Renowned celebrity photographer Michael Grecco makes a Michael Moore-esque leap behind the camera with Naked Ambition, a documentary feature that is billed as “an R-rated look at an X-rated industry,” all as told through the lens of the production of a same-titled coffee table book. A glossy, glancingly entertaining piece of masturbatory self-promotion, Grecco’s film purports to examine this amazing taboo subculture, and what draws people to it, but it mainly just serves as a small slice of “freak pie,” charting three days of choppy interactions with adult industry conventioneers.

Naked Ambition shares a love for name-dropping with at least one of its subjects, touting on its DVD cover an association with Jenna Jameson, Sunny Lane, Joanna Angel, Ron Jeremy and Nautica Thorn. In truth, adult industry icons like Jameson and Jeremy only pop up sparingly (the former isn’t even interviewed), since Grecco’s film is actually part of a side project (the book) that is and of itself another side project. The movie unfolds at the 2006 AVN awards in Las Vegas, where Grecco has been contracted to photograph the awards show winners; after a couple days pulling in starlets and customers for (relatively chaste) photo sessions, he sets up a sidebar backdrop to corral more reluctant participants, like Jameson and Hustler founder Larry Flynt.

So… apart from all the behind-the-scenes stuff relating to the photography sessions, there’s not really a cogent narrative here. Grecco touches some on ambition, but only really in the form of Lane, an eager newcomer to the business whose career is managed by her parents. (That’s a bit creepy.) Is there any through-the-looking-glass perspective from putative biz outsider Greg Fitzsimmons, the cohost of the AVN ceremony? No, and other interviewees who might provide some edifying outside context (a female psychologist, for instance) get relegated to this disc’s bonus materials.

Even when Grecco and his production assistant minions alight upon figures of interest (as with a Chinese aerospace engineer who’s built what he deems an “orgasm machine” for women, or the guy who makes hand-blown glass dildos), there’s no adequate mechanism for follow-up. Instead, there’s just plenty of indulgent voiceover narration. Grecco’s rhapsodic insights about pornography, identity and body comfort seem to alternate between the
fatuous, obvious and hyperbolic. When he shares a brief personal anecdote about how an antibiotic he was given as a child turned his teeth brown as an adolescent and young adult, thus stunting his interpersonal skills, it’s both a bit touching but also jarring, because so little of the rest of Naked Ambition is processed as an innately personal story. It’s not that the choice itself is a problem, but that there’s no real meat here — just the selling of the selling of sex. Emerging starlets Lane, Angel and Thorn provide the closest things to through-lines for the movie, but there isn’t a strong and forceful enough intellectual curiosity to squeeze any legitimate insights from either these or any of the other subjects.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Naked Ambition comes to DVD presented in a 4×3 letterboxed aspect ratio, with an English 2.0 stereo audio track that adequately if not dynamically handles the relatively meager and straightforward aural demands of the title. Optional Spanish subtitles are also included, alongside two different trailers for the movie, and eight excised scenes, running just over 18 minutes, which delve into male performance anxiety, women’s relationship to porn (both as consumers and purveyors) and, naturally, a lifelike silicone sex doll. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C (Disc)