Page 16 - AVN June 2015

INTERVIEW | |By Mark Kernes
The K-Beech WHO’S WHO
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
There are probably few people who’ve been in the adult entertainment
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.
16 | AVN.com | 6.15
Story Three decades later, Kevin Beechum is going strong
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.’”
people who have been with me
”I have some of the best employees,
25 years plus.
—Kevin Beechum
“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?”
>>