How I Got Into Porn After Being A Rocket Scientist

Usually when people ask me that I answer “I was too dumb to know I couldn’t” and there is a lot of truth in that.  At the time porn was a good old boys club consisting of people connected to Reuben Sturman in one way or another, if only loosely.

One of my guilty pleasures when working in the tech arena was going to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.  The CES happened twice a year back then with the Summer CES being in Chicago, I attended that one once but it was lackluster by comparison to Vegas. CES Vegas is where all the big new announcements were in gaming, home computing and pretty much anything consumer electronics,  I saw HDTV and large flat screen TVs there years before they were available in stores.

Back then CES had a section called “Adult Software” which meant video tapes. I would always spend Saturday in the adult section. What struck me the most was how accessible the girls were, I simply couldn’t imagine any forum where you could talk to and have a photo taken with the stars of Hollywood, these adult actresses were, by comparison, regular folks.

One year I was eating lunch at one of the big round community tables they had in the lunch area at The Sahara and a guy named Rick Savage came up and asked could he sit in the chair next to me, of course I said sure and he introduced himself and so did I.  Rick remarked on my southern accent, asking where I was from.  When I told him Atlanta he sighed and said you know, you have the most beautiful women in the world in Atlanta, I love Atlanta.  He then asked if I shot porn in Atlanta, I laughed and responded no.  He said well you should.

When we finished he invited me to walk around with him and of course I did and he introduced me to Farrel Timlake who had just acquired Homegrown Video out of bankruptcy, Farrel too loved Atlanta women and gave me his business card and said if you ever shoot porn in Atlanta I will buy it from you.  I thanked him, pocketed the card and went about my day.

In the course of my post NASA consulting I did some work for Dunn and Bradstreet Software and the project was to produce a training video on their product for the D&B sales team, that’s when I realized I loved video production. I learned a lot about production and lighting on that project, having sat in on every aspect from filming to offline post to online post.

One afternoon I was browsing through a pawn shop and found a fairly high end (at the time) video camera, I bought it and remembering Homegrown I approached a dancer at one Atlanta’s many strip clubs and she said “you will pay me to fuck my boyfriend?  Hell yes!”  and I thought boy this is like shooting fish in a barrel, first girl I asked was all over it.

I rented a light kit knowing that good lighting was more important than the camera,  secured a location and that Saturday she and her boyfriend came and we go to it.  I was the Director.  I got two solid hours of the boyfriend licking pussy, he couldn’t get it up, I didn’t know guys might get performance anxiety and I was thinking  that this was going to be a disaster.  She was obviously unhappy with him and he was deflecting his inability to get it up on her…finally he looks at me and says give me the camera, I will film it and you fuck her.

I was on the spot, that wasn’t the plan, I had no intention of being a performer, but given the choice of calling the shoot and scrapping it or doing her myself I decided that this was indeed showbiz and that the show must go on.  I did the scene.

Afterwards I called Farrel and he said to send him a copy , after he got the copy he said we want it and he bought it and I sent him the master…..meantime I shot again and sold it to Odyssey Group Video.

Farrel aka Tim Lake called me one afternoon and was enthusiastic, saying dude, you have this hokey, down home, hillbilly style and you are a good performer with a big pop shot…we love it, do you think you could shoot enough to do a series based around you?  I said of course and he made what I believe was a fair offer and that was that.

In one of my prior consulting engagements for Rust Engineering in Birmingham Alabama I would spend my Saturdays at a friends video store, it was smack in the middle of downtown Birmingham and myself and a few others would hang out on Saturday afternoons and people watch and chew the fat, while eating hot dogs and talking among ourselves and the customers, the store had an adult room which was it’s biggest draw.  One of the Sat afternoon regulars was an old black man named Hampton Reese.  I have mentioned before that I love to hear stories from old black men and Hampton had stories, amazing stories.  If you look him up you learn that he was a song writer and composer and wrote music for B.B. King, he is a member of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame.

After speaking to Farrel I immediately called Hampton and told him about it, he congratulated me and I asked him what I should call the series, he thought for less than a few seconds and said “Southern Belles”  and you should be

I didn’t even have to think about it. he was spot on and I new from my Political Science education that branding was important so MSouthern Belles” was born.

There is another person I met early on who was always nice to me and who helped me immeasurably, I met him before getting into the biz but I dont think he knew me except by face but once I had my first release we became friends (and still are to this day) that person is Dirty Bob.  While it was Rick who planted the seed, Dirty Bob did as much to nurture it as anyone, he is indirectly responsible for me meeting some of the people who would make me successful.  He introduced me to Dan Barros an aspiring agent from San Fransisco  and that lead to my shooting Melissa Hill in her first scene, also Anna Malle.  Dirty Bob helped me to get Felicia Fox and Sana Fey as well.  I owe DB much.

Imagine my surprise when Southern Belles Volume 1 got a nomination for an AVN Award.  I never expected to win but I was floored to get the nom.  I went on to win for volumes four and seven (Melissa Hill and Midori) and garnered more noms over the years than I can remember, I even got a best couples sex scene nom for the scene with Midori.  Porn was so different back then, it was actually fun. I had found my new career and I was welcomed by the industry with open arms.

To this day my best friends I have ever had have been a result of the adult industry and many I consider to be family, it is they that drive me to write this blog, the good people in this biz that will give you the shirt off their back, they are fewer and farther between these days to be sure but they are still out there.

Anyway that’s the rest of my story.