Earlier this week www.lukeisback.com posts: Regarding Gene, Paul [Fishbein] writes: “Gene Ross’s assertion that I give the awards screeners to my stores is an outright lie. Not true…. never happened. And it’s very sad four years later after he left he has nothing interesting to write about except me. I guess I should be flattered.”

Gene sez: Au contraire magazine owner in your underwear. Read the following.

Rodger Jacobs writes me: [Philadelphia Magazine writer Richard] Rys interviewed me via telephone earlier this year for over 90 minutes. It was kind of a cathartic experience for me, actually, having only weks before resigned from AVN as a freelance contributor due to certain promises that were made and never kept by Tim Connelly. In my dispute with Tim, Paul took Connelly’s side without ever hearing my version of events and that stung so I was willing to tell Rys a lot of interesting details, including but certainly not limited to the fact that Paul’s stores are stocked with screeners.

Aside from that well-known bit of trivia I said nothing derogatory about Paul but my portrait of AVN as a less-than-professional enterprise was met with enthusiasm by Rys – and not one bit of it made it into his puff piece. In point of fact, he complained bitterly to me that he was having trouble finding people willing to “speak out against” AVN.

Gene sez: I made a follow up call to Jacobs who talked about the 90-minute interview he had done with Richard Rys. Apparently Rys had also spoken to Luke Ford who offered some colorful details as well, according to Jacobs.

“He [Rys] seemed really dismayed that he was having trouble finding people willing to speak out against Paul Fishbein,” says Jacobs. “I told him except for one incident with Connelly I personally have no animus towards Paul, but, AVN, yeah. My four months working there was a fucking nightmare.”

Frankly, says I, I was so shocked to hear that comment. I say to Jacobs that Paul has this way of buttressing himself to keep from looking like the bad guy.

“Yeah, no shit,” agrees Jacobs.

“That’s the way he operates,” says I. “He can come out smelling like a rose while everybody else takes the fall and look like the heavy.”

“Tim Connelly just fucked me over big time,” says Jacobs. “I told him I was relocating back to L.A. This was about a year and a half ago. He had just gone over to AVN recently and I had been working for him over at Adam Film World. I said are you going to be able to get me some freelance work? He said, yeah, absolutely, come on down.” According to Jacobs, it took him about five months from that conversation to get the promised work. “Then I became their workhouse because I was local and I was turning copy around real fast.” Reviews-wise, Jacobs thinks he was turning out about 35 a month which is a pretty prolific freelancers pace.

acobs explained that his girlfriend does transcriptions, professionally and that she was working on a project that was coming to an end. “They [AVN] needed an in-house transcriber. Tim made promises he couldn’t keep and that’s the short version. He did not get her the work and really put us in a bad financial bind. I wrote about it on the site Luke was working for at the time. I had a big dust up with Mike Ramone about a review. I embarrassed him in a public forum. There were promises that had been made. [Imagine, AVN breaking promises. Shocking.]Jacobs goes on to say that he and Connelly had been good friends. “We used to meet out here at Glendale- Marie Calendar’s every Friday for drinks.” Jacobs says it wasn’t just him. A little research turned up the fact that Connelly was making promises to writers all over town. “He was unable to follow through. I wanted Paul to hear my side of the story before I quit. But he refused.” [Not surprising because the Fishbein m.o. is to keep completely at a distance.]Nevertheless, Jacobs said he found that surprising. “I have to say that honestly. Paul always struck me as a very fair person.””You didn’t work there long enough,” says I.

Jacobs said he wrote a series of articles for the erstwhile Adult Beat on his review of Carnival of Souls recounting his AVN drama.

“I detailed the whole messy dust-up and what happened with this one review I wrote that Ramone cut. But when Rys had called me from Philadelphia Magazine I had only been resigned from AVN weeks before so I had a lot of acid, still. He was listening to it all. But I was stunned when I read the piece. “There was nothing negative. It was just literary journalism. A decent piece at that but completely bereft of any truth.”

Jacobs said he told Rys the story about the tapes which go earmarked for the video stores. “He [Rys] hadn’t heard that story yet. I said do the math. The guy owns the video stores. They get X-number of tapes in for screening purposes every year. Do the math. Where do the tapes go? He mentions Paul owning the video stores but he doesn’t mention where the product comes from.

“I don’t know what kind of editorial decision was made on high,” Jacobs continues. ” Rys, is a young guy, by the way. I don’t know what kind of decision was made, whether to do a puff piece-profile.”

Jacobs tells me he’s now writing for Xbiz World. “It’s great,” he says. “I love working for them and I think they’re really going to give AVN a run for their money. The physical layout is like Billboard or Variety.” According to Jacobs his feeling is that the magazine will gradually assume general coverage of the industry. “But right now their focus is on Internet Providers. I just wrote a piece for the December issue- I’ve got a cover story on the exploiting of porn stars. There’s some good general news. They have real journalists over there. People with a real journalistic background. And they’ve picked up quite a few advertisers.”

According to Jacobs, AVN wanted to do yet another magazine. “This started in late winter early spring of this year. Tim told me they were going to do a completely brand new magazine. They were going to take AVN completely mainstream. They were going to marginalize the content and go more for a Rolling Stone-type mag. He picked my brains for a week- what ideas did I have. I wrote down a lot of ideas. He said sorry I can’t bring you aboard but Jen [Jennifer Rosenblatt] is going to be doing the sample issue. It looks like that never materialized. That was supposed to appear like November or December this year. I haven’t heard anything.”

Jacobs also recalled another conversation that he had with Connelly in which he [Jacobs] pointed out that AVN didn’t have any real journalists working for them. “He said what do you mean? I said I’ve been transcribing these fucking interviews. These people don’t know how to do a basic interview. That’s another thing that surprised me- the knowledge that there weren’t any real writers over there.”