VIVID STUDIO INSIDER

VIVID STUDIO INSIDER FOR MARCH 5, 2010

AXEL BRAUN'S OPEN CASTING CALL -Axel Braun - director of the forthcoming Batman XXX from his Axel Braun Productions and Vivid Entertainment - created headlines last week when he announced an open casting call for his next co-production with Vivid, an X-rated parody of beloved musical Grease. As AVN's Peter Warren put it in his story, "That's right, the madman behind [several other] huge [porn parody] hits is gearing up to make bona fide Travoltas and Newton-Johns out of porn's finest." The open auditions for the movie are scheduled to be held at the Vivid offices next Monday, Mar. 8 beginning at 2 pm. Said Braun, "I'm a huge fan of the movie, and as usual I intend to be very respectful in my spoof. Grease has a huge cult following, and I want the fans to have fun with my parody." Braun says there will be five full song-and-dance numbers in the production, and the actors will be required to execute them all on their own. "I intend to shatter the stereotype that porn people lack real skills," says Braun. "Many performers are incredibly talented individuals who have simply chosen to make their living in the adult industry for personal reasons. Grease XXX will give all of them a real opportunity to shine. We will have three weeks of rehearsals for the dance numbers with a famous Hollywood choreographer, and I'm working with a group of incredible musicians on the songs." For further information about the audition contact Braun at axel@axelbraun.net. Performers can also just show up between 2 and 5 pm Monday. The two-disc Grease release is scheduled to go on sale in September 2010 and will include a CD soundtrack of all the songs.

SUNNY IS WRESTLINGINC.COM MARCH GIRL OF THE MONTH -- The popular fan site WrestlingINC.com has named Vivid Girl Sunny Leone its Girl of the Month for March. WrestlingINC now attracts over 9-million visitors a month who love to learn more about the latest developments in the sport and its colorful athletes. Says Raj Giri of WrestlingINC: "We think our fans will enjoy Sunny's interview and spectacular photos of her. She's a beautiful woman and a terrific new addition to our Girl of the Month features." Sunny (http://www.sunnyleone.com) is the only adult superstar of South Asian ancestry. In her interview she reveals how her parents feel about her work; the role Penthouse played in her career; her favorite male adult star and the biggest misconception about her.

STEVEN HIRSCH IN USA TODAY & THE WRAP - Vivid founder and co-chair Steven Hirsch was quoted last week by USA Today in a lengthy article about the impact of free tube sites on the adult entertainment industry in the economic recession of the past two years. Writer Jon Swartz noted that the current slump "is especially stinging because technology - which helped adult-entertainment enterprises reap riches through innovations such as video streaming, webcameras and online payments - is contributing to the misery." Swartz quoted Hirsch as saying: "We're dealing with the perfect storm: declining DVD sales, rampant piracy, free content and a weak economy. This is the worst I've seen in this industry in 25 years." He also noted that "Vivid fires off more than several hundred takedown notices a month to sites that illegally show its content. Muddying matters, the 'safe harbor' provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act puts the onus on content providers to legally protect their content when it is filched by smaller sites, industry experts say. Vivid's Hirsch likens the exercise to a digital version of Whac-A-Mole. His company must troll the Internet, looking for offenders. It issues a letter, asking the offending site to take down its content within the law's 72-hour deadline. But the pirated content often is resurrected on someone else's site after being taken down."

Meanwhile, The Wrap, an online magazine covering Hollywood, carried an interview with Hirsch headlined: "A Porn King Tells How to Turn Porn Around; Vivid's Steven Hirsch: 'Maybe the best way to deal with Free is to be free.' Writer Dominic Patten's story begins: "As the co-chair of one of the industry's leading adult film studios and producers, Vivid's Steven Hirsch brought a strict studio system approach to what was once the Wild West Coast of skin flicks. Unlike many in the industry, the Vivid ( www.vivid.com ) boss, as he made clear to TheWrap, isn't about to singularly blame the internet, the economy or anything else for the profit problems porn is encountering. Hirsch is determined to take the bull by the horns, even if that means embracing some very new ways of doing business." The candid Q&A included the following: "Is porn, like many others in the entertainment industry, suffering from moving too slow in anticipating and embracing the proliferation of technology? We actually may have moved too quickly. We were the first industry that wanted to get our stuff out there on the net. As a result, we opened ourselves up to people figuring out how to pirate our movies and how to sell them... very quickly. So I'm not sure, in some ways, that we weren't part of the problem looking back. And now we're facing it head-on. So how do you turn things around? We need to honestly look at where we're at, how we deal with the problems and also at some the exciting opportunities on the horizon. I think the industry needs to look at Free. Maybe the best way to deal with Free is to be free. I'm not sure that at some point we don't see adult sites evolve to a place where our sites are free, our movies are free and we are ad supported and we take our traffic and send it different places and we support ourselves that way. That's become one potential option."