Page 36 - AVN June 2015

TECH NEWS
With the recent announcement that director Toni Ribas has joined Evil Angel’s
roster of award-winning directors, the company, which was founded in 1989 as
a vehicle for John Stagliano to distribute his own movies, only further cemented
its reputation as one of the industry’s most innovative companies and a place
that world-class talents encompassing varying creative temperaments love to call
home. That Evil Angel is director-friendly has never been in doubt; Stagliano’s
seminal decision to allow his helmers to maintain ownership of their movies has
for years provided the foundation for the company’s success. But massive and
often disruptive technology-driven changes over the past decade that turned the
relationship between creator and consumer on its head, and which affected all
media-centric industries, have also tested the solidity of the Evil Angel business
model as well as the company’s willingness and ability to adapt to the times.
Both have not only survived but appear to be thriving, thanks to core changes
that were put into place about three years ago, spurred by years of deliberation
followed by some gutsy decisions by Stagliano, then general manager Christian
Mann and CFO Adam Grayson, that ended years of distribution deals in favor of
bringing complete control of the company’s content in house. At about the same
time, internet operations were outsourced to Gamma Entertainment, which has
since become a very close partner with Evil Angel.
INTERVIEW | STOP, THIEF | | By Tom Hymes
|By Nate Glass
Reelin’ in the Years
Director-centric studio Evil Angel reinvents itself for digital consumers
As far as Evil Angel’s base of now just under 20 directors whose content it
distributes, some directors have gone their own way in recent years while others
have come aboard, but in a wide-ranging conversation with the 35-year-old
Grayson in the longtime Van Nuys offices of Evil Angel—where the small room
that was once Mann’s office is now a permanent Mann Cave following his passing
last year—a picture of a once again formidable adult company comes into hi-def
view, a portrait of big umbrella brand comprised of many substantial sub-brands,
that is grabbing hold of its future with an optimism and sureness that only a few
adult companies could even think to muster with any conviction. The conversation
reveals a well-established company in which new technologies are harnessed in
the service of the original mission: to help directors supply consumers with quality
fare that Stagliano himself can stand behind. Simple stuff, really.
AVN: When did you start at Evil Angel?
Adam Grayson: I started in January 2009, about four months after Christian did. I
knew John only casually but I was friendly with Joey Silvera, and it was Joey who
introduced me to John. It’s funny, but one of the most surprising things about
John was how quickly he would go to the worst place of his skill set with someone
he barely knew. “I can’t possibly know anything about this. Look at all the poor
decisions I’ve made.” Never bringing up any good decisions he’d made.
The price you pay, the quality of
what you get, the user experience,
”What are the components of value?
the customer service. … for us,
quality is probably the single biggest
slice of that value pie.
—Adam Grayson, Evil Angel CFO
Almost as if the success he had achieved had been an accident?
I’ve heard him say things like that. But I look at it and think, no one has a perfect
record; I’m sure there are things he could have made better decisions on, but in
the long run he’s created this company out of nothing.
But I think even for John it’s hard to separate Evil Angel as a company from
gonzo as a movement. He would be the first to tell you that The Adventures of
Buttman was like their fourth or fifth release, and if that hadn’t happened, the
history of this company would be very different.
And then with that early success he made some key decisions, right?
Well, one huge stroke was the idea of the content creator owning the content and
being vested in its quality and its life. The second was the death of the fourth wall,
and they just so happened to take place within a year of one another. ... I don’t
think it was ever John’s ambition to distribute other people; he just wanted a
distribution channel for himself so he could control things from soup to nuts.
So then do we look to his innovative business model as the reason for his longevity?
I think it’s more his integrity. … John is less interested in money than anyone
I know in this business. I’m sure some of that is motivated by the fact that he’s
made plenty of it already, but he’s not terribly interested in the structure of his
2015 income. What that means is that the structure here is always set up for the
director to make more money. I always joke that if a dollar rolls downhill here, it
never goes into John’s pocket, but always makes its way into the director pool.
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