It was Superior Video’s first flop and I didn’t know why. Dirty Pictures had all the right ingredients: a box picture of Traci Lords on black satin wearing red underthings and her famous pout; plenty of hot sex with group, girl-girl, and inter-racial action; and a fast-paced story, based on a case described to me by Lieutenant Lex Zabel of the LAPD Administrative Vice unit: a couple hires a pornographer to shoot them having sex so they’ll be able to watch their own young bodies in action when they grow old. Then they find that the pornographer has made extra copies and sold them to porn shops. Despite its attributes, Dirty Pictures only sold 1,100 pieces.
Then Physical II, released in the fall of ’85, sold nearly 4,000 pieces out the door—a smash hit. (The popularity of the original Physical helped.) Maybe, I thought, the failure of Dirty Pictures was just an aberration. When Diary of a Bad Girl also reached the desired 3,000-piece mark, Joe, Allyssa, and I expected our next release, E.X., to be a smash. The sci-fi flick had a classy cover of Nina Hartley’s soft-lit beauty against a night sky with spacecraft and starbursts. The box also had photos of the large cast cavorting with glowing, phallic aliens. How could the title fail?
It did. Only 1,062 pieces out the door.
The strong market that had brought growth and prosperity to Superior Video between 1982 and 1985 had become like a car starting to run out of gas—its smooth running interrupted by missing and stuttering. We were entering “The Smut Glut,” a crowded marketplace of porn company sales veterans, small-time shooters, “Mafia poor relations,” and industry newcomers, who began manufacturing and marketing their own X-rated videos in 1984. In ’83, there had been only about a dozen adult video manufacturers; by 1985, according to Video Business magazine, there were four times that many. Of the 96 California video software distributors listed by the VSDA in August of 1985, 45 were also adult tape manufacturers.
The number of porn video releases escalated—as noted by AVN—from 400 in 1983 to 1,100 in ’84 and 1,610 in 1985. The home video industry wasn’t growing fast enough to assimilate them all. “There used to be 25 new titles a month and the store owner would buy 15 or 20 of them,” lamented VCA’s Russ Hampshire. “He’s still buying the same number of tapes but now he has hundreds to choose from.” The adult movie industry was on the brink of chaos.
We were entering a time of rip-offs, lawsuits, arsons, and even murders; a time of bitter price wars, when even large, long-established companies would go bankrupt; a time when the production of big-budget X-rated motion pictures would end.
I had known production would increase when Superior’s competitors discovered the low-cost ease of shooting video but I didn’t anticipate the full impact of what Ted, my “electronic shrink” at Compact Video, called “the pornographer’s rapacious peasant mentality.”
The summer of 1985 reminded me of the proverbial cartoon image of a tattered soul crawling across a desert. Superior Video’s sales for July reached a record one month low of only 394 tapes. Our catalog of past pictures no longer sustained Superior between new movie releases.
I thought Allyssa would be happy when I told her she could drop the price of catalog titles from $19 to $15. Instead she frowned. “I don’t think that will help much. Some companies are dumping older titles at $12.” She had just returned from the new General Video branch in San Francisco where the manager had shown her a foot-high stack of one-sheets for new titles. “There’s already too much new stuff out there,” he’d said. “The last thing I need is catalog shit.”
When Joe said that Superior needed a new release every two months, Allyssa scoffed, “Maybe if you came out with Taboo Number 10 (referring to Kirdy Stevens’ popular series of incest features) you’d have a sales life that long. What you really need is a new title every couple of weeks, like AVC (Adult Video Corporation) is doing.”
“They aren’t really making money on all those releases, are they?” I asked. “Of course not,” Allyssa answered. “They’re just trying to hang in there.”
x x x x x x
Despite the plunging prices, out-the-door sales quantities kept falling. AVN estimated that sales of new adult releases were down 40% in the first quarter of 1987, compared to the same period in ’86, despite an overall market growth of 16%. By 1989, adult tape companies were lucky to move 2,000 pieces of a new title. Many retailers refused to pay $20 for a new tape when they knew that in a month they could get the same title for $10.
Distributors, in turn, limited the number of pieces they would buy brand new at $12 -$15; a month later, they’d get it for half those prices.
