Over the years Homegrown Video has been a critical launching pad and/or a booster rocket for porn careers. From starlets like Stephanie Swift and Anna Malle to producers like Mike South, Sweet Entertainment Group, and Dave Cummings. My brother hired the Sweets to shoot the series he concieved and named "Sweetloads". Dave Cummings was selling a few copies of his videos when we took him on. We revamped his boxcovers, and renamed his series "The Sugardaddy" and became the first company to distribute the old guy young woman niche.
Usually we are quite content to watch our little fledglings grow wings of their own and leave the nest. Sure, it hurts sometimes to hear afterwards - "Homegrown, nice guys, but they pay like shit", but what can we say? You don't see us denying it. The part that hurts, and which we often don't get the respect for doing is all the press and hype that goes into launching a new name in the biz. We sometimes have to demean and debase ourselves before members of the press who have heard it all and seen it all before.
And trust me, selling a niche like Sugardaddy is not easy when the writers don't have any interest in it personally. Sure, they have all day to talk to up and coming cute starlets that will suck their cock for an interview but what are you going to do with someone like Dave Cummings or Mike South who, let's give them a big hand, don't suck dick for press.
You have to be a squeaky wheel. You have to beg, plead, cajole, bitch, and moan and set your publicist on them and what do you get? A frustrated editor that finally has to give in and run your bit. So that is what AVN editor Mark Kulkis must have been reacting to when we asked for some press on our anniversary and hitting the milestone of 500 titles.
Sure, he would give us some play. We stopped whining and left his office. Only one month later the AVN came out and our headline, if you can even call it that since it was fairly buried and only sat atop a few lines of text, said "Big Fucking Deal, Homegrown hits 500". That stung, but then he had the nerve to make fun of our names too - crediting us as "the guys with the Dr. Suess sounding names".
That meant war.
We had just launched Mike South's Southern Belles. We even won an AVN award with the series. Mike was getting good press. And that is why we should have never taken him to the Vegas show. As soon as he showed up he had an offer from a cat named Patick Collins to take the series over to Elegant Angel. Mike came up to us to see if we would counter. "I don't know guys, that is an awful lot of money" he told us. We said "go in piece", meaning we would keep our piece and he could go break off his own piece wherever.
At around that same time Kulkis left AVN to pursue production and he was working with Elegant as well.
We had to act fast. We went and got the supplies. Set the trap. Mike and Mark were sitting together in the Elegant booth when the hot breakfast in a styrofoam box showed up.
Mark seemed reluctant to open it. Mike finally opened it for him. That is when they both saw how Homegrown deals its own form of justice. Inside was a pile of green scrambled eggs and a big green slice of ham. Inside the top of the box read the inscription: "I do not like them here or there I do not like them anywhere".
Later on we went up to Mark to make amends. Moff and I stood on either side of Kulkis and smiled as a photog from Hustler snapped us all shaking hands and forgiving and forgetting. Only we were tight with Hustler, and they did us the immense favor of adding "I'm with stupid" and "he is gay" with arrows pointing right at Kulkis onto the black sweat shirts we happened to be wearing.
You mess with the bull... you step in the bull's mess...
NOTE: No relationships have been harmed in the making of this post. Today our relationships with Mike and Mark are quite friendly and professionally respectful.
