The customer is not always right

Over the years, I’ve had customers who have run the gamut from ‘mom and pop’ businesses to national and foreign distributors, to an angry husband trying to sway a bitter child-custody court battle by sending porn to his soon-to-be ex-wife’s house…and everything in between. Here’s a quick rundown of a couple of my more memorable customers, and the lengths I went to please them.

 

A non-industry friend of mine who knew about my business thought it would be a great idea to send ‘adult dvd gift baskets’ to his clientele for Christmas one year. I strongly recommended against it citing the unpredictable way people respond to images of naked people screwing. Because his clients were all in the music licensing industry, he assumed they’d all have a sense of humor about it. He was spectacularly wrong. He got numerous angry responses and even lost a couple clients. He only sends cheese and cracker baskets now, although I hear a few are asking for more adult dvds. The moral? Never convey Yuletide greetings with porn.

 

I shipped thousands of VHS tapes, and later DVDs to a handful of customers in Australia over the years. They wanted everything: Reality Kings, Naughty America, Nubiles, Brazzers, Straight, Gay, Trans, you name it they wanted it. They turned out to be pirates. (Not the sword-wielding-eye-patch-wearing kind, the copy-a-movie-and-resell-it kind) Thinking back, it was pretty obvious…they never wanted more than 1 each of any title, but would brag about the hundreds they’d sold. They had full blown duplication labs set up in their garages and a mailing list of several hundred thousand horny Australians. Everybody over here knew they were pirating content, but nobody seemed to care because it was…Australia, and at that time very few studios sold to Australia anyway. These guys made a lot of money which is easy to do when you steal stuff and resell it times 50, and one of their biggest sellers was gay movies. They had requested a couple high profile titles months before they were released, and when they came out, I sent them one each. About a week later they contacted me in a panic and said that the movies had a scrolling marquis in the middle of several scenes that said, ‘for the unedited version contact…’ with the name and phone number of the company. They were getting a lot of complaints from customers as they were charging top dollar for these. Now here’s where it gets a little weird…

 

The studio was Falcon, a veteran gay porn company based in (where else?) – San Francisco. They released movies to distributors only AFTER 3-5 months of selling it themselves via private mail order for prices north of $75-$90 per tape. As it turned out, any movies that had ‘controversial’ content were edited before being released to us distributors. This was news to me, and to my customer. The Australian pirates insisted that I call the mail order version of Falcon and buy them the unedited movies asap, and price was no object.

 

I called the Falcon offices in San Francisco and ordered one each of the 5 titles that were causing problems. The total was $425 plus freight. The guy took all my information and when we got to the shipping address he said, “I’m sorry we can’t ship to Los Angeles county”. I said “I own a porn distributor”. He apologized again and said that they couldn’t ship to any county in the US where there had been an obscenity conviction within the last 15 years. LA county, home to 85% of the US porn industry had had several porn convictions since I’d been paying attention. I asked about Ventura county, and he said that would work.

 

Remember my friend above who unwisely gifted “Tonight’s Girlfriend DVDs” to all his music clientele? He lived in Ventura county. That was an interesting phone call. “Yeah Bill? I need to have some seriously kinky gay porn shipped to your house…is that OK?” My friend said it was fine, but his parents were staying with them that week. I warned him NOT to open the box under any circumstances, or he’d have some serious ‘splaining’ to do, to his ultra-conservative parents…not to mention his wife.

 

The shipping went off without a hitch and I picked up the contraband movies. They sat in my office for a couple days before my old arch-enemy curiosity, got the better of me. What could possibly be SO ‘controversial’ in these movies that they would be unwilling to ship them to specific counties in the US? Looking back…I recall what I did next as one of the more serious mis-judgements of my life, right up there with turning down the first US distributorship for Karaoke machines (thinking it would never catch on), and paying $75 for ‘Blue-Blockers’ while drunk-watching late night TV.

 

I put one of the movies in my office VCR and immediately understood what the ‘controversy’ was all about. The movies all contained ‘fisting’ scenes which at the time resided in a decidedly grey area of legality, but were rather commonplace in the world of mail-order gay porn. I remember walking away while the tape was playing to talk on the phone and when I came back, there on my screen was a guy with his arm buried clear up to the elbow in another guy’s ass. To make the visual even more alarming, the participants of this bromance-from-hell had dubiously chosen to use Crisco shortening for their lubrication which is white and looks like sloppy cake frosting…and it was everywhere. Well that’s just not something you see every day. In fact, I was so flabbergasted at the sight I went to the back and called my shipper in to have a look. He responded with, “That’s not fisting…that’s ARMING!” By now I had glazed over in dismay, transfixed with the bizarre images on my screen, but I had to agree. This was something new… The mystery of the controversial gay porn was solved. I’m pretty sure that my befuddled expression of disbelief was visible on my face right up until the day the horrific flicks finally left for Australia.

 

Now I’m a straight guy, but I’m of the belief that people should be able to stick whatever appendage they want, into any opening they want, if both parties have consented to it, or if one of the parties is an inanimate object. (a casaba melon jumps to mind) Having said that, I knew for certain that the terrifying apparition of greasy Crisco guy as human sock-puppet would be burned into my brain until the day I died. I’m still alive, and yep…it’s still there.

JB