NYT porn as business article -- continued ...
He points me toward the larger producers whose videos top AVN's charts and have the
widest TV distribution. There are many successful companies, but some of them cater to
niche markets (like gay men) that as of yet haven't cracked the national mass market of
TV, where pay-per-view pornographic movies, though priced two or three times higher
and not promoted, often outsell the Hollywood hits competing head to head. In a
business with no barrier to entry -- anyone with a video camera can be a director or star
-- there are also countless bottom feeders selling nasty loops on used tape. Whatever the
quality or origin of a product, it can at the very least be exhibited on one of the 70,000
adult pay Web sites, about a quarter of which are owned by a few privately held
companies that slice and dice the same content under different brands.
Fishbein has a staff of 62 to track it all. He seems smart, sensible and mercurial -- in
other words, just like any other successful editor. And like almost everyone else I met in
porn, he says he fell into it by accident. While a journalism student at Temple University
in his hometown, Philadelphia, he managed a video store and found that customers kept
asking him how to differentiate one adult tape from another. It was the early 80's, and
the VCR was starting to conquer America, its popularity in large part driven (as the
Internet's would be later) by the easier and more anonymous access it offered to porn.
Prior to home video, pornography had a far smaller audience, limited mainly to men
willing to venture into the muck of a Pussycat Cinema -- the "raincoaters," as the trade
refers to that dying breed of paleo-consumer. The VCR took porn into America's
bedrooms and living rooms -- and, by happenstance, did so at the same time that the
spread of AIDS began to give sexual adventurers a reason to stay home. There is no
safer sex than porn.
As adult titles on tape proliferated, Fishbein started a newsletter to rate them. Other
video-store owners, uncertain about which porn films to stock, took a look. Now, some
18 years later, Fishbein runs an empire that includes 10 Web sites and spinoff journals
like AVN Online. He also stages trade shows and presents the AVN Awards in Vegas in
January. An issue of AVN can run in excess of 350 slick pages, much of it advertising,
in which a daunting number of reviews (some 400 a month) jostle for space with sober
reportage like "For Adult, Ashcroft Signals Circle the Wagons Time." Fishbein has a soft
spot for porn veterans like Al Goldstein, the 65-year-old paterfamilias of Screw magazine
who writes a column for Fishbein's main Web site, AVN.com, in which Goldstein
sometimes rails against the new corporate generation of pornographers who have no
memory of the daring and sacrifice of their elders. "Al Goldstein took 19 arrests for this
business," Fishbein says reverently.
Though he embodies the corporatization of porn, Fishbein exudes a certain swagger.
"I'm here by accident, and now that I'm here, I'm proud of what I do," he says. "My
mother sits at my awards table each year when girls accept awards for oral sex. Sex
sells and it drives the media, and it always has. Billboards, movies, ads, commercials. It's
what we're thinking about at all times of the day. We're told it's bad, and it manifests
itself as political debates."
Fishbein assures me that he has no "naked girls running through the office," and alas, he
is right -- though a staff member does wander in with a photo to ask, "Was that the
naked sushi party?" But there's a pleasant buzz and bustle about the place -- one I
associate with journalism. "This could be a magazine about pens and pencils," Fishbein
says. Maybe.
The browsers on the two computers behind his desk are kept on CNN.com and
AVN.com, which is modeled on CNN's as a (porn) news portal. The decor of his large,
meticulous office is mostly movie memorabilia. A film buff as well as a news junkie,
Fishbein is a particular fan of the high-end comedies of Woody Allen, Albert Brooks and
Preston Sturges, and he could be a highly articulate, slightly neurotic leading man out of
one of them. He speaks glowingly of having just taken his 12-year-old stepdaughter to
"Yi Yi." Does he watch the movies that AVN reviews? He flinches. "I haven't watched an
adult movie without fast-forwarding since I saw one in a theater at 18. I watch them for
business reasons. My wife and I don't watch them for entertainment. It is hard for me to
look at it as more than product."
Many of the top porn producers are within blocks of Fishbein's office in the utterly
anonymous town of Chatsworth -- an unhurried, nondescript sprawl of faded strip malls,
housing developments and low-slung (and usually unmarked) business complexes that
look more like suburban orthodontic offices than porn factories. Everyone in the
business seems to know one another. "There's a certain camaraderie among those who
are on the fringe of society, a similarity to outlaws," Fishbein says. Yet he seems like
anything but an outlaw; he was about to fly off to the Super Bowl and then a skiing
vacation. I ask if organized crime is a factor in today's porn world. "When I got here, I
heard there were mob companies," he answers. "But I've never even been approached by
a criminal element. I've never been threatened or bribed. So if it ever existed, it's part of
the history of the business." He almost sounds disappointed.
Russell Hampshire, who owns one of the biggest companies, VCA Pictures, did do
time in jail -- nine months in 1988 for shipping obscene videotapes across state
lines to federal agents in Alabama. Somewhat more prosaically, he is also a
graduate of McDonald's Hamburger U., which he attended while running McDonald's
franchises in El Paso in the 70's. It's business training that came in handy in the porn biz.
