Hi this is Steven from Magnusbucks. I just wanted to clear up a few things that Yellowdude conveniently left out because it would make his side of the argument look bad. I personally do not like bringing drama to the boards. I see this as a last resort, not some sort of threat tool. It invites too many sided opinions about a situation that is usually too complex to be put into a few paragraphs. And as our explanation hopefully shows this situation is exactly that.
First off, when our relationship with Exxclusive started, we made special payment agreements with them. They were flexible with their prices and their schedule for payment which was a big plus and for the first few orders everything was going relatively smoothly. Sometimes a few days late but then no big deal.
Now the problems start. We started putting a lot of our confidence in them only to find out they are not as flawless as they made themselves seem.
-The once agreed upon payment terms suddenly became unacceptable to them as they started demanding money before it was due.
-The orders we placed with them only got partially shot and they started demanding partial payments for them. We placed a 4-scene MILF order with them for a DVD we were making. 3 of the scenes got shipped and it took almost a month for the 4th scene to show up. When we first started placing orders we made the agreement that the whole order needs to show up in one piece because partial packages aren't any use to us. This was also not the only order that arrived partially this way.
-They once shot 5 extra gay scenes for us that we did not need. We took the scenes anyway and asked if we could have a few weeks to pay for it since it was not in our content budget yet. But even the next week after we already saw them asking for payment on these scenes that we didn't even order or necessarily need.
-Many, many times our deadlines with them were broken. With every order we would give them a due date and ask if they could meet the order by this due date. The due date was there because if we received the content on that day or earlier we would not be late with our production which would save us from late fees. And if they could not meet the deadline it was not a big deal, we have 3 or 4 other producers who shoot for us who we could have given the order to. We just preferred to give them the orders because of the slightly lower price. When deadlines came and passed, we got just as many excuses from them as they claimed from us: They were out of the office and the office manager forgot to ship the package (for a week). "Administration" held the package because they were waiting for a wire to show up for an amount that we did not even owe them at that time. Models didn't show up and they could not find a new one for a week or two. And, my favorite, they got a new client who was prepaying for scenes so their scenes took priority over shooting ours (sorry if the payment plan you agreed on with us was not good enough for you). We placed an order once for 5 shemale scenes that they swore up and down promised would get delivered to us the week after. Because this was when we REALLY needed these scenes. We were more than willing to give it to our other producer who could have shot it for us on time. The next week we hear our scenes were going to ship out on time, but on the day we were supposed to receive them there was no package. When we asked for a tracking #, one of the Exxclusive reps told us that the package had shipped and we would get send the tracking number ASAP. The next day, another Exxclusive rep told us the package had not shipped and that the scenes needed to be "color corrected". After waiting for these scenes another week and a half, we finally broke down and told them to send us the scenes without the color correction. Sure enough when we got the scenes there was nothing wrong with them. I still have no idea why they held on to these scenes several weeks after we had asked them to send it to us. But that didn't stop it from costing us almost $2000 in late fees to get our DVDs produced and shipped out to our distributors on time.
-Incomplete 2257 - We all know the government is breathing down all our backs to make sure we are in line. We make sure to illustrate to all our producers that proper model releases and IDs are the most important part of a scene. Without this we cannot do anything with that scene. However we had scenes from even December 2007 that we did not get IDs for until June 2008. Yet they were more than willing to threaten and demand for their money for these movies before then of course.
-Bad Information - It is one thing for a producer to say that they are late on something so that we can make plans for this, but it is another for them to say that a package has been shipped out when it hasn't. This happened all too often where Person A would say that a package had gone out, and then the next week we'd hear from Person B that the tapes had some sort of problem to them and that they would be shipped the week after. When we would try to ask Person B why Person A had said the tapes had not shipped out we would just get a reply like "I don't know why he said that". Or "He must have heard wrong". That doesn't do us a lot of good.
Every time they would make apologies and want to do whatever possible to get things back on track. Bringing us new promises that Person A would no longer be involved in organizing the shoots and instead Person B would be taking care of it and if Person B was taking care of it then the same problems would not happen. Everytime I tried to complain and point out their lies to them their response was that I was acting "childish". Childish in their dictionary is synonymous for not rolling over and letting them exploit you.
In the end, our schedule got so screwed up and we had to pay so many rush fees, delivery charges, overnight shipping charges, you name it all because they kept breaking their word. I could have paid double for most of the scenes and if I had gotten them on time I would have ended up losing less money than shooting with Exxclusive. We eventually concluded that our relationship with them had to come to an end and that we needed to part ways. There was some money owed to them but we established a payment plan to give them all the money that was owed to them over time regardless of the tens of thousands of dollars they had cost us with their broken commitments.
Now we have producers who we have shot with for years. They keep their word, do what they are going to say and we pay them when we say we are going to pay them. We tried this with Exxclusive but they could just not be counted on. But not once did we take our problems to the boards. When our content was almost a month late, GFY didn't hear about this, we kept persisting with them until we got what we needed. For all that we went through with them and even the fact that my partner left them a message yesterday saying we would talk this over today and come up with a solution, they still chose to post on the boards and make themselves seem like a victim.
Producers we will always pay. We have several producers that shoot for us now and they are all happy to receive our wires.
Affiliates we will always pay. There is no point in being in business if your main source of business does not trust in you. We have not a single affiliate that can complain about not receiving a payment.
We are not the only ones who have had problems with Exxclusive. You can check out this post too:
http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=839715