Agreed !!!

Love this shot !
http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc...7tmo1_1280.jpg

That's a huge amount of profits! Mega millions!

When my partner family had the video shops, most movies were in the region of £30 to £70 depending on the title, terminator, the £70 to purchase a copy, each shop would have 3 or 4 copies & rent out nightly for £1.50 a night.

The under the counter, hardcore porn, £10 to £20 to buy and rent out for 3.50 a night, also, you only need a few copies of each & pass them around the shops as they didn't go out of new like new mainstream titles, like they do now. Massive amounts of of profits.

We're lucky with little payout, me modelling, he editing & filming. We'd have appreciated the business back then like you did! We only got together in 98, strangely, when Model Centro started, now with my MC site, coincidence?

There were also a lot of hairy bushes back in the day too. :)

Good stuff Paul :thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

Spent hours searching via Googler for shots of me or girls I knew from before I was shooting. I think this was one of the girls. What I am sure about is the location, I do know that wall. :1orglaugh

Worked in front of it a couple of times.

Paul -- this is awesome! Love it...what part of the world do you call home now?

A small town outside Brno.

Great read. Thanks. First pic reminds me of Our Friends in the North

Back in the day, the most legal UK porn could show was pubic hair. This is Francoise Pascal, who by coincidence I had known during my time working as a trainee chef, she was a kitchen hand, which entailed clearing up after the mess the chefs and cooks made.

We went out a couple of times after work, cold fish and no chance of more than a kiss. So it was a shock to see her like this. These pictures were the first magazine pictures to come out which showed pubic hair. Previously is had been illegal porn or pictures airbrushed to remove any hint of a crack. All his girls had to be shaved first before he could photograph them. Guess who did the shaving?

http://albums193.zbporn.com/main/999...66/4937133.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CqssENnFPA...+Austin-01.jpg

So if a person had pictures like this for sale, it was an easy market to sell to.

http://paulmarkham.com/wp-content/up...4/0485_032.jpg

http://paulmarkham.com/wp-content/up...04/401_034.jpg

http://paulmarkham.com/wp-content/up...04/457_024.jpg

Soft enough to not get raided by the police, or so I thought, hard enough to fly out the door. It was a thin line to tread and sometimes I erred on the side of caution. Still a set of 5 pictures like this would sell for £5 a set. Bigger sets sold for more.

All I had to do was find a constant stream of girls to keep customers coming back. Updates have always been important. Thankfully being able to offer girls £50 to £100 for a shoot. It was never a problem. One girl a week would be enough.

Model at £75 for a session
3 rolls of print film plus processing = £75 giving me 500 pictures

Total costs £150.

Sell the softer ones to magazines like Razzle for the Readers Wives section. For £100 and the profits were amazing.
http://guideimg.alibaba.com/images/s...2_7732736.jpeg

My better end works, nice girl and very friendly. :winkwink:

I shot this amateur stuff from the 80s to 2008 and received the last payment for that work in 2010 from a magazine. Later Club International did the same Readers Wives Section doubling our payout for pictures we did on castings.

Beautiful thread, Paul.

50 of 50 and 50 wishing it was hidden

Why not post excerpts in forums and link to an Amazon page?

Because he wouldn't be Paul Markham if he wasn't spending all his free time repeating himself.

If I needed the money it might be something I would think about. After 50 years of working, investing, making good money. I'm just enjoying life.

I didn't say anything about "making money".

Carry on.

if you don't want to read it get the fuck out the thread :2 cents:

Enjoying the read. :thumbsup

:thumbsup

Sorry, I thought amazon was a site to sell products on. Might as well link it to my blog, Which is easier.

Would you prefer reading it there? :winkwink:

Where is he now?

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/...69_634x395.jpg

He is posting on another forum.

Which one?

Whatever floats your boat.

There's an old saying in the construction industry: Measure twice, cut once.

Write it all out once, copy and paste it everywhere else and enjoy the time you have left.

Maybe I should structure it better asI can see I'm leaving a lot out. As for sitting down and writing the whole 50 years out with just the majors changes. Seems like a lot of work. Let me think about that one.

