Jason Green, co-owner of Paradise Visuals, has long been a fan of classic adult movies. The only question was how to make money out of them.
"I don’t want to name the companies," Green said coyly, "but when we investigated the market, we saw that almost anyone who had classics just said, 'We'll take it, we'll stick it on a DVD and we'll put it out.' And they didn't seem like they cared about each individual movie — and they were selling them for like $1.50, $2! So I said, 'How could I stay in business if I charged that?' So we decided that the only way to do this was to make sure the people liked what they bought."
Even we were surprised to see the Paradise Visuals imprint on their well-received first release, Ginger Lynn the Movie, and Green confirmed that the company has had a rocky history.
"Paradise Visuals was plagued with controversy because it had a bunch of Traci Lords movies, including Those Young Girls, which was the one that went to court, and they had the John Holmes movie where John had HIV," Green explained, "so [owner Michael Paulson] never had it easy. Finally, he was making more money from his other businesses; Paradise was becoming a headache, so he just let Metro use the name and sold the VHS rights."
Fast-forward about 10 years to Green meeting up with a guy who'd worked for Paulson. Together, the pair secured the DVD rights to the Paradise library — some 65 titles — and an idea was born.
"What we did was, we remastered each movie, and we decided to put at least two hours of bonus footage on every DVD, and that's what we've done," Green explained. " We're putting out movies that in some cases haven't been seen in 20 years. The movie we have out now, Ginger Lynn the Movie, that's two Traci Lords movies that are edited together. One of them was the first movie Christy Canyon had ever done; it happened that her first threeway and her first girl/girl were in a Traci movie. So we took these two movies that had Christy in them and tons of great Ginger scenes and just cut Traci right out, and we saved what we could."
But that's not all.
"What we did was, we contacted some of the stars that were in these movies — Christy, Ginger, Ron Jeremy — and interviewed them, and we actually used the interviews as bonus footage; not just commentary. I think people want to see what the girls look like rather than just hear their voices. Ginger gave us a two-hour interview, gave us all the details she remembered about Traci and that part of the business, and she was great."
But even that's not all.
"Every movie has a 30-minute bonus scene on the disk," Green explained. "They were loops called 'Dirty 30s', and on our first movie, we feature Brittney Stryker. While we put the big names out like Ginger, we're also trying to get people hip to some of the other legends that weren't quite such a brand name."
Another upcoming "Dirty 30" features Nina DaPonca.
Green has a list of the Paradise library on the company's Website, but notes sadly that several of the films are incomplete. For instance, all of the Ali Moore footage has been cut from the master of the next Paradise release, WPINK-TV, due to concerns that the actress might have been underage, so those scenes are lost forever.
The extras on that disk, however, should also be a hoot: An "interview" with Ron Jeremy and Bill Margold fighting over Ron's place in the Hall of Fame, with Christy Canyon meanwhile saying, "Don't you see I'm sitting here with my boobs falling out and you guys are arguing about this stuff?"
Paradise plans to release a new title every two months, and to shoot some original material later this year.
"We'll possibly do some remakes of the old films with new talent, and at the same time load it up with cameos from some of the classic stars," Green explained. "But for now, the priority is the classics."
"I get e-mails every day asking for the strangest titles, and 'When is Backdoor Brides 3 going to come out? I'll pay you $500 for one copy of it,'" Green recounted. "But it's just nice that people care about them."
For more information, visit paradisevisuals.com, or contact distributor Paladin Video.
