Page 47 - AVN February 2016

As “Toni English,” Holland spent more than a
decade directing, mainly for Vivid but also for Adam
& Eve, Wicked Pictures and the ill-fated Jill Kelly
Productions, but beginning in 2007, she plied that
trade, now under her own name, almost exclusively
at Penthouse Video—and so began a relationship
with that brand that has brought her to the heights
that a savvy adult entrepreneur can expect to reach.
“I actually came in 2006. I was brought in to a
company that had been acquired two years prior,
and they had not developed a broadcast division;
they were looking to do that, so they asked me
to come in,” Holland told AVN, referring to
AdultFriendFinder’s acquisition of Penthouse. “I
had just come off of Playgirl, where I had been hired
in to design the look and feel and the content for
the channel that would define the brand, so I was
asked to do the same thing for Penthouse. So I came
in, produced a little content, and then I would say
Penthouse took a weird turn as we went on an ill-
fated road to try to become Playboy and buy Playboy
and do all sorts of things, and in the process of that
turn, they hired the entire Playboy executive staff
on a Friday night—they did this crazy raid of the
executive staff and they started down that road for a
while, never bothering to ask if that was a successful
road; like, were those people successful at Playboy
or was the Playboy strategy successful, which it was
not. So I left, I went away. That lasted for about
two months and I was in New York and got a call
and was asked to come back, and now slightly more
officially go into the position as executive producer,
first for content, and then ultimately president of
broadcast.”
And Holland definitely had her work cut out for
her. Besides hiring more staff to run the production
and broadcast operations, Holland also acquired a
massive studio complex in Chatsworth, California,
which served as Penthouse TV’s base of operations.
As president, Holland began creating channels in the
U.S. and Europe, and over the years has entered into
partnerships that have put Penthouse TV in every
section of the globe.
“The Europeans are very open to us because
they perceive Penthouse as primarily being a
European brand, or at least 50 percent a European
brand,” Holland explained. “Plus, I’m very easy
to negotiate with; I don’t come in arrogant and
believing that it’s my way or the highway. I won’t
talk about my competing brands but there’s been a
history in Europe of what I’ll call American cultural
imperialism, and that has not played well. See, the
Europeans don’t want to see Americans; are you
kidding? Europeans like a few things. They like
their local talent and they definitely like their local
amateur talent. If you live in Belgium, you want
to see girls in dirndl skirts and speaking Flemish;
everybody wants to see the girl next door who’s just
downstream enough that you could actually imagine
having sex with her.
We’ve also got producers ... outside [Los Angeles
County] and what they do is, they do a movie and if
it meets our specs, we’ll buy it, so that’s our
solution to the onerous Measure B. Hasn’t stopped
our business at all; has simply pushed dollars
out of this particular city.
“So I came in early on in 2009 very respectfully
and said, ‘What is it that you need? I’m not going
to tell you what I’m giving you; I’m going to ask
you what you want,’ and they said, ‘We would like
this and that,’ and I said, ‘Great! I can accommodate
that,’” Holland continued. “So we’ve been much more
flexible about creating content. We have ten channels
around the world, serving over a hundred countries:
Latin America, Canada, U.S., obviously; in Europe,
all the way from Turkey, which is a secular Islamic
government, to Israel and all points in between. We
also have a great partnership with CanalSat, which
is a French platform that launched the channel into
French-speaking Africa on CanalAfriq, and we’re in
the Caribbean with that same partner for CanalCarib.
I’m launching VOD into Mongolia, which I’m as
happy to do that as I am to do a huge deal in Germany
or the U.K. or France, just because it’s Mongolia.
I just want to press-release Mongolia like it’s the
biggest thing on the planet because I just love saying,
‘Penthouse: Live in Mongolia!’ I just love that idea.
So we’ve been very successful with our broadcast
operations, and I think part of that is because we
are very respectful of the cultural specifics of the
territories we go into.”
