First Came EZTV...then Adam & Company

So EZTV, a small-format video post-production house in West Hollywood CA became my school for video production in 1981. And owner, John Dorr became my video fairy godfather, training me as a video cameraman, editor, and producer; in exchange for my services as photographer, art director, and graphic artist.

John was a Yale grad' with connections to AFI (American Film Institute), and AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences). His dream was to bring independent movie production to the masses, and to offer a place where those productions could be shown to the public. My main job (after creating the EZTV logo) was to compile a monthly publication EZTV Guide that listed the month's offerings, along with background about their producers. I also curated art exhibits in the small gallery / theater.

Almost daily some celebrity would come into the facility, to create a rough edit of their project, or to get videotape copies of a scene they were in, or a commercial that had aired. Some of Hollywood's most hard-working character actors, as well as producers, writers, and directors made EZTV their affordable creative haven. Often EZTV was rented as a preview house for Academy members to view movies being considered for that year's Oscars.

Since John himself was gay, he gave special attention and favors to young gay wanna-be producers, like me; becoming known as the 'Mother Theresa of independent video'. And for good reason. He routinely backed the projects (which meant supplying cameras and lighting equipment, as well as access to the editing bay) of struggling artists with a vision. And little did I know that some of the colorful unknowns were well on their way to becoming big names: Eric Bagosian, Michael Kearns, Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman.

Within a year, I became one of EZTV's practicing camera operators, and began editing my first projects; all the time, a working photographer for the magazines and newspapers catering to gay men in the US and abroad. I waited for my opportunity to produce my vision of the gay world, and to make use of the credits I'd amassed working with John.

In my never-ending search for new models, I came across an ad in one of the local rags, for an 'escort to older gentlemen'. The ad read like a dream list of attributes: wrestler's build, classically trained musician, uncut, and versatile. I phoned him immediately. Within the week I'd met Frank Jeffries, and during the next months we'd agreed to be partners in Adam & Company, our first video enterprise. We, as uncut men, didn't see nearly enough of our kind depicted in photos or movies. And worse, Frank had stories about uncut models being made to 'skin back' in order to look circumcised. So we decided we would fill that niche, showing proud, uncut men. And we'd dare to use men who were way above the age of most sex stars in the marketplace.

An ad for our first movie: Foreskin Fantasy One - A Primer to Uncut Dick hit the pages of the Advocate (then, still a newspaper) and we sold our first VHS tape that same day. And in the fall of 1982, my movie making career had finally begun. I couldn't imagine what a roller coaster of experiences awaited me.

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Thanks for your interest in my on-going voyage of discovery, through my crazy, sexy, exciting, and surprising career in gay male adult movies.

My interest in the erotic arts goes back to my childhood.  At a tender young age, I traced outlines of men in the Sears catalogue's underwear section; meticulously filling in the genitalia, and even giving them cartoon balloons of dialogue.  

At 13, I discovered the sensational genre of male erotica, first in Athletic Model Guild, and other posing magazines, then in the tiny ads for more revealing material, which I ordered as often as I could afford.  A lot of my teenager's salary went to feel a growing porn habit.  

By 16, I was adept at cutting out my favorite pics and arranging them into erotic collages.  Not long after high school graduation, I began taking photos of my own, with my more adventurous classmates as my first nude models.  Inspired by a chance meeting with famed Chicago-based  photographer, Victor Skrebneski, I declared this to be the area of photographic art I would give myself to.

By 1972, I'd incorporated a Super 8 movie camera into my arsenal of tools, determined one day, to share my secret fantasies with anyone who wanted to be aroused by them.  Many single-reel, 2-minute-40-second Kodak movies followed, all with some sort of surreal and usually (mildly) erotic bent. 

At 19, I accompanied my first love and benefactor, Steve to California, and enrolled in a photography and modeling trade school, where I learned the crafts of composition, lighting, and darkroom film developing, and got more than one stern lecture from the president of the school advising me against becoming known as a nude photographer.   After two years in the program, I headed out to become one of the vast cadre of commercial portrait photographers in the Los Angeles / Hollywood area, practicing my interest in male nudes on the side.  

In June of 1973,  Playgirl ushered in the heyday of male print erotica.  A flurry of other mainstream magazines followed, all showing beautiful men, the way God intended.  I felt the time had come for the first visions of my naked male aesthetic to emerge.  Inspired by having received an award for my print Primordial Adam, I put together a collection of my early works, and in 1976 my first spread of erotic art nudes were published by In Touch, one of the popular gay magazines of the era.  

This was a deliciously naive and guileless time in male erotica, before the hanky code, before the internet, and before AIDS and the health crisis that followed.  Gay was the way to Oz and to all the delights of a free-and-easy lifestyle.  And literally, all the fruits were there for the tasting.  And taste I did.  

Those days in the West Hollywood gay ghetto are a carousel of technicolor wet dreams remembered.  I was an enthusiastic young photographer, itchy to follow in the footsteps of some of male nude history's greats:  Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, George Platt Lynes, Skrebneski of course, Roy Blakey, Rip Colt aka Jim French, and my favorite erotic surrealists: Man Ray, Salvador Dali, and Jean Cocteau.  And I fully intended for my movies to be as iconic as Andy Warhol's Lonesome Cowboys or Naked Restaurant.  

By the '80s, I had gained a good share of notoriety, some international exposure, and a fair living by being published regularly in two New York-based magazines, Honcho and Mandate, as well as in some LA gay newspapers.  Small-format video was gaining popularity, as was the new medium of music videos.  I was burning to get into the game. and see my stories of men in love on the small screen.  And as life usually does, that possibility made itself available down another road, altogether.  

I continued on the model-go-round for what seemed forever...interviewing, shooting, and processing fodder for the the stage and movie industries, and the jack-off mill that was gay publishing.  When one day a good friend asked if he could use my studio for a video he was working on...and would I be his technical consultant?!!  The networking gods smiled, and shortly I became the art director for EZTV, an new small-format video post production house, right in my very neighborhood.  I'm tempted at this point to say, "...and the rest is history."  But that would defeat the purpose of this blog;-)

It's my intent in the posts I make here, to (in my way) tell-all about my little corner of what has become one of the highest-grossing enterprises in America, the gay porn industry.  As the movie Boogie Nights did, I hope to shed some more light on this fantastic art form, and the men who love it, produce it, and transform themselves through it. 

Annie Sprinkles (self-proclaimed porn goddess, actress, and producer) once said, "When one can make movies of people having sex, why would one make a movie about anything else?!"   That may not be completely my viewpoint.  But I do feel that my movies have taken the shackles off male sexuality, given it a sense of humor, and allowed men of all ages to be seen as nurturing, lovable, and sexy.  Is that so wrong?  I think not!