The 1st Annual AVN Conference continued with discussions that could well be the seedlings for a college course, Porno 101.
Debate about the adult industry having an active lobbyist in Washington, D.C. continued with Bert Levesque, general mananger of Zane Entertainment Group, making some very significant points. Levesque was a former lobbyist in the oil industry.
Levesque: "If you want to do this, you're looking at 2 to 3 million dollars period. Believe me or not, I don't care. I'm telling you what I know. These are expenses. I'm very passionate about this issue because you're going to piss it away. If you want to broker time which we should, focus on local issues, state issues - you get into national issues, you haven't seen sharks. I don't care where you've been in this industry, you haven't seen sharks until you've been to D.C. And they will eat you alive and you will come out with nothing. That's a personal opinion." "We've got a lot of smart people and resources in this industry," said Bill Murphy, owner of Fairvilla in Florida. "These expenses [for a lobbyist] need to be paid for by people who use the product. If person who used the product paid $10 a year, you could have lobbyists onj the state, regional and national levels. An agreement was reached that attorney Paul Cambria and the Free Speech Coalition would continue a search for a Washington lobbyist.
A consensus was also reached on the piracy issue discussed Monday, that, as piracy cases are being searched, there would be more active involvement within the industry to combat those situations as they arise. On the subject of Internet piracy, it was felt that resources and allies like webposse.com were invaluable and should be cultivated.
On the subject of video content, Mary Gates of Adam & Eve related the company's efforts toward setting up specific guidelines for evaluating tapes that could perhaps be extended to the industry-at-large. "We trained and paid our employees to review product," said Gates. "We set up a review system to make sure that we were within the Miller decision guidelines."
Video team's Chris Mann asked Gates what her particular policy views on gaping anuses were. "You had to bring it up," said Gates. Gates was particularly adamant against tapes featuring degradation and humiliation.
A debate went back and forth whether it was possible for the industry to adopt a content standard. The room appeared equally divided on the issue.
Levesque: ""If we have a certain set of standards, we can defend ourselves on those standards. We should learn from Adam & Eve."
The respective roles of the manufacturer and distributor relative to the product glut in the adult network were also discussed.
Attorney Clyde Dewitt took up the cudgel on behalf of the retailers.
DeWitt: "Most of what I do is represent retailers, and retailers are the ones taking all the shit in this industry right now. Do you disagree with me on this? Trying to get retail locations is impossible, I bet there's retailers who would love to open other locations but zoning prohibits it. The retailers are small little People fighting against forces all over the place. They can't get stores opened, they can't expand their stores, they can't advertise. They can't even put signs up in some places except 'books.' And it's getting worse. Unless something is done to counter the force that's closing down all the retail businesses. What you're talking about is just going to get worse. You've got a glut of product, and you've got a ton of people who want to buy it and you got no store to go to to get it. The next thing that's going to happen is they're saying you got to close at ten o'clock. You got to close on Sunday. You got to close on holidays. All that shit's going on, and retailers are financing all that litigation, and an awful lot of them are saying I can't afford it. It's something you ougtht to think about it.
Paul Fishbein: "One of the biggest issues that retailers have gotten back to us [AVN] is limited shelf space, that the biggest problem they have is they want to keep a larger selection of adult material but have to get rid of stuff that may do well because they need more shelf space. Has anybody considered going to sleeve packaging, going to a more compact package. Everybody's afraid that if they do it, they're competitors won't."
Eddie Wedelstedt: "Don't even think about it! This is a very sore subject. It's a loser in every store, except for those #!%&! magazine stores - those liquor stores that sell on the corner. They're not good for us. We have a product. We're not the Internet. We [Goalie Entertainment] got stores. We're no different than Sears or Bullocks. We got a ton of customers who want to get the product, look at the movie, see what the box looks like, see what he's buying. That's the customer who comes into my store."
A heated debate ensued. \n Fishbein: "I got the biggest response from anything I've said…It's a joke."
Eddie Wedelstedt took the podium and offered a stirring summation of the conference's discussions.
