My ex-boss Marv played a dirty trick. He organized an adult video manufacturers’ boycott of a trade show that had been treating them badly. Then, Marv secretly signed up to exhibit at the show. By the time the others found out, it was too late for them to sign up also. As the only X-rated tape company at the show, VCX did booming business. In most trades such tactics would get one ostracised. But Marv’s associates acknowledged that he’d pulled a beauty and vowed not to be suckered again. He was still invited to their poker games.
The porno industry operates as a series of fast-buck hustles. Video didn’t change that. The new, electronic age entrepreneurs like myself learned to be as wary of our peers as of the outside world. Both were treacherous.
“Running Superior Video is like piloting the starship Enterprise,” I said. “Zap! Enemy lasers on the left! Rowr! Gargantuan monster on the right! Waah! Meteor coming straight at you!” Joe Farmer nodded vigorous agreement.
x x x x x x
The misfortune of Noel Bloom illustrates the vulnerability of pornographers to the outside world. The Swedish Erotica chief promoted his Family Home Entertainment line of children’s videos with a float in the Pasadena Rose Parade. It cost him the helm of the porn giant, Caballero Control Corporation. A journalist reported Bloom’s adult industry involvement. In the spotlight of scandal, police nosed out some hard bondage (graphic penetration of a model in restraints that prevent escape —raising the question of coercion) in Caballero’s Bizarre Video line. As part of a plea bargain, Bloom agreed to sever all contact with pornography—at least “officially.”
Pornographers are constantly reminded of “real world” antagonism. When Superior Video’s headquarters (not the sales office) moved into a suite of funky offices above Whole Earth Access in San Rafael, I found out that a few blocks away at 40 Belvedere, police had raided a warehouse full of hardcore books and magazines. Like S and L Distributors a half-decade earlier, we put no identifying signs on our doors. Joe put up a memo: “Keep doors and windows closed at all times. Remember, sound carries in the hallway.”
You can’t keep the nature of your business a total secret. UPS drivers, mail carriers and phone repair personnel find out. You try to get those around you on your side. I bought VCRs from my landlord who owned Whole Earth Access and car insurance from the independent agent in the front suite. We never complained about the screaming from the acting class across the hall—they didn’t believe in underplaying—and sold them blank VHS at our own distributor cost. When the police department solicited donations for their charitable activities, Superior responded quickly.
I maintained the same policy away from the office. I lent my next-door neighbors X-rated tapes. After they sent their eleven-year-old daughter over to fetch Deviations, I told them I’d feel much more
comfortable giving the tapes to them directly. I was the toast of the ski club Shelly was president of when I supplied the entertainment for “Porn and Pizza Night.”
Despite precautions, all pornographers expect trouble eventually. Then, your non-industry friends will shun you and reporters will hound you. The charge of the press corps up the Berkeley courthouse steps had so frightened the slightly-built Joe Elliot that he maced them. With an “us-versus-them” outlook on the world, many porn kings stock their companies with family members, who wouldn’t sic the authorities regardless of what quarrels developed. Without clan members at Superior, I was at risk for episodes like the “Bob H.” affair.
x x x x x x
As the sales staff grew and files bulged with new dealer accounts, the constant hassle over which store “belonged” to which rep reached the crisis stage. A retailer would complain he’d been pestered that morning by four different callers from our office, and he never wanted to hear from Superior Video again.
The sophisticated computer system we installed to keep accounts and leads organized never worked right. It became my sales manager “Bob H.’s” Frankenstein. He’d researched the system, worked out the lease details and helped write a custom software program. Bob became obsessed with making “his baby” work. He’d fail to process new leads and distribute them to the staff, neglect to call his own accounts and snap at anyone who disturbed his hunched concentration over his keyboard. Office morale plunged.
I tolerated his deteriorating mental state as long as I could, until he began bolstering his own lagging commissions by stealing the orders of others—calling their accounts, offering lower prices and writing up the revised orders as his own. Finally, I had to call him into my office and terminate his employment. I felt terrible about it, after all the effort he’d put into the computer. But Bob accepted it stoically. Or so I thought.
