While visiting a video store in New York City, Scott Morris asked the manager how Club Onyx —the first all-black feature from Factory Video Productions — was doing. " 'Not very good' was his answer," says Morris, who helped start Factory Video with Frank Parker in 1997. "It was an excellent film, and a lot of people who bought it wrote us to commend the movie. But it never did well for us."
It was a lesson learned: "Stores just automatically put our titles in the Factory Video section, which is not known for black videos, so we accomplished hiding a movie. That lesson stayed with me. I realized that if you're going to do something that's really different, you have to make it very obviously a separate product, a separate name. And the opportunity finally came up about a year and a half ago."
That's when Factory Video launched two new lines: the lesbian-themed Working Girl Video and the Blue Alley Studios amateur line. While the lesbian product proved a challenge to promote and sell (Morris doesn't rule out future releases if he can crack the code and hit the true lesbian market as opposed to straight men), Blue Alley soared immediately. Each installment heads to a different city (NYCum was the first, Dallas Cum will be the ninth) to catch some local flavor. "It was originally meant to be all oral, heavy on the cum-shots, heavy on the cum-eating," Morris says. "There really wasn't fucking, but in our eighth one—which is done in Philadelphia—we decided to go ahead and allow a little bit of fucking. So we'll incorporate a little bit of that into all the Blue Alleys in the future."
The company then decided to start another line, Slippery Palm Productions, using Michael Hitchcock as the director of product aimed at showing straight men. Initially a solo line, it has been renamed Street Trade and will get nastier. "I discovered that jack-off videos do not work," Morris says. "The new name opens it up for sex, and we have one of those filmed and it should be coming out within the next month."
Meanwhile, back on the home front, Morris and company started taking the Factory Video line up a notch, doing more theme-driven (but not story-driven) features. "We shot on location, shared studio space with Raging Stallion and did a big thing in their studio, and created a number of production-style things. We are coming back a little again more toward what Factory Video started as, because we don't want to look like we're trying to be Falcon. But we are going to try and incorporate a little bit more high-end product into Factory every once in a while. It allows Blue Alley to be really sleazy. It's our dirty little cousin."
In addition, a phone call from its distributor more than a year ago proved to be fruitful. While cleaning house (literally), AVNS discovered 90 pounds worth of Beta tapes, all features it had obtained the rights to but never released. So they mailed them to Morris, who found an old Beta player, hooked it up to a computer, and the Time Warp to the '80s line was launched (Volumes 5 and 6 are coming soon). "We edit them for the first time," he says. "We made it fun, but it's still very sexy. That line has worked out very well for us."
But the best seller for Factory has been its Cum Suckers series, with Volume 9 due soon. "We actually do a full re-edit of the movie with a little bit of sex up to the blowing-off point, and it's kept at a quick pace." The ninth installment will feature optional text pop-ups with model and film credits for each segment, just one of the little touches that has shown Factory takes information and technology seriously. Cum Suckers 9 is also scheduled to utilize 3GP technology (a version of MPEG4), allowing consumers to download and install 30-second clips (which Factory will trademark as CumSpots) onto cell phones.
"For those into the techie things, this is wonderful. So we are trying to stay on top of that, we're focusing a lot of our attention to video on demand," Morris says, adding that Factory has also sold the rights to its titles to foreign companies specializing in adult channels for hotels. "And about a year ago, we started shooting in high definition, making us the first gay porn company to shoot in high def and release in high def," he says. "We started shooting all Factory product, with the exception of one, on high def."
But none of that dedication compares to pleasing the customer first. In addition to visiting stores on a regular basis to get feedback from the owners, Morris notes that Factory has upped its community involvement in San Francisco and beyond. "We turned out to be the biggest hit of the Gay Pride festival in Sacramento, but it's also a great promotional tool. We're going into markets the big boys see as too small, but the Gay Pride event there had to have about 100,000 people. I don't think that's small."
As for the future, Morris isn't prone to predictions. "Nothing I would have said five years ago regarding goals would have applied today, except that we want to make movies with real-looking guys having real sex, and we want to make movies that people jerk-off to and have a good time with. If there were a mission statement for us, that would be it. We've never lost sight of why we do it. It's always been for the customer."
Factory Video is distributed by AVNS, 800-526-1663.
