After almost a decade in retirement, legendary producer Carl La Fong has returned to adult entertainment with his own special brand of Fetish content.
Incredible as it may seem, Carl La Fong began his career as a 12-year-old schoolboy. “I belonged to the school camera club,” he tells us. “It didn’t take me long to figure out I had a eager audience of curious 12-year-olds. I found some girlie magazines, photographed them and made prints that I sold. It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was pirating content!”
La Fong’s real career began in London, where he started out in advertising and television. He found his inspiration in ‘underground’ grindhouse cinemas that screened American and Swedish stag films, and their British equivalents. Harrison Marks, the British Russ Meyer, became La Fong’s role model. “Harrison was a huge influence on me,” says La Fong, “my first pseudonym in the business was ‘Edward Marks’ out of respect for his work”.
With access to cameras, modeling talent and crew, La Fong was soon making his own films – and attracted attention in London’s highly evolved, and carefully concealed, Fetish scene. “There’s always been this unspoken connection between celebrity, money and Fetishism in the UK”, La Fong explains. “I learned early on the difference between a true Fetish style and something that is phony and misunderstood”.
In the late 70’s, La Fong was approached to partner in a new business – the creation of an editing centre using the new medium – video. “I was probably the first European adult producer to switch to video,” La Fong recalls. “Certainly in the UK, I was the first. I was worried about the ‘look’ for a long time – and I got even more worried when I saw how some adult producers started abusing the image – just pointing and shooting. It looked so bad. A lot of really poor Fetish content got made – and it damaged the market”.
A major police raid on his video distribution warehouse during the puritan Thatcher Years made La Fong decide to leave the UK. He set up operations in Amsterdam – a city he still loves. There, his business expanded dramatically. “The first time I went into a Dutch adult store I knew Holland was going to be good to me,” La Fong says, with a chuckle. “That store was as big as a supermarket. It took me an hour to check out all the titles in the Fetish section alone!” With success in Holland, and La Fong videos selling all over Europe, Carl partnered for a while with the Gottlieb Brothers in Munich – but felt uncomfortable. “German Fetish back then – well, it was rough,” La Fong remembers. “There were some stuff that went out under my banner in Germany that was too strong even for me. Nobody got hurt – but it was turning into something beyond Fetish. Something dark.”
By the early 90’s, La Fong had expanded his business into Fetish clothing, fashion, accessories and even furniture. He was partnered in stores in Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Paris. He owned a state-of-the-art video facility in Rotterdam and a printing works in Belgium. His mail order business alone had 18 full-time employees. A business that large soon attracts attention. Some of it unwelcome. Authorities in France and the UK made life very difficult for La Fong. So much so that he began planning to move out of Europe. The opportunity came when a Scandinavian consortium made an offer for La Fong’s European holdings. The price tag was stupendous for its time. La Fong made the deal, paid the taxes, and moved to the USA.
Carl La Fong bought a house in the Hollywood Hills and settled down to retire. But old friends from England soon sought him out. These expatriates were themselves adult producers – and soon La Fong found himself in Chatsworth, California – the epicenter of the US Adult Entertainment Industry. Responding to the creative freedom he found in America, La Fong began writing and producing again. “I didn’t direct for the longest time,” he says, “I was happy just to write and have legends like Fred Lincoln direct.” La Fong also delved into ‘mainstream adult’, and wrote a string of features for many of the industry’s biggest production houses and adult stars.
But soon, La Fong began to despair of the attitude most US adult producers had to Fetish. Indeed, La Fong saw that the “old school” adult producers didn’t ‘get’ Fetish. “To them it was something they had no interest in. They would make a “specialty” video really cheap, in a badly constructed dungeon, and sell 300 units on video. They didn’t understand that to make good Fetish content you have to love Fetish, you have to understand quality, and you have to respect your audience.”
La Fong went back into retirement – and watched with interest as the Internet took hold and once again adult entertainment was at the forefront of an evolving technology. But for Carl La Fong, the legendary producer who took Euro Fetish to a mass market, there still remains a disconnect between the content producers and the Fetish audience.
“Make no mistake, there’s some good content out there,” La Fong says, “in fact, some of it is brilliant and innovative. But it’s a tiny percentage of all the material that is labeled and marketed as ‘Fetish’.”
Carl La Fong thinks its time to give the Fetish audience more of the real deal. At last, he’s getting ready to unleash true Fetish content into the marketplace, with his first pay-site, FemDom Fascination ready for roll out in Fall ’08, under his The La Fong Archives banner.
Carl La Fong has exacting standards. A style that is unmistakable. An incredible eye for detail. There’s an authenticity in this legendary producer’s content that – once seen – is never forgotten. Time will tell if his vision of how Fetish content should be produced will succeed a second time around.
“The way I see it,” La Fong says with a grin, “I carry all this knowledge of Fetish around in my head. Over thirty-five years worth of images and moods and situations – that I need to communicate to the artists I work with and through them to the Fetish audience. I’m not seeing real Fetish in the majority of content out there. And that’s got to change.”
Change it will. And we have a good idea what the response will be.