Caught in this downward vortex, manufacturers lost money on each release (Sturman said that a wholesale price under $20 was unprofitable) but had to keep pumping out product faster and faster to keep their cash flow numbers up. Some cut back by using cheaper tape brands, which often jammed in VCRs or clogged playback heads. Some cut sales commissions—and ended up with the dregs of the boiler-room gypsies. None dared lower package and one-sheet quality—those were what sold the tape. But there was one place where cut-backs could be unlimited: the production costs of the movies themselves.
When production budgets began to fall in the mid-’80s, director Bruce Seven groaned, “What kind of quality can you turn out in two days?” By 1993, the “one-day wonder” had become standard, and
AVN editor Gene Ross recalled Seven’s earlier complaint: “Seven, as any other director in the
business, would probably kill for that kind of latitude nowadays.” x x x x x x
“What’s the difference between the old silent 8-millimeter loops and the video features of today?” asked reviewer Steve Austin in the February ’91 AVN issue. His answer: “The guys take their sox off now.” Publisher Paul Fishbein scolded, “At this crucial stage in the history of adult video, the industry should be ashamed of itself.” “The overall quality in the adult genre has been steadily going into the toilet the last two years,” went an editorial by Fishbein and editor Ross, “…and these cheaper videos are the flush handles.”
economics aphorism “bad money drives good money out of the marketplace” to the barrage of cheap videos forcing producers to lower their standards.
Some refused to. Cal Vista’s feisty president Sid Niekerk had once drawn himself up to his full five-foot-four and proclaimed in my face his hatred for the shot-on-video look. But the theatrical market was dying: from over 2,000 adult theaters in the mid-’70s it would drop to 500 in ’85 and to 200 by 1993. Since the tape market couldn’t support the high-quality 35s Niekerk had built his company with, he left the adult video business, selling to Caballero the American video rights to Cal Vista’s entire catalog of 150-plus major X-rated features.
“God, it’s a ballbuster!” said Anthony Spinelli in the March, 1989, issue of X-Video Review, describing the shooting of one-day wonders. “You start at seven in the morning, or eight, and you’re not through—for me—until three the next morning.” When Joe Farmer and I ran cameras for Spinelli’s Plum Productions, the director/ manufacturer—in a budget squeeze—asked us to work 24 hours straight for our normal day rates—no overtime.
By the beginning of the 1990s, budgets had become so tight that the acclaimed Henri Pachard was forced to crank out three features in one day! (Not as impossible as it sounds: the trick is to shoot three separate dialog scenes with the same cast on each setup, to fit three different stories.)
Budgets plunged so low that the production of the cover photo and the printing of the box literally cost more than the movie itself. Directors complained about being limited to shooting four quick sex scenes with a cast of a half-dozen and calling it a feature, but many of porn’s new CEOs didn’t care how shoddy their product was. Video Exclusives’ Mark Curtis told AVN his “philosophy” was “Give the people a wall-to-wall sex program that’s light on story, big on action, star-packed, and they’ll be happy.” On a four-month shooting binge of ten sex scenes a day, Curtis reportedly got models to work at the 1970s loop rates of $125 a scene for females and $75 for males.
The demand for tons of titles at micro-budgets led to the Stallion Productions debacle of 100 videos in thirty days, after which the producers and their tapes disappeared without paying cast and crew. AVN’s Ross made the sarcastic prediction that “thanks to new Japanese technology that actually condenses time, some adult video company will hit on the brilliant concept of producing 100 videos in thirty minutes.”
x x x x x x
To feed their fast-track release schedule, many companies bypassed shooting entirely.
Desperate for a new title but unwilling to throw money away shooting one, I did something that would become a trend: create a new movie out of old footage. The premise of The Reincarnation of
Don Juan was that Don Juan, languishing in Hell, would be allowed into Heaven if he does a good
deed for womankind whom he had so cavalierly used in his lifetime. His task is to return to Earth and give a woman an orgasm. The catch is that he is reincarnated as a flea.
That story angle allowed me to disguise recognizable sex scenes by surrounding bodies with “flames of Hell” created by my “little black box” effect generator. I used change-of-camera-position travel over floors, rugs, and ground as the flea’s point-of-view shots. And I had a good excuse for lots of gynecological close-ups, as the flea narrates his frustrations with the logistics of his task.
