Page 54 - AVN August 2018

FEATURE |
Keisha Grey wowed on a Ducati motorcycle in her February 2017 Vixen Angel photo shoot.
“IT WAS INTERESTING TO SEE BECAUSE
REALITY TV WAS ALL ABOUT WHO COULD BE
AS OUTRAGEOUS AS FUCKING POSSIBLE AND
I LIKED THAT.”
—GREG LANSKY
kid. I was just a rebellious kid. Of course I am assuming that what was going on in my personal life had
something to do with it. The divorce, the feeling of losing it all.”
When Lansky quit school he went into full hustle mode, making a few inroads in the Paris nightlife
scene.
“I was trying to get parties together and trying to do deals with clubs,” he says, explaining that people
over 16 can get into clubs in France as long they don’t consume alcohol.
“They don’t really care about any of that in France anyway,” he says. “But it was interesting because my
first lesson in life … I quickly noticed that the clubs that were the hardest to get into were the ones that
people wanted to get into the most.”
Lansky continues, “I realized that the people that were inside felt special only because there were a lot
of people outside. That was one of the first lessons I learned about exclusivity. And I feel like I’ve carried
that a long time, even through my brands. People have this vision that they’re so inaccessible and I want
it that way.”
During his nightclub phase Lansky talked his way into the EFAP Paris School of Communication,
where he enrolled in a couple of classes in TV production. Though it was a four-year course, Lansky had
spent less than a year there when his instructors suggested he do an internship at a production company
called Cellcast.
FEATURE | LANSKY
“They said, ‘They’re looking for people kind of like you.’
And when they said, ’kind of like you’ they actually meant
hustlers,” Lansky says. “And I actually learned a lot there
because I can safely say I saw—from the first row—the birth
of reality TV.”
It turned out Cellcast did a lot of business with Endemol,
a Dutch media giant that is the originator of several reality
show franchises worldwide.
“Endemol is the pillar of reality TV,” Lansky says. “They
invented almost every single format—Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire?, Fear Factor, Temptation Island, Big Brother. … They
own all those formats and from there they just license it
around the world. And I went there and I worked a little
bit in Amsterdam, going there with Cellcast, negotiating
licensing rights for reality TV in France and then adapting
them to the French market.
“It was interesting to see because reality TV was all about
who could be as outrageous as fucking possible and I liked
that.”
MAKING MOVES
The guy in the porn business whom Lansky has known
longest is Mike Adriano, the performer/director who
won the 2018 AVN Award for Best Web Director.
Adriano has created his own successful sites, TrueAnal.com
and Swallowed.com.
The two met when they were 12 in Paris, bonding
through—what else—their love of porn.
“Because I had accumulated a great collection of porn
magazines and he had accumulated a great collection
himself, too, of porn and VHS at the time,” Lansky says. “So
we started trading immediately.”
When Adriano moved to Spain with his parents, the two
drifted apart but Lansky still considered him a friend. The
odds of him running into Adriano on the street in Paris were
slim, but that’s what happened.
“It’s a really, really big city,” says Lansky, who to this day
still marvels at how random their encounter seemed.
The old friends decided to catch up over coffee; Lansky
told Adriano he was in the TV biz, and Adriano said he
wanted to get into the porn business. Lansky recalls, “And
I was like, ‘I would love that. I’ve got all these connections
that I’ve made through TV.’ He’s like, ‘I want to get in on
that.’”
Adriano was heading back to Spain the next day so he
invited Lansky to visit—their goal was to shoot a porn
movie.
“So we kind of reconnected immediately,” Lansky says. “I
met him in Spain a week or two later and my girlfriend at
the time was like, ‘Oh, you’re going to go to Spain and shoot
all that porn.’ She was like, ‘If you go there I’m breaking up
with you.’ I was like, ‘OK bye.’ And I went to meet Mike in
Spain.
“And we spent the first part of the summer thinking about
how we can do this and then we spent the second part doing
it.”
Through his connections, Lansky eventually met a man
named Fabien Lafait, who shot amateur porn in France
and had a network of contacts that included a French-born
performer named Manuel Ferrara, who had recently won
the first of his record five AVN Male Performer of the Year
awards. Ferrara wasn’t able to work with Lansky, but he did
help the wannabe director land another star. “Why don’t you
try my friend Steve Holmes?” Ferrara told Lansky.
Holmes, who made his porn debut in 1996 and has
performed in more than 2,500 movies, remembers he was
living in Budapest when he got the call. They wanted to book
him for a 10-day stretch but couldn’t shoot him every day,
so he asked them if he could bring his own camera gear and
get some POV scenes done on the off days. They obliged and
Holmes met Lansky and Adriano in Marbella, Spain, where
54 | AVN.com | 8.18