Porn Valley- Craig Valentine was in town for a couple of days and is leaving Wednesday morning.
I met Valentine over at Rob Spallone's Star World Modeling. A couple of wrestling injuries aside, Valentine's not too happy with dance agents, and we had the following chat. [And boy I'm glad it wasn't by e-mail because Valentine's sentences are in Swahili.]
One of Valentine's assertions is that dance agents are partly responsible for the drop in DVD sales. Which actually makes sense if you hear Valentine out.
How could this be I ask, mouth totally agape. Valentine explains:
"You're familiar with the music business, somewhat?" he asks.
"The general theory of the music business should be the general theory of the adult film business - when a band releases a CD, don't they usually go on tour to promote it? And they make a lot of money off the tour. From what I remember when I got into this wonderful business 15 years ago, isn't that usually the same when you have a DVD and the star goes out to the [strip] clubs to promote i? The more the fans see the star, the more product they buy."
"I've been doing a little bit of studying and speaking to people in the Valley," says valentine. "And I would like people to write in and tell me if I'm incorrect- but the porn agents, they're good. They have one thing in mind: get their girls booked. They don't care if the girl works six times a day and the girl's pussy is blown up like a balloon, they want the girls working because they're making money and the girl' making money."
"Then we have the other side of the industry," continues Valentine.. "Which is the dancer agents [the major ones are Continental, Lee Network, New Age and Pure Talent]. For some reasons they think they're God- they have this little complex issue."
"Here's the thing- these are little guys in little offices who have no ties to the porn industry but actually spend their lives trying to make money off of us," contends Valentine. "There's two sides to it which I saw in Vegas, which I've always known, but I didn't know how ruthless it was till this year.
"You have the dancers and you have the porn stars. The porn stars are the respectful ones. Feature dancers? Not so respectful. Feature dancers get about 80 bucks a show. The porn stars start around $500 for appearances in clubs. And the dancer girls have always hated the porn girls, but, apparently the agents on the dancers' side aren't as smart as the agents on the porn side."
"I've looked at the sales charts," Valentine continues. "Where we don't have girls, for instance, from our studio booked in clubs, I see DVD sales fall off. And these agents turn around and will do everything they can not to get the adult stars booked."
[Valentine attributes most of this to favoritism and inner circle politics.]
"They've actually run a lot of the adult stars out of the feature business," Valentine claims. "There's bait and switch and bullshit."
I ask Valentine to explain.
"Some of the agents will go to a club and say you can only have this girl unless you take this girl. Or this girl is always booked so you'll have to take this one which happens to be their wife or their friend. So the big name star is sitting at home wondering why no clubs are not calling her for appearances when her movies are selling like hot cakes. That's because of the dancer agents. And it sucks."
"But aren't the porn stars being repped by the dancer agents?" I ask Valentine.
"Yes, that's the amazing thing," Valentine answers.
"Why would an agent keep a porn star out of a club?"
"Because they want to show it's a God-complex," answers Valentine. "Here's what I couldn't figure out. We got a call from one of my wife's [Summer Haze] dancer agents who fired her. Here's what I can't understand. If the agent's working for the entertainer, they get a percentage of their booking fee. Which means they work for the entertainer. For some reason, these agents think the entertainer's working for them. Wrong thing."
"Here in the Valley it's a flat fee that we as directors pay to the agents," says Valentine. "So basically they're not making part of the entertainer's money, so really the agents here can hire and fire girls because they don't thake any of their money. They take our money as the producers. But these dancer agents will fire you. I had club owners turn around and tell me we've got tons of product selling in the local stores. How come she's not coming out here? At the same time, the club owner says, oh her dancer agent said that basically if I book her then he won't allow any other girls to come to my club."
Which sounds like blackmail.
"The dancer agents basically try and run the dance circuit," says Valentine. "Because that's where the porn girls make their extra money from- out on the dance circuit."
"So why wouldn't it be in the dance agents' best interest to book these girls?" Valentine is asked.
"Because they play favorites," says Valentine going back to his original argument. "It's who you like. They don't care about how many movies you sell. And I'm trying to avoid naming names and taking a direct shot."
Valentine talks about a radio show he was on recently.
