Interview: Girlfriends Films President Moose

VALENCIA, Calif.—To say that Girlfriends Films is one of the fastest-growing movie production houses in the adult industry might just be an understatement. Having inked a contract with Larry Flynt Productions to distribute Hustler Video, VCA and HIS, and with discussions under way to enter into similar contracts with other big industry names, Girlfriends has become a company to be reckoned with—and much of that has to do with its new president, the man known only as “Moose,” a name he acquired during his high school volleyball days and has kept to this day. “I love the adult industry, man,” Moose said in an exclusive AVN interview. “I’m proud to tell my family, my mother-in-law, my father-in-law. I’ve got an amazing wife. She actually used to work for William Morris, and then Rupert Murdoch and the guys that made MySpace. She’s a whiz. She’s smart, we’re happily married, have fun, adventure—and that’s one thing about this adult industry: It’s 100 percent business to me. I don’t go out partying or getting crazy. I go to bed early.” That behavioral decision might have something to do with Moose’s background. An avid hot-rodder and racing enthusiast, Moose became a NASCAR firefighter shortly after graduating high school in 1994, a profession he practiced for five years before opening his own company whose employees combined the talents of firefighting and emergency medicine. “At one point, I had ten firefighter medics,” Moose explained. “I was on TV production sets like Monster Garage, Big Boom, Monster House, stuff like that; I’ve been on Unsolved Mysteries a bunch, both behind the scenes and on camera. Eventually, when they needed a firefighter or a medic, and they needed somebody real, they wanted someone who knew what they were talking about, and not just some actor guy. So that’s how I got into that. “When I was with NASCAR, I saw cars go 150 miles an hour out on a hot track, seen them flip cars over, but it was exciting and fun,” he added. “Then I partnered up and helped a friend start BS Industries, a hotrod shop. It wasn’t making enough money back then, but now it’s doing pretty well. We just did cars for Tim Allen, Johnny Depp—in fact, Tim Allen brought one of our cars on one of Jay Leno’s last shows. But back in those days, the shop wasn’t taking off where we could pull money from it, so we each got other jobs, had other things going.” But it was a former girlfriend who got Moose into the adult industry by finding him a job doing sales for producer/director Sandy Bunz at Flashpoint Productions. “I blew his sales up like crazy and made him more money in a couple of months than he’d ever seen,” Moose recalled. “Then I met Dan [O’Connell, Girlfriends’ former owner] at the AVN show [in 2007], and we hit it off from there; talked about bringing distribution in-house, and ended up doing that. We actually raised the price two bucks per unit, because the distributor that had it before us was doing a bunch of weird, shady stuff. And that’s the thing: I’ve now got cameras everywhere and tight inventory, so I’ve just continued to work hard, work smart, but I started on the ground floor and now I’ve made it to the top, got a great deal with Dan, and now I’m the owner.” Indeed, Moose’s rise up the corporate latter has been swift. It was in 2008 that he was first named head of domestic sales, and within three years, he was the company’s vice president before acceding to the presidency in December 2013. But what got Moose started on his ascent was hard work ... and not a little ingenuity. “I have places to sell that other people don’t have, and I won’t share them with anybody,” he warned. “When you do seven years at trade shows overseas, and you spend all this time and meet all these mom-and-pops and grow with them, you don’t want to share them with everyone else. People don’t realize it’s 70 grand every year to go over to that show, to bring girls and a booth, promo, and do ads over there, so you don’t want to give your competition these connections, but if you’re smart enough, you can find them. We’ve got the internet now; you can find everyone. You’ve just got to go city by city, town by town. That’s what I did when I first got to Girlfriends: I found every single store in the U.S. That was my first task. Then I called everyone, got all their fax numbers, and I still have the fax list that I fax everyone once a month.” But to be truly successful takes even more than that. “You gotta let the consumers know what’s going on, because if you don’t let them know, they’re not going to come into the stores asking for the product,” he explained. “I support our distributors now, but I do market to the retailers and let them know. That’s why I do the ads, and the newsletter. A