Twenty-Percent

We have more motive elaboration this morning, from today's Citizen's Voice (via PC's blog). It's like I've been saying all along: this was a "gay porn turf war" brought about by the Cobra settlement agreement...an agreement that blocked Harlow and Joe from partnering with Brent in the way both parties would have wanted.

In addition to the "scene stealing" provision I've mentioned before, another problem the settlement agreement posed to Harlow and Joe's dream partnership with Brent was the clause dealing with trademark licensure.

According to the CV:

Cuadra and Kocis had wanted to recruit actor Sean Lockhart, who appeared under the stage name “Brent Corrigan,” but Lockhart was under contract to work only for Kocis.

Cuadra and Kerekes met with Lockhart and his business partner Grant Roy at the Gay AVN Awards in Las Vegas, the gay pornography equivalent of the Academy Awards, in early January 2007, prosecutors said.

At the time, Lockhart was engaged in a patent lawsuit over the use of the Corrigan stage name. A proposed settlement would have allowed Lockhart to star in movies not involving Cobra Video, in exchange for a payment of 20 percent of the proceeds to Cobra. Cuadra and Kerekes did not want to pay any money to Cobra, prosecutors said.

The Times Leader gives additional details about how, at the April 27 taped San Diego meeting, Harlow and Joe were trying to devise ways around this problem (which thanks to the murder, now involved the estate of Bryan Kocis rather than Bryan himself...clearly, H&J had not thought this murder through very well):

According to the transcript of the conversation at the restaurant, Kerekes was pushing Roy into allowing Lockhart to work with Cuadra in several pornographic movies. Kerekes discussed ways to pay Roy and Lockhart royalty fees under the table to avoid paying Kocis’ estate.

Had this been a partnership paying full royalties (like H&J wanted), this 20% fee would have had to be paid by everyone involved, including affiliated sites like Boybatter. Here is the relevant provision from the MOU (which, I should add, was NOT the final settlement agreement...but was very probably very close to it):



By the way, this is Silence of the Chinchilla's 100th post...woohoo!