Dirty Secrets of the Hidden Industry
My Brief and Brutal Career in the Buried World of Trade Magazines
Railway Age and Sugar y Azucar were merely the tip of the iceberg. There were hundreds of trade publications in New York City during the last century, specialized periodicals for practitioners of every profession, occupation and commercial venture imaginable: spanning from august journals of law and medicine to deservedly obscure titles like Coin-Op Laundry World and Waste Collection Weekly. An artist friend of mine, who briefly designed pages for a trade paper, tagged this under-the-radar media The Hidden Industry.
Video Marketing Newsletter was yet another publication I’d never read. Soon after I stumbled into my new job there, near the dawn of 1982, I quickly decided VMN was onto something BIG. Though I didn’t yet own a recorder, I sensed video cassettes were the future. Right away, I was sold: the future had potential. Yeah — the future sounded like a solid commercial proposition.
At a couple hundred bucks per subscription, business newsletters only required a few thousand subscribers to turn a profit. Production costs were almost non-existent on these glorified brochures: stapled, picture-less, ten-page pamphlets. My new boss Ira Mayer, who edited Video Marketing Newsletter, was a supremely mellow baby boomer — an ex-folkie — whose easygoing manner disguised his laser-vision focus on where popular culture was headed. It wasn’t until years after we’d parted company that I realized just how astute Ira was. When he hired me at the tail end of 1981, Ira had just rented a three-room suite in a four-story office building, on a relatively quiet side street in the East 50s, between Lexington and Third Avenue.
Next door to our building was an enclosed concrete park with a fountain and a snack bar that operated in warm weather. On the other side was a synagogue, housed in a quietly handsome modern building. Across the street was an outlet of the Erotic Baker chain, its display window stocked with a grotesque assortment of penis and breast-shaped layer cakes. New York City was so tacky sometimes. I never imagined that the porn influence would extend across the street and into our business.
A few weeks later, I was introduced on the back page of VMN as a “veteran trade reporter.” This was flattering — and gravely concerning.
Ira and his California-based partner foresaw the all-conquering acronyms: VCR, CD, DVD, and PC. They were right. On the money. Video Marketing Newsletter was a high-tech oracle, a handbook for nerds before being a geek became cool or insanely profitable. Foolishly, I spent most of my time there writing freelance music articles for New York Rocker.
The videocassette market, in terms of movie content, resembled Times Square circa 1982: evenly divided between Hollywood blockbusters and the vast tawdry empire of pornographic films. 50% glitz and 50% slime.
Times Square was hands-down my least favorite neighborhood in Manhattan. Relentless sleaze permeated the neon-lit atmosphere. It was breathtaking, and doleful beyond words. The soul-numbing aura of human exploitation extended from the joyless porn movie palaces to the narrow range of personal services offered in strip clubs and on the streets. Obvious and not-so-obvious sex workers of various genders bantered with the tourists who stood around gaping at the marquees: Live Nude Girls 24 Hours, Peep Show/Private Booths and XXX All Male Cast Triple Features Daily.
There were still first-run movie theaters on Broadway in those days, too. The Times Square audiences were lively: yelling at the screen, openly smoking weed. Watching a mainstream movie in those conditions may not have been dangerous, but it wasn’t remotely pleasant either. In my opinion, anyway. As a rule, I tried to avoid any sort of potential-mob-scene situation.
The mass popularity of pornography (and prostitution) in New York City astonished me. Not merely the prevalence, but the demand and the apparent frequency of consumption. Put it this way: I knew porn was popular but I had no idea how popular. The proximity of Times Square to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Penn Station only partially explained the lurid proliferation. How many suburban commuters made a secretive sex stop on the way home?
Though porn movies accounted for roughly half of the burgeoning video cassette market, you (understandably) wouldn’t have read much about that in Video Marketing Newsletter. Retail outlets and video stores servicing the new market couldn’t afford to be so discriminating; typically, the “adult section” was discreetly situated in the rear of the store.
The crucial issue for VMN was sales versus rentals. Most consumers preferred to borrow video cassettes for $2 or $3 and return them to the store, rather than purchase and own a movie for $20. Columbia Pictures tried to squelch the new videocassette rental market in early 1982 by announcing that it would restrict movies on tape to “sale-only” but the video dealers weren’t having it. Soon the battle lines were drawn between suppliers (the movie companies) and video retailers. And we — Video Marketing Newsletter, that is — were stuck in the crossfire.
Ira Mayer and I attended a hastily convened meeting of the regional branch of the Home Video Merchants Association, a loose knit group of video-store owners, taking place in New Jersey at a chain-hotel conference room. The day before I had called the main office of Superstar Video (let’s call it), New York City’s popular new chain of video stores, located in the back room of what was basically an upscale pornography supermarket in Times Square. When he found out VMN knew about the meeting, the owner got on the phone. Of course he was pissed off about the security leak. Swearing at me and then swearing me to secrecy until the story ran, he grudgingly said we could attend the meeting as long as we didn’t draw undue attention to ourselves. That night “Mr. Superstar” rallied the troops; he rocked the house.