"There's a very famous veteran in the business [one must presume it's Haze] and she said she got tired of all the bullshit- she kept calling her agent- there's no work, there's no work. Then she had a club owner call: I've been asking for you for so long, but the agent kept saying you're not available. Then she found out the agent didn't want to book her any more because he said she'd gotten too old."
"If the club is offering to pay the money- a $10,000 appearance fee- and the agent's getting 12%, who gives a fuck?" says Valentine. "We got a phone call from a club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We sent the contract in; they know my wife, everything else. I gor a phone call 20 minutes later from the club owner. 'Yes, the agent who books my club says I have to cancel her contract. He threatened me.'
"Let's see- we had an agent show up to one of the trade shows two years ago and turned around and told my wife he was banning her from every single club he represents. And he did. No matter how much the club owners want her, he will not allow her in those clubs."
"Was he repping your wife?"
"No," says Valentine.
"So how can he ban her?"
"Because he basically controls an assortment of clubs and won't allow the club owners to let her perform," Valentine answers.
"Believe it or not," he continues. "These club owners aren't as smart as everybody else. They'll listen to these agents and that's basically how it works. If the porn agents ran the dance business, we'd be better off."
"So the dance agents pull these leverage tactics- like, if you book Summer Haze, you're not going to get my little pumpkin from the patch?"
"Right," says Valentine. "Porn agents operate on the principle that they'll book a girl and get as much as he can for her and himself, and make as much as he can. Dance agents don't see it that way. They want to play favorites. All the agents are married to feature entertainers and it's what their wives or friends want. That's how it works."
"But if you notice the DVD sales, we're all fighting for every nickel in Porn Valley," continues Valentine, noting that with his company he was selling 3,000 to 5,000 talent copies to girls.
"That's a lot of units," he says. "There are clubs that purchase units when the girl shows up. Anywhere upwards from 100 to 300. So by the dance agent not allowing the adult actress to go to this club, we're all losing money."
"Didn't we in Porn Valley put all the money into making these girls famous?" Valentine asks. "Why is somebody outside of us reaping the benefits off of the girls we helped make famous? And why are they hurting the girls? All these girls need money. Why should these people dictate? These club owners should be contacting the studios and the porn agents- you know where I can get this girl? Let them write the contract. It's much easier."
Valentine says depending which agent is exerting leverage, it probably costs about 1,000 pieces in sales.
"At $10, $12 a unit, that's $10,000, $12,000," says Valentine. "Can you piss that away? I know one club here on the west coast that will purchase 300 pieces of the girl's title just to give away at the club. Figure this way, the girl goes there once a year, that's 300 pieces just on that place. And there's about a dozen clubs across the country I know that do that."
Valentine concedes that Summer Haze is a very odd duck in the mix because she's not only a dancer and a porn star, she's now making a name for herself on the wrestling circuit.
"She's gone from porn to pro wrestling," says Valentine. "She holds one championship belt. She's the number one contender for the second one. We were at one of the wrestling shows - which I can't disclose - for tapings. Who knows? Everywhere we go, she's doing more mainstream stuff and getting booked in conventions and she's getting top pay to appear as a wrestler. She's got lines of people getting autographs. She's got lines of people wanting porn."
"We're with Nectar/First Strike and numbers are phenomenal. Let's get real. She's that popular and we're getting calls from club owners directly. And the club owners tells us we tried to get you from this agent and they wouldn't hear anything of it. Then the agent calls me- if you booked for that club, I want my commission. I had one club owner call me- he said the reason why he's not booking my wife in the club was because he heard a bad report from a lot of club owners that she's very impersonal, high maintenance and very nasty to her fans."
"And you've seen her- you can't get her away from the signing table half the time. She's got Ron Jeremy's theory- everybody gets an autograph. Everybody gets a picture. She was on the red carpet at the VMA. You don't get there from not being personable. "There's a lot of other star that are a little bit on the hoity-toity side. But she never has been."
"She's going everywhere to these mainstream events," says Valentine. "But you can't tell me a club an owner wouldn't want her to fill."
According to Valentine, just on the strenght of Haze's wrestling ties, she packed the place for a Wrestlemania party in Detroit earlier this year.
"You couldn't walk in the place- you could barely stand. They had to put a tent out back."
