Porn Valley- I had a chat recently with Arnold Stein, owner of OP Distribution, www.opdistribution.com. Stein’s company had shot a lavish movie in Beverly Hills last month and he was very excited about the prospects of Powder Room Confessions. It features Jezabelle Bond; and Aimee Sweet [photo] is on the boxcover. “A great cast- everyone looked just unbelievable,” says Stein. “We’re very excited about it and Aimee went a lot further than she’s ever gone before, which is always good thing for the R-rated girls who get into the XXX world. It went very smoothly. We got tons of footage. We got some great photo sets for some magazine deals in Europe and Australia.” Stein is looking at a Labor Day weekend release.

“We’re trying to give an exclusive to Adam & Eve for a pre-release launch,” says Stein. “And a bunch of the cable companies are interested in it. That market’s going to do very well for this product. And it was great to get a production of my own going. I do so many other peoples’ productions and post productions and help them with theirs. But now I would like to do one in-house feature every quarter at this point.”

Between Adultfyi.com and word of mouth referrals, Stein says he’s been having more people knocking on his door than he can count. “I field at least 35 calls a day from producers who want me to distribute them,” says Stein. But, by the same token, Stein says he seems some pretty horrible-looking content. “I got a call from this guy who wanted to e-mail me pictures of his wife- I’ve been filming her POV for a year now. I got 400 hours of footage. He shows me a picture and I had to write him back. I never felt so guilty in my life. I had to ask if he was gay. I didn’t know whether his wife was a man or a woman. And I don’t do gay productions. I didn’t know what to do. I guess this is what she looks like.” Fair to say that the woman or man could pass for a cross-dresser. “It was brutal,” laughs Stein. “But very funny, though. You take the good with the bad. And, of course, there are gems. You’re very impressed. There are website people who shoot all this content and never do anything with it outside the web. They have thousands of hours of footage and never do anything with it. For me it’s like a gold mine when I find one of these guys. There I can make ten videos in three weeks. It’s already edited and done. They’re computer-savvy. There’s some very exciting stuff happening.”

Stein and I started talking about aspects of The Patriot Act whereupon he tells a story involving customs. Stein flew in product from France.

“And they’ve never seen porn come through the Tucson customs office before,” he says. “There’s only about three of us out here who are really in the industry. I had them send finished product. Well, they called me and told me to come down with all my forms of ID. I had to show them passport, birth certificate, license, the whole deal. And they detained me. They told me that importing porn was illegal. I said you better learn your law because importing pornography is not illegal. They put me in a room and locked the doors. They said stay here until we figure this out. There was about four hours worth of me sitting around, talking to these guys. They misunderstood the word obscene. They thought the word obscene meant pornography. Luckily, they let me leave with all my product. Once I showed them my product was straight pornography, it wasn’t a big deal. But they were citing the Patriot Act. That’s what they were telling me I was falling under. What I did before I went down there when customs called me, I did all my research on the law and called my lawyer. He said you’re fine, go down there and play stupid.”

But here’s the kicker. “The guy I bought the titles from, I made a deal with him,” says Stein. “We were all happy and he wanted to do me a favor. He decided to change the covers to English for me. I viewed everything in French and it looked great. The videos are in French and it adds a lot of sex appeal. I was happy with that. Well, he did this transfer to English. I saw the title in French but translated it means Extreme Rape. That was the title on the cover so I knew why they were stopping me. Oh my God I can’t believe this. The front cover has a picture of a girl with a knife held to her neck. I understood why they had to do this, but once you watch the movie, the girl was within three minutes of the scene starting, begging for sex. I don’t think any rape victim has begged for sex. They were, like, we can tell this is acting. So they let me go. It’s all in the interpretation of the law, and these guys have never dealt with it, so they had no idea how to interpret it.”