King Smut
Inside an anonymous one-story warehouse, Paul Fishbein wanders into a dim, musty cave of a room. It's connected to a smaller antechamber with a canopied bed made up to look like a low-rent honeymoon suite. There is no hint of the sunny Friday afternoon just beyond the walls. This is the San Fernando Valley, the heartland of the multibillion-dollar pornography business, of which this town, Chatsworth, is the unofficial capital, and in which Fishbein is the most influential figure — the man who gave shape to a business founded upon subterranean chaos, and in so doing, showed porn the way to the mainstream, where its stars are now seen in music videos and profiled in Hollywood journals like Premiere, and where its annual profits are estimated by the New York Times to surpass those of pro baseball, basketball and football combined. Looking a decade younger than his 45 years, uniformed in jeans, sneaks, and a powder-blue tee with a shark logo on the chest, Fishbein is the architect of porn's success, the Frank Lloyd Wright of filth. Director Larry Paciotti, better known as transvestite Chi Chi LaRue, gives Fishbein a warm hello, then turns to the monitor in front of him. “Let me see hardcore!” he shouts. “Action!”
Hardcore is exactly what he and Paul Fishbein see on the lace-draped bed, courtesy of broad-shouldered, tattooed Steven St. Croix — a veteran “woodsman,” as reliable gents are known in the biz — and Malezia, a petite French-Canadian, Asian and Egyptian waif, all of 20 years old.
“That's it, baby girl,” says Chi Chi, eyes on the monitor. “Go boy! Go Steven!”
“I'm your dirty little princess!” cries Malezia, sounding more angry than passionate. A set photographer slumps into a couch, half-asleep. Fishbein smiles like a 10-year-old who just heard a dirty joke, then returns to looking uncomfortable, arms and legs crossed as he sits across from Chi Chi. He's not watching.
Fishbein isn't a porn aficionado, but he is the founder of Adult Video News — the trade magazine that forever changed the business of porn — and movies like this one have made him a millionaire. What began in Northeast Philadelphia with an eight-page newsletter and raised eyebrows in the blue-movie business has grown into a 300-page monthly crammed with hundreds of movie reviews and miles of ads. If, as longtime adult-film insider Bill Margold puts it, “AVN is the Bible for a godless industry,” Paul Fishbein is its Moses, delivering porn's Good Word unto its people in the form of a glossy pseudo-journalistic missalette, and anointed by Larry Flynt himself for raising the industry up out of the muck and granting it some degree of respectability. AVN is just one aspect of the Fishbein gospel, which includes 10 websites, various supplemental pubs, the Excitement Video chain of stores, and the AVN Awards, dubbed by Entertainment Weekly “the Oscars of adult.” When AVN bestows high ratings on new releases, sales climb. Fishbein has also created a centralized source for industry news; when five performers tested HIV-positive this past spring, those in the business and outside it turned to AVN's website for daily updates. “Paul professionalized pornography,” says Al Goldstein, founder of the infamous flesh rag Screw. “The practitioners of porn are scam artists, semi-criminals and lowlifes. He's made something presentable out of a scurvy business.”
Right now, though, he's just trying to survive his excursion Deep in Malezia, as this production is titled. Chi Chi directs St. Croix to do something very specific with his member.
“That was off-script,” Fishbein says with a smirk.
“Isn't she beautiful?” Chi Chi asks him.
“Until they ruin her with fake boobs,” Fishbein says. “I like them natural. That's in now.” Sex on camera, to Fishbein, isn't erotica or voyeurism. It's trend-watching.
Chi Chi calls cut, and Malezia teeters in, wearing only five-inch heels, a belly chain, and the countenance of a woman who just spent the past half hour being violated by a complete stranger. St. Croix, soaked in sweat, condom on, is decidedly more pleasant.
“I'll shake your hand later,” says Fishbein as St. Croix walks by.
The actor laughs. “Hi. How you doing?” he says between breaths.
“Sorry to intrude.”
“Why would you be intruding? You're the capo of this business.”
Fishbein demurs, and while the two discuss their recent vacations in the Bahamas and Hawaii, St. Croix sits on a couch, spread-legged, casually working his chassis with short strokes. Fishbein barely seems to notice the maintenance work. After all, it's just business.
