I’ll give credit where credit is due. www.lukeisback.com was the first to spot this item written by former AVN editor Tod Hunter re: the Paul Fishbein puff piece written in Philadelphia Magazine. https://adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=6794 Believe me, I have much more to say about this load of horse crap [the article, not Tod] passing itself off as a serious magazine piece. My prediction? Richard Rys the author was attempting to curry favor and looking for a spot on the AVN staff. But here’s what Tod-o has to say.

www.tod-hunter.net writes: Boomerang thrown from Philadelphia

I don’t know if you read the profile on My Old Boss that Gene posted on Adult FYI, but you should.

The Philadelphia Magazine article starts so lame and superficial that it could have been written for AVN. It’s filled with misleading, carefully selected facts like Fishbein going to a porn set, a thing that happens with the regularity of a solar eclipse, and outright lies like the description of Erotica L.A. as “a convention… to serve couples and women who are looking for a new vibrator or a nice schoolgirl outfit, and maybe a movie to watch while using both.” I was at Erotica L.A. and I could count the couples and unaccompanied women on one hand and have enough fingers left over to greet somebody I don’t like.

The writer’s ignorance of the adult industry is appalling. He takes this load of crap at face value: “Surrounded by black-and-white bondage photography, managing editor Mike Ramone reveals that, like Fishbein, he was roped into an on-camera appearance while on assignment; unlike Fishbein, he became #351 in the ‘Houston 620’ gang bang.” If you ever set foot on a porn set, you know that bystanders don’t get “roped in” to fuck the star of a video while it’s being made. Ramone planned to be at the gangbang: He filled out the form, got himself tested, and walked around in a knee-length T-shirt all afternoon while the professional performers racked up the numbers on Houston, and finally, to break “the gangbang record,” Ramone, the AVN freelancer, was pulled out of the crowd and did the deed on her.

I know this because I was there, as an AVN editor, on a social call – I was originally assigned to cover the gangbang, but Ramone offered to write a story from the POV of one of the gangbangers and that looked like a better angle so he got the assignment – and I was approached by Greg Alves and asked if it was okay for Ramone to “break the record” because I outranked him and they wanted Official Approval. I wasn’t about to put him under that kind of pressure so I just said “It’s okay with me if it’s okay with him” and the rest is history.

“Roped in.” Do me a favour.

Small details about Fishbein start to accumulate as the story continues, though. The missed opportunity of the Marilyn Chambers interview. The embarrassment of the Red Velvet profile. The abject failure of The Money Shot, which went from big-budget movie to low-budget movie to cable movie to network sitcom to cable sitcom to 10-minute Internet show to $75,000 loss. By the end, Fishbein looks like a sad little man, pushing 50, carrying around a tiny bottle of Purell hand sanitizer to keep his hands germ-free, engaged to a now-retired porn performer 20 years his junior, getting ready to marry her (with a pre-nup, natch), wistfully looking at the booths at Erotica L.A. and wishing somebody would hand him some lube samples, looking over his 125-bottle wine cellar, barbecuing chicken and “doing his best to look every inch a man who believes it truly is great to be Paul Fishbein.”

Nice piece. Check it out.

Gene sez: Tod omits one interesting detail about Ramone’s participation in the Houston gangbang- that he had urine stains on his jockey shorts.

Rys in his article writes: “As Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Right Stuff put journalism in a half-nelson and tossed it around, The Adventures of Buttman changed porn. It was dubbed “gonzo.” Suddenly, anyone with a camera and some willing participants could make and sell sex movies.”

Gene sez: the term gonzo was not applied to porn until years later, and it was not Stagliano’s movies that prompted it; in fact Stagliano’s stuff was long considered features and placed in that voting category. So Rys gets that one wrong. I should know. I was the one who reviewed Stagliano’s original Buttman. I loved it and wrote a glowing review. However the distributors in this business kept telling Fishbein I was insane and Fishbein sided with them and gave me crap about my opinion of it. So let’s put some things in proper perspective, shall we?

On another note, when Rys contacted me for an interview, I said I would, provided I got assurances that certain people on a list I e-mailed to Rys were interviewed, too. He assured me they were. Rys lied. None of them are quoted in this piece. Why? Because that would have provided obstacles contrary to Rys’s preconceived puff thesis.

Rys writes: “Back home on Aramingo Avenue, it’s just another day at the office for Len Fishbein, who’s showing me around one of his son’s eight Excitement Video stores, all here in Pennsylvania.”

Gene sez: But what Rys doesn’t tell you is that those stores are stocked in part with freebie porn tapes which AVN collects every year when it solicits “screeners” for the awards show.