Penthouse

Rocco Reed to Make Directorial Debut for Penthouse

via xBiz

LOS ANGELES — Rocco Reed will make his directorial debut this month for Penthouse Video with a movie called “10 Things I Hate About Valentine’s Day.”

A native of Columbia, S.C., who is in his fifth year in the adult industry, Reed said he “jumped” at the opportunity when it presented itself.

He regularly works for Penthouse as a performer, averaging four to five scenes a month for the feature-oriented studio. Reed said he has built a strong rapport with Penthouse Studios president Kelly Holland and director of production Cisco Guerra, and while he’s on set he always asks questions about the technical side of filmmaking.

“I basically drive them crazy,” he joked. “They have a lot of stuff going on with their studio and with their distribution deal in Europe. So they have a lot on their plate and more work opportunities are presenting themselves. I’m always willing to learn and do anything, so when they pulled me aside and asked me if I’d be interested in directing, I was speechless.

“This is something I’ve been working toward since the beginning.”

Reed, who also wrote the script for his first movie, told XBIZ that “10 Things I Hate About Valentine’s Day” is a romantic comedy based on the mainstream film “Valentine’s Day.” He cast Nikki Benz as the lead playing a florist shop owner “who doesn’t believe in love.”

“She just likes to go through life experiencing things and tries not to get too close to anyone,” Reed explained. “She enjoys making other people happy. She gives people advice and she’s happy and carefree and not worried about commitment

“Throughout the movie she sees her friends in love, and then one Valentine’s Day she gets lonely. Her best friend is played by Danny Mountain. And there some sparks there. That’s the small gist of it.”

Reed hand-picked the cast that also includes Kristina Rose, Gracie Glam, Allie Haze, Dana DeArmond, Kiara Diane, Mick Blue, Christian XXX and Bill Bailey.

“The girls were all no-brainers I think,” Reed said. “I wanted there to be a girl/girl [scene] in there. I just feel like it will be a well-rounded movie with one in there and Dana DeArmond is a phenomenal girl/girl performer. And Allie Haze I’m in love with, I had to put her in the movie. In my opinion Gracie Glam is the next ‘it’ girl. Kristina Rose is probably one of my favorite girls to work with, and Nikki is a star.”

He added, “Kiara is one of the most gorgeous girls in the business. I wanted really pretty girls that had acting ability that really love sex, and I’m good friends with all of them and I want to work with people that.”

Reed is a 2011 XBIZ Award nominee for Male Performer of the Year as well as Acting Performance of the Year for his role in Wicked Pictures’ “Mad Love.” He did a whopping 302 sex scenes in 2010, his most prolific year to date.

A former full-time print and runway model, Reed originally moved to Los Angeles to continue his modeling career and pursue mainstream acting.

“I made a living modeling, and I did some theatre and some improv — I did anything I could get my hands on,” Reed said. “I really wanted to be an actor. In college I studied psychology and theatre. I have a degree in psychology.”

Reed also played basketball for the University of South Carolina after receiving a partial scholarship. Even though he started working as a model when he was 15, Reed said he actually had his sights set on playing basketball for a long time.

“That was my plan,” he said. “I liked modeling, it was extra money. I was really into fashion. I wanted to own my own brand, but I thought, ‘I’m going to play basketball.’

“Reality set in when I was in college. I’m barely 6-2. I was good enough to be there, but not play in the NBA. I started taking improv classes and really got into theatre and I loved it, and I fell in love with acting. I still do things. I’ll take days off and do it for free. And I love writing.”

When Reed got to L.A. he was like many aspiring actors.

“I was hungry, I wanted to do things,” he recalled. “The opportunity came up to shoot for Playgirl, and I did that. When I did do that, it didn’t ruin my [mainstream] career, but it started to limit it. My agent had a big problem with it. We argued about it and I ended up doing it.”

Reed continued, “I really liked the adult business, always did. I was very intrigued by it. So I looked into it further and further. I was friends with [former adult performers] Cassidy and Kylie King. They said we can introduce you to a man by the name of Derek Hay [LA Direct Models owner]. So they took me over there, and the next thing I know I haven’t done less than 20 scenes a month since I started. I’ve already done close to 1200 scenes.”

Reed’s modeling career took him all over the world. He lived in Milan, Italy, for two summers and also traveled to Sydney, Australia, and Zimbabwe. He has appeared in catalogs for Abercrombie & Fitch and Gap, and in print campaigns and runway shows for designers such as Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein and Prada. As a teenager, Reed was a contract model for Structure, which is now the Express men’s clothing line.

“I’ve worked for eight of the 12 top designers,” Reed said. “It was a lot of fun and good times.”

Reed will begin shooting “10 Things I Hate About Valentine’s Day” on Feb. 22.

Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder (1930 – 2010)

AEBN mourns the loss of one of the adult industry’s true pioneers.  Our thoughts go out to his family and friends.