Back home on Aramingo Avenue, it's just another day at the office for Len Fishbein, who's showing me around one of his son's eight Excitement Video stores, all here in Pennsylvania. The shop is clean, brightly lit. The counter jockey is a sprite of a woman in a skirt and knee-high socks, married, with a kid. At 73, Len's done everything from teaching junior high school to leasing cars — never made much, but enough that his wife Dolores could raise their son and adopted daughter, Dori, in the Somerton home they lived in for 37 years. After Len retired, Paul suggested he help out at the video stores, which is what Paul did before this whole Adult Video News thing started and the name Fishbein became synonymous with porn. “We go to the AVN Awards every year,” Len says of his son's gala. “My wife watched like this.” He lays a hand across his face. “God bless her, she's such a prude.”
With a certain shy pride, Len shows off the sex-toy room, which is separated by a curtain (beads, of course), as per city regs. Dolores is proud, too, but you won't find a copy of AVN on her coffee table. She prefers to discuss her son's appearances on Larry King or Nightline, and the fact that he still comes home for seder, even though he's been a wiseass agnostic for years. Len, however, seems fairly comfortable inside the porno den his son owns, and leads me to a room where a guy in a kelly-green Eagles jersey browses. “This is gay, and what they call ‘trannies,'” Len says. “We have a ‘buy two, get one free' sale. It's nice.”
Before Fishbein and AVN arrived in 1983, pornography was neither a retirement option for kindly Jewish dads nor much of a structured industry. Though porn was already an estimated $4 billion business, its practitioners hid deep below the fabled Hollywood sign, scurrying with their cameras to private homes and secret locations, living on frequencies the cops wouldn't pick up. It was an underground profession, a handful of companies whose only organization was with organized crime.
Porn insiders felt like speakeasy bartenders — renegades, romantic throwbacks. It was exciting, but as a business model, it left much to be desired. Back East, Movies Unlimited on Castor Avenue kept its triple-X behind a covered glass case, but 24-year-old manager Paul Fishbein noticed that while adult rentals were brisk, customers had no idea what was scheduled for release, or how to judge one flick from another beyond the steamy box covers. What the flesh trade needed was someone who could let flesh fade into the background so the trade could come into focus.
Fishbein was tailor-made. His experience with dirty movies began and pretty much ended with sneaking into the Philmont theater for a double feature of Pretty Peaches and Femme de Sade as a teen, and his lone venture into the sex business was the masturbation contests he'd hold with friends. (In a reverse of Seinfeld's “contest,” Fishbein's buddies raced to see who'd finish first.) Studying communications at Temple cemented his love of cinematic artists like Truffaut and Scorsese. He was also hard-wired as a publisher — as a kid, he sold homemade wrestling magazines outside the Spectrum, and in college, he won a Hearst Foundation journalism award for a magazine he founded.
Inspired by the brisk porn profits at Movies Unlimited, Fishbein rounded up friend Irv Slifkin (now known as WIP's “Movie Irv,” and a Philadelphia magazine contributor) and print-shop buddy Barry Rosenblatt, and rolled out the first issue of Adult Video News in February 1983. Subtitled “A Monthly Newsletter For Today's Sophisticated X-Rated Viewer,” AVN, penned by Fishbein and Slifkin, was aimed at consumers, featuring interviews with the talent, reviews with tepid lines (” … the sex in Taboo II is plentiful and varied … “), and a four-A grading system. “It could have been Science Fiction Video News or Children's Video News,” says Rosenblatt. “Whatever was hot at the time.”
From the start, Fishbein didn't quite fit into this strange new world. When sex star Marilyn Chambers came to town in 1983, he interviewed her in her hotel room. Playful answers to his questions turned into obvious flirting, yet Fishbein missed all the signals and didn't realize he might have missed a chance to get laid until hours later. The following year, Fishbein visited his first set — an airplane romp titled Lay Over — and was coaxed into his one and only on-camera appearance, as a drunk. While people screwed all around him, Fishbein was passed out, eyes closed tight.
What Fishbein saw were dollar signs, and the fact that while consumers were curious about new product, distributors and movie stores depended on it to survive. AVN shifted to target them, and a decade before “branding” and “product placement” were buzzwords in every business plan, Fishbein created a marketing guide with advice on selling tapes and tips for retailers on stocking their stores. He also published a Billboard-style Top 20 sales chart. Someone was finally speaking to the renegades and smut-peddlers like they were CEOs instead of scum.