You can fool some of the people some of the time: a reviewer for Adam Film World’s Adult Video
Guide wrote, “Lots of pluses here: storyline, sex, camerawork, editing—it all comes together. Shanna
McCullough and Traci Lords stand out, as always.” But savvy viewers and distributors weren’t fooled. The Reincarnation of Don Juan got so many complaints and threats to drop the Superior line
—not to be taken lightly in this dire business climate—that I didn’t try the scam again. But other companies pulled recycled footage rip-offs more blatant than mine.
In mid-’85, Hollywood Video came up with Seka’s Teenage Diary , boasting “exclusive, never- seen-before footage of the platinum blonde beauty when she was just a teenager.” Two years later, VCR released The Lost Episodes of Seka, similarly hyped as “never before seen on video.” The footage in both cases was actually from those old Scorpio Etc. half-hour shows that had worried me in 1978 by beating my own shot-on-video shows to the marketplace.
Producer Perry Ross excused the use of the same three sex scenes in both The Autobiography of
Herman Flogger and Hanna Does Her Sisters, saying they were “edited differently.” Desperate
manufacturers pumped out “wraparounds” (new footage ‘wrapped around’ old) and compilations—if you had three or more scenes of some obscure model named Connie Lingus, you released The Best of
Connie Lingus. Some simply retitled old movies, put them in new boxes and sent them out as brand
new releases. AVN called companies such as Limelight Releasing, notorious for retitling old product, “pariahs, predators and scum.”
Running out of title names for all their new releases, producers looked to outside sources. The Reverend Jim Bakker/Jessica Hahn affair inspired PTL (Pay The Lady). English literature, patriotism, comic strips, and network television begat Great Sexpectations, Yank My Doodle, It’s a
Dandy, Bedman and Throbbin’, Vasoline Alley, Gonad the Barbarian, The Twilight Moan, Genital Hospital, and Leave It To Cleavage. Even commercials played a role, with Mikey Likes It and This Butt’s For You. Among the rip-offs of Hollywood titles were Backside to the Future, All That Jizz, The Load Warriors, Jane Bond Meets Thunderballs, The Poonies, Romancing the Bone, Pumping Irene, Poltergash and The Sperminator. There were Bimbo: Hot Blood, Part I and Ramb-OHH!; Beaverly Hills Cop, Beverly Hills Cox, and Beverly Hills Copulator; and Sister Dearest, Daddy Dearest and Mommy Queerest. A full-page AVN ad for Executive Video’s Butts Motel II featured a
woman in a shower being assaulted by a figure in a granny wig brandishing a dildo.
And then there was Debbie. After the sequels to the original hit reached Mark Curtis’ Debbie Does
Dallas IV, producers branched out with Debbie Goes to College, Debbie Does ’Em All, and Night of the Living Debbies. Bob Vosse directed Debbie Duz Dishes, and Spinelli couldn’t resist And I Do Windows Too, inciting Dishes distributor Adult Video Corporation to complain “WE WERE RIPPED
OFF!” Debbie Does Dishes III producer Richard Aldrich announced in AVN his plans for Bang the
Debbie Slowly. Wanting their own “Debbie” title to cover as much porn turf as possible, Essex Video
called their 1987 release Debbie Does the Devil in Dallas. Walt Disney Productions sued Ventura Video, fearing the public would confuse the hardcore In and Out in Beverly Hills with Disney’s
Down and Out in same. Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie company, sued Soho Video over Victoria’s Secret the porno. Mitchell Brothers Film Group won $160,000 in remunerations and punitive
damages from Essex, plus an order restraining that manufacturer from using “Green Door,” “Censored Door,” the word “Door” in green colors, or “a visual depiction of a green-colored door.”
“I shot this picture with Shanna McCullough called Ecstasy,” Spinelli told me. “So just when I release it, this schmuck (Lawrence T. Cole of Now Showing) releases this cheap piece of shit under me called Xtasy—spelled with an ‘X’—with Shanna on the box. All I could move was 1,500 pieces.” Spinelli swore he’d never again mention the name of a title he was working on until the day it was ready to hit the street. Years later I was doing sound on a Spinelli set and asked him the name of the movie we were making. Spinelli replied, “Number 1027.”