We built this business for the studios. They wouldn’t have Home Video divisions if we didn’t risk our necks in 1978, ‘79. The movie companies didn’t know they were sitting on a goldmine. Retailers created the home video market. It didn’t exist back then. Now we’ve got freaking, excuse me, Fotomats renting videos. [applause] I don’t have to tell all of you. We watched it grow, the home video market. We grew it. And now the movie studios are trying to snatch it back from us. No thanks. We’re not laying down. No way. My stores aren’t carrying sale-only videos.
We were mildly exuberant on the way back to New York. A little drama made for lively journalism, even in The Hidden Industry. The story would write itself, for once.
A shot at establishing (or redeeming) myself as a business reporter arrived with the coming of warmer weather. The Summer Consumer Electronics Show, or CES to those in the know, was scheduled for the first week in June. Naturally my boss planned to attend, this season with me in tow. I spent the week before CES on the phone. Ira hoped to interview every — any — executive who could be corralled for five minutes on the convention floor. “Why in the world does he want to speak with me?” was a frequent response. With minimal pressure, nearly everybody gave in. VMN was impossible to avoid before the bloody show even began.
Our hotel, more of a motel, was a Holiday Inn equivalent next to O’Hare airport. The McCormick Center was accessible via buses from the airport. Since my flight was delayed five hours, I missed the Thursday evening festivities, including Sony’s legendary all-you-can-eat sushi buffet and a luau hosted by Panasonic, among other draws. I slept fitfully in the sub-polar air conditioning. The first bus departed at 7:30 AM and I was on board, clutching my styrofoam coffee cup as if it were a life preserver.
A battery of satellite dishes guarding the entry plaza imparted a militaristic Star Wars vibe to the airy lakeside complex. Welcome to the wonderful world of gadgets. Batteries not included. Indoors was a midnight-sun environment, relentlessly bright. Natural light would’ve been inappropriate, somehow. The harsh lighting gave me a near-blinding headache after a few hours exposure.
Predictably I was so overwhelmed by the magnitude of variation that I had trouble putting each product in context. What makes this one different? I’d think, and then silently answer: who cares? Who would want to watch a Sony Watchman, a portable TV with a tiny 4-inch screen? Presumably not the same sort of person who would fork over $10,000 for Sony Trinitron 30-inch screen sunk in a wood cabinet, complete with monogrammed gold plate. I didn’t have anything invested in “consumer electronics” because I wasn’t an electronics consumer beyond my Walkman, component stereo system and portable TV. I felt like an enemy spy behind the lines at CES — or a double agent about to be exposed.
The most popular exhibits at CES — by a wide and obvious margin — were situated in a roped-off section devoted to the so-called adult video industry. This had to be the most heavily trafficked area in the entire McCormick Center. When various porn actresses were appearing, the line of guys waiting for (presumably) autographs stretched past the life-sized cardboard statue of Jane Fonda in her workout leotards at Karl Home Video. In a perfect stroke of terrible timing, I ran into my boss and his business partner near the entrance to Sodom and Gomorrah.
“What are you doing here?” The tone was accusatory, as though they weren’t “here,” too.
“I came over to check out the crowd. Guess I should’ve known what was going on.”
“What else have you doing, Mark?”
I flashed my reporters’ notebook, blue ink smeared on its fluttering pages. Promotional brochures and pamphlets stuffed my shoulder bag.
“Wait there’s something else you cab check out before lunch. There’s a secret meeting of retailers back at one of the hotels. The big guy from Superstar Video is rallying the troops. We want you to just show up.”
“He’ll kill me. Then kick me out.”
“No, no, it’ll be fine. Tell him we’re sending you in my place.”
The Red Roof Inn conference center resembled a mid-sized college classroom. One notable difference: Mr. Superstar, looking fierce in a button-down shirt and track suit, glowered next to the podium and empty blackboard. Everybody seated at the long tables in front of him — maybe thirty or forty people — turned to look when I slipped in. I shut the doors behind me. “I’m Mark Coleman from Video Marketing Newsletter.”
“You!…you sold us down the river with that article!”
“You said we could write about the dealers’ meeting. The whole thing was your quotes. Hey, our subscribers gave us grief for taking your side.”
“No that article was fine. But the one after that. These Hollywood pricks say we’re greedy? Don’t get me started.”
“No, no, let’s talk, let’s talk, you should do a follow-up interview.”
“Kid why don’t you come down to my store back in New York and I’ll rent you a copy of All The President’s Men.”
“How about Deep Throat?” I hoped he got the joke.
“Get out of here. Now.”
The Consumer Electronics Show was my Waterloo as far as The Hidden Industry was concerned. Yet I caught a fleeting glimpse of the digital future at Video Marketing Newsletter, even if I was too dim to realize it at the time.
