Note to the industry: When a studio needs to move into bigger offices with a larger staff, things are going well. Very well. Not that Hot House Entertainment needed any more evidence of its fast rise to the top.
"My expectations back in 2001 were just to get up and do the next day's work and make a living," notes Steven Scarborough, the famed director who filmed at Falcon before starting Hot House in 1993 — and resurrecting it in 2001. "But all of a sudden it's taken off. I find that terribly exciting. It's been beyond my wildest dreams, the success we're having right now."
Hot on the heels of the instant success of Skuff 3, Scarborough has Hot House poised to raise the bar even higher with the year's remaining releases: Ram Tough is just be hitting the shelves, with Mischief landing in October. In December comes The Missing, which harkens back to one of Scarborough's Falcon hits, Abduction.
And while Scarborough is scheduled to direct full throttle with six titles a year on the Hot House label through at least 2006, he has given assistant director David Lamm (formerly Falcon's stills-photographer) his first crack at directing with Twisted on the Club Inferno line. Lamm is expected to contribute four to six titles in the next year on the Club Inferno and Plain Wrapped labels.
"I am actively interviewing and thinking about how we're going to put additional directors in place, David Lamm being the first one to come on. Probably in a year or so we'll have a third director here."
Lamm will be moving to Paris to help Hot House build and develop more of an international production team for new, original ventures in Europe.
"We're looking to expand," Scarborough says. "We have probably one of the largest direct marketing email lists in the gay business, and we're going to pick up other lines as well, some select stuff that we think that our customers will like."
The first production is scheduled for November, and Scarborough hopes to do four a year under the new international umbrella. Talks are also underway with a "really well-known European producer" for Hot House to become his U.S. distributor.
Hot House also plans to debut its new website, which has been under construction for almost a year, next month. "That's probably the most exciting thing for us, because it involves so many of us. We'll finally get our affiliate program up."
In addition, Scarborough is excited about Hot House's relationship with German powerhouse publisher Bruno Gmünder. "Our very first calendars are coming out, and our very first coffee table book. We're really thrilled with that. We've been in business for over twelve years and we've never had a book before or a calendar, so we're really looking forward to these — as marketing tools also."
Throw in show appearances, sponsorships at the Folsom Street Fair and traffic from Scarborough's new movies for Falcon (after the big hit Bootstrap, he is currently shooting a second feature for them), it's no wonder the company has gotten too big for its current office after nine years. With a staff of 15 and four additional contractors, Scarborough is in the process of finding and moving into bigger digs in San Francisco — and hire three more full-timers.
"We've had exponential growth the past three years, and it hasn't showed much sign of slowing yet," Scarborough says. "After all these years being in this business, I'm really thrilled. It all seems kind of blessed right now, like everything's working."
But that's not a surprise to anyone. Scarborough's films have been top-quality from the start, and Hot House has consistently presented one of the most polished and high class packages around: From the sex to the box covers to the promotions, everything has a stamp of meticulous care and quality, the efforts of extensive branding research.
"I think we have one of the clearest visions of who we are and what we are to our customer, and we try to stay true to that. In 2001 we brought in some outside professionals and did a serious brand evaluation, and we've had a secondary brand evaluation since then to clarify for everyone here what we're doing and how we get there. And I think that it shows, particularly in our packaging and advertising, that we've been right on brand," Scarborough says, crediting the skills of his partner (in and out of the office), vice president Brent Smith. "We're right toward the tail end of repackaging the entire DVD collection, with some of the older stuff being updated so if you lined it all up, you could tell it's ours. For the most part it's big, bold and masculine. That would define what we do."
Increasing the company's visibility even further is on Scarborough's agenda. "Many people used to think of us as just a hardcore company, and now know we have a more general offering. That's how we saw it when we initially founded the company, but for some reason the Plain Wrapped movies took off, and that's what we ended up doing more of. So I'm really glad that we're back making a lot of Hot House movies," Scarborough says.
"We're doing really well, it's an exciting time, I've been in this business a long time, almost twenty years now, and I'm really just kind of dumbfounded that I'm still so excited by it."
Contact Info: 415-864-8910, HotHouse.com; distributed by Paladin Video 800-228-8395.
Steven Scarborough photo courtesy of HotHouse.com
