LOS ANGELES—Russell "Russ" Hampshire, the pioneering adult video producer who founded VCA Pictures, has passed away. He was 72 years old.
"Russ had been sick for some time; he'd had several health incidents, and a couple of months back, Russ started on dialysis but he still continued to have problems," Hampshire's longtime friend and business associate, director Luc Wylder, told AVN. "His health was deteriorating, so I think it was about 12 days ago that Russ made the decision that he was going to end his dialysis, so from that time on, his body continued to slowly deteriorate. This was all part of the process of renal failure and no longer clearing the impurities out of his body, and towards the end, he was taking morphine to control his trouble with breathing and his panic. That's not a situation that you return from."
He died at his home, according to veteran industry executive Kelly Holland.
“That’s a major chapter closing,” Holland said.
Truer words have rarely been said. Hampshire, a graduate of the University of McDonald's management school—yes, the hamburger one—opened VCA Pictures in the early 1970s, using what he'd learned about restaurant management to create an organization to acquire and distribute both adult and mainstream movies on videotape. VCA was first based in south Los Angeles, but soon, Hampshire had moved the company to a building complex on DeSoto Avenue at Prairie in Chatsworth, where besides his burgeoning video business, he also opened TracTech Studios, which served as studio space for productions, editing bays for post production, and a VHS and Beta videotape duplication service.
"Russ was the quintessential businessman in the adult industry. He defined what it meant to run an adult company with class, ethics and integrity," recalled Wylder. "When he opened up VCA, Russ applied all of his skills that he had learned at McDonald's to selling his VHS tapes; treated them just as if they were Big Macs, and you could tell: the warehouse was run like a tight ship. You had to have security before you were able to walk back into the warehouse; you had to be cleared; there were cameras everywhere; there were fork lifts, there were duplication centers and there was Michael [Ninn] with his amazing editing system set up, and right next door was Jack Gallagher's camming company, so that was all part of TracTech Studios as well. So between the directors that he was supportive of, and Russ' vision of running a tight ship like a business should be run, and his ability to spend money and not just put it all into his pocket with gold laméed desks and such, Russ was able to bring the industry to a level that it had never seen before."
If there was one thing at the top of Hampshire's business agenda, it was giving customers the best quality product that he could deliver.
"Russ quickly became the largest manufacturer and producer of adult movies in the early '80s, and he, along with Caballero, VCX, Essex and those companies, he was one of the first huge producer/distributors," recalled AVN founder Paul Fishbein. "I believe he distributed other people's titles as well, and by the mid '80s, he was really producing most of the top-notch feature productions in the industry. I remember he always said, 'I want to charge top dollar but I want to give people quality, I want to give them good movies, I want to have good, top-notch duplication.' I remember he always said, 'I don't use used tape; I only use new tape,' because he was also a big replicator for a lot of people, and so I remember he never would use used tape. A lot of people liked to use cheap stuff, but not Russ. He always cared about the quality of the product, the quality of the packaging, and I know he paid his employees well and he expected the most out of them, and he was really very much cared about the quality. It didn't matter that it was porn; it could have been anything."
But such was Hampshire's business acumen that he could often assess almost instantly whether he wanted to be involved in a project that was brought to him—like, for instance, director Cass Paley's multi-award-winning documentary, John Holmes: The Man, the Myth, the Legend (2004).
"One of the most wonderful things I remember about Russ was his business ethic," Paley said. "He would make a deal on a handshake, and I wound up doing the entire John Holmes documentary on a handshake. No contract, nothing. I just walked into his office one day—this was 1997 or '98—and told him I'd like to do this documentary; everybody was talking about doing one but nobody did one, so I put together a budget, and I handed him the budget and ran over it with him; he looked at the budget and asked me, 'How long will it take to do?' I said, 'I don't know; it depends on how many people I can get.' He said, 'I'll call Stephanie right now and have her write you a check.' And that was it. That was Russ."
Indeed; Hampshire's VCA was the foundation and suppport network for several of the adult industry's best directors, including the Dark Brothers, Michael Ninn, Eon McKai, John Leslie, Antonio Passolini and Jim Holliday.
"My ex-wife Ariana was on the cover of Michael Ninn's first big movie, which was called Black Orchid, for Western Visuals," Wylder told AVN, "and immediately after he directed that movie, Russ came over and hired Michael to work at VCA and he left Western Visuals. That's when we got movies like Sex, Latex, lots of good ones."
In all, Ninn did 19 movies for VCA, one of which, Shock, a sequel to Latex, became the first adult movie to be released on DVD—another major feather in Hampshire's cap.
