Porn Valley- Whether it’s porn fans receiving handjobs or trannies having a serious go at it with Cytherea or Cindy Crawford, Defiance/Torrid is operating at a dizzying pace. The company’s planning its first feature film to shoot the beginning of December. It’s called Runway. Friday morning I spoke to Keith O’Connor whose job it is to keep all the company’s balls in the air simultaneously. And Runway, the brainchild of Defiance director Norman Bentley, sounds like it has very big balls.
Defiance/Torrid came out of the chute five months ago with a blockbuster called Pleasure and it hasn’t looked back since.
“I don’t think that companies get into features nowadays without already establishing some kind of credibility in their field,” says O’Connor, a guy who kind of reminds you of a union boss. “I think with titles like Pleasure- the way we shoot titles and the way they’ve been received and the way they sell and re-sell, that we’ve got credibility within our genre and market. And I think people know that by us going out into the feature market that we know what we’re doing. If they give us a shot, they’ll see that we know what we’re doing and it justifies us doing it again and again.
“This is not just a matter of throwing a script together and saying let’s make a feature,” O’Connor continues. “But for years that’s what people were doing.”
O’Connor considers the Runway project very special, particularly for the fact that Runway will feature girls that are actually runway models, says O’Connor. “These are not porn girls- these are fashion models that have agreed to do this.
“We had a bunch of ideas on what we wanted to do for a feature,” O’Connor goes on to say. “Then we asked ourselves what makes this different? Well we’re also going to use a downtown LA fashion studio and runway. We start primary shooting December 6 and will have it released in February. It’ll be a two-disc set. And the packaging will be phenomenal.”
Defiance’s choice to shoot big in December is an interesting one in that it’s traditionally downtime for the industry. But this maneuver will allow Defiance not just to shoot an A-list group of girls but THE list, says O’Connor.
“This is Norman’s baby,” O’Connor says. “This is something Norman has been wanting to do for awhile. You got to remember- this is the guy who used to do productions for Penthouse. He knows how to shoot stuff like this.”
But the strong impression is this won’t be the first and last feature, although Defiance shoots first and foremost gonzo movies. Even so, you’re not likely to see one of those “gonzo” movies come in under $20,000. Minus the dialogue, you could almost call these features, says O’Connor.
“Except for a handjob movie or a blowjob movie,” he states. “But movies like Pleasure, Slick Chicks, Latin Obsession, Teenage Dreamin, Assylum- they’re well over $20,000.” Likewise, in its short existence, Defiance’s philosophy has never been to sweat the petty things.
“If a girl walks on set and tells you what her rate is- if she gives us a scene we like, I’ll bump her rate 10%,” says O’Connor. “That way you give a girl incentive; and a lot of the scenes we get are different because our sets are laid back; the company’s laid back; there’s nobody overbearing.”
Defiance is competing in a market where a lot of adult companies are fighting for space and credibility, O’Connor notes. “They’re fighting for market share. We don’t fight for anything. We have the web. We have members sites. We have contract girls that do store signings. We have so many different revenue streams that we don’t have to force anything. You see a company like Redlight- they’re already established themselves so they don’t have to force anything. They just make their product. Look at what Greg has done at Zero Tolerance. Greg has already established himself so that’s why he can venture into Black Ice.”
It’s very easy for a company to shoot a $12,000 gonzo movie, O’Connor points out. “Because if you only sell a 1,000 pieces you’re going to break even. “But that’s what a lot of these companies are doing,” he says. “They’re selling a 1,000 pieces. We’d hang ourselves if we only did a thousand pieces.”
to be continued