lot of people don’t go online.”But for Moose, adult entertainment is still largely a brick-and-mortar business. “I think the stores have really made a difference,” he opined. “The experiments they do, the women’s nights, the bachelorette stuff. We always promote that. I go to every store possible, just to see how they’re laid out, what they can do better, how I can help them, from a rack to a trailer-playing display. We do a lot of POP; whatever they need, we’ll do on bigger movies. We don’t do posters and stuff for everything, but when someone’s buying your DVD now, you have to give them the most value for their buck to make them become a return customer. And with distribution channels and the different delivery methods, you have to arrange different times for releases, so you do give the DVD stores some respect, make it exclusive there for a little bit. Some of the other companies, they didn’t manage their money right and were desperate so they put their stuff up on the internet as fast as possible, and then the stores get mad because how are they supposed to support you? If you go to a membership model and get customers to pay 130 bucks and they can eat all the buffet, but then you want them to pay 30 bucks for a DVD? It doesn’t make sense.” And then, of course, there’s the piracy, from which Girlfriends suffers at least as much as other video producers. “The technology is already there for digital fingerprinting, so you can find your stuff anywhere if you want to,” Moose stated. “The thing is, if they can catch the infringer and get their address, they hit them for $240, so that shows them, ‘Hey, I better not do that again,’ and hopefully they tell five or ten friends—but who really wants to admit they got caught stealing porn? It’s not like a table conversation. But the music industry or mainstream, they’ve all had to deal with it, and they’re still trying to deal with it. “I think eventually the world’s going to collar the internet and make it be responsible and take care of these torrent sites,” he predicted. “Everything’s going to the internet, so the broadcast companies are holding on as long as possible, but they just need to change and go with the flow. You can watch everything on ABC on ABC On Demand, so everything’s going in that direction, but the stores are doing a better job at being couples friendly. People want to see product, but at the end of the day, it’s just different delivery methods. But DVD player sales are up around the world; DVDs aren’t going to go away. Kids with computers, parents have to be careful with online stuff, because kids are smarter than their parents now with devices and technologies and phones and tablets and Google Glasses. In the next five years there’ll be a screen on every table. You just don’t know what’s going to happen or what’s going to go on.” Fortunately, what’s going on at Girlfriends is sales, and it’s their success that continues to attract content producers. “Everyone came to us: Bonnie [Rotten] and B. Skow and Viv Thomas and Tasha Reign and Tammy Sands,” he noted. “With our best-selling series, Women Seeking Women, we’re up to Volume 104. That’s one of them. There’s also Road Queen, Lesbian Seductions, Lesbian Triangles, they’re all up there, with 3,500 pieces going out the first day. It used to be a lot more, but most companies can’t get over 600 out the door right now. But when I took on Tasha, I did 1,500 for her first one, and she was only doing 500 pieces before. “You can’t just put a brand out there; it takes a while. It took us a while to build Skow for Girlfriends, and now it’s considered one of the top imprints. He just finished Silhouettes. If that doesn’t win for Best Romance, then the thing’s rigged, because no one else is doing what he’s doing. No one else is doing productions like we are every month.” We wondered if different series sell better in different parts of the country, but Moose assured us that it’s more the quality of the product rather than its theme that brings in customers. “Overseas, people want to see American, so pretty much everything sells good,” he said. “They like to see Road Queen because it’s traveling and they like to see more of the U.S. It’s pretty much—our boy/girl stuff has taken off worldwide. I think the thing is the reputation. In order to get in our distribution channel, you have to have good product; otherwise we wouldn’t let you in, and the stores trust us. I think they’ve been burned a lot of times in the past with bad product or bad camerawork or bad sound, or the quality of the girls or the orgasm. I mean, Dan still has 20 scenes he won’t share with the world because they didn’t meet the caliber. Any other studio would have released them.” And while it’s not as if Moose watches every video he