ASB Magazine

Popularity can be great for your cause, plain and simple. Right now, there are few names in the industry that are as controversial as Extreme Associates...

Popularity can be great for your cause, plain and simple. Right now, there are few names in the industry that are as controversial as Extreme Associates, and there are only a handful of companies that are as hot as Evolution Erotica. Both companies are affiliated with each other, as well as the adult video production companies DNA Movies and Bruce 7, through family ties, and they work together towards the unified goal of increasing revenues for everyone involved with their combined success.

 When it comes to the popularity of these companies, it takes a group of people that are capable of building and retaining an unstoppable buzz to ignite and maintain massive retail sales. In other words, it takes a team effort to make Extreme, Evolution, DNA and Bruce 7, four dynamic adult companies, run successfully. And it takes a revolutionary approach to breaking the mainstream, which is something that happens to be the specialty of this dynamic group.

 One very important person that is responsible for building and fostering the team is Dennis Desantis, President in charge of sales for all four companies. As a tireless advocate for his employers, his clients and the products he sells, he is responsible for taking each company he represents to the next level of popularity when it comes to sales reports.

 Since ASB is devoted to the concerns of those who actually sign checks, send invoices, purchase products and oversee budgets, we requested time with Desantis, as well as Rob Black, owner of Extreme. After speaking individually with both men about their combined strength, entrepreneurial efforts and business philosophies, we came to realize that when popularity and profits meet each other at equal levels, it is because of a forward-thinking team. Extreme, Evolution, DNA and Bruce 7 are proving that they are a unified force that is unafraid to break out of the mold and take business to the next level. And it all reflects in the receipts at tax time, because at the end of the pitch, it’s all about selling the goods!

Industry Philosophy

 Known as one of the top salesmen in the business, Desantis is all about the home team, and he has a powerful ability to please the clients of all four companies that rely on his ability to get people to spend money. Responsible for generating sales for Extreme Associates, Evolution Erotica, DNA Movies and Bruce 7, Desantis might have four business cards, but he has only one objective – to sell as much product as possible to those demanding the type of adult videos for which each company has become famous.

 When Desantis gets warmed up, he is indeed phenomenal in his ability to get others to understand why his point of view is worthy of attention, and he certainly knows the worth of salespersons like himself in this business. Describing his beliefs, he offers advice to those trying to get started on how to move units from the stockroom to the shelves and finally out of the stores. “First of all, you’ve got to get a decent product, you’ve got to have good packaging, and then the main part is what I do - sales. If you don’t have a decent salesman to get in the stores, nobody’s going to know about the product, so that’s where it all starts.”

 Keith Gordon, who owned Bizarre Video for twenty years, is Desantis’s uncle, and has known him since the days of diapers. Gordon watched his nephew take ardent strides towards the top working on Wall Street, proving his worth as a good salesman. Desantis was always focused on and accustomed to being self-employed, even in the face of adversity. There came a point when he had to give up several businesses he owned due to financial problems, so he had to start from scratch again at only 22 years old. He went back to his roots and decided to get back into the game of selling. When his uncle heard that he lost his businesses, he offered a position at Bizarre Video because of his skills as a salesman. After taking the job, Desantis did well enough selling bondage that he decided to stay onboard and rebuild himself in the adult industry.

 “After I learned enough to be on my own, I branched off. I met up with Rob, and he offered me a big deal for Extreme and Evolution, and from there I branched off into DNA and Bruce 7. I’ll probably take it to the next level again sometimes soon. If you can sell, you’re going to make money in this business. Again, if you don’t have an outstanding sales guy, you could make all the product in the world, but if you don’t have good relationships, it’s useless.”

 And while he is not afraid to share his confidence with ASB, he makes sure to share the spotlight. He runs the sales departments for all four companies with the help of his assistant Rose, who he praises for assisting with anything he needs done (“She’s a really, really big help”).

Mr. Sell-it-all

 Desantis is fully aware that he works for companies that are the subject of moral criticisms. He explains that in order to efficiently manage sales of the company, he has to be realistic about the type of productions that are expected from each brand.

 “Extreme’s a niche product. It’s raunchy, it’s nasty; they do extreme stuff. With that specific brand, it’s a delicate situation,” Desantis admits. “There are certain stores and distributors I have to be careful with. Extreme is a little different because of the lawsuit they’ve got going on where they’re fighting the government for an obscenity case - which they’re going to win. Not a lot of stores and web sites take the Extreme product. But the stores that do take it, they take big of it. Extreme has been around for eight years. It basically sells itself.”

