Porn Valley- Ho, ho, ho…

It was a close call, says St. Nick, for him to reach into a bag of coal and come up with this year’s top adult video company. But after over a year’s worth of trying, Damaged Pictures rose to the occasion and became the company we’d most want to snuggle securely with in a Christmas Eve’s bed.

[For the record, EVN was a close runner-up and only one stop payment check away, ala Scooby, from taking it all.]

The drama with Damaged Pictures all started November of last year when director John T. Bone posted some things on this website, www.johntbone.com to say that he and Damaged had come to loggerheads in a deal they struck. Bone was saying that Damaged was delinquent on payments, breached their distribution contract with him, contravened distribution deals, and basically misrepresented themselves as owners of his product.

Before any of that information had become official by way of Bone’s website, I had interviewed him several months prior and Bone was hoping that he could resolve issues with the company before making any of that interview public.

“They [Damaged] haven’t been paying me,” Bone told me at the time. “They don’t answer the telephone. We can’t talk to them. They come up with excuses after excuses but the bottom line is they ain’t paying me. And now I find out that they’re suddenly manufacturing product with my name on it and they’re making four-packs with my product. They’re making other entities that they’re selling with my name on, without my permission. We’re discovering that they’re selling in other areas that they’re not allowed to. They’re understating the sales that they make. I just got an e-mail from Brazil telling me that one of my movies is being premiered on the adult channel on New Year’s Eve making a big deal out of it. I didn’t sell it to that channel.”

Well that alone would be enough to make a merry old elf take a dump.

Bone, in that interview, went on to say he discovered that Damaged had also struck a deal with Marc Bruder without his knowledge.

“They have an exclusive contract with Josie [Snyder] that she has all exclusive rights for all of their product for all foreign and broadcast,” Bone explained. “But they also have a deal behind the back with Bruder and they’re putting my product through Bruder that they don’t have the right to represent for broadcast.”

“They don’t have the right to do that,” Bone continued. “It’s the same as you picking up my DVD’s and going to Bruder and saying, hey, sell me foreign broadcast on these movies. You don’t have the right to do it. They don’t have the right to do it.”

“This is bullshit,” Bone went on to say. “At the end of the day, this is the point. They have sold my movies. They have collected money and have kept it. They haven’t paid me. They have sold my movies into markets where they’re not allowed to thereby fucking my deals with other people. And then I sit down with their salesman one day. And he says to me, John, you have to do Tabu number 2. It’s the best-seller we’ve ever had. I said, really? He said, yeah. We’re in our third replication of it. we’ve sold over 4,000 pieces. I said, really? He said, yeah. It’s flying off the shelves. I said the amazing thing is they told me that they [Blaine at Damaged] sold about 1800 pieces.

“So their salesman tells me we’ve sold around 4,000 pieces. So I go to Blaine and say I hear we’re doing really well with Tabu. He said, nah, you know, we did one run. We sold about 1800 pieces. I said, really? You haven’t run more? ‘No, we’ve still got it sitting on the shelves.’ Who’s lying to me? Louis [Adams] tells me that mine was the biggest selling product they have that they sell their other product by virtue of selling mine. That without my product, the company would have been in the shitter already. He told me that when they first opened, the sales were so bad that if it hadn’t been for my first movie, Tabu, the company would have collapsed four months after it started.”

All of this being said, all of this being written, Bone subsequently came to some agreement with Damaged prompting him to post another article stating that Blaine Hensler, head of the company, basically did the right thing, yadda, yadda, that Blaine was a good guy and the matter between Bone and Damaged was resolved.

Not so fast.

Several months ago, Bone came across some new information prompting him to write on his website that Damaged has to be among “the biggest thieves in the industry.” Bone discovered that Damaged was supplying VOD companies with his movies, selling foreign rights that they don’t own and trying to sell his content through www.thecontentstore.com.

“Does Blaine have your masters???” Bone wrote, thunderstruck, noting that he got an email from Jonathan Silverstein of The Content Store who was apparently horrified to hear what Damaged was doing. Silverstein told Bone that every studio he deals with stipulates they have the rights to license for Internet use.

“In this case I was obviously duped,” said Silverstein. “The titles will be removed immediately.”

This prompted Bone to comment on his website: “So Blaine and Steve once again you have been caught red-handed stealing from me. It probably never occurs to you that what you do reflects on the decent, honest people that you dupe into your illegal sales. When Jonathan called me I was just preparing a posting for one of the webmaster sites to tell all of the adult site webmasters in the world that he was selling my content illegally. This would have caused him irreparable damage. You really are the lowest fucking scum in the business.”

In recent weeks Homegrown Video had similar problems with Damaged that got resolved once the information was made public. And Homegrown’s tussle brought Vittorio from HotAm out of the woodwork with a similar story.

“They released ‘Tony’s Amateur’s line’ which is ALL my content, without EVER paying a dime,” Vittorio wrote. “They are also selling my content as web content to websites, which is NOT allowed in the contract (and they STILL haven’t paid in full so the contract STILL doesn’t exist yet).

“Steve’s a total scumbag and so is his father,” Vitorio continues. “I TOO was nominated for an AVN award (didn’t win) last year without even knowing the line was released (Steve used his TXP Media as a front for Damaged)…. “Oh, and www.sleazyeddie.com is giving away my entire content for FREE to surfers!!! I never heard of them. Did Damaged sell the content to them?? Who knows? Anything you can do about Sleazy Eddie also?? Let me know and contact me ANYTIME!! Sincerely, Vittorio”

“So here we go again, Vittorio wants his money,” says Bone summing up the situation. “The Content Store is probably the company illegally selling his content to websites; Jonathan [Silverstein] is either another nice guy duped by Steve, or he is so fucking desperate to make a buck he is willing to risk his reputation and that of his new company on the word of Steve, a liar and a thief.

“I am sure Damaged is also fucking him by selling his DVD’s Internationally and with VOD sales. I don’t think Steve can keep convincing everybody around him that he is just careless and makes mistakes, but just in case you are all fucking stupid here’s the scoop. Damaged keep selling VOD rights, Internet footage, Foreign sales and now domestic DVD sales on product they have no rights to. If you are aiding and abetting them you are committing a crime also. Are the few dollars you make worth your reputation?

I still believe that all of this is going on behind Blaine’s back, but enough is enough, if he doesn’t do something now, then from this day on I will assume him to be a partner in crime with good old ‘he just keeps getting overwhelmed with work’ Steve.”