LOS ANGELES—Longtime Vivid Entertainment contract director B. Skow has cordially exited the company and announced the creation of his own studio, Skow Digital.
Skow has directed for Vivid since 2005, but been with the company for nearly 20 years, starting out photographing box covers, layouts and advertisements for the adult powerhouse in 1994. His résumé includes photo shoots for celebrity magazines and such major adult publications as Hustler, Playboy, Club and Genesis. Since branching out into directing, his movies have garnered slews of AVN Award nominations, in particular his long-running pro-am series Brand New Faces and his 2010 epic The Condemned, which AVN founder Paul Fishbein gave a perfect AAAAA rating and called "a modern classic that should stand the test of time."
"I wanted to leave for a while, and the opportunity came where I knew they had enough movies in the can and it would be a good time to part ways," Skow told AVN. "I was talking to people for about six months before, just looking around and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I've wanted to shoot my own stuff for a while, and I was supposed to do it under Vivid's label, but I never did. It was in my original Vivid contract to be able to make movies and they would distribute them, but I didn't want to do that, I didn't want to distribute my own movies and compete with my own movies. It didn't make sense to me."
Skow suggested that after so long with the same company, perhaps his ambition had begun to fade. "You kind of lose your drive a little bit," he said. "I love making movies, so it's like I was missing that ... you sort of get too comfortable and you don't have that crazy drive you have when you're starting something new, and I just wanted to start something new and make a different type of movie. I was restricted with Vivid a lot. I had to make a certain type of movie. And it was sort of late to the game having me do parodies. I'm just not a parody person, and I really didn't want to be shooting a bunch of parodies."
Skow's efforts for his soon-to-launch Skow Digital label are already well underway. "I already have three movies in the can," he revealed. "I've been shooting nonstop for myself, they're my movies 100 percent. I'm shooting two more in the next week and a half, and I have two deals: I have a deal with a big studio where I will be their contract director, and they're allowing me to make my own movies too and have my own company while I'm there. And that's really what I've always wanted to do, and I wasn't allowed to do that at Vivid."
For clarification's sake, the first five Skow Digital titles will be distributed by a different company from the one where Skow has agreed to a contract directing deal. Beyond those five, future distribution of Skow Digital titles is yet to be determined. Both companies will be disclosed in the coming days.
The movies Skow plans to make moving forward, he said, will consist heavily of scripted features and gonzo fare. "I have a couple of lines I'll be introducing, ideas I've had for a long time that I couldn't do, and my stuff's going to be really concentrated on customer. I'll probably be releasing almost all my movies as two discs, with at least five or six scenes minimum; I'm trying for six in every movie. A lot of BTS, a lot of what I'm known for, like my interviews and everything. I really want to make sure every single movie I release is a really high-quality movie, with the newest girls and the most popular girls, and that'll be my gonzo stuff. And then I'm going to do features, I'm going to do original features, and David Stanley is going to be writing for me. We already have three completed scripts, and I'll be starting to shoot those soon."
He added, "I'm also concentrating on doing all the photography again, which I wasn't always doing at Vivid. I'm shooting all the boxes, I'm doing all the photography on set now. I'm excited. I just bought all new equipment, all new everything. I've been dying to do this for years."
AVN will report the details of Skow's new directing contract and distribution deal for Skow Digital when they become available.
