Founded in 1984, Vivid is one of the oldest adult film production companies in America and dominated the industry in the 1980s and 1990s. It is perhaps most famous for turning celebrity scandal into a repeatable business model.
For a generation of people who never set foot in an adult video store, Vivid wasn’t just the porn company… it was the sex tape company. The name became shorthand for leaked VHS tapes, blurry hotel-room footage, and suddenly very expensive “home movies” involving A-and-B-listers who were never supposed to be slapped across a porno DVD cover.
That reputation was not accidental. Vivid Entertainment has a track record of paying top dollar for some of the finest celebrity sex tapes to hit the press. In this guide, we take a look at the rise of a commercial porn giant.
How One Studio Took Celebrity Sex Tapes Mainstream
Owned by Gamma Entertainment, the Canadian powerhouse behind more than 200 premium adult websites, Vivid produces a huge variety of porn in a whole range of genres.
It’s not just a sex tape brand.
However, it is for their celebrity exposés that they have carved a niche for themselves over the last few decades. In fact, by the 2000s Vivid had aggressively positioned itself as the go-to broker for these illicit celebrity romps, turning leaked intimacy into very big business indeed.
The genre was brand new way back in the mid-1990s when private tapes made by Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton came to the public domain. Back then, the concept of a private sex tape sparked huge controversy over privacy laws and the right to publish such footage.
The legal wranglings around Anderson’s sex tapes rumbled on for years with many criticizing the stars themselves as being fully aware of the media attention they were courting for their own benefit.
Vivid were also behind the infamous Kim Kardashian sex tape which is now widely acknowledged to have been the most successful PR stunt in porn history – and the reason behind her meteoric rise to fame.
Since the Kim K tapes, celebrities of all kinds have virtually been queuing up to replicate even a tiny amount of her success and Vivid openly market themselves as THE place to sell celebrity sex tapes.
Let’s check out some of the most notorious releases…
What Are The Most Famous Vivid Celeb Releases?
It all starts, inevitably, with the tape that created the blueprint.
The one that showed Vivid exactly how much money there was in turning private shag into public spectacle.
Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
If you’re looking for an “origin” story, this is it.
The Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee tape was the first celebrity sex tape to properly detonate. It was the one that taught a legion of copycats what was possible once sex, technology, and fame collided.
Recorded during their honeymoon in 1995 and stolen shortly after, the tape leaked into circulation after Tommy pissed off an electrician, who responded by stealing the footage from his home. You have to remember that, at this time, Pamela Anderson was basically the sex symbol of the decade. While Tommy Lee was a walking excess machine at the height of rock-star mythology.
The footage (54 minutes) isn’t particular artistic or spectacular. It’s full of loose handheld camerawork, laughing arguing and plenty of downtime (just 8 minutes of sex)… but… the sex.
It includes Pam giving Tommy a blowjob on board a yacht as well as full close-up shots of penetration.
Pammy in the sack?
The whole world wanted a piece of that action.
In fact, the footage had leaked online long before Vivid actually acquired it – allegedly for around $15 Million – but Vivid poured fuel on the fire and launched a massive PR campaign to drum up sales.
Commercially, the tape was a monster. It sold in numbers that traditional adult films simply couldn’t touch ($77 Million in the first 12 months!), and it did so despite years of legal resistance from Anderson herself. Vivid didn’t create the scandal, but the company absolutely learned how to monetise one.
The lesson was simple: people were less interested in explicit perfection than they were in proximity to fame.
So, the Anderson-Lee tape established the blueprint Vivid would refine for the next two decades:
- A recognisable name (the bigger, the better)
- A plausible claim of “private” origin
- Just enough authenticity to feel forbidden
- And a legal path… however messy… to monetisation
Everything that followed, from Paris Hilton to Kim Kardashian, traced back to this moment…
One Night In Paris
When we think of the modern “Influencer Sex Tape“, we instinctively think of Kim K. But it was actually Paris Hilton who rose to prominence first.
In 2004, a year before YouTube even existed, a grainy green-nightvision recording of 20-year-old Paris and her then-boyfriend Rick Salomon became the next truly viral sex tape sensation.
Titled cheekily One Night in Paris, Salomon’s home video was picked up by a smaller studio called Red Light District Video and released against Paris’s will (Paris initially sued and was not a willing participant in marketing it). The tape was full of weird interludes… like when Paris paused mid-act to answer her cellphone. 😂
It sold like crazy, proof that Pam & Tommy’s success was no fluke.
For Red Light District, this was a one-off jackpot. For Vivid, it was a wake-up call: there was a public appetite for celebrity tapes that just kept growing.
