Porn Valley- Monday morning I spoke to Bob at Dane Productions. Bob wanted to correct Craig Valentine [picture] on a couple of ideas he seems to have about Bob's relationship to Dana and what's going on over at the company in the wake of allegations that Dane both owes Club Summer Haze money and return of their product.
"A lot of this is bullshit," says Bob. "I never said Dana ran AVN. She was at the front desk over there. She saw everyone who came through the door. And I'm not 'screwing her'. She's my girlfriend. We're living together. I don't do that kind of shit. We've been living together. And Craig can just send his accountants in here, look at the books and see what's going on. Everything's open. We're not holding anything back. Let him send his people in here.
"We have records to show they were overpaid," Bob insists. "But the girl who was doing the books before didn't know what she was doing. There's two ways of doing it: accruals and cash and Dana can explain that to anyone. It's a bunch of he said she said. But Craig's the one considered to be a sleazebag and he's calling the police? And what he's saying is a personal affront to me.
"Whatever he has to do with Ed that's between him and Ed. I don't want to be involved with that. I told Ed you handle this type of stuff. I don't want to get involved with anybody like this. To say the things Craig is saying is just not right.
"The last thing we want to do is screw anybody," Bob insists. "But the girl overpaid. She overpaid everybody. We found Jet got overpaid by $6,000. They're avoiding us now like crazy. The girl was doing it wrong."
"Let's say she screwed up," I ask Bob. "Doesn't Ed sign off on all the paperwork?"
"I don't know what he does," Bob replies. "I think he was trusting her too much. That's what Ed does. He trusts people. The situation was she was running the front office and we had her doing sales. That's the same old struggle. We had one person doing the job of four. But Ed found out there was a lot of stuff going on. Then Dana came on. She's very good at bookkeeping and that kind of stuff. She found major errors in the books. For instance Jet next store. From us owing them $12,000 it turns out they owe us $6,000 and they admit to it. This is what was happening.
"But this is getting frustrating. Ed is not a bad guy."
Bob who's seen the same fractured e-mails from Valentine as I have, is of the opinion Valentine's illiterate.
I then spoke to Craig Valentine who's armed with paperwork and reasons to believe that Dane screwed up but doesn't want to admit it.
"I sent your last e-mail to a cryptographer to see if he could translate it." I tell Valentine.
"I bought voice recognition software but it came back saying you don't know no English," Valentine replied, laughing.
"Go figure - the schools here in Florida passed me," Valentine adds. "The scary part is I hold a degree in robotics engineering."
"Now we're into the realm of Science Fiction," I tell Valentine.
Valentine also suspects that "Porn Insider" who wrote a scathing e-mail about him must have worked for Arnold at OPD at one time, www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=22506- OPD's another distributor that Valentine had Dane-type drama with.
"We all the know the story about Arnold," states Valentine. "Besides ripping off 16 other directors, don't you figure during that fight we had, if my product was defective, Arnold would have thrown that in on the reasons he wasn't paying us? We went to blows on that one and the gloves were off. Why wouldn't that have come up? Plus I'm using all the replicators everybody else is. I guess we're all using shitty replicators."
On the Dane issue, Valentine says Ed always defers to the secretary and why is that.
"What the fuck is the secretary?" asks Valentine. "Like my comments on Dana- who says she's a QuickBooks expert? And Bob told me she ran AVN. Same thing like that last salesman who ripped them off. He's the best. You don't understand who this guy is but you're not allowed to talk to him. As soon as I spoke to the guy he didn't know who Gourmet Video was. Didn't know who Rob Spallone was. Didn't know who half the people were and this is a salesman? I go do you buy anything from Gentlemen's Video? He goes who. Do you sell anything to Frank at IVD. Who's Frank? This was their last salesman. Another top flight job. To them everybody's the greatest and the best.
"But here's the thing," says Valentine. "I have all the records to show we're way underpaid. But like I told them before you need the money that bad, keep the money, send my product back. It seems we're at a stand still and Bob can sling whatever he wants to sling. The fact is they're still holding my product. And I told them you can send it freight collect. So if you want to get out of this whole pissing match, ship my shit back."
Weighing Bob's comments about how Ed at the company trusts everybody, Valentine says, "Ed trusts nobody. Every time I did a price lowering on my DVDs I had to sign documents. That's why I'm saying when they turned around and said I didn't deliver that many DVDs, they signed the order from KM Digital. How could the inventory be wrong? If somebody stole it then you're liable for it.
"The thing is if Dane didn't do anything wrong why are they fighting so much and going around the answers? We tried to do this nicely through e-mails. But Ed was blaming everything on the first secretary. He always has somebody to blame."
"If I'm the poster boy for a slimeball producer, what is Ed the poster boy for?" Valentine wants to know.
And Valentine's not buying the arguments that he should send someone out to go over the QuickBooks.
"What's wrong with the reports I have?" he asks. "I'm basing everything off the reports they've been sending me since November, 2005. QuickBooks is very easy to change. You can't change a report that has somebody's original ink on it and their handwriting. This is all in Ed's handwriting and the secretary's handwriting. I'm sorry but if we did go to court what would the judge base it on? Soemthing you just printed out from the computer yesterday or something that dates back to 2005?"
To make his point, Valentine reads off a report he got dated March, 2007.
"It basically shows what they've sold in the past 90 days but there's nothing that shows all the past people we've sold product to."
"They're showing unpaid items," states Valentine. "Here's where it gets interesting and I know that the girl doesn't know how to use the program. New Beginnings bought 25 pieces @ $8 a unit which came to $200. On the same title another company bought 2 pieces @ $8. One company says paid, the other company says unpaid.
"When you go to the bottom of the report that says paid and unpaid, I just added up $390 of unpaid clients just for this month. They're telling me that $417 is paid and there's no outstanding money." In short, Valentine's argument is the way the program is set up it looks like you're collecting extra money that you're not.
According to Valentine, the report also shows that Dane sold $97 worth of a product that Valentine hadn't been paid for. It's for a title called 'Drops.'
"I don't have a title by that name," he says. "But I sold $97 of it."
Valentine says when he was at the Dane office two weeks ago he had them run a 29-page report and now Dana is telling him there's only $289 in open balances owed to Dane on his product from customers.
"But going through the report there's tons of stuff missing," Valentine contends. "According to this report all the IVD stuff isn't even on there. Where did it go? The product's not accounted for."
"Then Ed wrote me a check, #4299 for $292 which he said he owed me. Then he proceeded to go ahead and cash that check to himself. I have a copy of the check. Ed took the check as payment for money he said we owed him. Ed did this to all the directors. He wrote the checks for the month then kept them."
"So Ed cashed a check made out to Summer Haze Productions?"
"Yeah," says Valentine. "On behalf of Dane."
