Chris Alexander Interview
– Chris’s Bio & Movies

I’m standing behind the Anabolic booth with the owner/founder and head honcho of Anabolic, Chris Alexander.

Hi.

How has this show been for you?

It’s been great, very busy as I’m sure you’ve noticed. This is really the only show in the business. If there is an official industry trade-show, this is the one people should attend.

Before you formed Anabolic, you were a performer in the industry. When you were doing that, did you have something like this in mind?

No. I wish I could take credit for this being part of a grand plan, I can’t. I had a lot of odd jobs before this; I was a fitness consultant, a room service waiter at the Marriott and a number of other jobs. After I graduated from UCLA my dream was to become a wrestling coach. I competed at an international level and that earned me a scholarship. I always joke that when I came to LA, my buddies were in the bars spending money, trying to get girls to come home with them. I never got into the drinking or party substances that others enjoy. I was more into the fitness thing so while they spent money to get girls to go home with them, I was getting paid a few hundred bucks to have sex with a pretty girl. To me it was a joke. From there it has evolved into this. I went from an actor to a director and now a manufacturer.

You directed some early pro-am stuff.

We did “Biff Malibu’s Totally Nasty Home Videos” which were videos with two-scenes each. The guys in the warehouse affectionately call those “Totally Chris” because at least one scene had me with whoever had dragged into my Venice Beach apartment.

That must have been fun to shoot?

Totally. I was picking out who I wanted to fuck, taking them home and fucking them. I didn’t have to pay for male talent. My roommate had a hard time coming up with the rent most months so I made him hold the camera. I could pick who I wanted to mess around with so it was a great time.

How did that evolve into Anabolic?

I realized that at some point or another that I was never going to make a career out of being male talent. You can only do it for so many years and then you’re past your prime. There have been some guys who can keep doing it, Randy West, Ron Jeremy and a few other guys who have been around for a long time. I realized that for me, acting was never going to be enough to provide the kind of paychecks that I wanted. I also was not genetically blessed like Lexington Steele or Erik Everhard. Lacking that, I started directing. For a while I was shooting for anyone who would buy my stuff. I was smart enough not to squander my money on party supplements. I was able to finance my own projects, the first of which was bought by Caballero many years ago. The next two movies were bought by Cinderella. The owners of both of those companies were sitting together at a Goalie dinner I attended last night so I thanked them both for buying my stuff. I gravitated more towards the gonzo stuff and shot a lot for Midnight and LBO. All those guys treated me great and I made some money. I saved what I could, shot more scenes and went back and forth until I had saved enough to take the next step. I wanted to be able to buy a house and raise children. While I was shooting scenes for other people, I would hold back certain scenes. If I found one to be really spectacular, I would put it on the shelf and save it. That’s where the Totally Nasty Home Videos came from.

When did you start thinking about shooting gang bangs?

I talked with someone who really liked my stuff. He had a great desire to see gang bangs. He didn’t like the way they were being shot and we talked extensively over the course of a few weeks. That was the initial spark that put Anabolic on store shelves.

Was Gang Bang Girl 1 the first Anabolic release?

We released Gang Bang Girl 1 with Trixie Tyler at the same time as three of the Totally Nasty titles. That is the signature line for our company.

One of my favorite Gang Bang Girl volumes is playing on the screen here.

That’s Aurora Snow. She is one of few girls we have had come back for a second gang bang. In her first one she didn’t even do anal and we got her to do double anal the second time around. I really hope she wins Performer of the Year tomorrow night because she deserves it. She is beautiful she’s fresh and she is an amazing performer. A lot of women become very high-mileage quickly, but Aurora has maintained a freshness even after a few years in the business. She is a hard worker, she shows up on time and she is great. I wish every actress could have her work ethic as well as her beauty.

When you started Anabolic in the mid to late eighties, gonzo had not yet dominated the market.

True, with the exception of Ed Powers, the features did dominate the market then.

There was that black hole when everyone was making bad features.

When every movie had a pizza boy showing up to fuck the bored housewife.

Did you meet any resistance in the marketplace to your movies?

I don’t believe so, but I can’t be sure since I never did any of the sales. I know that our stuff was embraced quickly because I saw our numbers grow and re-orders develop that other companies only dream of. From the beginning, Anabolic has been one of the most re-ordered companies.

