Those guys at MeatCash are assholes.
Arthur Chang, Mike Sullivan, Khan Tusion—they’re despicable human beings.
That’s what you’d like to believe, isn’t it?
Like everything in porn, there are two sides: the glossy box cover and pristine footage that are the finished product, and the suitcase pimp and garbage pail full of used douches that it sometimes takes to get there. Most people only see the former.
With MeatCash, the elements of the theory are reversed. The finished product is messy, like that garbage pail. A lot of people don’t want to look at it. A lot of people are downright offended. Disgusted, even.
But the partners in MeatCash aren’t representative of the stuff you see on their sites (rough sex, DP, bukkake, etc., etc.). Chang and Sullivan aren’t even terribly interested in watching the kind of content MeatCash produces.
They’re three degrees of normal, three contrasting personalities, each with his own niche inside MNP Enterprises, MeatCash’s parent company.
Chang runs the sites. He works hard, is quite possibly the nicest person you’ll ever meet, and goes home to his wife when his day is done.
Sullivan makes the deals. He likes to compare the adult industry to food, is concise and to the point, and loves the ladies.
Tusion is the personality, the visionary. Word is, he still puts his pants on one leg at a time, though.
A little ditty about Jack and Diane
It was called Rough Sex, a series briefly produced by Anabolic six years ago. The first installment in the series won the AVN Award for Best Specialty Tape - BDSM in 2000. The tapes flew off the shelves. A young lad named Khan Tusion directed the movies.
Rough Sex, despite its popularity and acclaim, was discontinued after two installments when allegations surfaced that two performers were coerced into shooting their scenes.
One of the performers, Jewel Valmont, said the rumors were untrue. The other, Regan Starr, claimed she got more than she bargained for, despite agreeing to certain rough elements beforehand.
Tusion defended himself in the maelstrom that followed, saying he was apprehensive about shooting Starr before the scene began and even tried to cancel it.
“Chris and I went in with Regan. I told her that she couldn’t do the scene,” Tusion told industry newsgroup site Rame.net in early 2000. “She sold me a bill of goods, assuring me that she could do it. I told her she was underestimating the emotional impact of the scene. The three people in that room left with the idea that we would attempt to get the scene shot.”
The scene never was finished as intended. Starr called a stop to it after she had had enough. It appeared on the video anyway, as it was shot — with Starr yelling for a halt in the action and walking off the set.
Tusion went on to establish and direct many of Anabolic’s Oral Consumption installments.
Despite the controversy over Rough Sex, it set the stage for Meatholes.com three years later.
“Rough Sex and Oral Consumption were really ahead of their time,” Chang says.
The MeatCash revolution
In July 2003, MeatCash effectively was born when Tusion-directed FrankWank.com, MidnightProwl.com, and Meatholes.com were launched.
Crazy shit, to say the least.
Midnight Prowl, for instance, drops a porn slut in a Los Angeles-area adult store, where she proceeds to suck and fuck the unsuspecting patrons.
Frank Wank is a reality-based concoction, featuring Wank as a pimp auditioning Porn Valley’s finest. The twist is in the attitude.
From the site: “Super Agent Frank Benjamin combs the streets of Los Angeles and the classifieds in search of jizzmop whores to pimp out. He jackpots around with these vile fuck pigs as they swallow his load and clean his asshole with their tongues. All for the promise of filthy cash.”
Reminds you of a field of daisies on a warm spring morning as the sun breaks over the horizon, doesn’t it?
Then there is, of course, Meatholes, which needs no introduction at all. It’s the realization of what Rough Sex could have been; Tusion’s personality is the centerpiece. Though he rarely appears on camera, his voice and his point-of-view style are prominent. The director emotionally abuses whichever $500-a-scene whore happens to be in the studio and then lets his minions spit on, spank, choke, and fuck said tramp in every orifice.
The girls, of course, know what they’re getting into beforehand: They go through two interviews before shooting begins. Each one sets limits for her scene, and most of them do a good bit of acting. The end result is great drama for the porn surfer.