But perhaps one of Holland’s greatest achievements
for Penthouse TV was its move into 3D DVDs, which
helped jumpstart the creation of the world’s first
hardcore 3D channels.
“We’ve been doing 3D for four years now,” Holland
said. “We launched 3D channels over two years ago.
At the time we launched them, someone said to me,
‘So, is 3D the future?’ I said, ‘Well, obviously it’s
not the future because I just launched it, so it’s the
present.’”
However, the service’s rollout of 4K high-definition
content is still meeting barriers.
“Usually, I like to stay well on the front of the
cutting edge of technology; I love to just contemplate
where culture is going, where technology is going,
both for our industry and the larger entertainment
industry, media industry,” Holland stated, even while
admitting, “4K, I have to say, I held back on. The
broadcasters were exhausted on the retool they had
to do around 3D, and I will tell you that they are still
exhausted, and 4K has been there now for a couple
of years minimum. They are moving into it but very
slowly. A couple of big platforms—a big platform
in Italy, a platform in Germany—are committing to
4K; none of them are committing to a linear adult
channel yet. They’re committing to 4K in a VOD
environment.”
Actually, Penthouse had given up producing DVDs
until Keith Gordon, a longtime friend and owner of
Bizarre Video, convinced Holland to get back into that
game, with Bizarre as her new distributor.
“Mostly we shoot vignettes, and we have been
asked by Cams.com, which is part of our parent
corp, to do a weekly cam show,” Holland told AVN.
“All we do here [at Penthouse’s current offices]
is interstitials. We’ve outsourced the bulk of our
production to Europe, because the bulk of our
revenues come out of European broadcast; 70 percent
of our broadcast revenues are coming out of Europe,
and we are by far the most dominant brand in Europe.
“It all flows through here,” she added. “For
example, Rebecca Lord is producing great content out
of France. We’re shooting in 4K now because we want
to launch a 4K channel, so Rebecca Lord is producing
in France but she’s flying [legendary cameraman]
Barry Wood in to shoot because he’s a great shooter
and he knows how to use the 4K cameras and he
knows what we need. We’ve got people producing in
the U.K. I’ve got people producing right now in Spain.
We’ve also got producers here in Las Vegas, Miami—
producing outside the county and what they do is,
they do a movie and if it meets our specs, we’ll buy
it, so that’s our solution to the onerous Measure B.
Hasn’t stopped our business at all; has simply pushed
dollars out of this particular city.”
But Holland isn’t just the president of Penthouse
TV; she’s also the managing director for broadcast,
licensing and publishing for Penthouse magazine, a
responsibility she acquired in mid-2014, and one she
takes incredibly seriously, even to the point of having
thoroughly researched the life of the magazine’s
(indeed, the empire’s) founder, Bob Guccione.
“Guccione wanted to take on Playboy from the
beginning,” she noted. “He took an ad out, two pages
in The New York Times, a centerfold, and it was a target
and a rabbit, and it said, ‘We’re going rabbit hunting.’
And then he did this: “Rabbinomics: Bigger Deposits,
Lower Yields.’ And then he did this ad, ‘The Old Gray
Hare Just Ain’t What It Used To Be.’ I think what I
want to do is dress a Playboy bunny up in a burka and
take an ad out that just says ‘The New Bunny.’ And
then I found this, which I like, this line from Bob:
‘The culture’s catching up to us; the competition
can’t.’ That’s from about the late ’80s.”
Indeed, Guccione apparently didn’t play well with
his peers in the adult publishing world.
“Another quasi-tragedy in Bob’s life was that he
never spoke to Hefner,” Holland revealed. “He tried
to shake Hefner’s hand at a fundraiser one time
but Hefner walked right by him and rebuffed him,
because he always felt he was Hefner’s equal but
Hefner would not even acknowledge him. He and
Larry [Flynt] got into a couple of lawsuits. Larry did
some cartoon that dissed Bob’s wife, Kathy Keeton,
and Bob sued him.”
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