I once found myself standing next to Larry Flynt outside a Beverly Hills hotel. Flynt, paralysed by a gunshot wound in 1978, was in a gold-plated and velvet upholstered wheelchair, looking on the whole extremely disappointed with his lot as a porn magnate with a $150 million-a-year empire. Then a hotel guest appeared. “Mr Flynt, sir,” said the guest, offering a greasy palm. “I wanted to tell you how much I admire your work, sir. A pleasure to see you. A real pleasure, sir.” The Great Man paused for a moment, then turned his thick, lopsided face to meet his admirer’s gaze. “Fuggarghf,” he said.

At that precise moment, a gleaming Bentley approached, the door hissed open, a gold-plated mechanical arm reached out, picked up the old man and his wheelchair, and installed him in the driver’s seat. The car rolled away. The hotel guest turned to me, grinning like an idiot. “That was awesome,” he said.

Only in LA does porn get this kind of respect. Drive over the Hollywood Hills into the desert suburbs of Chatsworth and Van Nuys and you’ll find an industry with 6,000 employees, several dozen studio/warehouses, STD clinics and costume suppliers, all geared up to release 7,000 DVDs (and countless hours of internet footage) per year. The 2005 “pornbuster” Pirates cost more than $1 million to make, featured CGI effects, multiple locations and a replica of HMS Bounty. It even had its own film premiere at the Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, one door down from the Oscars’ Kodak Theatre.

By rights, the adult video industry should be thriving. But all is not well in pornland. According to reports over the past fortnight, sales of explicit DVDs have drooped by 30 per cent since 2005, and are expected to become insignificant as online video takes over. Now, in theory, this shouldn’t be a problem – the porn industry practically invented the internet. Accusing porn of not exploiting the internet is a bit like accusing Halliburton of not capitalising on war.

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But here’s the big surprise: YouTube and the phenomenon of “user-generated” content is doing the exact same damage to the porn industry as it’s doing to the mainstream media. Hence the massive success of a website called, yes, YouPorn.com. Not to mention PornoTube.com. All this has taken the LA porn industry by surprise: filming your cat doing a backflip while balancing a mouse on his nose is one thing; filming yourself starkers while doing something unspeakable to your spouse is quite another. Yet Americans are embracing the user-generated porn revolution with almost the same enthusiasm they’ve been documenting the party tricks of their pets.

So is this the death of a $14 billion industry? Or will porn companies do what Hollywood did when TV arrived in the 1950s, and simply go for ever bigger budgets? It’s anyone’s guess. But in the meantime, Flynt should probably start being a bit nicer to the general public. They may soon be his competition.

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