Why do you think that is?

I can attribute that to quality. We’ve had directors who really care about the product. We’ve had directors spend so much on quality talent that they lose money on a movie. Both Gregg and I believe in our people so we’re willing to make it right.

You have directed all of the Gang Bang Girls right?

That’s right. From the beginning I have directed Gang Bang Girl, World Sex Tour and the Nasty Nymphos. That line took over for the Totally Nasty movies. Instead of two scenes, they have six and are two hours and twenty minutes like our other lines. We do price them a little lower than our other movies as a gift to our distributors and to get some stores acquainted with the Anabolic line. There are some stores that won’t carry the premium-priced lines.

The World Sex Tour stuff also started a trend with American talent working with European actresses.

I really wanted to get the English-speaking guys who could give us the style we were looking for laying the pipe with the foreign talent.

Last year I interviewed Gregg, but let’s get your side of the partnership. How did you meet him?

I met Gregg when he was working in the warehouse for another company. Around 1991 I asked him if he would ship my boxes while I was in Cannes. He handled that and a friendship evolved from there. I believe that we have become the best of friends and I hope he says the same. He became the voice on the phone for Anabolic for the last ten or eleven years.

That’s a long time for a relationship in this business.

It’s a very long time.

You’ve had a history of long relationships with talent and directors as well. Sean Michaels, Lexington Steele and others.

Mike John is another one. We found him in Costa Rica when we were shooting. Someone told us that there was another American down there. When we first called him, he thought that we were kidding. He didn’t believe us. Mike was from Venice and shooting stuff down there for his own amusement. He was a surfer as a hobby and spent time down there. There was an instant camaraderie. From there, he has become one of the best directors in the business. That’s of his own doing, nothing we can take credit for. We gave him an opportunity, but he ran with it and that’s all him.

Anabolic movies have a similar look to them, a signature that runs across every line. Was that part of the plan from the start?

I don’t think it was part of a plan. It just sort of happened over the years. We care very much about what we put out. We wouldn’t take a director who didn’t feel the same way. If talent doesn’t give us their all, then we are done with them. When we find someone like Aurora Snow, or Ander Page, then we will work with them quite a few times.

From the beginning, Anabolic has shot a lot of cutting edge stuff; do you worry about legal problems?

I spoke with LA Vice and they advised me to not have fisting, pissing, bondage with sex and not to have any kids or animals in my movies. We have avoided those areas and we hope that we stay out of their way. Obscenity is such a gray area because any company from Playboy to Anabolic can really figure it out. The law is based on community standards and let’s face it, I we take this to a bunch of little old ladies in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma they might be offended by a girl in her bathing suit running down the beach with her boobs shaking. At the same time, where we are, it’s a much more liberal sexual attitude. All we have done is keep in mind what they told us and tried to steer clear of obvious problem areas. We have also done our best to treat talent and everyone we do business with respect. I hope that since we have always treated people right, that we will be treated right.

One line that sort of blurred the line was “Rough Sex.” That stirred up a lot of controversy.

If anything was going to be considered pushing the envelope that was it. It was misunderstood in the industry. The director of that series, Kahn Tusion, is a very interesting individual. He has a mainstream job that earns him a very generous salary. He wanted to fill a niche in the marketplace that he felt wasn’t being addressed. He took girls who were very much into the whole scene. Some girls like to be spanked. Some girls will freak out if you give them a tap on the ass. There are a lot of girls who are into the whole master/slave thing. Kahn wanted to mix that up with sex. There wasn’t any bondage involved so we felt it was valid. We gave him the opportunity to shoot that and all of a sudden things started happening. Mike John came to me and said “Chris, I can’t get girls to come in for an interview. This fucking Rough Sex thing is scaring them off.” The girls in the series know that they can stop the scene any time they want to, they all had that option. There was one young woman who did a great scene for us and who really wanted to push herself. She even earned a bonus. The next day she was on an airplane to Mexico for a Metro shoot. Someone saw her around the pool with these huge bruises on her butt. They asked her what happened and she told them she had done an Anabolic shoot. No one understood that she had done a scene she wanted to do and had fun on. All they saw was her butt and decided that no one should work for us again. It was a black eye for Anabolic. Up until that moment, no one had anything bad to say about us. No one could say that they weren’t paid or were treated badly and they still can’t. Because of that one thing, people that wanted to get a leg up on us finally had something to talk shit about. They said that Anabolic was beating girls. It was one director and he was meticulous about making sure that girls could handle what he wanted.