 Those eight years of existence have been well documented in both the mainstream press as well as courtrooms. In April 2003, during the tenure of John Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, federal agents raided the premises of Extreme Associates. Black, along with his wife Lizzy Borden and his company were all indicted for distributing obscene pornographic materials.

 Extreme has remained in business during the trial, continuing to market and sell the five tapes that are at the center of the prosecution’s case as “The Federal Five”, with a portion of the sales revenues going to Extreme’s defense fund. During a hearing in November 2004, Black’s lawyer argued that the right to privacy gave individuals the constitutional right to view offending materials in private, a right which cannot be meaningfully exercised without a corresponding right of companies to distribute such materials.

 On January 20 2005, the District Court judge dropped the charges, agreeing with the defense that the Federal anti-obscenity statutes are unconstitutional. The Department of Justice, now headed by Alberto Gonzales, announced on February 16, 2005 that it would appeal the ruling. That appeal was filed with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on April 11, 2005, and the outcome of the case is still pending.

 Desantis asserts that even though there has been ongoing controversy with Extreme, it does not hinder his ability to change channels so to speak, when it comes to selling the other companies’ videos. “Evolution is a lot tamer. Every chain store, every web site, every distributor takes the Evolution stuff, so I’m a lot busier when it comes to Evolution than when it comes to Extreme, but they’re both highly branded names. Tom Byron shoots all the Evolution stuff, and actually he’s making a comeback. He’s going to be starring in his own line soon, called Tom Byron’s House of Ass.”

 Being able to sell Extreme and Evolution material in a climate of contentious debate made Desantis the golden child of Black’s enterprise, and opened up new opportunities for him to create his own adult production companies.

 When asked to describe his top salesman’s qualities, Rob Black gives Desantis a solid gold stamp of approval. “The sales aspect is a basic premise that he’s just naturally phenomenal at. But seventy-five percent of what he brings to the table is personality and new energy into our relationships.” Black gets especially nostalgic when he remembers the well-timed assistance he received from Desantis. “When I got Dennis,” he says, “I had just come off the heels of beating the last government case. It was a tough period of time, and the first thing that Dennis did was breathe new life into the company and me. He made me excited about the business again, because I had lost touch with what was important.”

 Black commends Desantis for being a one-man sales force, but he gives him the biggest points for his attitude and approach, which is crucial when selling adult films to new and existing adult stores. “He could come up here and do sales from nine to four and do sales all day; that’s easy. He’s getting people excited again, and more importantly making me feel that there’s a lot more to be accomplished, and we can accomplish it and go to a higher place. Not to mention I’ve never seen or met anyone in my life with more girls than him.”

 “I do a great job for Extreme and Evolution,” Desantis says proudly. “So they gave me the opportunity to start my own company and still sell for his companies, just because it’s worth it to Rob. I ship DNA product out of the Extreme warehouse. I use their phones, I use their lights, and it’s under the same roof, so I really got a good deal out of it. I’m rooted into it because I’m tied to Rob, and there’s no DNA without Extreme.”

 Black is very realistic about the demands that an Extreme Associates salesperson would encounter, predicting his own controversy a long time ago, before it came to pass. “I knew from the beginning that I wanted to be controversial, and be remembered for something. I wanted to ruffle everybody’s feathers; do something in the business that’s not what you would expect from your average porn company. So at the end of the day, it has cost a ton of money and we could go to jail. But I’ve never had more mainstream press, from 60 Minutes to Nightline. The last year and a half I had a documentary crew that followed me around and followed the case, and the footage is going to the Sundance Film Festival. And that’s basically the starting point for good documentaries.”

 “And it couldn’t have happened if the controversy wasn’t there, so you have to take the good with the bad. The bad - you could go to jail; we lost a ton of money because people are scared of us. But it’s good if we can break that mainstream, and have a god-damned documentary about us going to the Supreme Court, with Tom Cruise playing me in the fuckin’ movie! I’m one hundred times more entertaining than Larry Flynt!”

 Black is proud not only of the struggle to maintain his rights, but also the movement which he feels Extreme Associates helped to start in adult video. By creating films that were almost guaranteed to spark debate, Black was able to generate press and media attention faster than his competitors, making his films among the hottest on the market.

