Page 58 - AVN April 2018

FEATURE | By Sharan Street
A
quick glance at the news emanating from Evil Angel’s
Van Nuys headquarters reveals that this 29-year-old adult
brand has been quietly reinventing itself over the past
year or so. Not by sweeping proclamations or catastrophic
reorganizations, but slowly, steadily, one headline at a
time.
And after the last two bits of news—bringing on mega-
star Lisa Ann as a director, and signing Aubrey Kate as
porn’s first TS contract star—it was high time to sit down
with Adam Grayson, the company’s chief financial officer, and talk about all the
changes. An energetic, no-nonsense “structure guy,” Grayson asserts, “I have
zero creative in me.” Yet with his quiet hand on the financial rudder and an alert
eye focused on the fickle desires of porn consumers, Grayson has created a safe
playground for Evil Angel’s directors to exercise their own creativity.
Not even 40 yet, Grayson got into the adult business in high school, starting his
own company with his partner, an expert in search engine optimization. “It was
a good experience,” Grayson says. “I mean, we did that for eight years. We made
plenty of money, but all good things come to an end before you expect it.”
Then, trouble set in. “Google did an algorithm change—I don’t remember,
maybe in the summer of ’06—and we lost maybe half of our traffic overnight. You
FEATURE |
THE STRUCTURE GUY
Adam Grayson keeps Evil Angel in the black … and on the right track
spend a while trying to rejigger it and then you realize, ‘OK, we can get some of it
back, but it’s never going to be where it was again.’ That’s when we looked at each
other and thought, ‘Maybe it’s time for new adventures.’”
That new adventure began in 2009, when Grayson joined Evil Angel. Though
that was a tough time for many in the adult industry, Grayson says it was less so for
Evil Angel. His own experience, however, left him primed for the down market that
plagued porn after the 2008 recession. “I had already been humbled by something
imploding,” he said. “So I didn’t have a light-cigars-with-hundred-dollar-bills
mindset when I got here. John all the time tells me how cheap I am: ‘Why won’t you
let me spend my money?’ … I’m here to be financially responsible and make sure we
stay in business and continue to be profitable.”
Grayson sheds some light on how Evil Angel has managed to stay in the black.
For one thing, the company was so successful before 2008 that it was insulated from
some of the pain that hit some of the studios that either went under or stopped
producing new content. “Other people were jumping out of windows, but when
I got here there was still a lot of money being made,” he says. But Grayson and
former General Manager Christian Mann, who passed away in 2014, knew that the
adult industry was changing. “We could see certain macro things happening. So
Christian Mann and I were able to say, ‘Let’s figure out what’s going to happen in
eight years, really plan for the long haul.’ So there was a lot of painful stuff we did
early that we did way before we had to do it. … ‘Let’s do hard stuff now, so it’ll be
softer later.’”
The bottom line on the bottom line? Grayson says, “I’ve been here a little over
nine years and I’ve been personally responsible for the P&L about half that time,
since 2013, and we’ve never lost money in a quarter. I’ve never seen a red number
at the bottom of the statement. … The variance in revenue is less that 10 percent.”
WE’RE LESS MARRIED TO THE
BOILERPLATE OF WHAT AN EVIL ANGEL
SCHEDULE LOOKS LIKE. WE’RE TRYING TO
BE MORE EXPERIMENTAL WITH
DIRECTORS.
Not Your Father’s Porn
But Grayson doesn’t just go by the numbers. He’s also deeply concerned about
one thing: staying relevant in the marketplace.
“If you were to make a list of companies that were genuinely relevant to
consumers in 1989 and in 2018, I think we’re probably the only name you’d come
up with. … That being said, we have to understand that not only is this a business
that has always changed really quickly—with consumer tastes, with technologies,
with the structure of the business as a whole—but it’s accelerating, like technology
as a whole. So I would say one quarter to the next is probably analogous to, 15
years ago, one year to the next. …
“For a long time, I think we were laggards to change because we had such a
reverence or commitment to the company,” Grayson said. But tastes do change,
so one could argue—as Grayson convincingly does—that it’s important to also to
change what’s being offered to consumers. “You’re trying to connect with people
on a carnal level when you make these movies. The past couple of years we’ve
gotten more open-minded about what next quarter or next month holds for us.
And we’re less married to the boilerplate of what an Evil Angel schedule looks like.
We’re trying to be more experimental with directors. Because historically once you
became a director here, unless you were a massive fuckup, it was like a lifetime
gig. Until you quit, or died, or something. Which is not necessarily a good long-term
plan. It shouldn’t be like having kids—like you’re stuck with them once you have
them.”
Grayson is quick to firmly point out the debt of gratitude owned to Evil Angel’s
core of longtime directors: “This company was totally built on their backs—and
John [Stagliano], if he were sitting here, would be talking about that.”
Yet he also knows that porn fans skew young (“our biggest demographic is 18 to
25”), which is why Evil Angel has brought in some new directors to complement
the brand’s stable of shooters in their fifties and sixties.
“I think of porn like pop music. It’s always going to have a young crowd just
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