Porn Valley- John Bowen says he was sitting in his hotel room in Sao Paolo one night three weeks ago watching a French movie translated into Portuguese. At which time there’s a frenzied knock on his door. It’s Bowen’s friend Alan along with his girlfriend Bruna. According to Bowen, it’s an unusual set of circumstances because Alan, an adult producer, would generally call first. And Bowen notes that Alan’s very stressed out.

“I’ve been held up again,” Alan tells Bowen. Alan has a very large studio in Brazil and was shooting with most of his staff. It was a big transsexual shoot shoot. And, at some point during late afternoon, some guys were banging on the door to get in. One of the people in the studio opened the door without asking who it was. Three guys come in wearing ski masks, wielding guns. It’s a holdup. The way the story’s told, transsexuals are screaming all over the place and it’s total mayhem. The robbers take $6,000 in cash. A couple of cameras are also taken along with some other equipment. This is not a quick hit and run job. The robbers linger and people have guns held to their heads and in their mouths.

“It’s real fuckin’ scary,” Bowen relates. “But this is not the first time.” According to Bowen, his trip to Brazil before that saw Alan sending one of his employees, Junior, along with Bruna to the bank to get change. With $4,000 in their possession, Junior and Bruna were held up at gun point outside the bank. “Junior, I know, was hit in the face with a gun,” Bowen tells me. And, in an attempt to grab Bruna’s handbag, the buckle scratched acros her face and eye.

But robberies seem to be a way of porn existence in Brazil because Bowen tells me of even another occasion where an employee he and Alan had been sharing, named Marcos, was also held up at gun point.

“All of these people think that we have a glamorous life with the traveling,” says Bowen. “It’s real scary.” Getting back to the recent tranny robbery, Bowen said Alan was calling his partner. “He’s trying to explain to his partner that he’s just had a gun put in his face and that his partner shouldn’t be stressed out about the $6,000 and the two cameras, that he should be thankful that Alan’s not dead.” Bowen then asked if there was anything he could do. He was told, yes, that Alan’s crew was pretty shaken up in the robbery. Since he was leaving in a couple of days, Alan said he had to shoot the transsexual movie the next day and asked Bowen if he would take over the reins. Bowen agreed.

“But it was kind of eerie,” said Bowen. “I was constantly looking over my shoulder. Every time somebody’s banging on the door, I’m yelling don’t open the door. This is just another side of our business that people don’t normally know about or talk about.”