Porn Valley- Years ago, too many to count, I get this call from a guy. He tells me he's working in the editing bay at Western Visuals and has come up with a technique or a process that he wanted to bring to the look of adult movies.
I meet with him and he shows me a couple of the movies he's done with it- stuff that's way different than anyone was doing at the time. I thought to myself, yeah, this guy's going to make a name for himself. And I started writing about him. His name was Michael Ninn.
I haven't talked to Ninn in ages, but we chat Monday night about the Otto Bauer story www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=24762 that was posted earlier in the day.
Ninn brings up the fact that Spearmint Rhino bought Ninn Worx.
"And they're trying to do the due diligence by having [Paul] Cambria come in and look at everything. [Remember the Cambria list?]
"There was no firing of Otto," Ninn emphasizes. "There was no flaking of Otto. We are looking at whether or not we can move forward with his line. It's as simple as that, and I wanted to set the record straight. There's no animosity with Ninn Worx and Otto. It's just a different direction."
"Spearmint Rhino has a lot more at stake," Ninn continues. "They're a $200 M a year company and my best year may have been $3M. Their club in Vegas does that a week."
At the same time, Ninn wasn't sure if Spearmint Rhino wanted to stand up for the things that Otto wants to do.
"If you took Hustler and you took away the magazine- if you put Hustler, Wicked and Vivid together, they don't do $200M- and Spearmint Rhino will probably gross closer to $280 M this year. It's a different world and they're much more protective and they do everything by the book. Right now Cambria has their ear and we're trying to figure out what I can do. Right now I'm even fighting for the edgier stuff that I do like Catherine."
Ninn is saying that he needs to take a meeting with Cambria and look at how they're going to structure future projects.
"But we can't milquetoast this thing to the point where it's unsellable either," Ninn says. "Lawyers are always going to err on the side of conservativeness and that's not always that great of a place to be, especially if you want to do something that's edgy or magical. In today's market, you need to."
"Otto and I have been friends for a long time," Ninn continues. "When I did Catherine with Otto and Audrey, everybody thought I was nuts. Even some of the people that watched it afterwards thought I was nuts. I had no problem distributing it, but I'm not as big a target also for the government to come after. If you've got deep pockets they seem to want to come after you more than if they know you don't have deep pockets. And Rhino's a company that's all about the bottom line. And we're such a tiny part of their revenue stream that they don't want to stand up and say take a shot at us."
"I don't know if we'll come back and offer Otto something that's less edgier than what he's doing," Ninn goes on to say. "I just don't do a lot of stuff that Otto does like the choking, the spitting and ass-to-mouth that they're finding problems with."
