SANTA FE SPRINGS, Calif.—One of the best-known—and best-selling—series in the history of adult cinema is late director Kirdy Stevens' Taboo, of which he directed five volumes starring some of the biggest names in adult of the early '80s—think Kay Parker (pictured above with Stevens), Dorothy Le May, Juliet Anderson, Mike Ranger, Holly McCall, Ginger Lynn, Jamie Gillis, John Leslie ... the list goes on. Now, all of those volumes as well as several more of Stevens' films have been remastered in HD, and those DVDs will henceforth be distributed exclusively through Spring Town Distribution of Santa Ana.
"After a long and careful process in finding a new distributor, Standard Digital confidently has chosen Spring Town to handle the entire company’s line of blockbuster adult titles for DVD distribution," Kirdy Stevens' son Steve Stevens told AVN. "Max is the owner/operator and I've worked with him for years; they've been really good buyers, and he's looking forward to being the sole distributor, exclusive for the Standard Digital line, so if you want 'em, you've gotta go to him."
Spring Town's Max agreed with Stevens completely, stating, “The original Taboo series is undoubtedly one of the best sellers in the industry, if not the best. We're extremely honored, excited and grateful to be the exclusive distributor."
Those who wish to stock the remastered Standard Digital titles need only contact Max at [email protected] to place an order.
But that's just a small piece of the news coming out of Stevens' production company, Standard Digital. All of those remastered Taboos, as well as such top-rated and popular titles as Playing With Fire, Daisy Chain, The Animal in Me, Little Me and Marla Strangelove, A Taste of Sugar and Lollipop Palace (Stevens' very first feature) will be available for streaming on HotMovies.com, Adult Empire and AEBN—and Blu-rays of those titles will be available for purchase on an individual basis from Vinegar Syndrome, a major source of classic Hollywood B-flicks and classic adult titles.
And yes, people are still buying those classic titles on disc.
"There is still a market for the classics," Stevens assured, "and people still want to own them as opposed to having to go on the internet to watch them and deal with internet streaming and buffering and all that. They like to have a collection or a library."
Also, there's another treat for fans of the Taboo series: Stevens has taken each of his dad's volumes, selected all the scenes that deal with the moms and their fauxcest couplings (and orgies) and put those together in a single volume called Taboo: The Mothers Edition, for the real MILF lovers in the audience.
Finally, those who recall AVN's obituary for Kirdy Stevens from back in 2012 may have noted that the director first got into adult when he began shooting 16mm color loops—most of his competitors' product was black-and-white—which he showed on early arcade machines known as Panorams, and which he also sold in his arcade store on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles until the cops busted him for it in 1963—a bust that inspired him to begin shooting adult features.
"My dad sacrificed a lot for this industry because he loved naked girls and, you know, people put all sorts of stuff out now and no one says boo, and he was one of the people who paved the road for that; I'm very proud of him," Stevens told AVN.
Fortunately, the younger Stevens has been able to unearth more than a hundred of his dad's loops, many of which starred the most popular performers of the era, including Susan Nero, Lisa DeLeeuw, Sharon Mitchell and several others, and he is now in the process of remastering them, adding music (because all loops back then were silent) and he'll soon be offering DVDs of those loops as well as licensing them to HotMovies for streaming.
One interesting note: After Kirdy Stevens had filmed his loops, he found that there was no business in the city of Los Angeles that was willing to develop the film for him—this was the late 1950s after all—so he and two partners built their own lab to handle the product.
"Dad built this machine where he would hand-crank it through these boxes that would have the developing solutions in them, and he did it himself," Stevens recollected. "He developed the negatives, but he was able to get someone to make prints, and those are what he sold in his business and by mail."
But if one thing's clear from all this recent interest in Kirdy Stevens' films, it's that classic porn never dies, and there will always be fans who want to get a glimpse of what beautiful women looked like having sex on film.