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini “Bob” Guccione, the visionary who founded the Penthouse media empire and assembled one of the great private art collections in the United States, has died after a long and courageous battle against cancer.

He passed away on October 20, 2010 at Plano Specialty Hospital in Plano, Texas, according to his wife April Dawn Warren Guccione, who was at his side at the time along with two of his children, Bob Jr. and Tonina.

A highly praised painter, for most of his life Bob Guccione was best known as the founder of Penthouse magazine, which he launched in 1965 in England and built into one of the world’s most popular magazines for men. He established Penthouse as a brand name that remains a significant part of pop culture.

Bob Guccione was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 17, 1930 into a large family of Sicilian immigrants headed by his accountant father. He was raised in Bergenfield, New Jersey, and attended the Blair Academy preparatory school. His consuming interest was painting, and in 1948 he wrote to a friend: “I want to devote my life to the serious and profound intricacies of true and imaginative art”. He married for the first time before the age of 20, and had his first child, Tonina. He then moved to Europe to pursue his passion as a painter and while there he befriended and painted with Picasso and Matisse. He traveled widely, and became friends with William S. Burroughs and other ex-patriot American writers. After marrying again he had four more children, Bob Jr., Nina, Tony, and Nick.

Mr. Guccione was working as the manager of a chain of self-service laundries in London and as a cartoonist on The London American, an American weekly newspaper, in 1965 when he got the idea of starting Penthouse, a magazine that would be aimed at “regular guys” and would be more sexually explicit and daring in its editorial approach than another early adult magazine for men, Playboy. The magazine featured photos of nude women in highly suggestive poses and its editorial coverage of government cover-ups and scandals was frequently far ahead of “mainstream” journalism.

In its early days, the magazine operated on a shoe string, and Mr. Guccione himself photographed most of the models for the magazine’s early issues, applying his knowledge of painting to his photography as he created the diffused, soft focus-look that was a trademark of Penthouse pictorials for many years. His plan was to get the magazine business to generate an income stream that would enable him to devote more time to his first love, painting.

Penthouse became a great success, as well known for its investigative reporting as for its pictorials of gorgeous women wearing nothing. Eventually, Mr. Guccione bought a mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that was said to be the largest private residence in the city, and which he remodeled with painstaking care. He and his third wife, Kathy Keeton, lived a quiet life in the 30-room, 22,000 square feet home, although they opened it frequently to host events to support causes including the New York Chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and other organizations. For many years Ms Keeton worked closely with the poorest school district in Harlem to provide funding for basic needs and for extra curricular activities.

The mansion also housed Mr. Guccione’s art studio, where he eventually resumed painting again, some 32 years after he stopped. He created oil on canvas works that were shown in critically acclaimed exhibitions at the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, the Nassau County Museum of Art and in many galleries across the country. He told an interviewer in 1994: “My art is something I do for myself, as all other artists do, so my art represents the real me.”

He and Ms. Keeton launched several magazines, including Longevity, Viva and Omni, which in the late 1980s was the first magazine to have an Internet presence. He also produced or financed several motion pictures, including Caligula (1979) with Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, and Peter O’Toole; Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston; and The Longest Yard (1974), directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Burt Reynolds, Eddie Albert, Ed Lauter and Michael Conrad. In the early 2000s, Penthouse published a short-lived comic book spin-off entitled Penthouse Comix featuring racy stories. Ms. Keeton died in 1997.

Bob Guccione had numerous personal and business enthusiasms, including an ill-fated attempt to create the Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, which cost over $150 million and caused him to tell an interviewer, “I was the biggest loser in Atlantic City.”

Guccione married Ms. Warren in 2006 and in 2009 they moved from the New Jersey to Texas, where he fought the lung cancer that eventually took him. He told Anthony Haden Guest during a New York Magazine interview in 2004, “My cancer was only a tiny tumor about the size of an almond at the base of my tongue. The cure is probably every bit as bad as the disease. It’s affected my ability to swallow . . . the mobility of my tongue . . . it makes it very difficult for me to talk…”

Mr. Guccione was also a world-renowned art collector. His collection, which was displayed on the walls of the New York City mansion and a country home in Staatsburg, New York, included works by Modigliani, Picasso, Botticelli, El Greco, Durer, Chagall, Dali, Degas, The Guccione art collection was sold by Sotheby’s in November, 2002.

He was greatly admired by his peers and by media figures. Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of adult industry leader Vivid Entertainment said: “Bob was a true innovator and his magazines reflected his wonderful artistic sensibility. He paved the way for adult entertainment to become acceptable to mainstream America, and companies like Vivid have followed the path he laid out. He was without parallel in his art direction of Penthouse and succeeded in balancing portfolios of beautiful women with exciting editorial content. It was an act that was very hard to follow and no one succeeded as well as he did.” Writing in New York Magazine, Anthony Haden Guest said, “Bob Guccione pushed the soft-core envelope, building one of the most profitable porn empires in the world.”

Services for Mr. Guccione will be private.