Companies come and companies go — but one of the longest-running companies in adult video is one nobody talks much about: Caballero Home Video.
For over 25 years, Caballero has pumped out some of porn's best-known classics, two of which found themselves among this year's Best Classic DVD finalists. But more recently, the company has launched three video lines, two of which have already found favor with black, gay and she-male fans, and the third, Vertigo Video, managed to garner four nominations going into the 2006 AVN Award show.
"Vertigo has been around for a couple of years now," said Dick Lane, director of sales at Caballero. "Besides our nominations earlier this year, all of which have done very well in the stores and online, we've had great reception of some of our 'group' titles. There was one called Vulvapaloosa that did extremely well, and we had a series called Mad at Daddy 1, 2 and 3 — that's young girls with older guys — that's been selling steadily."
"A lot of our series have snappy titles," he continued, "like Tonsil Hockey and funny types of things. We recently did very well with a title called Splash, which was a squirt movie with Cytherea. Vulvapaloosa was a big lesbian movie, gangbang lesbian movie, and so is a title we came out with in April called Lipstick Girls, so the line does quite well and has a good reputation."
Also on the Caballero plate is Fever Films, which has been releasing features for about a year, and in January, the company decided to break into the black urban niche with its Black Fever Films imprint.
"Fever Films probably has about 30 titles out now, and under Black Fever Films, we've got maybe about eight or 10," Lane detailed. "We're putting them out about two a month."
"Our best seller in that line,” he noted, “is probably Juicy Black Coochi, which stars Jada Fire, and then in two other movies, Choice Dark Meat and Blackout, we have Marie Luv; she's a good-looking girl, and they all do quite well. We're particularly proud of the packaging on those titles; they really stand out on the shelf."
As a new imprint, Black Fever is staying away from what could turn out to be a series trap while it finds its best footing in the marketplace.
"We're just doing individual titles right now," Lane explained. "We might have some number 1's and 2's of a particular title, but that'll depend on sales. We're watching closely to see what the public seems to respond to."
Caballero's third new imprint is Blue Pictures, which specializes in gay, she-male and bisexual titles — and the company isn't afraid to take some bold chances.
"A lot of our gay movies are bareback movies," Lane said. "That genre seems to be very popular in the gay community. We did very well with a take-off on Brokeback Mountain called Bareback Mountain, which came out in time for the Academy Awards, and it did quite well."
And did the feature's stars actually herd sheep?
"Not really," Lane chuckled. "We had some young guys up in a cabin in the woods; it was the same kind of theme. With Blue Pictures, we feature a lot of young-looking talent, and the public seems to respond well to them."
Other Blue bareback titles include Bareback Stud; Bareback, Bare Front; Tender to the Bone; and Stud Buds, all of which have sold well, and Lane said the non-condom sex scenes have garnered no complaints.
"It's just — some people don't carry it, like Adam Male," Lane admitted, "but other than that, we've gotten no flack at all. In fact, the features do very well when they're bareback."
Lane claims that Blue Pictures also has some of the best-looking she-males in the business.
"They're so good looking, they're scary, some of these girls," he described. "A lot of them are foreign, from Brazil and Europe. I think there's a whole community where they live together down there [Brazil]."
Lane claims the first she-male gangbang sub-genre line for Blue Pictures, noting that their first one, 15 Dicks, 14 Chicks, did quite well. Other top-selling she-male titles include Rent-a-She-Male, You Got She-Male and She-Male Ballbusters, which he notes do quite well for Playboy's Spice outlets.
But despite the growing popularity of its new lines, the mainstay for Caballero continues to be its classic library, which Lane estimates contains about 500 titles.
"We're putting out 15 new classic titles in April," he said. "That'll bring us up to 290 that are out on DVD, and we have a lot more to come. We've got about 100 catalog titles, features, not from the golden age but from the '90s, and we expect them to do pretty well, too."
"There's a big fan base for the classics," Lane noted. "No one's really turning out stories these days. Quite frankly, I think the women were much better looking back then.
“Also, I find them a little more erotic because the women were all natural. There weren't phony breasts, and they didn't shave their vaginas; they had beautiful bushes and what-have-you, so that's another point — besides stories and costumes and the amount of money spent on those movies."
One of Lane's most important jobs is to create new markets for Caballero's classics, and he's working on penetrating every possible outlet.
"We're making deals with some of the top cable companies," he said. "Also, we've made deals with some of the hotel chains, like On Command, so these classics can be seen in a lot of hotels. Other ones that are talking to us now are The Erotic Network and also The Playboy Channel; they'll be picking up some of our stuff."
But one of Lane's most effective marketing techniques are the classic four- and six-packs, arranged to feature either a star like Seka, Vanessa Del Rio or Ginger Lynn, or around a theme, like nurses, doctors, phone sex, whorehouses, coeds, cowgirls, desperate starlets, sci-fi, mysteries, detectives, and so on.
"The boxes do two things," he explained. "They put together movies for fans, for people who like a particular subject or star, and also, they're a way of reinventing the classics, too. Some of the classic fans, they don't know the names of the movies. Maybe the top 100 they do, but others they don't — but they're attracted to a theme.
“Somebody might like nurse movies, or somebody might like something else, so it's a way of reinventing the classics, bringing it to their attention through themes if not titles and if not stars."
AVN detailed some of Caballero's very best classics in our August, 2005 issue, but Lane said that some of the current top-sellers include Private Teacher with Kay Parker, all of the early Andrew Blake titles — Night Trips, Secrets, House of Dreams — and almost everything with John Holmes, Vanessa Del Rio and Seka. And Caballero will even supply, free of charge, special stand-up display cases, each featuring a particular classic star, with which to sell the disks.
But one of Caballero's all-time prizes is the Swedish Erotica Collection, loops featuring almost all of the top stars of the ’70s and early ’80s, all 100 hours of which are now available on 25 four-hour DVDs.
"In the old days, Caballero was the leader," Lane reflected. "Everybody — VCA, whoever — modeled themselves after us. They all wanted to be Caballero."
But much as Lane may love the glory days, he doesn't live in them. Today's Caballero, he assures, will build on its nomination-worthy quality, and with its complete in-house printing, editing and replication systems, the company's ready to compete on every level. So watch out, world!
