Tag Archives: Catalina

Scott Masters

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.

In memory of John Travis

Director John Travis is gone (for the AVN obit, click here). From his early days at Brentwood, Falcon and Huge, to his Catalina blockbusters in the mid ’80s, to the co-founding of Studio2000 in ’92, Travis has helped shape gay porn like few others. He is… he was the golden age of porn. With lofty budgets, large crews and even bigger production values.  We stand on the shoulders of giants –even when we forget them (and it happens all too often). I learned my trade from Kristen Bjorn, Gino Colbert, George Duroy. And yes, I was lucky to work for John as a PA on a Jeff Stryker’s production (“JS Big Time”, ’95) and as a Production Manager for VCA’s blockbuster “Stryker’s Underground” (’97).

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Much of the  online ‘amateur’ wave of the 2000s stemmed as a reaction against what Travis (and Studio2000) stood for: beauty vs reality (or pseudo reality), the ‘studio system’ and its aesthetics (the ‘star system’, the formulaic scripts and the Hollywood-style cinematography/decoupage) vs. no aesthetics at all. And yet, where’s porn today? I remember each and all of Travis’ lush productions, I don’t remember, nor care for the majority of fungible online porn ‘loops’ produced these days –with little money, 0 skills, 0 ambitions and little imagination. Thank you, Jim (John’s real name). For the memories and the beautiful dreams.