Using Hustler and Screw as his templates, the young publisher sought wisdom from his surrogate skin godfathers, who were skeptical at best. “He was like a virgin at a topless club,” says publisher Al Goldstein, describing Fishbein's early treks to New York's Bernard's, a hangout where he hunted down porn's power brokers. “He was a little baby. I always liked him, because he was sincere, but I never thought he would make it. I didn't think there was a trade.”
With the naïve ambition of an outsider, Fishbein saw what the porn titans couldn't imagine — an industry united by a magazine that spoke to them as entrepreneurs and artists. Some suggest his partners were casualties of that ambition, but Slifkin, tired of finding new ways to describe titles like Top Buns and Hannah Does Her Sisters, says it was his decision to walk away without compensation. Rosenblatt, after partnering with Fishbein in two other, misguided business ventures, used a lawyer to make his AVN exit. Alone, with heavy debts plaguing his business, Fishbein recruited a silent partner, fellow Washington High classmate Stuart Franks, who printed the magazine through his family's shop and agreed to defer the $200,000 debt AVN owed his company. Franks still prints for AVN from his warehouse off Red Lion Road. There, nestled between stacks of brochures for Pep Boys and a major local university, is a backside shot of a woman grabbing her ankles, from Crack Addicts 5. It's AVN's August cover, ready to ship.
The same survival instincts that kept AVN afloat shaped Fishbein's plan for its future. Despite evidence that the Mafia had its hands in all aspects of the porn business, Fishbein insists he was never approached by organized crime. If that's true, it's likely because AVN wasn't a moneymaker. Fishbein knew what had to be done to change that. Variety couldn't watch over Hollywood from Upper Darby. AVN needed to relocate. In 1991, he took his new bride, Allison, to California, and AVN was finally immersed in the business it covered. But its owner wasn't. Not yet.
Hours after Fishbein's quality time with Chi Chi and St. Croix, the curtain rises on Erotica L.A., a convention he runs to serve couples and women who are looking for a new vibrator or a nice schoolgirl outfit, and maybe a movie to watch while using both. And there he is, motoring around the floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center. Thin as an exclamation point, he lives in perpetual motion, usually doing multiple things at once (like downloading music to his iPod while taking calls and checking his IM — signified by a Woody Allen icon — for new messages). Though he's taken to carrying a pocket bottle of Purell hand sanitizer at all times, Fishbein graciously shakes hands with everyone from venerable cocksman T.T. Boy to former California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey to David Joseph, who hit this year's porn jackpot by snaring the rights to Paris Hilton's homemade hump tape. Then Fishbein locks his blue-gray stare on a novelty booth, all nubby dildos and French ticklers, and remarks wistfully, “I want free lube samples, but I don't want to have to ask.” That would be like Bill Gates trying to cop some free mouse pads at Circuit City — bad form. Fishbein wanders on. After an hour or so, he's holding his hands out to his sides, letting his wrists hang limp and away from his body, as if they've been infected by some airborne smut virus. “Mind if I go to the bathroom?” he says. “I forgot my hand soap. I feel disgusting.”
Fishbein had much less scrubbing to do when AVN debuted. There were only 20 or 30 movies to sort through each month, compared to 11,000 a year today, and variety was minimal; plots, negligible. Some films were funny. Natural breasts were plentiful. Over time, the boobs got bigger, and the sex more experimental and graphic. Then came John Stagliano in 1989. Goodbye storylines, laughable dialogue, and any pretense of artistry — just Stagliano with camcorder in hand, walking through his house and talking to the lens while lusty pals in each room were getting busy. As Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Right Stuff put journalism in a half-nelson and tossed it around, The Adventures of Buttman changed porn. It was dubbed “gonzo.” Suddenly, anyone with a camera and some willing participants could make and sell sex movies.
As gonzo crested, AVN rode the wave. Companies cropped up faster than Fishbein could keep track, but that didn't matter. Since he was pornography's magazine of record, they sought him out, and he provided a means for all facets of the industry to stay informed. The can-do Clinton era also changed AVN's identity. Gone was the “no foul language” rule, as raunch replaced restraint and ads showed everything, making AVN look more like Hustler than a trade magazine. Gossip found its way onto AVN's pages in the form of blind items (“An industry actress is being made up to look like and passed off as an Oriental”) and juicy tidbits (“Madison, who was being squired around by Lou Rawls Jr., went and tied the knot with him.”). AVN officially transformed from industry observer to industry insider.
