from www.ottawacitizen.com – It’s 9 a.m. in Chatsworth, California, and Kevin Blatt is already at his desk smoking a joint.
This is a busy time for Hollywood’s leading broker of celebrity smut, and not just because it’s the height of the holiday season. In the last few days, he has juggled the scandalous revelations of two of Tiger Woods’ mistresses, footage of the former Miss California masturbating –that’s Carrie Prejean who was dethroned after speaking out against same-sex marriage –and several other D-list morsels whose details he can’t yet share for legal reasons.
Some have sex tapes to let loose on the public, others have stories and pictures to sell. And when they’re ready, they all come to Blatt, who’s held the dubious post as the celebrity-sex industry’s go-to guy since he brokered Paris Hilton’s wildly successful night-vision romp One Night in Paris in 2003.
“I think the recession’s helping,” he says, beaming. “This influx of tapes I’m getting is a direct result of people being broke — and it’s Christmastime. You start seeing every piece of shit crawl out from every rock trying to sell out their friends.”
Here’s how it typically works: a celebrity’s ex-boyfriend or girlfriend contacts Blatt through Facebook, promising a sex tape and asking for millions of dollars. Blatt then calmly douses them with cold water. First of all, he says, male celebrities don’t sell.
“There’s only so many women or gay men out there who’ll get their credit card out to look at some celebrity’s wee.”
In those cases, he’ll often recommend trying for a financial settlement, in which the celebrity pays a cash sum to take the sex tape off the market altogether. But even if the star is female and the onscreen action is hot, it can’t be released without the celebrity’s permission – such are the privacy and copyright laws in America.
“That’s why most sex tapes never come out,” he says. “If you’re Cameron Diaz and you make $25 million a movie, you’re not going to sign off on some sex tape for $1 million.”
Diaz was actually hounded for $2.5 million for a sex tape that never saw the light of day back in 2004. But if you’re Tonya Harding, or Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian – all of them Blatt’s clients, by the way — then you sign the releases, Blatt cuts you a deal with a distributor, and along come the cheque and promises of profit.
“It’s a myth that the celebrity is a victim,” says Blatt. “When a tape is legally released, the celebrity has always signed off — those lawsuits they file in protest all get redacted in the end. That’s why I can’t stand Kim Kardashian.”
Kardashian is a former client. No love lost in this business it seems.
“Her whole career started with this sex tape with her ex-boyfriend Ray J and she still claims she had a gun put to her head. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ray J told me that she actually sat with Paris Hilton, wondering whether to put it online herself. Both Kim and Ray J made several million dollars on that tape, easily.” (Kardashian soon split up with Ray J and started dating the footballer Reggie Bush, but that’s a rocky relationship, too.)
Blatt is in many ways the archetypal celebrity pornographer — he’s a natural pitchman, with the gift of the gab, who has spent the bulk of his career in porn and currently, at 40, dates a girl almost half his age, who performs sex acts on her webcam in the adjoining bedroom in his house.
But in other respects, he’s an odd fit: an upper-middle class Jewish boy from Cleveland, Ohio, who went to etiquette classes and studied ballroom dancing before taking a left turn into the world of adult entertainment in the early ’90s. It started with DJ-ing in a strip club — like any other young guy, he did it to get laid. But then the adult world started opening up to him. An opportunity came up to sell penis enhancement pills online and before he knew it, he was knee deep in the world of online porn, an industry in its infancy back then.
In those days, Blatt’s bosses were often too young for their own sites — he once worked for a 17-year-old who paid him $50,000 a year. But it was also the early days of the celebrity sex tape, what would become porn’s most lucrative niche and a potent symbol of the celebrity obsessed, gossip crazed world we live in.
The genre is believed to have inadvertently begun with Rob Lowe’s 1988 menage-à-trois with two women in a hotel room during the Democratic National Convention, an image-tarnshing event that derailed Lowe’s career for nearly a decade and scandalized his adoring female audience.
Then came the 1994 boat ride that Pamela Anderson took with then-hubby Tommy Lee at the height of her fame — the one with all of those vérité POV angles? No celebrity sex tape has ever come close to achieving its global reach, and had it not been leaked when the genre was still so nascent, the happy couple probably would have made millions. As it happened, they did eventually sign a deal with Vivid Entertainment in 1998, as their marriage was on the rocks, but by that point everyone had already seen it.
A few minor scandals followed, including a man who wasn’t R-Kelly urinating on a young girl. But then in 2003, the young genre reached a climax of sorts. Judged as porn, One Night In Paris is dreary — Paris famously answers her phone during sex — but from a business perspective, it was pure gold.
“It’s not just the biggest celebrity sex tape, it’s the best-selling porn film of all time,” says Steve Javors, editor-in-chief of Xbiz.com, which reports on the adult industry. “One million copies is way ahead of anything that Jenna Jameson has ever done.”
The second best-selling celebrity sex tape, he says, is Kim Kardashian’s. The rest come in a distant third.
“Today, celebrity sex tapes are like a cottage industry within the adult world. The days of Pam and Tommy were like the Wild West. Nobody knew what they were doing. But now, people know how to get the marketing and the publicity in place — it’s a controlled media event. And it doesn’t seem to hurt anyone’s career. It’s no coincidence that both the Paris and Kim tapes came out just before their reality shows launched.”