That line was pulled after two releases.

We pulled it not because I think it was a bad line. It was a misunderstood line and I didn’t want to give people the chance to talk shit about us. Since that series ended, other lines form other companies have been much more rough.

Would you consider bringing that line back?

At this time, no. I honestly believe that there is nothing wrong with it, but I don’t want to give people the chance to talk trash about it. I would rather keep our reputation for treating people well in tact.

Anabolic has grown to be one of the biggest companies in the business with nearly no advertising in the industry’s leading magazine, AVN. How did that happen?

Let me just say that I respect Paul Fishbein a great deal. We are paying a lot of money for this booth and he’s got the industry believing that they need to advertise with his magazine. God bless him for that. We haven’t bought into that idea and I think we move more pieces than a lot of companies who do. I can see how it would really help a new company to get their name out. At the same time, I’m not sure how much it would help sales. We did some ads a few years ago and found no increase in sales. We figured we would have to sell X number of pieces to pay for the ad and without an increase it didn’t make sense to do the advertising. We also have good recognition with fans. When people see our logo, they know it will be a good product. I was talking with Lexington Steele the other day and he told me that before he got into the business, he was a fan. He would walk down the aisle, see an Anabolic movie. He knew ours was a premium priced product and that he could pick up three or four of the cheaper titles. In the beginning, tried the cheaper movies, got them home and realized that it lacked the energy he wanted, had bad tracking or didn’t star the women who were on the box. Before long he realized the buying the Anabolic movie would save him from wasting his money.

Anabolic has always been a consumer driven company.

Absolutely. What we do with our advertising budget is spend the extra dollars on hats, T-shirts and then give them to our fans. We skip over the advertising and give something back to our fans. Hopefully they remember us when they are in the stores.

Do you think that internet has allowed you to be more directly connected to fans?

I hope so. With people like Roger Pipe on the internet, shameless plug, shameless plug.

I hate that guy.

Yeah, he can write, but I hear he’s a dick. But you get an objective reviewer who is willing to say that a movie is shit if it’s shit. At the same time, if a movie is great and is worthy of praise, then reviews like you can see it and acknowledge that. It can’t hurt us to have people out there who will give readers something they can trust. They can go to your site and know that if you like a movie it’s because you like it, not because someone slipped you a hundred bucks.

I’m still waiting for my check by the way.

That’s not going to happen, but help yourself to a T-shirt. I’m just guessing, but I would imagine you have had people trying to solicit reviews from you all the time and perhaps have even offered you something for positive reviews. From what I’ve heard, you aren’t someone who plays that game and I hope that your readers respect that. We’ve seen reviews in AVN and wondered what they hell they were watching. Mike John has gone down to South America and shot a movie filled with beautiful women who have never been seen before and then had some other company shoot a generic Latin line in the Valley. Mike’s movie gets 3 stars and then the movie with three Latin girls, an Asian girl and some chick with a black wig gets 4 stars as a Latin line. I understand the logic from the magazine’s point of view. Anabolic doesn’t advertise so they are looking out for their customer, but at the same time, it’s hard to ignore.

What do you think about some of the new companies and the fact that some of them have very similar boxes to yours?

There is an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I’ll take it for what it is. At the same time I would say that we have spoken to our attorneys and there is something called trade-dress infringement. That’s why you can’t start Rog’s Cola and put it in a green twisty bottle with white italic lettering and last very long in the market. We will see how that plays out.

What do you see in the future for Anabolic?

Continued hard work, great movies and hopefully keeping our customers happy. We shoot a lot of stuff and it’s a brutal schedule. God bless our editor for keeping up with it all. We could shoot Bring Em Young every month, but we want to keep it fresh for the fans.

Is there anything that we didn’t cover?

No. Once again you have done a spectacular job as an interviewer.