While the magazine had become a conduit connecting the industry to itself, another Fishbein brainchild — the AVN Awards — served as a beacon to the outside world. From its wine-and-cheese roots at the Aladdin in Vegas, the production grew to a 3,000-head pay-per-view broadcast spectacle in 1996. Other porn galas came and went, but Fishbein's thrived, in large part because of his endless networking, coupled with his compulsive need to keep people happy — he coddles directors after giving them low ratings, sends out advance copies of reviews, and defends the awards from charges they're rigged. “He worried about every detail,” says Steve Orenstein, owner of Wicked Pictures, a frequent AVN Award recipient. “You'd get calls from him saying, ‘You weren't offended by that, right?' And I'd say, ‘No, relax.' There's never a time when someone isn't pissed off. Those award shows, I never saw Paul happy. It was always, ‘All these people are pissed at me. Why do I even do this?'”
Fishbein knew the headaches were worth it. His glorified bowling trophies fed the bottomless egos of adult, and for at least one night a year, Belladonna could feel like Meryl Streep, even while ending her acceptance speech with a heartfelt “Thank you so much for letting me suck dick.” Celebrities like David Duchovny and Drew Carey attended; Plimpton, Foster Wallace and Faludi translated the gala's sights to print — all part of a larger media fixation with porn that included a New York Times Magazine cover story and a fashion spread in Vanity Fair. Thanks to Fishbein's awards, porn's profile was soaring, as were sales — stamping “AVN WINNER, BEST THREE-WAY SEX SCENE” on your box cover became a prized marketing tool. TLA Video, known nationally for its adult catalog, always stocks extra copies of films featured on its “AVN Award Winners” page, because that merch always moves fast.
Fishbein found other ways to put his stamp on the business. Porn's premiere trade show was once a part of, and literally curtained off from, an electronics expo; now, Fishbein's own show is the industry's largest. He has united competitors for a week-long smut summit to discuss issues and plan for porn's future. He's also become a spokesman of sorts — chatting with Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, being recognized at the 2004 AVN Awards, when the Godfather himself, Larry Flynt, knighted him by saying, “I want to thank Paul Fishbein and AVN for lifting this industry out of the gutter.” Like Flynt, Fishbein's a staunch free-speech defender; he testified two years ago in the government's obscenity suit against producer Max Hardcore, insisting that Hardcore's faux child-porn videos, while revolting, have a constitutional right to exist.
That's the libertarian crusader in him, but more so, it's a self-preservationist struggle to keep oxygen flowing to the industry he chronicles and, by doing so, helped build. Success on the outside, as he's learned, has not come so easily. His one foray into mainstream was a comedy series he produced about the business of porn, called The Money Shot. (Its lead character, a trade-mag publisher, is “filled with nervous energy” and “constantly cutting secret deals, some of which backfire.”) The cable nets passed. Now he'll be satisfied with a DVD release to try to recoup the 75 grand he lost on its 12 episodes. He'll never be his cousin, David Berenbaum, who wrote the screenplay for Elf, a $173 million grosser, or his cousin Harry Elfont, who penned Can't Hardly Wait and Josie and the Pussycats. “He'd love to produce a regular dramatic feature,” says Michael Berenbaum, another cousin, who has received Emmy nominations for editing Sex and the City. “His businesses take a lot of time. It's a double-edged sword. He's kind of trapped in that world.”
