Industry veteran Marty Turkel will end his association with LGI Digital and its SexZ production company tomorrow, February 6.
Turkel told AVN.com that the amicable separation was triggered by insuperable difficulties caused by the distance between LGI headquarters in Manassas, Virginia, and the production operations in Chatsworth.
“They are on the East Coast and I’m out here on the West Coast, alone,” Turkel said. “The communication is near impossible. It’s a good company, good people, it’s just that it’s so difficult to do business from two coasts at the same time.”
Turkel had nothing but praise for LGI owner John “Bo” Kenny. “He’s a hard working, very good man that’s just tied up so much, between owning stores and the distributorship and everything back east, that he didn’t have time to work out here. He was coming out here two days a month and it’s just not enough.”
Turkel, who presided over the large, striking SexZ booth at last month’s Adult Entertainment Expo, is spending the rest of this week “trying to clear up everything for him so it’s a clean slate. It’s going to be much easier for him to run from his offices back east.”
It was Turkel who set up SexZ’s directing deals with “Roy Karch, Skye Blue and some others that are doing very, very nice work. And now Bo is okaying it all, so there’s no problem. It just has to be Federal Expressed to him, instead of it going back and forth, back and forth, which is a ridiculous concept.”
Kenny, Turkel added, is “one of the nicest guys. He’s kept his word on everything he promised; so have I. It’s that we’d rather part friends than just do business for the sake of doing business.”
Kenny, speaking from Virginia, told AVN.com, "The impact of Marty on our company will be felt years down the road. He was doing more for us than we ever could have asked. He got us our biggest release ever, Deconstructing Ava [which shipped last week], he got us two great directors [Karch and Blue], and I am terribly sorry to see him go. If he ever wants to come back,we have left the door open."
Turkel, who was one of the industry’s most respected executives during his long tenure at VCA Pictures, is ready to talk about new offers. He can be reached at (818) 886-6041.