"I learned about inventory, buying the proper insurance, doing everything by the book,
not taking shortcuts," he says.
Hampshire, who runs VCA with his wife of 10 years, Betty, has an Oscar Madison look
-- Hawaiian shirts, gym shorts and a baseball cap. I wouldn't want to get on his bad side.
He's big and leathery and sounds like Lee Marvin as written by Damon Runyon. Asked
why the sign outside says "Trac Tech" instead of VCA, he says he wants to stay "as
innoculous as possible."
He has been in the business since 1978 and waxes nostalgic for the early video days,
when you could transfer a prevideo Marilyn Chambers classic to cassette and sell it
wholesale for up to a hundred bucks. Now his top movies wholesale for $18 or $19,
sometimes lower. "There used to be only 10 to 12 titles to choose from in a video store,"
he says. "Now there are thousands of titles." A typical release may sell only 2,000 units
or less -- 7,500 would be a modest hit -- but thanks to TV and international sales,
Hampshire says he makes money "on every title." Though the total income from a hit is
pocket money by Hollywood standards, Hollywood should only have such profit
margins. An adult film that brings in $250,000 may cost only $50,000 to make - five
times the original investment. Production locations are often rented homes, shooting
schedules run less than a week, and most projects are not shot on the costly medium of
film. There are no unions or residuals. Marketing costs are tiny, since quote ads run in
AVN and skin magazines, not in national publications or on TV. Most economically of all,
porn movies don't carry the huge expense of theatrical distribution: video killed off adult
movie theaters far more effectively than it did regular movie theaters.
Still, Hampshire resents the lower overhead of porn's newcomers: "I have 80 employees.
I have a 100 percent medical plan for everyone's family -- dental and vision care too.
Some of my guys have been working here 17 or 18 years. And I'm up against amateurs
with $800 Handicams." He also grouses about the new administration in Washington, as
many in the industry do, fearing there could be a replay of the war on porn during the
Reagan years, when Attorney General Edwin Meese called for restrictions on live sex
shows and the dissemination of pornographic materials. "I like the rest of Bush's cabinet
-- just not Ashcroft," Hampshire says.
With the company's in-house press rep, a former preschool teacher named Mischa Allen,
in tow, Hampshire takes me on a tour of VCA's 40,000-square-foot operation, proudly
showing off the state-of-the-art video-editing bays, the room containing 3,000
video-duplication decks (churning out 400,000 tapes a month) and the prop room in
which I spot a neon sign for "Bada Boom" from the set of the recent "Sopornos 2." The
mechanized assembly line on which the tapes are boxed and shrink-wrapped is as
efficient as that for bottling Coke.
But more than anything, VCA resembles the corporate headquarters of a sports
franchise. Only on close inspection do I realize that a towering glass case full of what
look like trophies in the reception area in fact contains awards such as the 1996 Best
Group Sex Scene, bestowed upon the "Staircase Orgy" from "New Wave Hookers 4."
Hampshire, an avid golfer and bowler, has lined VCA's corridors with his collection of
autographed sports jerseys, the latest from Tiger Woods. On one wall are plaques of
appreciation from the Hampshires' philanthropic beneficiaries, including a local school to
which they donate video equipment and free yearbook printing.
Hampshire's own office is spacious, outfitted with leather furniture, but --
characteristically for the business -- looks like a bunker. Above his desk is a console of
TV screens tuned into the feeds from security cameras. Incongruously, this inner
sanctum's walls are festooned with another variety of pompously framed "collectibles" --
autographed letters and photographs from Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter
and Richard Nixon. Hampshire says they're all copies, but he points to a melted-looking
clock and says, "I've got Salvador Dalis all over the place -- authentic Salvador Dalis." He
also shows off a vintage group photo of Murder Inc.
But Hampshire describes his existence as considerably more mundane than Bugsy
Siegel's. He almost never goes to a set, where the hurry-up-and-wait pace makes it as
"boring as Hollywood." He ticks off his duties: "Dealing with distributors and OSHA rules
and regulations. I have to write reviews of all my department heads and decide raises."
As I leave his office I notice still another framed artifact: a Bronze Star for "exceptionally
valorous action on 12/8/67" while serving as a Company C rifleman in combat in
Vietnam. The citation says that Hampshire "continually exposed himself to hostile fire"
while saving the lives of his fellow soldiers.
It's the only thing that seems to embarrass him. "I buried it for so long," he says. "When
I first came out here, I was ashamed to say anything because people might say I'm a bad
person."
Almost every adult company is pursuing innovative media, preparing for Internet
broadband and interactive hotel-room TV. At Wicked Pictures' newly revamped
Web site, for instance, a visitor can cross-index a particular porn star with a
sexual activity, then watch (and pay for) just those scenes that match. Digital
Playground's "Virtual Sex" DVD's resemble video games in how they allow the user to
control and inject himself into the "action."
As in nonadult video, DVD is
(see next post ...) |
