Kevin Beechum: Three Decades in XXX and Still Going Strong

This article originally ran in the June 2015 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the magazine online. There are probably few people who’ve been in the adult entertainment business for any time at all who don’t know the name Kevin Beechum—and there’s a better-than-even chance that Beechum knows their names as well. For Beechum, it all began on Valentine’s Day, 1981—the day he and 70 friends from his hometown of Bay City, Michigan, migrated to Los Angeles, and Beechum soon found himself living in a four-bedroom house with 17 of them, many of whom had worked at the city’s General Motors plant. “I worked there from ’78 to ’81, and then we lost our jobs to the Japanese,” Beechum told AVN. “Everybody was buying Toyotas because GM cars suck, so people just started packing up and coming out. Dusty [Urban] was out here first, so when everybody came out, he was already hooked up with a roofing company, so we all were roofers. Dusty was a high school friend of mine.” But Beechum didn’t stay a roofer for very long. Within two years, he’d gotten a job as sales manager for movie producer Visual Entertainment, working for porn legends Tommy Sinopoli and Norman Berkoff—and brought his old pal Dusty Urban in as a salesman. Beechum eventually left VE to work for producer Larry Fields, perhaps best known as the owner of Fat Dog Productions—but it wasn’t long before his life was to become much more interesting. “So I was working for Larry, and then Bobby Hollander came to me and said, ‘Hey, The Boys want to talk to you.’” Beechum recalled. “So I went over and met Vinny DiStephano with Century Distributing, and then Big Tony Peraino. They asked me to come on board with them because Vinnie was going to prison, and I’m not sure what that case was—MiPorn? [Ed. note: Yup!]—so he was going away and they asked me to come on board.” And so began Beechum’s brush with the people who ran a substantial portion of the adult entertainment industry Back In The Day. Once Peraino’s sons were released from jail, Beechum moved on, first getting a job with Jeff Steinman of Essex Video and then starting his own company out of Essex: K-Beech. Beechum wound up sharing the building with LA Video’s Sal Richichi, and it was during this time that K-Beech acquired its first video line, Dreamland Entertainment, from producer John Arnone, who then went to work for K-Beech as a salesman, even as Dreamland was putting out Talk Dirty to Me 3, the series that had been inaugurated by adult auteur Anthony Spinelli. Beechum vividly recalls going to the second Video Software Dealers Association show, in Washington, D.C., where the pair promoted Arrow’s Reel People, commonly known as “porn’s first pro-am movie,” since several in its cast were amateurs. Over the years there were many changes at K-Beech Video. After a split with Richichi, Beechum recalled, “I went to Eton [Avenue in Chatsworth] and opened up a 35,000-square-foot building, and we moved into there. Taylor Wane and Laurien used to shoot my box covers upstairs; we had a studio upstairs; beautiful place: motorcycles in the front and it was a badass building, but it was just too much after VHS died, so I said, ‘We might as well shrink down, because DVDs take up less room than VHS.’” “By then, I had released Erotic Angel under Midnight Video, and we were putting that stuff out; all big budget. Buck Adams was shooting a lot of them. We did Savannah’s last movie before she died. Hustlers, which she starred in and Buck directed, was shot at my buddy’s biker bar; that was cool. And we had the helicopters in it and everything. It was a big budget; Buck was big. And towards the end of that era, Allen Gold came to work for me, said he was leaving VCA [where he’d been Vice President], so we ended up starting Cherry Boxxx, and when we moved out of that building, we moved down the street across from AVN, a 20,000-square-foot building, and we were there for God knows how long. At that point, Beechum began developing several different imprints. Though Midnight Video is perhaps the best-known label, Beechum soon followed that up with Cherry Boxxx and Baby Doll, and later adding Erotic Angel (after the successful movie title), Cherry X, 818 XXX [after the San Fernando Valley’s main area code], Sex Line Sinema, Midnight Mayhem, Sinsation Pictures and Back End Productions. “I had some gay lines too,” he noted. “I bought the LA Video line back then, which was called Nova, which was a gay line. It was really big, so I bought that one. I probably produced over 5,000 movies. At one time, we were putting out four releases a week, and we were putting out 30 four-hours a month. Cherry Boxxx would do a white and a black [comp] and Baby Doll would do a white and a black—we would alternate them—and I had Back End too.” Beechum has had his share of talented directors and stars, with whom he had fairly loose contracts. “Farah was our biggest one name-wise, but we made movie deals with Teri Weigel and we made deals with Taylor Wane,” Beechum said. “I would do like six- to twelve-picture deals with them, but a non-exclusive contract; they could shoot for other people if they shot for us. If they were dancing on the road, they might only want to do one, and we’d put it out for them. So we did them; I had Shay Sweet, I had Charmane Star, Gina Ryder, Violet Love. ... Girls were knocking on our door because we were shooting so much, so girls were not a problem … but I’m glad I wasn’t shooting them; I just paid, you know?” Besides Buck Adams, K-Beech also employed directors Big Man—“He shot our black stuff”—and Rick Davis, but one of Beechum’s better known directors was Cash Markman. “Cash shot the whole Erotic Angel line, and he did those Star Trek parodies,” Beechum recalled. “He’s a talented dude. You’ve got to give it to him, man. He shot some big movies. Cash was good at scripts. Sometimes we’d come up with an idea and tell him, and he’d go off and write the script. “I’m usually that kind of guy, like when I was shooting with Buck, Buck was my shooter; Cash was my shooter; Ricky was my shooter. I ran with them,” he added. “We didn’t jump a lot of different directors. A lot of other guys would bring us in movies and we would buy the rights to them and put them out, but I would say those guys were my main shooters. I also