Page 56 - AVN April 2013

Feat_Wicked2.04.13 3/20/13 3:08 PM Page 56
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emember the days when, if you wanted to see a new, high-quality, story-driven feature, you had basically two choices: Vivid or VCA?
Before Digital Playground, before Adam & Eve Pictures, before New Sensations Romance, and before pretty much every company
that’s now jumped on the parody bandwagon? Well, beginning on March 1, 1993, there was a newcomer about to take its place among
the great feature producers: Wicked Pictures.
But it’s not as if Wicked’s founder/owner, Steve Orenstein, was an out-of-nowhere stranger to adult feature production; he’d
already been in the adult business for nearly 14 years, working first in magazine distribution, then managing a small chain of adult retail
outlets, and finally handling video distribution for CPLC before Ruby Gottesman, the owner of video distributor Xcitement Video, gave Orenstein
a call and offered him a job as one of Xcitement’s primary buyers. Orenstein wound up buying product and servicing a lot of the smaller video
companies, and in the process becoming familiar with video production—and getting to know what he liked and didn’t like about the features.
Of course, Orenstein’s tenure at Xcitement was a bit tenuous. Gottesman
had been arrested in 1987 on charges of shipping underage T raci Lords videos
across state lines to undercover state and federal agents, and though his convic-
tion in federal court was later overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals, the possibility of Gottesman serving a prison sentence was always in
the background—even when, in 1989, he offered Orenstein a partnership in
the video production company Gottesman wanted to set up.
“Six years after I was working with Ruby, he said, ‘You remember one day I
said you
’ll have your own money and we
’ll do something together? I want to
get into production. I want you to be my partner.’ At first, I said, ‘I’m not
interested,’ but he convinced me.”
While Gottesman
’s contribution to the new enterprise was basically putting
up his building and staff, it was left to Orenstein to do all the grunt work.
“I did all of the work, and interviewed directors to shoot our first movie,”
Orenstein recalled. “So we started the company, and I remember John
Stagliano was one of the people we interviewed, who either was directing
already or wanted to direct. But as it turned out, Stuart Canterbury directed
our first movie, Sleepwalker, and it just took off from there.”
Early Xcitement directors included Fred J. Lincoln, Patty Rhodes, Michael
Craig, Henri Pachard and Herschel Savage, but Orenstein took his oversight
duties seriously.
“I’d go to the sets after work, watch what was going on, that sort of thing,
and we started from there,” Orenstein said. “I’d worked for Ruby for six, seven
years at this point, and we were partners in the video production for two-plus
years, and being partners brought up challenges that just working for someone
didn’t. That’s partly why I said I didn’t want to do it in the first place, and we
wound up splitting up over those issues. We split the movie library we had at
that time, 24 movies, and I went out and started Wicked from there.”
“If you spoke to anyone I grew up with and asked who’s least likely to wind
up owning an adult movie studio, it’s gonna be me,” he added. “It’s one of
those things that you fall into this business and it takes you where it takes
you.”
One of those places was the AVN Awards Show.
“January of ’94 was our first award show; we’re in business nine months, and
Haunted Nights won for Best Video,” he beamed. “Again, first year in business,
’
everyone
s excited, 20 people were on stage to accept it, including me. Jim
Enright directed it, and Jonathan Morgan and Steven St. Croix starred in it, and
for all concerned, it was the start of a very successful franchise: the ‘Nights’
movies: Western Nights, Arabian Nights, all were successful.”
But even in those days, when the scarcity of high-end production companies
should have made it easier to enter the features market, Wicked still struggled to
brand itself—and in the process, found its first contract star.
“Our first was Chasey Lain,” Orenstein stated. “Lucky Smith represented her,
and I started Wicked and I’d already known him, and he said, ‘I have this girl; if
’
you
re looking for a contract girl, she hasn’t done anything; she’s beautiful.’ I said,
‘I’m not looking for a contract girl, thanks.’
“Anyway, I started Wicked in March, and probably in July, I put out a movie
with Shayla LaVeaux [The Look, directed by Paul Norman], and that was sort of
my first lesson, that summer is the worst time to try to sell a movie,” he
explained. “I also saw that the people that I expected to support me, based on
how long I’d been around and how I knew everybody, didn’t really pan out that
way. I released the Shayla movie, it didn’t sell a ton, so I called Lucky and said, ‘I
want to meet that girl.’ So I realized—look, I truly believed in what we were
doing; I truly believed we were making quality product, really felt it, believed it,
and talked about it. What I didn’t get was that everybody says their stuff is the
best, ‘My stuff is the best,’ this, this and this, and when they hear you say it, it just
sounds like another sales pitch to people, and they weren’t buying in. That’s when
I said, ‘You know what? I can’t tell them how great we are, because they don’t
want to hear that. I need a girl that we can tell them how great she is.’ …
“I didn’t create the contract star model, but that was the internal thinking: ‘I
see how this can make sense for us.’ It wasn’t the, ‘Oh, I like that model’; it was,
‘Oh, I see how this could make sense for us.’ So Chasey was this girl that nobody
had any preconceived notions on, a blank slate. ‘Now go sell her to everybody.’
And she was a beautiful girl, and that worked. I’d say we signed Chasey in
November of ’93.”
Chasey stayed with the company for more than a year, ending her contract run
in January of 1995 ... and then there was Jenna.
“When Chasey left, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not gonna look for another
contract girl, because Chasey is just so beautiful; whoever I sign next is going to
be compared to her,” Orenstein recounted. “Now, when I started Wicked,
[artists/photographers] Brad and Cynthia Willis were doing a lot for us as far as
the art goes. They were doing that at Xcitement, and they came over to Wicked.
Wicked at 20 founder Steve Orenstein; two new titles: Ink Girls, and Show No Mercy, the first in Barrett Blade’s cosplay line.
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