IanDuncan.com

It’s not very often anyone asks to interview me, so I was excited when I got to do an interview for gaystarinterviews.com the other night over the phone with Matt who runs the site. He’s interviewed quite a few pornstars, so be sure to check out his site for some juicy tidbits on your favourite performers. But for now, check out the interview he did with me. It’s a long one though, so pull up a chair and make yourself a drink, lol.

IAN DUNCAN: INTERNET PORN PIONEER

I’m amazed that I had not personally known Ian sooner since we have so many friends in common. Strangely enough, it was Ian who found me on Twitter, and I’m grateful that he did. What started as an interview devolved into a fantastic conversation. We lost all track of time spending almost two hours on the phone. In addition to a great interview I feel like I have made a great friend. I have always respected him from the wonderful things I had heard from the friends we have in common. After spending an evening on the phone with him, I have an even deeper respect than before. You can follow Ian on Twitter www.twitter.com/ianduncansblog,  at www.twitter.com/thegailyjerker, at www.twitter.com/videoboysstudio, or at www.twitter.com/squirtz, or read his blog at www.ianduncan.com, be his friend on Facebook. Most importantly check out his sites www.videoboys.com, www.squirtz.com and his free arcade site www.slimergames.com.

MATT: Hi Ian, how are you?

IAN: Hi Matt, good, how are you doing?

MATT: Good. You know it’s crazy that you and I have never spoken before given how many friends we have in common.

IAN: That’s true. Who else do you know?

MATT: Well, Pierre Fitch, Jeremy Roddick, Jeremy Feist, and Kinsey Russell (one of the other producers for www.videoboys.com).

IAN: Oh yeah, It’s been so long since we’ve known Pierre because he got his start here with us in Montreal when he first moved here, back when he was a young, skinny little thing.

MATT: I remember that.

IAN: He did some live shows for us and he did his first movie ever for us back when he had no money and he was a skinny little thing, didn’t know what to do in Montreal. We tried to guide him in the right direction. And it turned out fine for him. He ran with it. Some guys do it for fun or it’s a sideline, but for Pierre it’s a full-time job, it’s his career and he’s making the most of it. It’s nice to see.

MATT: He really is a great guy.

IAN: Where are you located? You’re down South, right?

MATT: Yeah, I’m from the South.

IAN: Yeah, I can hear the accent… well, me too. I probably have the Canadian accent.

MATT: A little, but you don’t really have the Quebec accent.

IAN: No, no, I barely speak French. I’m learning but very slowly.

MATT: I barely speak French myself. Whenever I visit Pierre I can’t read the menus, so I look at the waiter and tell him to bring me whatever Pierre ordered.

IAN: A lot of people don’t speak French, but if you make a little effort and say “Bon jour” and “merci” and little things like that they will open up to you and they are very happy to talk with you. Imagine someone going down to where you live and they refuse to speak English and will only speak French, they wouldn’t get very far. A lot of them speak English anyway, they just want to know that you are open to it.

MATT: When did you start your very first site? Weren’t you just 18 at the time?

