Falcon Studios Turns 40, Celebrates on Sept. 24

When Chuck Holmes founded Falcon Studios in San Francisco in 1971, the gay porn industry was a ramshackle enterprise dominated by hippies and brothel owners. Pornographers sold photosets and 8mm film, blurry and vaguely illegal, out of the trunks of cars and under the counter at book stores like San Francisco’s Le Salon. Helmed by Holmes, a formidable businessman and exacting consumer, Falcon helped change the industry and in the process became one of its greatest successes. This September, Falcon Studios marks its 40th anniversary with parties, re-releases and sales. (Click here for more details.) And though Holmes himself has passed away, his company remains very much alive. Now under the direction of Raging Stallion Studios founder Chris Ward, Falcon still is an exemplar of ambitious, high-quality erotica. Falcon’s influence on the history of gay porn cannot be overstated. Holmes took a hobbyist’s industry and modernized it, building a studio and star system based on the MGM model. At a time when many directors were focusing on theatrical distribution, Holmes concentrated on mail order, producing not only his own films but also buying up rights to those of his competitors. During the 1980s and ’90s—the heyday of VHS—Falcon dominated the industry. Today, in the haze of a thousand websites and imitators, it remains one of the most enduring brands. “I grew up watching Falcon movies back in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Ward, who in late 2010—with the help of Raging Stallion parent company AEBN—engineered a purchase of the company. “My favorites from the early years were Al Parker and Dick Fisk. Both of these men greatly influenced my own direction when I started my porn career.” Ward is not the first porn director influenced by Falcon Studios. Over the course of 40 years the company has served as an incubator for gay porn’s greatest talents. Steven Scarborough, GayVN Hall of Famer and founder of Hot House Entertainment, was vice president of the company in the late ’80s and early ’90s (as well as Holmes’ real-life partner during those years). In turn, Scarborough hired John Rutherford, now president of COLT Studio Group. Rutherford took over operations of the company after Scarborough’s departure in 1992, and continued after Holmes’ death in 2000. Chi Chi LaRue of Channel 1 Releasing, Bruce Cam of Titan Media and George DuRoy of Bel Ami all spent formative periods shooting for Falcon. Studio heads Michael Lucas and Kristen Bjorn started as models for the company. The pedigree of Falcon’s founding directors is no less impressive. Holmes, a sexually precocious Hoosier, moved to San Francisco—dubbed the “Smut Capital of America” by national press—in 1970 to sell pre-fabricated houses. When a recession felled the business, he partnered with brothel owner John Summers to launch his own company, eventually working with pioneering directors Matt Sterling and John Travis. Summers sold Holmes the original mailing list, reputedly stolen from a San Francisco magazine publisher, for $5,000. “He didn’t even have a name for the company,” said the late Summers in a 2010 interview. “I said, ‘I want a bird of prey.’” Falcon, a company hatched over a kitchen table in San Francisco, quickly swooped down on its competitors. “Anyone who had a list for sale, we would buy it,” said Summers, who often credited himself as the co-founder of Falcon, and produced many of its early hits, such as Style. “Chuck wasn’t a creative person, he was a money person.” While Holmes had a keen business sense, from the beginning it was Falcon’s exacting standards that set it apart from the competition. “Chuck hated dirty feet,” said John Rutherford, a recollection echoed by dozens of former Falcon employees. In the ’70s, the sexual revolutionaries both behind and in front of the cameras were often free-loving hippies. Not on Falcon sets. Holmes could be fanatical about appearance (until his death, tattoos were verboten in Falcon films). Every picture, every box cover and every mailer released by Falcon was scrutinized by Holmes in daylong sessions referred to by employees as the House of Pain. When he felt material was not up to Falcon standards, his temper could be fearsome. Holmes once became so enraged that he broke his arm pounding on the conference room table. For 30 years, Falcon reflected Holmes’ own passion for clean-cut blond California boys, in many ways a grafting of Holmes’ own Midwestern background into a new, liberated San Francisco idiom. The Falcon look—collegiate, often blond and, in a move that killed the flannel-clad ’70s clone, shaved—became the template on which a generation of gay men modeled themselves. “When I was growing up in Iowa in the ’80s,” said Troy Prickett, who worked in model development for Falcon until 2008, “we didn’t have a gay neighborhood. So what I saw of gay life was from Falcon. I copied the way they dressed—the popped collars, the polo shirts—because that’s the way I thought gay men looked.” In many ways, it was. Holmes’ shrewd purchase of mailing lists and competitors’ 8mm loops in the ’70s meant that he was uniquely positioned in the ’80s when VHS arrived. Chuck’s vision of gay life—affluent, athletic and sexually unabashed—was incorporated into movies like Splash Shots, Spokes and Spring Break, and exported across the country. Falcon stars like Jim Bentley, Kurt Marshall