Porn Valley- I’ve long suspected that XRCO will be running under the AVN umbrella. I’m convinced of that more than ever. There was a meeting Wednesday at AVN with Jared Rutter, Tim Connelly, Bill Margold and Jim Holliday. Paul Fishbein was “arbitrating.”

And that word isn’t just glibly tossed in there. Because Connelly and Rutter’s positions with AVN would more than suggest that the magazine intends to steer the XRCO- known for its free spirited independence and non-partisan voting- into porn company-powered commercial waters and eventually make it a profit center. Just like it’s done with Erotica LA and ventures of similar ilk. Whereas Margold and Holliday’s positions as the jolly rebels of the business have always been that XRCO was intended for “the kids.”

Wasn’t it Connelly who used to say at the gavel of all the XRCO shows that they were “the only awards worth a damn?” So how would that declaration sit now with the fact that Connelly presides over at AVN which has always made it clear it was running the only awards show in town. That’s if a buck is to be made.

Lending even more credence to the suspicion that AVN’s going to assimilate XRCO, was comments made by Rutter on AVN’s website. Rutter says, with his pressing duties at AVN making it impossible to continue what he was doing with XRCO, that Dirty Bob and Dick Freeman were stepping up to the plate. Well, it’s fairly well known that Dirty Bob is Rutter’s “boy” and that Dirty Bob didn’t step up to any plate. He was handed the bat. That, plus the fact that Rutter has said on occasion, that if XRCO “sticks to the old way” it would be laughed at, might tell you that the Volkswagen Bus with the peace signs is being traded in for a Mercedes.