VCA was among the first adult studios to produce and distribute big-budget, story-driven feature films from the early '70s into the 1990s, finding success with movies such as Insatiable, which sold 12,000 copies on its first day of release. Other VCA-released classics included New Wave Hookers, Night Dreams 1-3, Pretty Peaches 2 & 3, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Café Flesh, Taboo American Style 1-4, Party Doll A Go-Go, and Chameleon, several of which have been AVN Award nominees. Astoundingly, in the mid-'90s, Hampshire declared that all VCA movies would include seven sex scenes—a situation unheard of since the very early days of adult, and one which few other studios could afford to compete with.
Of course, not every VCA release was a Maserati.
"We always ran reviews, and reviewed the movies objectively, and I remember one of the reviews we did in the early days of AVN was of a movie called Piggies, which was a take-off on Porky's, and I remember it got a one-A review," said Fishbein, recalling his first meeting with Hampshire. "So we were at CES, and I'm gonna say this is probably January of '84, we were at CES and I went up to introduce myself to Russ, and I wanted to sell him advertising, and I was telling him about the magazine, and he goes, 'Oh, you're the guy!' and he grabs the copy of AVN and he points to the review of Piggies which got a one-A, and he goes, 'How could you give this movie such a bad review? Do you know how many of these I sold?' And he was yelling at me, going, 'This is a great movie! We sold a lot of copies! How dare you come in and do a bad review on it?' And he just yelled at me, and he said, 'How can you ask me to give you money for advertising when you're trashing my film?' And I said to him—I was so naïve, I said, 'Well, we're always reviewing the movies objectively, you know; we're not trying to say it's bad; we're just being objective about it and the reviewer just really didn't like the film, and we're being honest about it.' And he gave me an ad contract. He said, 'Okay, I'll give you a page a month for 12 months, right?'
"Later on, I was talking to him and I asked him about that. He said, 'I was just testing you. I wanted to make sure you were really objective. I didn't want to start putting money into a magazine where I could buy good reviews. I wanted my reviews to stand on their own.' So he really had a view of integrity. He wanted to make sure we had integrity before he was going to give us money. And sure enough, he was just testing us; he was testing me to see if I would stand up to the pressure, and frankly, I was scared of him. He was yelling at me. But I did stick up for the integrity of the product and I won him over, and he became AVN's biggest advertiser for a long time and one of our best customers ever."
But Hampshire wasn't just a businessman; he was also a great believer in freedom of speech, and that ethic showed in almost everything he did.
"One of the things that you'll get from people when they talk about Russ, you always hear about what a big heart he had. They'll probably tell you he had a bad temper and a big heart; he would yell and then he would make up for it," noted Fishbein. "But one of the other things that was important to him was, he was probably the biggest supporter of, first, the Adult Video Association, and then the Free Speech Coalition, especially in its early days. Not only donating office space, not only donating his time, but money, lots and lots of money. Whatever the cause was, he would be one of those people who put the money out, and if people were indicted or people were having trouble, he would be one to start spending money to help defend people on First Amendment rights. Remember, he went to jail; he took a plea for a case because they indicted Betty and another of his employees [Don Browning], and he didn't want them to be in trouble, so rather than go to trial, he took a plea to keep them out of jail. His art director and his wife, the government went after, so he didn't really want to take a plea, he didn't want to admit that a movie was obscene because it clearly wasn't, but he didn't want to risk them going to jail. But he was the biggest supporter of the Free Speech Coalition and the biggest supporter of all the First Amendment causes, and other people will tell you the same thing."
Indeed; Hampshire was one of the original board members of the Free Speech Legal Defense Fund, the predecessor organization to today's Free Speech Coalition.
But Fishbein's throw-away thought about Hampshire yelling was actually a quality that many people noticed about him upon their first meeting: his often-mercurial temper sometimes made it difficult to deal with him.
"The other thing I remember about Russell is that he used to yell a lot," Paley recalled. "For some reason, I was his yelling post. I remember one time he screamed at me so long, I walked out of his office with him yelling at me, all the way out to the front doors of the building and back into his office, so he yelled all the way out and all the way back—and when we got back in his office, everything was fine. I was his 'yelling boy' for the day, and I really seemed to be his yelling boy a lot."
But eventually Hampshire tired of the day-to-day struggles to keep the business alive and his employees paid, and in the spring of 2003, he sold VCA Pictures to Larry Flynt's Hustler Video.
"We've been working on this deal for a while," Hampshire told AVN at the time. "After 25 years in the business I'm ready to move on but I'm still going to be working as a consultant. I'm not leaving the business. I'll still be making films. I'm not going anywhere."
Hampshire is survived by wife Betty, sons Scott and Michael, father Mark Muus, a brother and sister, and several nieces and nephews.
