Another giant passed away. Scott Masters/Robert Walters left us this Fall at a retirement home

I can’t think of any gayporn producer more consequential than Masters/Walters.
With a career spanning almost 4 decades and relevant contributions in each decade.
As a magazine publisher in the late 60s, as the man behind Nova in the 70s, as the
Producer in charge of Catalina in the late 80s, as the co-founder of Studio2000 in the late
90s/early 2000.

Scott and I became friends after my directing debut at Men of Odyssey in 1997, with “Journey to Italy”. He was brutally honest with me: “Lucas”, he told me. “You didn’t give Men of Odyssey a 80K movie. You didn’t deliver a 50K movie. Hell, you didn’t deliver a 20K movie. You had no idea of what you were doing!”. Was he right… and I loved him all the more for it. Scott taught me a great deal about self-discipline, self-criticism, work ethics. And about the industry I was about to embark on.

We would get together for lunch in Weho every now and then. I would ask him, star struck, about Nova, the early loops, the later feature films (“Someting Wild” is, to this day, one of my favorite movies of all times). He would hardly discuss any of them. Perhaps not realizing, not fully, the richness of his legacy and its impact. On the language of gayporn and the forms of
gay desire. Farewell, my friend.

Below a picture taken at the premiere party for All Wolrlds’ ANDEL’S STORY. From l to r, Gino Colbert, Tom DeSimone, John Travis, Bill Higgins, Scott Masters and yours truly. © “Unzipped Magazine”). And a quote by @wishfultopping I found on my Twitter feed, best defining porn back then vs today’s porn : “We didn’t watch porn back then to simply bust a nut, it was almost a lifeline for some. It projected everything society told us we weren’t: happy, free, successful, charismatic,beautiful ! Those were the first movies I’ve seen gay men in a positive light”. And that is Masters true legacy.