Producer-director John Stagliano was ecstatic that his newest movie in The Fashionistas trilogy Safado: Berlin won him the Best Director’s award at the Mandalay Bay telecast. It also won for Best Editing and his studio, Evil Angel picked up several other awards for other movies too. The Best Female Performer award went to his 19-year-old discovery Sasha Grey from Sacramento who got her start with his director, Belladonna in The Fashionistas Safado; The Challenge. He also proudly showed me the award he’d picked up a few days earlier in Germany for Best New Film.

But he revealed he will now be forced to close the live dance spectacular The Fashionistas show that has been running since September 26, 2004 at the Krave Theater on The Strip at Planet Hollywood. He told me: “My adult movie company, Evil Films fortunately was a $20-million a year business so I could put money into keeping it going without making money—and although we’ve had ever-growing really enthusiastic audiences we’ve never made a penny of profit—and its time now for my labor of love to end on The Strip. By March or April we will have to call it quits. The impact of the Internet on falling DVD sales cannot be minimized. We simply are not making as much money out of full-length movies on DVD anymore. The first two Fashionista movies kept the live show running- but the adult industry is another business today and I can’t go on subsidizing the live show with it. Money is getting tighter so with regret it has to come to an end. But we had a great run and everybody who saw the show said it was the best, most creative and energetic they’d ever seen. I am very, very proud of it.” His original The Fashionistas movie won 10 awards back in 2003, and he was determined to turn it into a respectable (read “fashionable,” instead of “topless”) yet controversial erotic R-rated Vegas spectacle. He hoped that by moving it to the Empire Ballroom it would finally break-even but he had to move back to the Krave Theater. The controversial filmmaker brought his 20-Vegas cast members for a special new choreographed dance-entertainment number to introduce the Sturman Award for First Amendment Rights battling federal obscenity prosecutions. AVN President Paul Fishbein told the audience: “Most of you weren’t even born when AVN was started—and without the battles we fought you wouldn’t have an industry to work in. The dance number is futuristic—but for us the future is now.”

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