It was back in the beginning of 1992, I had just started shooting amateur porn scenes, which I initially thought would be a fun way to make a little extra income. I had made a list of companies that were putting out amateur scenes. Back then, you could sell an individual scene to a company, as “amateur” movies were all the rage. One of the companies on my list was LBO. They were having great success with their “Mr. Peepers” line. Each one had 3 scenes, shot by different people, but all listed as “Directed by Bobby Hollander.” My initial dealings with LBO were with Bobby Hollander, but I was introduced to his boss, Bob Genova, the owner of LBO. I became one of their regular amateur shooters. For several years, Paul Little (who became Max Hardcore), Farrel Timlake (who went on to own Homegrown Video), myself and a handful of others were shooting the majority of the “amateur” scenes coming out of Porn Valley. After a while, I started dealing directly with Bob Genova.
Every week, I’d drive up to LBO with a new scene or two for them to buy. I’d come in, hand over the camera master, the model releases and the “chromes.” My biggest memory of Bob in those early days was of him usually looking at the color slides (no digital back then) and saying, “These Chromes Suck!” I never knew whether my chromes really did suck or whether it was his way of getting the prices down. Back then, if you could get $650 for a scene, you were doing good. But regardless of whether that was his way of “negotiating” or not, I vowed that I would make my photos so good that there was no way that Bob would ever be able to say “These Chromes Suck” again. So I ran down to Samy’s Camera and bought more professional lights and a book on lighting.
I sold many many scenes for most of the 90’s to Bob Genova for his Mr. Peepers and other amateur lines. One of my first series, “Rodney Moore’s Northwest Pecker Trek,” was distributed by LBO. Bob was always friendly, smiling and easy going. It’s been a number of years since I last saw him, but I remember those days with fondness. Thinking back, my early chromes probably did “suck,” so I have Bob to thank for inspiring me to become a better photographer, as well as providing me with lots of work throughout the 90’s.
Thanks, Bob.
Rodney Moore
One Response
RIP Bob.
As for $650 a scene, those were the days to make money as a LBO-type business. Today the talent and crew alone even for an amateur scene would cost more than $650 although you would probably get two or three scenes out of the $800 you paid a porn chick and the $500-$600 paid to a stunt cock. Crew costs (with a two man crew) would be at least $200, it would be that cheap only if you hired illegal Mexicans off of the Lowe’s parking lot (in a large city if you want something done cheap you show up to Lowe’s or Home Depot’s parking lot at 6am and make it known what you need done — you will likely have ten people to choose from, paid under the table of course). Learn some Spanish, give your day labor a crash course in how to use your equipment and hope they do a decent job — otherwise established crew would cost at least $500 per day for two crew members. $1500 in labor divided by three scenes (optimistically) is $500 just in labor costs. Add in location costs (if you don’t film it in your own residence) and amortized costs for camera, lights, and those little things like light cords/bulbs, condoms and baby wipes and you are over what this guy was paying for a scene already! I can only imagine what it costs Mike to film in Georgia and Florida without much established crew to compete partially on price, probably $700-$1000 for two crew people although the talent may be cheaper as he is the only game in town for porn and he seems getting people that mainly want to fuck on camera a few times (from what I have seen those women are the best talent to have, actually) — other than Lindsey Lovehands and Adella I don’t see his talent vying for the LA porn biz (or in many cases even stripping).