 “Here we are in 2005, and everybody’s Extreme; Skeeter Kerkove and all these other guys who just basically do really bad imitations of Rob Black. So I am definitely proud that I’ve started a movement in the industry. The second thing is fighting the government, fighting this administration, not rolling over or copping a plea and taking it up the ass. And I’ll fight it even if I’m sitting in a federal prison in Arizona, you know? It’s just something that I’m proud of. I don’t believe that anything we do is against the law, because it’s not against the law.

 Obscenity is a funny thing. Obscenity is up to the eye of the beholder. And it’s crazy to say that you can go to jail because somebody doesn’t like some movie that you made or book that you wrote. That’s the complete opposite of what our America was founded for. Not long ago, we hit the two thousand dead soldiers mark in Iraq, and that’s definitely not what these kids died for. It was to give the Iraqi people freedom. So how do you give the Iraqi’s freedom, but you come over here to the United States and you want to prevent people from watching a bad fuck movie?”

 While both Black and Desantis are awaiting good news from the courts, they are continuing with business as usual and are ready to move full speed ahead in order to meet the new demands of an evolving adult industry. “I think that in the next five, ten years, it’s going to be all VOD, and the DVD business is going to plummet a lot,” Desantis predicts. “Once the average American and everybody in the world can afford a computer, when it drops from five hundred to maybe one hundred dollars a computer, I think everybody’s going to be on VOD or the web sites.”

 Black agrees that technology holds the key to the future. He also wants other adult video production companies to realize that as long as the government is intent on prosecuting obscenity, no company that profits from selling pornographic material is truly safe. “I think the next movement is keeping the fight alive and not letting it die. Basically stomping out the obscenity laws as we know them. And then I think the second movement is to pick up where we left off a couple years ago, which is still trying to find new ways to create pornography and different movies. And I think the third is continuing in developing our Internet into a huge global leader in VOD, the PlayStation Portables, and the iPod movies. We’re in the process of creating content that will be licensed and programmed by us, so we’ll be able to get people movies on their portable devices.”

 Of course, when it comes to sales, Desantis is all about winning. He has already implemented several strategies that have worked very well for the biggest players in adult video production, and he’s prepared to push even harder.

 “We make Bruce 7, DNA, Extreme and Evolution shelf talkers for every store in which we have our own section, which is good promotion that not a lot of people have, besides major companies like Evil Empire, Vivid and Zero Tolerance. Then we had tons of promotional materials made, such as t-shirts and posters. We also just hired a PR guy who represents all our companies, setting up television media coverage like the Howard Stern show for us, advertising monthly in magazines and organizing parties, feature dancing gigs and store signings for the girls. So we brand the companies like that, just spreading the word.”

 He also uses adult celebrity star power to drive sales higher and increase the amount of traffic to each company’s individual web site. With a roster of stars that includes Gia Paloma, Coffee Ron, Paris Gables, Chris Justice and Mark Alias, not only do Black, Byron and Desantis have a great pool of talent, they also have a staff of producers, directors and miscellaneous production crew members.

 “I wish you could spend a day here, you would see how great it is. Gia has a nine-to-five job here. During the day, she actually works in the office, and after five o’clock at night she turns into a porn star.” Paloma is also married to Coffee Ron, who directs his own line called Go Fuck Yerself, and both stars are sharing directors’ credits on future titles. “Now you’re going to see the guy and girl dominating people as a husband and wife tandem, like a Bonnie and Clyde. I think it’ll be pretty cool, plus we save money. Why go pay a director when a contract star that gets paid anyway could do it?”

 As a model for adult video companies that truly strive to build a foundation from within, Extreme is indeed starting a new movement. The company has been known for its bravado for almost a decade, and now with Evolution, DNA and Bruce 7, the trifecta of Black, Byron and Desantis are ready to revolutionize the industry once again, making money for and with their clients, and causing their competition to watch their moves carefully. Popularity has indeed been good to this team, and the confidence that it has instilled in Desantis and his partners will not allow him to ease off anytime soon.

 “At the end of the day, I think all these little companies will wind up going out of business, because a lot of people just don’t pay on time. I sell and I do very well because of my relationships. I go to see people all the time. I fly out to Ohio, to San Francisco, and I have drinks with our clients or we go out to dinner. And I always stay in these people’s faces, so at the end of the day, if there’s a hundred companies, I feel confident that they’re going to buy from Dennis first because of the relationship that I have with these people.

 And that’s why I bought Bruce 7 and started DNA. I don’t think just anybody can come in right now, open a new company and have it be successful, because nobody wants to support a new company or another new line. But since it was me and I had the relationship already, I thought it would work. And it has.”