I might regret this but i'm also curious to see your old "pornstar" photos of you in action!

Back to the story.

Shooting amateur photosets that showed more of a girl than the magazines was easier in the late 70s then it was finding girls to do porn in the late 60s. I put ads in free papers and the calls came flooding in. These ads cost around £30 a week a time during the 70s.


No more was required to have 1-3 girls phone a day. Of which 50% said they would come for a casting and 50% of them turn up. so we were seeing 3-5 girls a week. Some clearly not right so we could pick the best. Shooting them was simple, I started with flash on camera, once we had enough money I bought a single strobe and stand.


Shooting into a white ceiling, couldn't afford the umbrella. After a couple of months, I bought another one and the umbrellas, plus a light metre. So long as I could put out 8-10 new sets a month the money kept rolling in. The key was retention, not new customers.

A Magazine ad from £30 to £100 a week or month brought in enough new people buying samples to break even that month, the key was them rebuying. In the beginning, we were getting the list of content photocopied, no printer would handle anything under 1,000. When the mailing list got to 500 we threw half the catalogues away. We had to hand write every envelope to mail out the new list. Until I bought a computer, they were expensive, needed a printer to go with them and I had no clue how to work it. Luckily had a friend who did.

My first wife gave up her job as a dress machinist and worked full time answering ads, and mailing out to customers. The key was repeat buyers, once someone had bought a sample package they would very likely buy again at some point. The only ones who didn't were those looking for hardcore and we were reluctant to step into that area, fear of getting raided and lack of greed. I had customers from 1977 who would buy every month when I put out the updated catalogue, some had a copy of everything I produced. Not uncommon for the time, the other people doing similar could tell the same story, magazines was entirely based on repeat buyers f the same magazine.

This is the essence of retail. Someone loves a brand and stick with it. Be it Google or Starbucks, Amazon or Tescos/Albertsons. Only in online porn is the retention so awful. The reason is many give them 6 months supply every month, without adding the free porn which is more plentiful. :Oh crap

By 1978, we were making £2,000 a month profit. Doesn't sound a lot to some. This was working from home, from scratch and only selling to the UK. At a time when the average was £500 a year (the equivalent of about £1,500 today). And it was growing and we were getting out of debt.

By the time, I was shut down from selling videos I was clearing £10,000 a week. I lived off that till we arrived in Czech and started to produce magazine sets full time. Plus put a lot into pension funds when they were worth a lot of money over time. Which is why I don't need to write a book. :1orglaugh

My story is normal for those who were in the same business. Fiona Cooper is a name familiar to many Brits, That site brings back a lot of good memories. Your Choice is familiar to those online.

If you were willing to risk getting a visit from the police. You were tapping into a goldmine.

Same here.. Much better than all the political bs around here..

Will do. Maybe more stories from in front of an audience or camera.

OMG, lol, this guy's obsessed with Gary & I.

After he was banned from here, he continued to email our personal email address, quoting anything that had been said with my updates on my site, my twitter feeds, sometimes about what had been said on this forum, what insanity seriously does that.

Maybe not insane, attention seeking, a virus, maybe a leech :2 cents:

He's fallen on hard times.

The changes legalising porn, in Europe, made were huge on the production side. No longer was anything acceptable, customers had Color climax magazines and later films to choose from. Black & White photographs or the rare film were unsaleable. These were the new Norm.

http://x.imagefapusercontent.com/u/s...lename0046.jpg

http://img6.pixhost.org/images/3399/...2_01_front.jpg

http://x.imagefapusercontent.com/u/s...lename0075.jpg

http://img4.pixhost.org/images/319/9...max173-001.jpgAnyone in the UK recognize Gill. Lovely Girl. :thumbsup

Budgets for shooting content increased by tenfold or more. Production increased and jobs were easy to find. Girls had to be willing, boys able. nothing has changed. Girls are still able but now willing, guys willing but not able. Even guys like me without the size attributes could get work as I had learned to stay hard for as long as it took. 6 years of practicing jerking off without cumming were, at last, being put to use.

