, more or less forcing young white women in a gloomy atmosphere, he creates Blacked, his first website. Here, well-dressed black men living in luxurious houses are the fantasy of eager young white women. Because in Lansky’s films, women are generally the ones who decide, act and are the sequences’ heroines. Our journalist followed Greg Lansky to Las Vegas’ 2019 AVN Awards before interviewing him in his office in LA… Meeting with an artist who’s Bigger Than Life !