Elegant Angel

Elegant Angel (EA) was founded in 1990 by Collins in partnership with pornographic film maker John Stagliano as a subsidiary of Stagliano's Evil Angel Video.

The two labels soon became pioneers of gonzo pornography, along with other producers such as Rodney Moore and Ed Powers. Stagliano had pioneered the Gonzo genre in the late 1980s.

In 1996, Collins established Elegant Angel as a separate company, and in 1998 it ended all cooperation with Evil Angel. His departure from Evil Angel has been called "less than amicable", and he and Stagliano are apparently "ex-friend[s]". At the time Collins said that Stagliano "couldn't run a business, and would fail without him". According to Stagliano, "Patrick's a bully", "and he wasn't doing his job properly". "I should have fired him years ago".

Israel Chapa Gonzalez, who was a designer, cameraman and often performed on screen, joined Elegant Angel in 1996 as a set designer. On 27 May 1997, he shot dead Glendale police officer Charles A. Lazzaretto and wounded two others at the company's warehouse in Chatsworth. Throughout the night he exchanged fires with the police and at 6am next morning police entered the building and found Gonzales dead from a gunshot wound.

In 2004 the studio stopped production for two months. Collins then refocused the company on producing niche-themed pornography, and discontinued some series that had more ambiguous themes and were not selling well. The firm's logo and box-cover art were also redesigned and simplified. It hired a new DVD authoring contractor, and launched a new PR campaign. The company then went back to producing as many as eight new titles a month. Production was also halted for a month in early 2004 when the studio joined the moratorium on filming caused by Darren James's HIV infection.

In August 2004 the company opposed calls from Democratic California Assembly member Paul Koretz for the adult industry to use condoms. In response to the HIV outbreak in the industry in March the same year, Koretz had threatened to instigate legislation requiring mandatory condom use. EA head of production Graham Travis responded that there was consumer demand for scenes without condoms, and that forcing condom-use would force some studios out of business.

From June 2006 onwards Elegant started to see a sustained increase in DVD sales.

In 2007 the company started launching a number of paysites. SwallowSquirt.com was launched in April, followed by BigWetAsses.com in June, and PornStarSquirt.com in September.