had another guy shooting for me. Remember Gary Orona? Tabitha Stevens’ husband. We used to do movie deals with her too. We did a lot of deals for her because she was on the road dancing a lot.” K-Beech’s two main imprints now are Lipstick Lesbian Entertainment and Sinful Pictures. “We put those two lines out, but the way the business is now, it’s a struggle. The internet is a killer. Ever since the internet, it dropped our business by probably three-quarters.” But in addition to talented directors and top stars, Beechum attributes much of his success to the team he’s built, many of whom have been with him almost since the beginning. “I have some of the best employees, people who have been with me 25 years plus,” Beech stated with pride. “Carolyn Ward’s been with me for 25 years. She was a sales person at Essex, and when I was in there and Jeff was going out of business, she came over and she’s been with me ever since. Dave Wyne came over from Western Visuals, from Elliot, in the days, and then Ray Burke, he was with us in the old Essex building too. And Jeff Snyder, my general manager, he’s been with me 25 years. He’s another Michigan guy; I know his family from Michigan. And Joe in shipping has been here 15 years, so it’s a tight, good family.” Beechum has not only employed plenty of well-known names, he’s also started many in the adult business, including the men who founded New Sensations and Zero Tolerance Entertainment. “Scott Taylor from National used to work for me,” Beechum said. “He worked for me back in the Essex building. He was a salesman; Dusty was his boss. We laugh about that, me and Scott. … I’ve started plenty of people.” Of course, that isn’t to say that the past three decades have been smooth sailing. “I was indicted three times, but we beat the cases,” he chuckled. “This was the early ’90s, I think.” Beechum also recalled hearing details about Reuben Sturman’s trial in Indiana, about how during his defense, Sturman’s attorney played all of the charged videos for the jury—and also a number of Hollywood screamers like Friday the 13th. “The guy played five bloody, gutty movies, and said, ‘Which one would you rather have your kid grow up and watch? Sex or murder?’ And he won!” Not only has Beechum never spent time in prison on obscenity, he’s even helped some of his customers beat charges. One of these was Family Video, which Beech supplies. ””They have 800 stores. Six hundred of them carry adult.” Back in the day, Beech helped the company out when a store got busted in St. Louis. He said to the brothers who ran the chain, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll give you the ten grand; you just give me all the business.’ I’ve had it ever since. They’ve had about three or four busts and fought them and won, and now, they’re the last rental chain in the country that’s still surviving and still doing numbers for one reason: Most of their stores are in low-income cities or outside big cities where people don’t have cable, broadband, internet, and they still believe that every Tuesday, they can still get the new releases that come out. My brother does it in Michigan. He waits every Tuesday and goes down and rents, still. They have three giant stores in my home town, Bay City.” But video sales aren’t what they used to be. “It seems like today, bro, all they ask is ‘How much? What year is it?’ If it’s older than five years old, they don’t want to pay anything for it,” he scowled. “I mean, I’d say a movie today has a lifespan of three years, and then it’s over. People don’t care unless it’s got a Kardashian, a Hilton, a celebrity; then it’s got legs, but who’s a star today? There are no porno stars today. I don’t know a girl who’s a porno star. Jenna Jameson was the last big star.” So last year, Beechum expanded his operation by partnering with Keith Gordon of Bizarre Video, who owned novelty distribution company Joy Hollywood. “We brought it in here, so now we’re in the toy business, so we’re kind of expanding. Toys are good, but now they’re getting as bad as the DVDs. The Chinese are coming in here and selling these guys’ products! I give it a couple more years; all the manufacturers are already crying. … So the toy business is going to get what video got from the internet; they’re going to buy from the internet. … But we’re doing okay. I thought it would be bigger than it was, but it’s got potential. “You know, you go to the AVN Show, and like everybody said, you’ve really got to look at the industry,” he added philosophically. “DVDs aren’t going anywhere but you’ve still got to have them. Maybe the stores want to put more toys in, they say, but if I talk to my five good buddies that own chains of stores, they’ve still got to have DVDs; it’s 25 percent of their business, and it’s the most profitable part of their business.” And what videos are stores ordering from K-Beech? “My biggest title that still sells today is that PornoMation,” he said. “We did PornoMation 1, 2 and 3, and to this day, and that is still my top-grossing series. It was an animated series, but not like this stuff you see from Japan; this was animated by a couple that lived up in Washington, and they were creative as shit. The characters looked very realistic, so we made a three-pack on them, and it’s pretty cool. Those people were talented, dude, and I wish they’d kept doing it.” Which brings us up to the present day. Beechum’s a family man, married and the father of two sons, one of whom a Marine who has served in Iraq. The younger one works in K-Beech’s internet department—KBeech.com, naturally—and is what Beechum describes as a “race car drifter” who advertises K-Beech on his car. But what does the future hold for Kevin Beechum? “I’m hoping I can do another ten years in the business,” he said. “I don’t see it going anywhere now. After talking to everybody in Vegas, the guys that are in it now are in it to stay. The little guys are gonna fall by the sidelines and I think the majority of the guys that are still in it are gonna make it. It’s just that you’re not going to make millions anymore, but you can still make a good living, and it’s not stressful and you don’t have the FBI knocking on your door, right? Those days were a little tough.” Beechum should know: He went through them all, up close and personal.Go to KBeech.com to see the latest from this industry veteran.