At the one-story Adult Video News headquarters in Chatsworth, the receptionist says “corporate office” when answering the phone, and reviewers wear headphones in closed offices so the hallways don't sound like a continuous orgy. Yet there's no doubt as to what goes on here. Surrounded by black-and-white bondage photography, managing editor Mike Ramone reveals that, like Fishbein, he was roped into an on-camera appearance while on assignment; unlike Fishbein, he became #351 in the “Houston 620” gang bang. Reviews editor Heidi Pike-Johnson's office is packed floor to ceiling with DVDs. Legal watchdog Mark Kernes — bald down the middle, round, suspendered — shows me the 3-D Viewfinder sex photos he's trying to market. But Fishbein's office is like the Land That Porn Forgot, with its framed photos of Billy Joel and Donovan McNabb, his Hearst Foundation award from college, and snapshots of his five dogs. Some nerds grow up to wear Wookie costumes to Star Wars conventions, while others can tell you when Christy Canyon did her first three-way. Fishbein has plenty of porn geeks on staff, but he is not among them. His success is built on being the outsider, and even when he was welcomed in, he didn't fit the mold. No gold chains. No chest hair. No naked chicks on the walls. He wasn't banging the talent or snorting blow or watching blue movies in his free time. It was business for him, and that's exactly what porn needed: a guy who treated sex like widgets.
To maintain a safe distance between his personal life and his work, to have some sense of identity in such a soulless world, he's partnered with two childhood friends, keeps his dad and another friend on the payroll, calls his mother daily, and obsessively follows the Eagles. But the price of his success is that he's become an insider, a creation of the Valley, and no amount of pocket hand soap will get him a three-picture deal with Disney. Fishbein's list of industry friends includes various directors, talent the likes of superstar Jenna Jameson, and power brokers such as Steve Hirsch, owner of Vivid, the studio that distributes Jameson's movies and revolutionized porn marketing. Fishbein and Hirsch share a love of football, and take a cross-country gridiron trip together each year. Hirsch is an industry icon, and his indulgences in the perks of porn are well documented — drugs, alcohol, a messy relationship with Vivid's first contract girl, Ginger Lynn. When asked how it's possible for a Philly kid to find success in the Valley without falling victim to its vices, Hirsch is blunt: “Paul doesn't have an addictive personality. Period. I do.”
But Fishbein's symbiosis with porn extends beyond his friendships and into the workplace. AVN started as a vaguely journalistic entity, but today, its founder admits, he serves too many advertising masters for his magazine to stand as an industry watchdog — for example, an AVN editorial demanding an industry-wide condom-only policy or an investigation into porn's drug plague would be suicide. Fishbein's estimate that porn is a $10 billion to $14 billion business has been criticized as inflated by Forbes.com and others, and though he stands by it, as someone so dependent on porn's success, he's probably not the best source for impartial statistics. He's also in a particularly compromised role with his Excitement Video chain, for which he personally orders merchandise that's been reviewed by his magazine. Conflicts like these have made Fishbein the bull's-eye du jour for Internet porn mud-slingers like ex-AVN editor Gene Ross, who attacks his old friend and boss on websites such as the now-defunct fuckpaulfishbein.com from every angle, professional and personal alike.
The latter is what Fishbein long held sacred, but as AVN reached its peak, the man who built an empire on maintaining professional distance finally gave it up. In December 1999, he wrote a profile of a makeup artist named Red Velvet under the nom de porn Max Bloom — unusual in that Fishbein rarely writes anymore, and that AVN doesn't interview many crew members, even hot young ones. “It was a mistake,” Fishbein says now, admitting the piece was an excuse to meet her for lunch while he was still married. Like his first marriage, his second was headed toward divorce. Both exes worked in the business, but not as performers, and like Fishbein, they never brought their work home. “Our lives were everything but the adult industry,” says Kimberly Wilson, ex number two. But as his relationship with Wilson corroded, Fishbein found temptation on the job, with girls like Red Velvet. “I thought she was cute, I flirted with her, and that was it,” he says. (Red Velvet says she's known Fishbein for years through her father, and that he's “like an uncle.”)
After his second divorce, Fishbein abandoned the pledge he'd trumpeted to his friends, to his family, even to Howard Stern — I'll never date the talent. Luke Ford, porn's top gossip, who devoted a 180-page series on his website to rumors about AVN and Fishbein, linked him to scores of sex actresses, to which Fishbein only says, “What's funny is, they didn't get the right girls.” There was nude model Tricia Wilds, and a “just friends” drive-in movie with the star of the hugely successful gonzo series Shane's World, but as to others, he won't name names. What's certain is that in November 2002, Fishbein asked director friend Michael Raven to introduce him to Cherry Rain — a cute 23-year-old redhead he'd seen in Raven's movies — under the pretense of profiling her for AVN's “Fresh Off the Bus” column. Her first response: “I'll meet him, but I won't fuck him.”
