The Ghost
It all depends on where you look
Not that long ago, I read something that said Brazzers was in Burbank. Brazzers, if you’re not aware, is an adult production company, and I live in Burbank. I had a hard time believing that Brazzers was based in such a sleepy part of the San Fernando Valley. Historically, adult production companies were nestled in the northwest sector of the Valley, at the base of the Santa Susana Mountains, places like Northridge and Canoga Park. With some googling, I figured out that MindGeek, which owns Brazzers, has (had?) office space in Burbank. MindGeek is one of the biggest porn companies in the world; in 2015, revenue was $460M. In a sidenote, the last time that I referred to MindGeek as a porn company, in a Forbes post, I got a complaint from one of their employees, who asked me to change what I’d written because, he said, they weren’t a porn company, they were a technology company. When I replied that this was not the case, that they were, in fact, a porn company, and, no, I wouldn’t change it, he didn’t respond. Anyway, apparently the MindGeek offices are (were?) located around 2.4 miles from my house, and when I looked up the building on Google Street View, I could see that this was a building I’d driven past many times, on my way to Target or wherever I happened to be going that day, and I’d never noticed the sign on the front of the building that read MINDGEEK. This was around the time that the smoke from the fires was just starting to accumulate, but it wasn’t super bad yet. So I got in my car and drove to see the building. I parked nearby and walked around to the front. There was no longer a sign that read MINDGEEK: It had been removed. I could still see the faint outlines of the letters, though. Awhile back, I wrote an article for The Atlantic about the ghosts of Porn Valley past. Sometimes I’ll be going to the grocery store, and I’ll see the place I went to porn star karaoke. Or I’ll be driving to an appointment, and I’ll see the offices that used to house what was once the adult industry’s top agency through which aspiring porn stars funneled on the way to wherever their career was heading. One time, a long time ago, I had lunch with Nelson George. At the time, I was doing a fair amount of appearing on TV, shows like “Politically Incorrect,” and at one point, he said: “TV is like ether.” And then he waved his hand in the air like smoke disappearing into the atmosphere. That’s what the adult industry is like, too. That’s what adult content is like, too. One minute it’s there. The next, it’s gone.
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