And so, Vivid moved fast to stake its claim, acquiring the rights to Paris Hilton’s tape in 2005, which eventually took home a heap of accolades, including Best Selling Title of the Year from AVN (2005) and Best Renting Title of the Year.
Still, Vivid head Steve Hirsch had his sights on an even bigger prize: a tape so notorious it would eclipse even Paris. That prize arrived in 2007… gift-wrapped in Louis Vuitton: yes, Kim Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian, Superstar
The American socialite and social media celebrity is one of the most famous people on earth, but if you weren’t familiar with her rise to fame, much of it can be attributed to arguably the world’s most famous sex tape.
Kim was a relative unknown at the time – mainly “that pretty friend of Paris Hilton” – but she had pedigree (OJ lawyer’s daughter, Olympic hero’s stepdaughter) and, as Hirsch later noted: “Kim had everything going for her. It was a no-brainer”.
Her tape with R&B singer Ray J, later titled Kim Kardashian, Superstar was recorded in 2003 during a luxury vacation in Cabo.
The footage, though a little grainy, mostly shows scenes shot on a handheld camcorder of a couple on vacation with Kim sunbathing, getting ready in a hotel room and ‘goofing around’.
It’s an intimate behind-the-scenes video of a rich girl before she became a megastar.
And then there’s the sex scenes…
Kardashian claims that she took the drug MDMA before the scenes were shot and there is definitely a sense of lowered inhibitions as she indulges in hardcore and explicit sex with Ray J.
You’ve probably already seen the best bits before on sites like Pornhub or XVideos but the entire footage runs to around 90 minutes.
Kim initially tried to block the release, even suing Vivid for invasion of privacy. But, in what has now become a familiar ritual, she eventually settled – reportedly for around $5 million – and allowed Vivid to distribute the film.
I’ve always found that number staggering for essentially doing nothing new… the tape already existed, but getting Kim’s sign-off made it legit. Few Hollywood actors get a $5M paycheck for one “role,” but Kim did, ironically by starring as herself.
Some say that the perfect timing of the leak was down to her mother, Kris Jenner who allegedly engineered the whole scandal.
Whatever happened and whoever sold that tape couldn’t have predicted just how much it would boost the family’s fortunes. Understandably, many celebrities since Kim K have tried to emulate the same success by making sex tapes… but none have gotten close to the Kardashians.
It reportedly grossed over $1.4 million in its first six weeks, and went on to sell hundreds of thousands of DVDs worldwide. It also led to the meteoric success that she and her family have enjoyed from their realty TV documentary series Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Vivid’s Celeb Strategy Takes Hold
After Kim Kardashian, Vivid doubled down on making leaked celebrity tapes a core part of its business model. Steve Hirsch openly stated that the era of generic porn was over… you had to have an angle, a “tentpole” to draw in casual viewers, so to speak.
Vivid created a dedicated label for these releases (Vivid-Celeb), forging a reputation that made celebs (or their intermediaries) bring tapes directly to them.
The company became a magnet for anyone shopping an intimate video.
And Hirsch, far from being a smut-peddler in a trench coat, styled himself as a canny Hollywood producer: he would only pursue a celebrity tape if it met certain “quality” criteria. He’s said he looks for good production values, an attractive star, and a name people recognize…
Meanwhile, competing adult studios took different tacks.
Red Light District, as mentioned, struck gold with Paris Hilton’s tape in 2004 and also released WWE star Chyna’s wrestling-themed romp 1 Night in Chyna the same year.
RLD’s approach was more opportunistic: slap a punny title on the DVD, push it out fast, and reap the short-term rewards. But RLD didn’t or couldn’t sustain that momentum. They were a smaller gonzo studio without the deep pockets or media savvy that Vivid had.
Chyna’s initial sex tape was a huge success, selling over 100,000 copies and allegedly earning therself (and partner Sean Waltman) a tidy six-figure sum. The star denied making any money at all from the release, but it was reported that she landed a lucrative deal with Vivid for the follow up films.
Other studios tried their hand at celebrity content too.
Hustler Video made waves offering $1 million deals to hot-button names (from a Miss USA scandal figure to Octomom Nadya Suleman) to star in adult films. Larry Flynt was never shy about publicity stunts, but few of those offers panned out.
Hustler also infamously attempted to distribute a tape of Verne Troyer (Mini-Me from Austin Powers) in 2008, but Troyer won an injunction and the tape never hit stores.
Vivid’s advantage was that they could afford to fight or, more often, settle. They turned cease-and-desist letters into negotiation starting points – Hirsch had definitively mastered the art of the celeb tape deal.
Throughout this period, Vivid deftly used the media to hype their releases.
