LOS ANGELES—It was just a small notice in the Obituary column of the Los Angeles Times. It stated, in part, "Larry Ross, creative genius and one of the original ad men, as well as one of the original pioneers of the adult film industry, died Friday, Dec. 28. He was 84. Larry served in the Army and before, graduated from Pratt with a B.F.A. He was an avid sports fan and his one-liners always made everyone laugh. What a colorful life he led."
Though he frequently attended industry events, Larry Ross was very much behind the scenes of the adult industry, and hence didn't rate the sort of informative mainstream obituary bestowed upon such high-profile characters as Al Goldstein or John Holmes or Harry Reems. Beyond that, most of Ross's compatriots in the industry have either died or are retired, leaving the industry—and their memories of Larry Ross—behind them.
"He died about ten days ago," director/producer/actor David Christopher told AVN. "I used to go to lunch with him about once a month. He took me out to lunch probably about six or seven weeks ago, and he was almost 85 years old, so he wasn't looking quite as good as he once did, and then he had to go to the hospital. What happened was, he was losing oxygen coming into his heart; he was having trouble breathing, and when he was in the hospital a couple of weeks ago, it was down to like 20 percent of the oxygen, and he didn't want to stay in the hospital; he knew he didn't have long. About two days before he died, he called me on the phone and said something like, 'I don't think I'm gonna be around long,' or something like that; 'I don't want to be around anymore.' Then I found out from his friend who's a lawyer that he was down to like 10 percent of his oxygen going into his heart, and he died the next day."
Larry Ross began his adult career in the early 1970s, having moved to California from New York City. In those early days, he published a trade magazine whose name has been lost to history, that reportedly featured lesbian images on its cover, then became the founder and editor of the the early underground comic magazine San Francisco Ball as well as the adult magazines Fetish Times and Seize, before deciding to get into the still-young field of adult video, founding the fetish-based video company Platinum Video, later renamed Prestige Video.
"Larry wasn't really into fetish but it was his business and he saw it was doing good," Christopher remembered. "He was in with my old bosses, [East Coast distributors] Marty and Teddy [Rothstein]; they ran everything. When I moved out here in 1993, Michael Carpenter was directing for him, and they were doing like enemas with big poles. He did different fetish things, is what he did. I went to a couple of his shoots to see what he was doing, and both of the shoots happened to be enema shoots, and he had that old cameraman who did some old rock 'n' roll, and he died about seven years ago. Larry also had a company with [agent] Jim South, a big-breast company, and they sold it to Legend like maybe 1989, '88, something like that."
Besides enema titles, Ross also put out videos, directed by such pseudonymous directors as "Brick Wahl" and "Mason Dixon," devoted to foot worship, featuring men getting off on different varieties of shoes and boots along with bare feet, and even released several tapes—it was all VHS and Beta in those days—devoted to tickling, catfighting and spanking. Each video featured as many as nine different women in three separate stories.
However, as Ross reached his late 50s, he began to lose interest in releasing videos and sold Platinum/Prestige to Charlie Brickman, owner of Cinderella Video, a prominent producer in the 1990s, and went to work for Cinderella's sister company Cinderella Distributors as its creative director. Ross retained ownership of much of Platinum's early product, though, and in August of 2006, well after VHS had become nearly extinct thanks to the arrival of DVD, Ross arranged for his VHS catalog to be sold online by FetishRX.com.
In the late '80s/early '90s, Ross began to get involved in politics as it related to the adult industry, and founded the Personal Freedom Alliance, a forerunner of the Free Speech Coalition, on whose board he later served. In 2003, Free Speech Coalition, at its then-annual "Night of the Stars," awarded both Ross and Brickman its prestigious Joel Warner "Good Guy" Award for their "valuable contributions to the business side of adult."
Larry Ross is survived by daughter Laree Ross, son Jeff Ross, sister Patty, and several nieces and nephews.
