Oops. Rob Knob, head of Knob Ryder Entertainment, looked like a grown man about to cry. Knob, you see, jockeyed his company's release schedule to accommodate the big-budget feature Carnal Secrets as a late year entry in the AVN awards sweepstakes. Knob was banking on the timing to coincide with the awards voting. Except Knob got the screener copy deadline confused with the street date eligibility release. To make a long story short, Knob's got a screener of Carnal Secrets, but the pre-hype and publicity has already locked him into a street date of December 1. Well, there's always next year. "It could have been released two months ago," Knob says with a heavy shrug of the shoulders.
A three-camera shoot, Carnal Secrets features Jill Kelly's last non-condom scene," according to Knob. "Her scene with Eric Price has two pop shots. It's the last scene they did together before they broke up. It's a real interesting scene."
Knob said he invested in some major mainstream special effects to bring the feature off which he describes as a "spells, seance, space tubes, witchcraft, spooky-type of thing".
Besides Kelly, Carnal Secrets stars Dee, Obsession, Temptress, Halle Ashton, Vivian Valentine, Bunny Love, Bonita Saint, Eric Price, Eric Everhard and Brook Majors.
Knob mentions that some of the sex is set up with elaborate intros like a wedding scene and an slave auction. "We used five locations," he says. And, thanks to the miracles of modern editing technology, the feature, according to Knob, looks like it's been shot on 35 mm.
After the first of the year, Knob releases Secret Agent 69 wherein you'll find a multitude of stunt work such as 48-foot backwards high falls [don't try this in your living room], terrorists blowing up trucks, gun battles and fight sequences. Buck Adams, are you listening? Knob says he's been able to accomplish such fetes for cents-on-the-dollar thanks to a coterie of mainstream stunt guys who've been cutting him favors all over the place. In fact, Knob's entire crew is made up of an arsenal of mainstream directors, editors and stunt coordinators.
"We're trying to do some different stuff in the industry," Knob says. "We experimented our first couple of features trying to get a crew together, and we have an incredible one. We're lucky for that, except it's hard to put shoots together because they're doing big movies throughout the year."
On the sillier side of things, Knob's current release is Tai Blow Job, a takeoff of the Billy Banks Tae Bo video seen often enough on infomercials. Lexington Steel plays a Banks-type character named Willy Sacks. "Our lawyers didn't want us to get too close with the name," says Knob who mentions that Steele bought the videotape and watched the infomercial and studied two weeks to get in character. "He had the hand motions down and we added grain to some of the fight sequences to make it look like it was shot on 8mm film. It's hilarious," Knob adds. "It was written by a guy who was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival for a mainstream film."
Knob also mentions a spy movie which he has in the works for February. "We're going to flip a couple of cars and blow a couple up. We're going to do some real serious stuff." Again, Buck Adams, are you listening?
"It's a big investment," Knob concedes. "But we're doing a pretty good job. Super Sales is doing our distribution and doing a real good job for us. They're also handling DVD conversion for us, and our DVD's are real nice. We're also releasing our first two features in time for Christmas on a CD pack where one movie's on one side, and one's on the other. I don't think that's ever been done before. We're trying to do some real interesting marketing stuff." On the cable end, Knob says he's got a good deal with Colorado Satellite.