Wedelstedt: " The problem that you have in video today comes from…I've been offered 61 stores for sale…different people calling left and right. People are having the same problem. The bottom line is this. In our retail stores today…movies are flat over last year at this time. Rentals are down…sales are down. We're no different than Blockbuster. Look at their figures from last year at this time. Blockbuster made a tremendous deal where basically the movie studios are financing their product. They're stocking their stores. You do that for me, I'll do more for you, too. Give me all the stock free and I'll pay what I sell. Does anybody know what 'non-conforming' is in our business? Let's say there's 3,000 adult bookstores in America. I would say half those stores are stuck with the shelf life they have. They can't even move a wall. I'm not saying we're not making money, but we have to adjust, we have to do different things. All of a sudden, now, there's this thing out there called the Internet, and you're going to get fucked! Unless you do something now. The other night a woman on CNBC said there was over 1,800 sites in America on the Internet just for hate crimes and violence alone. She said we have the tendency in America to come home and see our children on the Playboy Channel - we have this tendency to want to punish them severely. But we could care less about all the violence that's on the Internet. Because we don't know anything about it. That's what's going to happen to you. If there's 1800 sites like that with swastikas, how many do you think are selling adult movies? Do we know how many are out there? These are guys that are knocking you off and selling your product. He's the competition for all of us. You need to join hands and look at this. We have to stop and think what we're going to do to protect us. It's time to stop the bullshit and sit down….in Texas, eight years ago, we got a lobbyist, and we beat laws before you guys did in California. But it doesn't come cheap. We [the oldtimers] fought battles for a long time and expect to keep fighting them. You got to have someone [a lobbyist] that everyone likes and gets along with, so they will chip in and work with him.
\n Some guys take a three-A review pretty seriously. Ferrall Timlake of Xplor Media remembers one with former AVN managing editor Mark Kulkis that had some amusing repercussions.
Timlake: "Back in the days when we were working with director Frank Thring, Thring went to Hawaii and he took Mark along as an AVN person. What Frank was doing for us was creating the double anal series - the first of its kind. We thought we'd get some good press on it. And we thought Mark would be sufficiently smooched to make that happen. We took a 2 ½ hour drive [from San Diego], brought a special disc of a boxcover and surrounding photos hoping to get a great review - or something additional that said, hey, this is double anal, the first of its kind by Frank Thring this famous Private great who's now working for Xplor. We felt that was newsworthy because here was our first big director.
"The issue comes out and I think it was like a three star review with not even a boxcover. That was the first glove being thrown down with Mark. Then I came up to talk about Orgazmo. I thought Orgazmo was newsworthy because a lot of people were making these overtures like they were on the threshold of the mainstream. Here I was not only on the threshold, but bridging it. I had half the pornworld coming into this mainstream feature, and I really thought it was an article. We sat down with him and he said, well, I don't know if there's much of an article here. Which blew my mind. At this point I thought the thumb was down on top of us. We stopped respecting him and started making heavier calls. I don't think we got nasty with him at that point, but we went hard and started being a little rough. He recognized that he was starting to use the editorial power against us. The next big thing was Homegrown 500. We hit this milestone in the business and we felt like this was a story. But we get a little paragraph and it says, 'Big Fucking Deal.' The headline on the paragraph. An obvious double-meaning. At this point it was total war. When he left the magazine he said my stay at the magazine was fun EXCEPT for those guys with the Dr. Seuss-sounding names from San Diego.
"At that point we had to get him back but didn't know what we were going to do. We ended up at CES. We made up all these stickers, and we got everybody that we knew to slap Mark on the back with a sticker [reading xplormedia.com]. If he'd walk through a crowd he couldn't help being pasted with a sticker. He was a walking advertisement for our website. Then we also went and got a thing of ham and eggs and green food dye. We sprinkled it up and put on the inside of a styra-foam food container: 'I do not like them here or there; I do not like them anywhere.' We sent them over to him. He was sitting there with Rob Black and a couple of people. The lunch was delivered and he was really scared. That was the thing we found out later. He was terrified to even open it. He thought he was booby-trapped. Finally Mike South who was sitting there, too, opened up the container. We had a video camera on the whole thing. We got his shocking surprise. We were happy at that point, but it wasn't enough.
"Moffat and I wearing black sweat shirts, came up to Mark saying let's let bygones be bygones. It's all cool. Let's be friendly and get a photo for the press. So we both stood on either side and shook hands. Kulkis was in the middle smiling. Then we got Mike Albo to put in I'm with stupid, and I'm with idiot captions and they ran that photo in Hustler Erotic Video Guide. "I don't know if it had to do with our product or our attitude. I'm not sure. We never understood it. I have a real hard time kissing ass, and I couldn't get that taste off my lips for fucking six months."
\n Because some of the conference attendees had to get back to their businesses, a "farewell" dinner was held Tuesday night at the Maria Bonita restaurant in Cancun.
As reported in a company newsletter about his getting a personality transplant in Switzerland, Chuck Zane is now resting comfortably in a Cancun asylum where he's been seen smoking Wal-Mart cigars.