At the beginning, a studio would shoot for a couple of days or a week. Hiring a location or some had a studio with lots of different scenes set up. These would require models to turn up and sit around for hours until called. Shooting film was a long tedious job, we could sit around 12 hours before being called on while the crews worked non-stop except for a break for lunch. I preferred that and it was when I started to learn to shoot the stills. 16 or larger Cine Film was too expensive to let me anywhere near one of those cameras.

The biggest difference was the money available. Limited publishers and titles, meant each one sold in the huge numbers at high prices. Over and over again for years. Buying porn mags or films like these wasn't a case of only buying the latest issue. A porn shop would have a whole shelf dedicated to a title with consecutive issues. It was usual to see 12 monthly issues or more on a shelf or one title. Some had more. with a 50% refund on returned issues the same mag could be sold many times. Especially in the UK where the only problem was satisfying demand.

The budget on some films was unlimited. Hiring a French Chateau, horses, Uniforms, historical costumes, 12 actors, 2 full crews, wasn't a problem. Sales would return all the costs and add on exceptional profits. Later Private took it to a new level. Flying everyone to places like Bali, Thailand etc.

So the talent could sit around a pool or on the beach for 90% of the time. Great days to be an actor, a few days work allowed me to bum around Europe for a month. :thumbsup

Second hand twat mags? Wow.

great great

And, they resold at first-hand prices. To the people who were bringing magazines back. Which is why criminals were running shops. The profits were huge.

The alternative was to jerk off to a girl showing her tits or maybe pussy covered in hair.

i loved this thread :)

Will add more tomorrow. About transitioning from photos to video.

he really was an idiot. In business, money's money & selling my websites or another, as long as it sells is good business :2 cents:

This looks an amazing photo, like my old gangbangs, I miss them :2 cents:

Mail order photo sets was a great way of making money. All I had to do was make sure the content was harder than mags could produce and soft enough to not get busted for selling porn. That was a wide area as magazine content was controlled by the distributors of the mags, not the Publishing Companies or the police. Stanger times when a High Street Newsagent Chain W.H.Smith controlled and censored porn. This was enough to get sales rolling in.

http://www.rabbitsreviews.com/gals/a...ue/pics/02.jpg

http://content.wafflegirl.com/galler...1_900x2999.jpg

http://i.penisbot.com/a/astral-blue/5972471/04.jpg

For more of my early work, look here.

VCRs made me adapt to the new market. In 1982, 10% of UK households owned a VCR. 30% in 1985, 1989 well over half of British homes owned a VCR. So I changed from only pictures to pictures and a few videos in 1984, by 1988 it was primarily video.

What triggered it was a letter from a company looking to get into softcore content they could sell to Newsagents and video shops. They wanted attractive girls to slowly strip, dance and prance around. That was the brief as far as I can remember. They paid £1,000 per girl, for 15 minutes and 4 girls for one tape. Plus pics for the box cover. A piece of piss.

Bedroom, lounge, kitchen and bath scene. Undressing keeping all the naughty bits hidden and talking to the camera. I added that last part. They were over the moon with my amateur attempt and apparently it sold well enough for them to come back many times. Shot on a hired Beta camera.

I also shot a scene for myself of the girls doing similar and jerking off open legged. Added it to the next mail out and the orders came back in a trickle, that over time built to a flow and then a non-stop flood.

By 1988 I was in full flow, finding girls had become easy, youth unemployment was on the rise and girls were very eager to earn £200 a day for doing very little and enjoying it.

I would shoot 3 girls a month each doing 3 scene of 20 minutes each. Then hire in an editing suite, reel to reel, to edit the content into one-hour tapes of each girl. Add the three new Titles to the "catalogue" it was a printed list that went from one page to 12 over the years.

The great thing is. 25 years on, I still own the content and it still sells. UK Porn Stars and Vintage Amateur18 year Daddys Girls

Great Thread Paul!

You should post this somewhere as well. Maybe your story in a web page format.