Porn Valley- If any company owner's done the big turnaround and reinvented his product it's been Mitch Spinelli http://adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=2544.
For years Spinelli's stock in trade was to write great scripts and direct great, award-winning features. When Spinelli was on his particular kind of roll, the word gonzo wouldn't have even come close to being the last word on his dying lips. Onloy Spinelli's stubborn refusal to acknowledge gonzo was more than a cause for acid indigestion when his business threatened to go under. Finally, Spinelli made the decision to go harder with his style. With the creation of Acid Rain, bright colors began appearing magically in the sky.
Now you'll find Acid Rain shooting about five gonzos a month. And Spinelli hasn't looked back once that decision was made to go where the big boys like Red Light District play.
"I had been flying below the radar so long," says Spinelli. "When I started Rain, it was a little company. Back then you could make a decent living being a mid-level guy. And before that was Plum when we were below, below mid-level. We did okay but the way the business is going, you either got to be big or small. There's no in between. You get swallowed and you disintegrate. I was tired of being mid-level, and I wanted to make a step up and take it to the next level."Spinelli says knew that meant getting a sales guy among other things.
"I got a line of equity on my house and now I got 25 shows in the can," says Spinelli. "I have shows until May. I knew I had to make more stuff."
Enjoying the fruits of his endeavors, Spinelli now heads to Las Vegas next week with five awards nominations, including best anal-themed feature; a big company booth, the first salesman he's ever hired [Russ Pasquale] and two hot porn performers signing for him- Brooke Haven and Mya Luanna.
Spinelli shows me an 8-pager pullout that appears in the January issue of AVN. You could buy a house with what that ad cost.
"This is stuff that you don't receive results on right away," Spinelli states. "But I'm hoping that with the releases, the promotions, the T-shirts and taking trips around the country this'll pay off. Obviously I won't be a Red Light, but I'd like to be mentioned in the breath of the top five or six companies. That's important to me."
I know Spinelli ran some promo parties this year and asked if he thought they were worth it.
"They're okay for the moment," he replies. "It's like advertising- it's over a course of time where people keep seeing the name. It's nothing that you see the results for in the next week. It's like Coca Cola. Do they really need to spend that money? I wonder if they'd stop, would their sales go down? Who knows. You would think they don't ever have to advertise but why do they spend so much money?"
As far as Spinelli's concerned, he trusts that the Acid Rain name is getting out there and that people like his product.
"That's when it works- when people tell you I see your name everywhere and you're doing a lot of stuff. Then you know it's working."
I also ask Spinelli if he's entertained the thought about signing a contract girl. Spinelli, said if he could, it would be Brooke Haven in a heart beat.
"She's signing at the booth for me," he says. "But these girls make so much money that you'd really have to pay them not to work. How could I pay her?" Mya Luanna's also signing for Spinelli, and I remember an incident earlier this year on a Defiance shoot where Luanna took one look at Lee Stone's cock and began to cry. She had never seen anything like it.
Now that he's dried his tears from the Plum days, this was also the year that Spinelli was able to put all his pieces in play. He thinks 2006 will be the big year for Acid Rain. Spinelli admits that some of what he's saying might sound pretty vague.
"I got a salesman," he says. "This is the first time I've ever done that. It's always been me. And then I kicked up productions to where I'm doing four to five a month. Hopefully the branding of the line will pay off where people will know what Acid Rain is and who it is, and they'll be asking for it."
Besides Pasquale who he brought on board around June, Spinelli, likewise, has been building a stable of directors and has Benjamin Bratt shooting for him. There's also Robbie Fischer who Spinelli enjoys working with.
"He was one of the first guys who shot gonzo when it exploded and he really knows how to do it," Spinelli continues. "Robbie brings a lot of that enthusiasm with him, and I like the way he shoots. He's a good guy to have and knows what he's doing." As an owner, Spinelli continues to be hands on with his productions.
"I'm always involved because if you're not there, you don't get what you want," he reasons. "In the same breath, I'm stepping back a bit because when you come out with more product, you need different looks and different attitudes."
Spinelli knew he also needed to have a heavy hitter like Pasquale.
"There's maybe a handful of guys in the business like that who make the big bucks," says Spinelli. "Howard Levine would be a heavy hitter but he's with Vivid. Then you have Eric Gutterman from Leisuretime. These are the guys who have been with companies for years and don't do the thing where they move from one company to the other. At least not every month. I needed somebody big and I was looking at who was available. We talked- Russ called me. Word was out that I needed somebody. He just gave me a call. I knew that he put Luck Distributors on the map with its 20 hour comps.
"So we did 20 Hours, too," Spinelli continues. "Russ pitched it to me and I think we made it work. It's been doing really, really good. With Lucky he kind of instigated that whole thing with them and he brought that enthusiasm here."
To go one better, Spinelli and Pasquale decided to add a 50 Hour comp series, as well, packaged on 10 discs with such titles as Young Sluts and Before They Were Porn Stars.
"This is for people who have absolutely no lives," Spinelli laughs, thinking about what it would take to sit through 50 hours of porn.
Asked if he missed the old days of feature shoots, Spinelli says he misses the camaraderie.
"Like with you, Jack [Michaelson] and with my dad, especially," he replies. "But as far as sitting there for 14 or 15 hours I don't miss that at all. But I heard that features are slowly coming back. Do you think they are? But I don't miss them. The gonzos are so easy. There's no script. It's fucking and that's it. In that sense, it's easier."
