STUDIO CITY, Calif. — Greg Lansky — visionary chief creative officer of the Vixen, Tushy, Blacked and Blacked Raw brands and perhaps one of the adult’s industry’s top success stories in the past several years — was featured in a just-published Rolling Stone interview.
The article, titled “Versace, Champagne and Gold: Meet the Director Turning Porn Into High Art,” takes a look back at Lansky's 10-year career in the industry, from the very beginning when he was 21 and had “no money, zero experience and no idea how to hold a video camera” to where he is today — turning porn into high art and earning accolades for the work.
“Lansky spent a year honing his chops as a director for New Sensations before landing a job at the Miami-based porn website Reality Kings,” the Rolling Stone article said of Lansky, now 35.
“To him, the company may as well have been ‘the Harvard business school of the adult industry.’ It gave him the foundation to form his own company, having worked his way to one of the top creative positions there.
In the Rolling Stone piece, Lansky goes on to discuss that he was exposed to an environment, back in the day, where there was very little competition and piracy in the porn world. “It was insane,” he said. “They were printing money."
But Lansky said the "golden age of adult entertainment," as he described it, was short lived, and that many studios were going for the cheap as tube sites got off the ground.
Lansky, as an entrepreneur starting up his own adult studio, decided to go the opposing way with his business plan.
"I'm coming in and I'm like, 'I want to do the opposite. I want to create a quality that's so superior, and attend to all these little details for customers," he told Rolling Stone.
“Lansky's business plan relied on the premise that customers were still willing to pay for quality content through subscriptions, rather than pirate the cheap stuff for free,” Rolling Stone wrote. Investors brushed it off as overly idealistic, if not laughable. Lansky's friends and colleagues told him he was crazy, that there was no money left in Internet porn.”
The Rolling Stone piece went on to speak of his taste-making ideas he pairs up with his studios, like the Vixen Angel, which has helped push the Vixen brand to get noticed — “not just as a porn company, but as a lifestyle brand with mainstream appeal.”
“The artists are porn stars, of course, but Lansky sees their roles as more than that. His Vixen Angel photo shoots, which he's compiled into a glossy coffee table book in his office and hopes to someday mount in an art gallery, have reimagined porn stars as action heroes, movie stars and athletes, complete with sports cars, helicopters and guns,” the Rolling Stone article said. “The shoots aren't cheap, with some costing more than $30,000.
“To Lansky, the Vixen Angel shoots are an investment in a more long-term goal that's harder to define: Changing the culture's perception of porn.”
And that perception might be swayed by "the gold, the lifestyle, the nice car, the Versace, all that shit, the nice watch, it's kind of like, that's how you hook people," he told Rolling Stone.
Check out the Rolling Stone article here.