Desperate over dwindling sales, companies concocted off-beat promotional gimmicks. Intropics pushed the safe-sex angle in The Huntress with a condom in every cassette box. An order of any size
for Caballero’s Stiff Competition came with an exploding penis slinky in a can. Naked Scents included a vial of cologne. Fifty Fashion Fantasies boxes hid gift certificates from Fredericks of Hollywood. Twenty lucky people pulled out their Beverly Hills Copulator cassettes and found a gift certificate for “the dream date of a lifetime with Traci Lords.” Howard Farber of Video-X-Pix complained that things had gone too far when he was offered cassette boxes that were supposed to contain human pubic hair.
My ex-boss Tony Romano tried to bring a fast and dirty buck into his failing Visual Entertainment Productions (VEP) by appealing to pedophiles with Little Kimmi Johnson. The giggly, coltish Kimmi’s disclaimer that she is really 19 years old and merely “re-living” on videotape the adventures and fantasies of her girlhood didn’t stop police agencies from busting the tape.
Scenes of the gamine in parochial plaid skirts and bobby socks, seducing her science teacher, her mother’s boyfriend and the mother herself clearly violated the L.A. ordinance against depicting underaged sex. With no other companies willing to risk competing in this “market,” Kimmi did well enough for the daring Romano to bring out “her kid sister,” Little Muffy Johnson.
With all the price wars, product dumping, scams, gimmicks and rip-offs, the video market in the latter half of the 1980s became a battlefield. When the elephants fight, goes a business saying, the ants get stomped. As one of the smallest competitors in the adult video field, Superior Video was getting crushed.
x x x x x x
More maddening than the falling prices and low sales figures were slow collections. Some of Superior’s clientele had legitimate reasons for bad checks and late payments. Larry Field, one of our most reliable customers, lost his warehouse to arson. When Allyssa asked a New York distributor to please pay his bill, he flew into a rage; Allyssa hadn’t known that two days before her call, the man’s partner had been murdered, with sixteen .22 slugs in his head. Ferris Alexander, head of AB Distributors in Minnesota, was preoccupied with the aftermath of an anti-porn demonstrator immolating herself in one of his bookstores.
With their profits squeezed by falling prices, Superior’s 30-day distributor accounts were taking 60, 90, and 120 days. I couldn’t help but laugh when a General Video check came with the instructions, “Please don’t deposit until April 1.” Without Allyssa to browbeat them, some accounts wouldn’t pay at all. “They’ll only pay for their last order when they want your next title,” Harry Young of Select/Essex told me. “If they want your next title.” Hollywood’s major studios, also feeling the crunch, were putting pressure on one-stops to maintain sales quotas. So some of the one- stops were dropping the smaller adult lines.
I found myself sinking the money I’d made from Superior Video back into the company: $8,000 here, then $3,000, then another $5,000—all on paper as “loans”—just to stay afloat.
The financial crisis made a bad check from Tony Romano for $10,525 all the more infuriating. As my attorney dunned VEP, I’d lie awake nights fantasizing about bursting into my ex-boss’s office with Maggie spewing .357 slugs—especially after my attorney gave his opinion that Romano and his partner Norm Berkoff were “raping their company” of cash. But I didn’t think they were gloating about screwing me; they were in such a money crunch that even their in-house bill collector turned against them. That story was one of the industry’s few current chuckles. The collector, a muscular tough named Ron, had ended an argument with Berkoff by punching him out. According to a VEP saleslady, “Tony came in, drunk as usual, and goes, ‘What’s Nahmy doin’ layin’ dere on da flahr?’
Someone tells him Ron punched Norm out. Tony just shrugs and says, ‘Hey, dese t’ings happen.’ Then he goes into his office and locks the door. A couple hours later, his secretary looks in. There’s Tony with his head on his desk, fast asleep.”
My attorney managed to get only $4,000 of the bad check amount out of VEP before the company filed Chapter Eleven—joining my ex-clients Select/Essex and Marty Krause of Video Home Entertainment in bankruptcy. There were rumors that even the conservatively-managed “General Motors of Porn” Caballero was about to go under. Caballero president Al Bloom insisted the company only suffered “temporary cash flow problems,” but the leviathan had fallen so deeply in