This is where Blatt comes in to create the media event and talk up the sizzle via outlets such as TMZ, Perez Hilton and Howard Stern. He understands that in this age of 24/7 gossip, even the faintest whiff of a celebrity — well-known or niche — in something even remotely resembling porn can create huge buzz. And this has value. The Dustin Diamond tape, for example, sold poorly, as you would expect of a porno starring the guy who played Screech from Saved By the Bell. But the news story was read by millions, of which a fraction visited the website of the distributor, Red Light District, which in turn sold more of its regular catalogue. Like, say … One Night In Paris.
“Sometimes a tape’s value is the number of eyeballs it can attract,” says Blatt. “When Vivid offered former Miss California Carrie Prejean $1 million U.S. to shoot a porn video, they knew she wouldn’t do it. But they knew it would make the news and drive people to their site.”
Manipulating the media is great sport for Blatt. In 2007, he starred in a satirical “documentary” called American Cannibal, in which he unbelievably pitched a reality show called Virgin Territory that would feature virgins competing to lose it to a porn star. The show was a hoax, but the media didn’t know that. And when the movie debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, Blatt announced he was suing Robert De Niro and his fellow organizers because he was concerned about celebrity secrets being leaked on film. The screening was packed.
It’s this kind of savvy that contributed to the huge success of Paris. He still gets misty-eyed talking about it.
“It’ll never be that good again,” he says, wistfully.
“These days, the porn industry is tanking. It’s the piracy –all these tube sites offering free porn based out of Singapore, Malaysia and Costa Rica. No one’s buying DVDs anymore, and everything online is getting ripped and put up for free. There’s less money to go around. Recently, I had to tell Foxy Brown, the rapper, that I got her $100,000 for her sex tape and she was offended! But she was hot 10 years ago.”
These days, Blatt makes most of his money from making sex tapes ‘disappear.’ If there’s no way a celebrity will sign the releases, then he or she will often pay to make the whole mess go away. The case of Colin Farrell and Playboy Playmate Nicole Narain is a good example.
Blatt showed up one day at Mel’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard to meet two men, one of them a huge bodybuilder, who claimed to be friends with Narain. They said she wanted $1.2 million. Blatt asked to see the tape.
“And they start whispering back and forth,” he says. “They say, ‘no problem, but you can’t know where we’re going, so would you agree to be blindfolded and thrown into the back of our truck?’ And me being such a whore, I say sure.”
So with a bandanna over his eyes, he was driven to a home in the Hollywood hills, shown the tape, and then returned to the diner, blindfolded. But the very next day, he got a call from rival broker David Hans Schmidt telling him to back off. “He said, ‘I’m the worlds greatest celebrity sex tape broker and you just stepped on my territory. I already have this tape sold, and if I have to, I’ll put a bullet in you …'” Blatt takes a lug on his joint. “So I’m like — OK, this guy is crazy. So I called Farrell’s agents at CAA and blew the whistle on him. I told them what was happening, and they asked me, ‘Kevin, how do we make this go away?’ ” This time Blatt stepped away rather than further inflame Schmidt. He called Hollywood law firm Lavely & Singer, which represents most major stars in royalty cases, and negotiated a fee for the handover of the material. As far as Farrell’s lawyers knew, the tape “disappeared.”
Blatt insists this isn’t blackmail, no matter how it looks. It’s a matter of phrasing.
“If I say, ‘give me a million dollars or I’ll put this tape out’, that’s blackmail,” he says. “But if my lawyers say, ‘my client has this tape and you have an interest in keeping it off the market, so he’s prepared to sell it to you — what’s it worth?’ In that case, you’re doing them a favour.”
The only thing to watch out for is that the footage hasn’t been stolen, like the time Blatt was approached by two men who couldn’t explain how they’d gotten hold of Tila Tequila’s laptop. Needless to say, it was a short meeting.
Blatt has come across a lot of weird tapes in his day — there was the Verne Troyer(!) escapade, most of which involved acts and behaviour, too icky to reprint in these pages. Beleaguered actor Tom Sizemore’s got debaucherous in a hotel room with a series of hookers — and this one was actually released.
“It was like Fellini on crack,” says Blatt. “This is a guy wasting away on crystal meth and he’s got priapism, so for like four hours, he had an erection and he’s non-stop — throwing dildos across the room, talking into the webcam about Heidi Fleiss. He was out of his tree. And he’s wearing this kind of Lance Armstrong outfit with the spandex bicycle pants. Me and my buddy would quote lines from that tape like it was Caddyshack. It was that funny.”
Neither Sizemore nor Troyer generated much money, nor did they help their principals career-wise — they represent this world’s desperate underbelly, the flipside of the calculated glamour that produced Paris and Kim’s works of low art. But recession or not, both extremes stand to flourish. Greater currents are at work — the technology is on most cellphones today, and the prevailing culture is one of self-promotion, web-exposure. This is the reality TV generation, raised on Facebook status updates, tweets and … celebrity sex tapes.
“This isn’t a passing fad,” says Steve Javors of Xbiz. “Reality TV has created a lot of temporary celebrities, and when people feel their 15 minutes is coming to an end they get desperate — this ride is almost over! I’m surprised there aren’t more tapes along the Paris and Kim lines. It’s not like they’re the only party girls in Hollywood who are anxious to become stars.”
Blatt agrees. “This is an industry that’s going to grow,” he says as he rubs his hands together. “The future is interactive celebrity sex. Pick your D-lebrity from column A, and a D-lebrity from column B and if it gets enough votes, we’ll get them to have sex! I’m going to go patent that right now.”