Hirsch was (and is) a master of earned media – he’d leak juicy tidbits to TMZ, issue public “offers” to the likes of troubled celebs (Lindsay Lohan was a frequent target of Vivid’s open invitations), and even invite press to comment on the “unboxing” of a new celeb tape. Crass? Yes, but the strategy had legs.
One of his favorite tricks was to name-drop an upcoming potential tape on TMZ to gauge public interest. If a gossip item about, say, “Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag’s possible sex tape” set the internet ablaze, you can bet your bottom dollar that Hirsch was seriously pursuing it the next day.
By the early 2010s, Hirsch openly admitted what we all saw happening: celebrity scandal had become Vivid’s business model… but never tape was a blockbuster success.
Minor Successes and Major Flops
The Big Winners for Vivid are well-known: Pam & Tommy, One Night in Paris, Kim Kardashian: Superstar.
These sold in astonishing numbers.
Vivid had some other lower-key successes through the 2010s:
There was Farrah Abraham, a former Iowa cheerleader and star of the MTV reality series 16 and Pregnant (2009) and Teen Mom (2009-2012).
Abraham has actually starred in two celebrity sex tapes with Vivid, the first being released in 2013 Farrah Superstore Backdoor Teen Mom and the follow up, Farrah 2: Backdoor and More being released in 2014.
Both were filmed with the help of adult film mega star, James Deen with the first (reportedly) being recorded as a private sex tape.
Apparently Deen refused to play along with the charade that he and Abraham were dating and that the video was ‘leaked’. Whether you believe her or him, she decided to have the footage released anyway. It sold extremely well on DVD and Vivid’s website.
Kendra Wilkinson’s tape, Kendra Exposed, was another solid performer, if not an all-time chart-topper.
The tape’s release in 2010 coincided with her having a TV show and being in tabloids for more conventional reasons (marriage & motherhood). It didn’t catapult her to a new level of fame the way Kim’s did. It more or less supplemented her celebrity profile… and bank balance.
A few celebrity tapes simply failed to ignite public interest or were thwarted by legal action.
Take Mindy McCready, a country singer who had a tape released in 2010. Despite some initial tabloid buzz, it didn’t sell impressively. Similarly, tapes from the likes of Tonya Harding (the disgraced skater) and Gene Simmons (of KISS) had their moments in the press but ultimately fell flat commercially.
I’d argue the biggest flameouts were tapes that never made it to retail at all.
We mentioned Verne Troyer’s – that one got injuncted. Another was a mooted tape of rapper Tulisa Contostavlos in the UK, which was blocked by court order.
And then there were the many rumored tapes that never surfaced or turned out not to exist: Kanye West allegedly had one, a Glee star had one… these swirled in gossip but led nowhere.
Montana Fishburne, the daughter of actor Laurence Fishburne, was hyped by Vivid as the “Next Kim K” in a full-on porn release. It shot to the top of the charts, selling out a 25,000 DVD run at $45 a pop, but the Montana experiment fizzled quickly; her famous father’s outrage dominated the news cycle, and she didn’t have the same charisma or media savvy to capitalize long-term.
Clearly… for each big hit, there were plenty of misses; now mere footnotes in sex tape history.
But overall, Vivid’s batting average was good.
Where to Watch Vivid’s Sex Tapes Today
Most of the major releases – the Pamela Anderson, Kim Kardashian, Kendra Wilkinson, Farrah Abraham tier – are still officially distributed under the Vivid Entertainment banner.
You won’t find them promoted front-and-centre the way they were in the DVD era.
The cleanest, least sketchy route is Vivid’s own ecosystem. Through the Vivid Vault (now a part of AdultTime), Vivid’s archive streaming platform, many of the celebrity titles rotate in and out depending on licensing and regional restrictions.
Some titles are also licensed to major adult VOD marketplaces that specialise in studio-owned catalogs… like Adult Empire or AEBN.
What you’ll notice, if you go looking, is what isn’t there.
Vivid has quietly deprioritised aggressive promotion of celebrity tapes in favor of its core contract performers.
Part of that is down to the times we live in. With newer platforms like OnlyFans, a major star no longer needs the distribution might of Vivid to make a fortune from private content. This had made it harder for companies like Vivid to profit from the same sex tape model that worked in the 2010s.
Still, the company’s shadow hangs over the entire category.
Whether people realise it or not, Vivid Entertainment effectively wrote the playbook for how celebrity sex tapes can be turned from private footage into commercial juggernauts.
Do you have an all-time-fave Vivid sex tape?
What did you make of the infamous Kim/Pammy home videos?
Let us know your thoughts below…
