Porn Valley- The Grand Vizier and I met for a late breakfast and a couple of puffs of an Auchincloss Monday morning in light of Michael Ninn’s statement www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=28607
The cat got let out of the bag in the last few days that Ninn and Spearmint Rhino had parted ways.
“Everyone in the industry snickered when AVN and Xbiz put out that bullshit piece about Ninn going on “hiatus,” says The Vizier. “The Ninn story was the worst kept secret in the business. And the hiatus story was a press release that went out and was accepted at face value.”
But the big news, says The Viz is the word that both AVN and Xbiz intend to go newsstand. I think this will be AVN’s third or fourth attempt, I tell The Viz.
“I was around for the others, and each time I said you can’t go with the format you have now.”
“I suggested a consumer format along the lines of an adult industry version of Premiere Magazine but was scoffed at.”
“Well they’re changing formats now,” declares The Vizier. “Maybe it finally dawned on them.”
The Vizier and I agree that AVN’s got to do something radical because advertising revenues are shrinking at an alarming rate. AVN laid off 12 people already this year.
[AVN used to have a giveaway subscription base of maybe 17,000 copies- mostly to adult video stores, most of which have closed over the years because of the economy and free product on the Internet.]
“AVN practically had to give away ads to beef up it’s 25th anniversary issue,” adds The Vizier.
The first time AVN went news stand was in 1987 when it almost lost its ass. They had tried selling a very raw, untested product. It took them four years to recoup from that financial disaster resulting from enormous printing bills.
“Well, it looks like Xbiz is throwing down the gauntlet to take on AVN altogether,” states The Vizier.
“My guess is that there will be only one man left standing after that Armageddon,” I tell The Viz.
“The industry can’t support two large monoliths like that.”
Months and months in the making, the Ninn story, on the other hand, might precipitate trips to a court room. It’s ugly. In fact Ninn, who was fired to his face, is in the process of a court order to retrieve his belongings.
When he tried on his own to get them out of the Spearmint Rhino complex in Norco, he was told he’d be arrested. The arguments are over money, of course, and who was supposed to be responsible for this, who was supposed to be responsible for that, etc. Another layer of the story is that Spearmint Rhino was unhappy with its rate of return, and the hasty retreat of the contract girls was pretty much an indication of where this was all heading.
Another rumor for the grist mill is that Spearmint Rhino wanted to take the in-house editing out of Ninn’s hands. That didn’t go over to well especially when Ninn cut his teeth in this industry in the editing bays of Western Visuals. He knows his craft like few others.