The next day Joe became tense and silent after answering his phone. He turned to me and said in a flat tone, “Bob H. just called. He said he was going to put us out of business.”
I called Bob back and felt a chill of adrenaline as I heard him say, “A lot of powerful people in this community would be very interested in knowing the details about a hardcore smut ring operating right under their very noses.” He demanded a month’s severance plus two weeks paid vacation time to keep him quiet.
Joe wanted to capitulate. “Just give Bob what he wants. We don’t need the aggravation. Let’s just be rid of him.”
“But what if he comes back for more?”
I thought of how my ex-mentor Tony Romano would’ve handled the problem and decided to try some “old school” tactics. I met Bob at a noisy Canal District bar. “Let me think this out,” I said, staring down into my Rob Roy. “If I give in to your extortion, what’s to stop you from using the same threat to get more and more and more?” He began to protest but I interrupted. “But if I resist, every anti-porn yahoo in the county will be out to shut me down.”
Bob feigned sympathy. “It doesn’t have to be that way, Dave.”
I stirred my drink. “I’ve got everything tied up in my business. This is my LIFE. If I lose it, I’m ruined. My one shot at success, down the fucking toilet!” I raised my Rob Roy and downed it in one gulp. It burned all the way to my stomach. I waved the waitress over and ordered another.
“Fuck!” I took another stiff gulp, slammed my glass down and shook my head. “I won’t give in to you, so I guess I’m screwed. Everything I’ve worked for—turned to shit!”
“Dave, Dave–”
“And then I’m supposed to live with myself knowing that the guy who fucked my life is still around to laugh about it?” I stared off, trying to look distracted and maybe a bit unhinged. “That wouldn’t be tolerable…”
For a moment Bob was silent, then he leaned forward. “Look, if you’re trying to threaten me, I’ll have you know there are people concerned about my welfare. If something happens to me, they’ll know who to come after. So you better hope I lead a long and healthy life!”
“I hope so.” I sipped my drink. “But if that becomes unfeasible…”
For a long moment, neither of us spoke. Then I looked into Bob’s eyes. “You do what you feel you have to, Bob, and I’ll…” I gave a slow Tony Romano nod of tragic resignation. “I guess I’ll have to do the same.”
We left the bar and went separate ways into the night.
Weeks later, I got a small claims court summons. I immediately counter-sued Bob H. for the amount of his fouled-up orders. As I’d hoped, the judge ruled that the two suits cancelled each other out. Bob didn’t once mention what kind of products Superior Video dealt in.
x x x x x x
Allyssa Hampton was no instant success. Trying out for one of Superior’s phone jobs, the future adult video marketing legend would deliver the pitch, hear responses like “Who the fuck cares?” and go home in tears.
But Allyssa persisted, studying books on sales techniques. “Lissy is five times a Scorpio,” said her best friend and roommate Alana. “Birth, moon and several other houses. When she sets her mind on mastering something, she is very much the all-conquering, unstoppable force.”
It took a while to find that out. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the short, compact woman with the greying page-boy hair and intense brown eyes. But I began to notice Allyssa’s weekly sales totals compared to the rest of the staff. Theirs kept dropping; hers kept rising. She’d picked up on a shift in the marketplace that the rest of us weren’t yet aware of.
With all the new adult video manufacturers starting up in 1984, retailers became swamped with sales calls. To avoid spending hours on the phone each day, dealers turned to “one-stops.” Instead of buying 100 adult tapes from forty different callers, a retailer bought them all from one source. After hearing the often-repeated line “I only buy from my distributor,” Allyssa would solicit the name of that distributor, whom she would then call. She was soon selling Superior tapes to every distributor in the nation, from local buyers’ groups to the eight General Video giants that were part of Reuben Sturman’s empire.