“We knew Meatholes would be our best site, not only because of the controversy, but there’s something unique about it,” Chang says. “It’s the niche. This is drama and frankly, the girls are really good at delivering what we want.”
But it almost never happened.
When Chang joined the company in 2003 as a video editor, the trailers for what would become the first three MeatCash sites were still being edited. The footage had been shot a year earlier, and the partners in the company didn’t know what to do with it.
“I represented girls in the business, and when I saw Bang Bros. – they were making crazy money – I thought I could do it too,” Sullivan says. “I figured the Web was the wave of the future. I’m out here bringing girls to every [video] company in the business, and none of these guys are doing anything with the Web. I thought we should do something.”
When the decision was made to put it on the Web, growth came slowly. In the first two months, MeatCash had 15 joins, but the partners forged ahead.
Chang’s strategies centered on adverting the sites at TGP powerhouse The Hun, which didn’t have a waiting list in 2003.
“We just kept advertising, and it avalanched,” Chang says.
Somewhat surprisingly, in the copycat world of porn, the early MeatCash sites haven’t been duplicated successfully. The reason, along with their success, is Tusion, according to Chang.
“It’s the director’s personality,” he says. “You just can’t duplicate Meatholes or Midnight Prowl.”
Kick in the door and show that bitch who’s boss
Once MeatCash got rolling, there was little to stop it.
The following generated by sites like Meatholes enabled the program to develop a substantial source of in-house traffic. Soon more sites in the same vein followed — GaggingWhores.com, CockBrutality.com, Ass2MouthSluts.com, CumFarters.com, PornJackass.com, and Whorgies.com, to name just a few. The number now has pushed past 30, and late 2005 saw MeatCash begin adding four new sites a month.
The launch of MeatCash Version 3.0 earlier this year even has its partners contemplating making the program invite-only because, as Chang says, “We’re serious about making money, and we only want affiliates who are serious too.”
MNP, which calls a former recording studio in Porn Valley’s Woodland Hills home, began to move in other directions as well.
Video directors from Red Light District, Platinum X Pictures, and Anarchy began calling. Soon, StoneyCash, VouyerCash, and RectalRevenue joined MeatCash, which now represents the online presence for directors Stoney Curtis, Vince Vouyer, Mike John, Erik Everhard, Jon Dough, and Michael Stefano.
Cue food analogy, this time from Chang, “The Web is all gravy to these guys, because they make their money on the DVDs.”
Speaking of DVDs, MNP has followed in the footsteps of successful Web producers like RealityCash and TopBucks in compiling footage and releasing it on the other market with help from JM Productions. The company released Midnight Prowl and a Meatholes disk in early 2005, and releases from those series have continued.
“On the DVD side you need to have something more extreme to stick out. Otherwise, it makes no sense for them to put you on the shelves if you’re new,” Sullivan says. “Why do we need to see a new company doing boy/girl scenes? That’s what we have Wicked and Vivid for.”
A Meathole on every corner
Clearly, MNP has come a long way, but the partners are shooting higher.
Talk to the principles, and you’ll hear the name Bang Bros. pop up time and again. Undoubtedly one of the kings of the adult Internet boom, Bang Bros. was one of the first companies to tap into a bit of the mainstream market, largely because it had something people hadn’t seen before.
“I think that’s where we’re heading, of course, with a little bit more of an edge,” Sullivan says. “A lot of men like pornography, and I think the majority of them just want to see pretty girls sucking a dick or getting fucked, but there’s definitely a smaller crew that wants to see double anal.”
MNP’s move toward the mainstream, along with the fact that you can shoot only so many Meatholes scenes before you get bored, has changed the company philosophy a bit. Chang compared MeatCash to amusement park giant Knott’s Berry Farm, which built its company selling jam. Today, jam makes up a relatively small portion of the company’s profits.
“We’ve developed the traffic to do whatever we want with it,” Chang says. “We made the jam, and it got us where we wanted. Now, we don’t need it.”