and Kevin Williams became the first celebrities the gay community could call its own. As it grew, the Falcon catalogue became a font of cash, replicating its own success with VHS again in the early ’90s with the advent of European distribution, and again 10 years later with DVD. It wasn’t until the internet—and the democratization of production and distribution permitted by digital video—that Falcon faced real competition. The sea change affected the entire industry, but Falcon—in the midst of a corporate reorganization after Holmes’ death—found itself rudderless. Holmes had intended the company to be run as a non-profit corporation after his death, filtering money back into the gay community that helped build it. Structurally, however, the plan was a problematic. The Charles M. Holmes Foundation was spun off as a charitable entity (eventually helping to build the San Francisco gay and lesbian center which now bears Holmes’ name), while a board of directors ran Falcon Studios. “Suddenly,” John Rutherford recalls, “You had people asking, ‘Why does this scene cost so much? Do we really need that many people in the orgy?’” Rutherford soon left to revive the equally iconic COLT brand, and after some additional restructuring Falcon began looking for a buyer. After much speculation, Charlotte-based VOD powerhouse AEBN took over the studio in late 2010, placing Raging Stallion Studios Chris Ward as the head of production. Ward, who became a part owner of AEBN after the sale of Raging Stallion in 2009, now runs both studios. The merger of Raging Stallion—known for its rough, hairy, tattooed stars—with clean-cut Falcon seemed an odd fit to some, but Ward sees underlying similarities. “Most people think of Falcon for its bubble-butted blonds,” Ward said, “but there were also lots of hairy, masculine, and sexually extreme guys in Falcon films.” Despite its exterior, Falcon often had a rougher edge than many remember. In fact, Holmes’ own predilection for fisting—and his willingness to defend it against obscenity busts—set Falcon apart from many competitors. The Falcon director’s-cut releases, often available only through mail order, were synonymous with an aggressive sexuality. Likewise, many of Falcon’s biggest hits, like Spokes II and the Abduction series, were far from the sunny pastorals of Catalina, its main competitor in the 1980s. And Falcon’s Mustang line was often used to compete with studios like Hot House and Raging Stallion that pushed the boundaries of gay erotica in the ’90s. Ward himself directed a Mustang film, Lumberjacked: Crimes Against Nature, in the late ’90s. Ward’s first move as president of the combined studio system was to revive the Other Side of Aspen series. The first Aspen, a legendary 1978 film featuring Dick Fisk, Casey Donovan and Al Parker, helped cement the company’s fortunes. Subsequent iterations in 1985, 1995 and 2001 were milestones for the company’s evolving aesthetic. “[I wanted] to make sure everyone out there knew we were continuing the tradition of Falcon and not turning into a mirror image of Raging Stallion,” Ward said. “I had my own ego to deal with. I was now the leader of the greatest gay porn company on earth, with a legacy that spans generations.” The success of Aspen 6 this past spring, along with Falcon-Raging Stallion’s alliance with gay VOD powerhouse NakedSword (another arm of the AEBN empire), has once again made Holmes’ company the dominant studio in gay porn. The combined company hums with activity in three-story office building in San Francisco’s South of Market district, just blocks from where the original 1971 mailing list was procured. The company boasts more than 60 full-length releases a year and Ward’s production team shoots more than 20 days out of every month. Ward still insists on shooting many scenes—including for Aspen 6—himself. For Falcon’s 40th, Ward’s plans are no less ambitious. On Sept. 24, Ward will host a Falcon 40th anniversary party in conjunction with his annual Raging Stallion VIP Folsom party, and he has invited many of Falcon’s directors, stars and exclusives. Traditionally, the party has been used to announce Raging Stallion’s Man of the Year. This time, he also plans to announce Falcon’s first-ever Man of the Year. Falcon stars including Landon Conrad, Angelo Marconi, Tony Buff, Tom Wolfe, Heath Jordan and Jesse Santana will be in attendance. Perhaps the most anticipated fruits of the celebration, though, will come from the vaunted Falcon Studios library. Beginning after Labor Day, Falcon will release previously out-of-print titles from the Falcon vault, transferred from the original master prints. While no titles have been specified, certain titles—sometimes shelved by Holmes after he began dating a specific model—haven’t been seen in nearly 20 years. “This is a huge responsibility,” Ward said. “Falcon has been hugely successful. I do not plan to fuck it up.” Filmmaker and journalist Michael Stabile is currently in production on a documentary about the life of Chuck Holmes. His documentary short “Smut Capital of America” debuted at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival in April; a related short about the Falcon aesthetic, “Style,” screened at Philadelphia’s QFest in June. Stabile recently produced a featurette on the Aspen series to commemorate the release of Falcon’s Other Side of Aspen 6. This article originally ran in the September issue of AVN.