Operating on slim profit margins and high volume turnovers, distributors had a hellbroth of tricks in store for beating down phone reps’ prices. At Superior, only Allyssa developed the wiles to deal with them:
“I’m not supposed to sell Running Wild to anyone else in the New York area because you’re buying 150 pieces? Come on! If you take 500 maybe…”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t move all the Dirty Pictures, Al, but company policy won’t let me exchange previously-sold titles for new ones. I’ll tell you what I’ll do: if you promise not to tell anyone, I’ll give you a price on Bad Girl that no one else is going to get until after CES…”
A General Video manager liked to browbeat lower prices out of sales reps by denigrating their titles. “Physical II is a piece of shit!” Allyssa: “Come on, Earl, you know it’s the best thing you’ve ever seen.” Earl (to his staff): “Hey guys, what do you think of Physical II?” Background voices: “Garbage!” “Piece of shit!” Allyssa: “Come on, Earl. You don’t have to pull this act on me…” After Earl had his fun, Allyssa would get her 100-piece order—giving no special discounts.
Allyssa said many people bought from her because they were tired of being “harassed,” which she did with a bouncy, upbeat sparkle that could perk up people on the verge of suicide. She’d laugh at bad jokes, trade bonhomies with melodic enthusiasm, scribble an order, gracefully sign off, then hang up the phone and mutter, “Now let’s see… which asshole can I call next…”
Her friend and confidante Alana helped Allyssa bring a semblance of order to the sales office in the wake of Bob H.’s mismanagement. A sophisticated, unflappable Englishwoman of middle age, Alana was well-traveled and educated in fine arts. She kept the office organized and gave the company an aura of refinement when she answered the phones with her clipped, upper-class accent.
Alana had no trouble handling the occasional obscene calls on the mail-order 800 line. A voice panted “Hey, baby, I’m masturbating,” and Alana responded, “So you’ve seen some of our movies. Well, good. They can definitely help you with your problems.” I was at the sales office when a teenaged girl called and said, “My panties are wet.” Alana replied, “That’s what happens when you forget your diaper.” The girl didn’t call again.
Alana became passionately involved in the constant search for new movie concepts. She came up with the title and script idea for Diary of a Bad Girl. Clipping ads from Vogue, she said, “I’m getting so I can’t look at things any more without thinking of the commercial possibilities.”
With Joe Farmer and I at the San Rafael quarters and Allyssa and Alana at the Sausalito sales office, Superior Video now had a family better able to run an adult video company than most of those based on genealogy. One such company, owned by the world’s biggest and most powerful pornographer, plunged into a marketing crisis, due in part to the practice of hiring family and friends.
x x x x x x
A friend of mine, part of the brain trust at Reuben Sturman’s new company Vidco, told me Sturman kept moaning, “I’ve never had this much trouble meeting my numbers with anything I’ve ever done before!” Sturman was right; his business history had been a string of successes.
His erotica enterprises had begun in the early 1950s when this son of a Russian immigrant and neighborhood grocer in Cleveland added nudie magazines to the comic books he’d been peddling to news stands from the back of his car. Sturman’s own news stands became porno bookstores, in which he pioneered the quarter-slot peep-shows that became the foundation of his empire.
Behind a tangle of intertwined corporations, the secretive “Howard Hughes of porn” accumulated over 300 bookstores and peep-show arcades nationwide, large warehouses in most of America’s big cities, and outlets in forty foreign countries. Amused at being called “the world’s kingpin of porn,” Sturman named his fortress-like, barbed wire-encircled Cleveland distributorship Sovereign News Company. He’d let small operators who bought Sovereign’s films, magazines, rubber goods and Doc Johnson “marital aids” run up huge debts. Then he’d sue with blitzkrieg swiftness and take over their businesses. When informed that his new San Francisco General Video branch faced competition from the long-established Now Showing, Sturman had laughed and said, “They could easily become ‘Now Closing.’”