Fishbein wasn't looking for more than that, but Cherry, or Amanda, as she's known off-camera, took him by surprise. “If you were to script the perfect girl, she's it — aside from being in the business, so my friends can watch her fuck,” he says. “Aside from that, she's it.” Now he's getting married for the third time, with his first prenup, and Amanda, with more than 30 movies on her résumé, will become the third Mrs. Fishbein, having pledged to leave her career behind. Friends and colleagues agree they haven't seen Fishbein this happy in years. He knows the dangers of flying too close to the sun — losing credibility, losing objectivity, losing a piece of that kid from Bustleton Avenue he used to be. But his tale is no tragedy. If this modern-day Icarus is headed for a fall, he'll be smiling the whole way down, and probably washing his hands one last time. “I have no regrets,” Fishbein says. “There's still a stigma attached to adult, but I'm not ashamed of what I do. I think I can live with myself.”
On Erotica L.A.'s second day, with his golden rule broken and nothing to lose, Fishbein again wanders the convention floor, this time with Amanda, until famed nude photographer Suze Randall spots the happy couple.
“You took her away from us!” she yells playfully at Fishbein, before bear-hugging her former model. “You lazy bitch! Take it off! Come back!”
In minutes, Japanese men with professional cameras and a bald guy in a Lord of the Rings tee recognize the soon-to-be Mrs. Fishbein and circle around. Amanda dissolves, and Cherry Rain climbs up on a table, beaming as the shutters click away. Fishbein talks shop with a vendor while Randall smiles at the throng of Cherry Rain fans and waves to Cherry's fiancé. “Bye-bye, Paul!” she laughs. “Bye-bye!”
As Erotica L.A. draws to a close on its third day, a Sunday, the president of Adult Video News is searching his 125-count collection for the right bottle of wine to go with dinner. Amanda now lives in his seven-figure home perched in the Hollywood Hills, not far from the site of the John Holmes Wonderland murders, but high above the Valley, where sex in warehouses is as commonplace as rush-hour gridlock. There's a room here with more than 1,000 DVDs, but nothing rated higher than NC-17. The only copies of AVN are buried in a box in the closet of a spare bedroom. Teddy, a pup who's beloved by Fishbein's two stepdaughters from his second marriage, runs around yipping. Anton, a 16-year-old shepherd/husky mix, on visitation from wife number one as stipulated in their divorce agreement, doesn't move around much at all. Amanda chops tomatoes for bruschetta in the kitchen while her mother boils corn, and after much mental wine debate, Fishbein makes a selection and heads out to the poolside grill, where he's tending to the poultry. Once everyone's gathered outside, he samples his cuisine.
“The chicken is dry,” he says.
Amanda takes a bite. “No it's not.”
“Yes it is. It's dry.”
He'll eventually call to get a head count for today's expo attendance, but right now, he seems uninterested in the world outside his gated compound. While his AVN empire gave porn a foundation upon which it could thrive, it also ushered in this era of oversaturation, much of which is sub-par product that Fishbein admits is bad for business. Plans for a second go of a mass-market newsstand edition are on hold, and he's increasingly focused on trade shows and online. Personally, aside from fretting over the wine and the dry chicken and the Eagles' lack of depth at the corners, he seems as at ease as he can be. He's coming to terms with his legacy, and his life. He'll probably never enjoy mainstream success like his cousins. Even though porn keeps inching toward middle America, it also pulls the other way, deeper into depravity, and when the Ashcrofts come bearing torches and a noose, Fishbein has to defend it to ensure his own survival. He has enemies, and they have high-speed Internet connections. Screw 'em. Yeah, he's fucking a porn star. And yeah, Fishbein knows that Steven St. Croix, the guy banging Malezia two days ago, has also enjoyed sex, in multiple positions, on film, with his fiancée, and elicited her cries of “It's perfect!,” among other proclamations of ecstasy. That sucks. He doesn't embrace it, but he's dealing with it, and he's trying to stop worrying about it all, doing his best to look every inch a man who believes it truly is great to be Paul Fishbein. He pours everyone a glass of 1999 Château de la Gardine — “Good shit,” he promises, before wandering away. He returns in a minute. Something's wrong.
“Does this taste good?” he asks. “It tastes bad to me.” b
