Porn Valley- Having been the guy who was responsible for the restoration of Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com, and the fact that he was Arrow Productions’ point man at last week’s Sex Expo in New York City, I wanted to get Paul Interlandi’s take on what happened at The Big Apple. Events included a “world premiere” and subsequent showings of Deep Throat at The Cinema Village on 12th Street, as well as the official start-up of the search for Linda Lovelace.
According to what Interlandi is telling me, the Expo promoters forecast an attendance of 30,000 people but maybe produced between 2,000 and 5,000 bodies at best depending who was counting. “It was slim pickings,” Interlandi says.
Nevertheless, Deep Throat looks to be taking in something like $5,000 in revenue in a theater that seats 60 people at best. Some mainstream films don’t have that kind of one-screen average but Arrow would have hoped for more with a better turnout for the Sex Expo. To accommodate theater turnout, Arrow ran shuttles from The Hotel Pennsylvania where the Expo was being held to The Cinema Village which is located across from NYU on a side street with no traffic. “They get no walk-by,” says Interlandi. “And they didn’t put a poster out until Friday; and then the poster they had in the theater was blocked by the door of the ticket booth.”
Interlandi notes that Al Goldstein attended the premiere but many of the porn stars who said they’d be there didn’t show. “We got promised by Tera Patrick- she didn’t show,” said Interlandi. “We got promised by a dozen other girls. None of them showed. Of course it was in a middle of a thunderstorm and a downpour of rain so that may have had something to do with it. Maybe they didn’t want to get wet.” Despite a number of press releases that went out, Interlandi was frank to say that local media didn’t do shit, although The Sex Herald, which is part of the Herald news organization was doing a piece. “They did a big story on us,” says Interlandi. “They went Saturday but I don’t know if they’re got it done as yet. They were going to make it a feature story and wanted photos sent to them.”
Some reports indicated that Thursday basically sucked but picked up over the weekend thanks, in part, to hype on the Howard Stern show. “The place was very small,” said Interlandi, comparing the entire floor space in New York to the gay area at AEE in Vegas. “That was the problem. Hopefully, next year if they continue to do it, they’ll get their act together and do a better job.”
What wasn’t generally known is that Thursday was for trade-only. “To pull together a trade-only event in New York is kind of naive,” Interlandi sighs, although Arrow, by measure, did pretty good trade and retail business. “We paid for our whole trip just on Thursday. But it was still a long day.”
Interlandi, who owns Moonlight Entertainment, notes that Arrow is now selling his catalogue. “And with Arrow selling that large of a catalogue we can write a lot of business,” he says. “Our trip was paid for. But the other people who didn’t have that opportunity or have a big catalogue lost their ass on Thursday. They didn’t sell anything. And because they didn’t market the show to couples, they ended up filling the show with the Adultcon kind of people. The single guys with cameras wanting to take pictures of porn stars. But that doesn’t work for most of the vendors they drew. Because they drew the sex toy vendors, the lingerie stores and sex aids like lube. Stuff like that. If you don’t get couples there, you’re not selling any of that stuff because single guys want to take pictures. All the booths that tried to retail there, they died.”
Interlandi also conducted a how to get in porn seminar that was scheduled for Sunday. Asked how that went, Interlandi commented, “New York’s an interesting place. One of the students paid us with a fake $50 we didn’t catch the fake $50 until it was too late. He wrapped it in another $50 and passed it to us. We didn’t notice it until the end of the day. Then one of them wrote us an IOU. Then some people came and didn’t have to money to pay $100. It was nuts.”
Judging from what Interlandi had to say, the search for Linda Lovelace will continue for awhile. “We had one girl come up that said she read about it but that she wasn’t interested in changing her name.” To clarify, Interlandi said the new Lovelace will have to change her name accordingly because Arrow owns the trademark. “The people we’ve been talking to so far aren’t interested in losing their current stage names.” Interlandi concedes that it’s been a deal killer so far, even though the girls they’ve talked to are newbies with scant industry identification. “They’re young and they don’t want to use our stage name. The idea is when they leave, they leave our name.”