sells, he assures the quality mainly by picking the right people. “So far, they’ve hit it out of the park, because we’ve partnered with the right people who wanted to grow their brands and they’re not just doing it to get their name out there; they’re doing it to actually grow something,” he explained. “Bonnie Rotten’s new stuff is amazing, like no one’s ever seen, and it’s her own flavor, her own style, and she put her heart behind it and you get a lot more from them. And I tell them, ‘Hey, your first one’s your first baby, your firstborn; you gotta take care of it, but then you gotta step it up each time because you’ve learned so much and you’ve got to bring your “A” game every time, plus what you’ve learned in the past.’ They want to build a name, and they’re in the industry, and let’s face it: some of these girls are role models.” Moose said that he and Girlfriends’ former owner, Dan O’Connell, brainstorm nearly every day, as they also do with staff like Wilson, their warehouseman, and Sabrina, who among her many duties is one of their primary camera operators. “I mean, the porn industry, everyone’s got a lesbian line now; everyone’s chasing everyone’s tail,” he reflected. “We were one of the first to land it and just to gear on that. AbbyWinters is older than us, but they didn’t have DVDs. I’m saying, they could have hit the market; they already had the product. Then again, we were slow to the membership site idea and broadcast—but not too many people have their own branded channel, which is a little more than a year old now. And that’s the thing: We don’t jump into bed right away. If people want to do a deal, we try to think about it, make sure it’s a good deal for them and us, because we want our partnerships to do well and do good, and without that, you know, if they don’t succeed, we don’t have a good reputation or a good brand or a good following, so that’s your best sales tool is reputation and follow-through.” Part of that follow-through has been the company’s move last year from their headquarters in the San Fernando Valley. “When we decided to move, we knew we wanted to grow into distribution and we knew we had a niche, so going to a 37,000-square-foot space from a 9,000 was a big jump, but it was cost-affordable, because it was the same price we were paying in the Valley. So now we’re up here in Valencia, and we just got our new Costco-type racking, is what we call it. Hustler will take up one of them, and we’re working on a couple of contracts now with other studios, working with some A-list studios now.” But though Moose seems to spend an incredible amount of time tending to business—for instance, every day he parks at the back of their building so he can enter through the warehouse, talk to his employees and find out how they’re doing—he’s well aware of the social impact the adult industry has. “I hate how the world views the adult industry,” he half-sighed. The mainstream will “push sex or marketing or branding, from swimsuit issues to mainstream ads during the Super Bowl, but they’ll slap us when we try to protect our rights to sell our material. I mean, when you see billboards, they’re just selling sex. You go through New York, there’s sex everywhere.” Speaking of which, this is how Moose describes his only sex education: “My Scottish grandma gave me a haystack of Playboys when I was little and a six-pack of beer and a 12-pack of condoms, and that was like the birds and bees—and I wasn’t supposed to open it until late at night. “But sex is always there, man; it’s human nature. I used to breed horses, and at a certain age, you knew when your mare was ready. And these girls, they get their periods and they get their training bras and they see all this sex on TV and they want to be like the older kids, Some of the parents raise them right, some don’t, but you’ve got to protect the children unless you have a grandma like mine and she gives you some Playboys.” So what does he think of porn in general? “I think it’s awesome, as long as they respect the boundaries of the world. It’s like being raised right; it’s like certain things, if someone wants to do it and are happy doing it, as long as they’re of age and consenting adults, it’s fine.” Even as we talked, Moose has more distribution deals in the works—most of which he can’t talk about. “I’m always looking for good distributions, good partnerships,” he said. “Stoya came in the other day; we’re talking to her about some stuff. You know, you just keep the reputation up and people come. That’s the key element: if you have a good name, a good brand, then other people refer you or recommend you. You can always be just a nice, polite guy, that’s the thing. Be humble, but be willing to work for what you want.” And that’s Moose in a nutshell.