Sturman beat a half-dozen major prosecutions. In 1991, he was finally convicted of racketeering after an FBI agent and a former employee testified that Sturman’s “X-rated supermarket,” Talk of the Town, shipped the Golden Showers loop series, the feces-eating video You Said A Mouthful, and films of women having sex with “horses, pigs, ponies, dogs, a mule, a cow and a chicken.”
Before I first met Sturman in 1986 to discuss shooting for him, I was apprehensive. My experience with his tactics hadn’t been pleasant. Early in 1985, the king had decreed that the peep-show arcade rights to every X-rated video in the land be granted to him for the princely sum of one dollar each. Non-complying adult manufacturers would be barred from selling to Sturman’s General Video distributorships, losing roughly a third of their sales volume.
Most manufacturers signed Sturman’s contract. They knew arcades were running their tapes anyway, despite the box phrase “Not for Public Exhibition.” If Sturman wanted to make it legal and official, fine. I, however, read the fine print. Couched in legalese, the contract stipulated that if one of my tapes was in a Sturman arcade booth that got busted, I would be responsible for the cost of his legal defense.
Sturman’s self-described “contract doctor” Jerry Greenberger was willing to drop the clause. He seemed surprised it had slipped past other manufacturers. But by the time attorneys finished hashing out the details, months had passed. At first Allyssa had been frantic for me to sign the contract. But then the General Videos, uneasy about partaking in a restriction of trade conspiracy, began buying from her on the sly.
Waiting 45 minutes for Sturman in a brittle chair in the lobby of Vidco in North Hollywood, I wondered if he’d remember my contract holdout. I determined not to be intimidated by the fearsome porn mogul, as my Canadian client had been: “He punches a button that locks his office door behind you,” said the Toronto distributor, “And you sit there with this surveillance camera trained on you. Instead of looking at you during the conversation, Sturman watches your face on his video screen.”
Sturman arrived with apologies for being late; he’d been caught in traffic. His face had lost some of the angular hardness of earlier photos, but he still seemed much younger than sixty-one. My friend at Vidco said Sturman put on a jogging suit every day around noon and went out for a run. He was still tough—when he’d caught a man breaking into his car, he’d punched the thief out—but the built-in sneer of the news shots was gone. I couldn’t believe this friendly man in designer jeans was the fearsome Sturman of legend.
No camera was trained on me in Sturman’s office. He offered me a comfortable chair and a cigar —which I declined. “I usually don’t light one up before four o’clock,” he said, striking a match. “But it’s already been a long day.”
From the blond wood and silken fabric of the furnishings to the delicate vases on the shelves, the theme of Sturman’s office was light and Oriental, with none of the oppressive ostentation of most porn potentates. I remarked on the beauty of three gleaming Chinese figures, each about two feet high, on a shelf behind Sturman’s desk. “I bought them when I was in China,” he said. “They’re a little over a hundred years old. The Chinese are very superstitious, and these figures often appear in businesses and homes to bring good fortune.” Sturman explained that the old man with the long white beard represented longevity, the richly-dressed middle-aged man stood for prosperity and the laughing man with the baby in his arms meant fertility.
A chubby greying man surprised me by rushing into the office without knocking. He had an urgent problem he wanted a solution to. Sturman didn’t have it. “We’ll discuss this when I’m back in Cleveland next week.” But the man kept persisting and Sturman finally said, “Look, I’m not God.”
After he left, I said, “I thought you were God, too.”
Sturman laughed. “If I were God, maybe I could tell when people are lying to me, but I can’t.” “Well, that’s something we both have in common.”
“If you had to be God, everyone would be coming to you to solve their problems.” Sturman laughed again. “I get enough of that already.”
He gave me a tour of his premises, and I began to see why he was courting new video talent. The warehouse racks were stacked to the rafters with tapes. Either Vidco needed a deep inventory to meet heavy demand, or their titles just weren’t moving—which I concluded upon seeing that none of the 160 new dubbing machines were running.