IAN: Oh yeah, it was so long ago. I was in high school at the time and I was working for an architect in Hamilton, Ontario and there was a big newspaper chain called Southern Media. They owned a bunch of newspapers across Canada and they had their R&D office in Hamilton where I lived. There was a man there starting a new group called the Info Lab. The Internet was all new at the time and it was just to explore how publishers and media could use it. He went around to high schools and chose about eight of us, and I was one of the ones he chose to come work at the lab. And that is where I learned everything about making web pages and marketing and seeing how a business is run from that side. From there, when that all finished like two years later and I was just finishing high school I decided I would start my own business; not necessarily because I wanted too, but because in Hamilton there was such a depressed economy I figured no one is going to hire me anyway so I might as well try to start my own business, so I did that. We actually started doing website design, hosting and marketing, and it was kind of lukewarm, you know, not doing that great. But one of our friends in Toronto who started a live cam show from a strip bar, Remington’s, had a live feed going from the bar. He told me, “Well, we are doing this new thing now, why don’t you just make a new site and resell, you can ask a flat fee each month and sell it to your members and give it a try.” I was like, OK, I’ll just try that as a side business, but it started doing so well that it became our only business at some point. For a few years we were only reselling stuff other people were making. That first company we were working with in Toronto became the biggest in the world at what they were doing and we thought, oh my God, people are just raking it in. We need to produce our own stuff to. We didn’t want to go to Toronto because that company was already there and they basically owned the town, so we were like, well, it doesn’t look like anyone in Montreal is doing this and Montreal is full of gorgeous guys that love being naked, so we moved to Montreal and started our own live Internet shows and moved into doing solo videos to go onto DVD and the site and the eventually movies too. We were doing maybe one movie a year because it was expensive and we didn’t have a lot of money, but it became obvious that this was the way to go. After nine years we closed down our live shows, which was very good, we were happy to do that, because we spent 80% of our time running the shows and it was not making money and it looked like it never would, so we just wanted to cut our loss there and focus on making movies. Now we are doing a scene every week for our site, www.videoboys.com, which also go on DVD. Each month a new DVD is released based on the scenes that we have. We try to combine something that looks nice together so you see different models. That’s pretty much where we are now. That was a long winded answer, haha.

MATT: You and Kinsey do a nice job of pairing models up to create good chemistry.

IAN: We try. When we started we were a little more desperate because we were new here. We would save up enough money, and when we started filming we would have to make that money back right away, so we had to take whoever was available at that time and we had to be a little less picky at the time. Now there is a line up down the street of guys waiting to work for us. They call every day, “When can I do my scene? When can I do my scene?” I’m like, “Well, there are 30 guys ahead of you. Just wait, we’re trying.” It’s great. We have a good reputation here now and people love to work for us. I think they like working with us because we respect them and we’re fun to work with. We treat them very well and we make them look as good as possible on the site too; we don’t put up stupid things that make them look foolish like some sites I have seen do. Now a days we can be more choosy and repeat the same models. With our solo stuff we were trying to do one new model a week that we had never seen before and we’re almost 400 models now. We’ve had a few repeats lately because after seven years we see a guy who was on before and now he looks even better and he was very popular – people want to see him again, so we bring him back and people are thrilled about that, but it’s pretty rare. We always try to keep a new face each time because there is a new one every day appearing. A lot of guys now… we don’t even have to look for them. Sometime they just show up at our door and they’re like, “Hi, I just turned 18 last week and I’m ready to do porn.” I’m like, “oh, hi, come on in.” That happens all the time. We start with solo just to see how they are in front of the camera, get to know them, see what they’re like and if that works well and they are interesting in doing sex scenes we’ll move to that later. It’s like a candy shop. We try to find a good combination ’cause, like I said before, we were less picky out of desperation and need, but now we have more leeway and we can take the time to find more models with good chemistry. It really makes a big difference. Some guys are doing it just for money or whatever, but it shows when people are really into it. It’s a better scene. We have a total range of models. There’s completely gay, bisexual, 50/50 guys, and some very straight guys who fuck guys on the side. ‘Cause here in Montreal the straight thing is very different here. You can fuck guys every once in a while but it doesn’t matter, you go home to your girlfriend and it’s no big deal. You can fuck a guy and enjoy it, and actually we have a bunch of straight bottoms here that we love. I don’t know if it’s true everywhere, but it seems especially in Montreal there some really odd guys that are absolutely straight and love to be fucked. You watch them get fucked and you just cannot believe that this person is not gay because they love it so much. Here it’s just like an identity, you know, it’s not what you do, it’s just the way you feel. For me I could have sex with a girl, no problem, but it doesn’t mean that I’m secretly heterosexual or even bisexual. I’m gay, I always feel like I’m gay but I can be open to different things. I think it’s the same for the straight guys too. But if they’re going to work for us and do a scene they can’t just be doing it for the money and be very rigid in their performance. It has to show that they’re enjoying it. So, we get a feel for it. We’ve had a couple of guys lately that are really good and I’m beginning to wonder how straight they are. I think the more experience they have too the more open they become to it and they realize they do like it. They don’t want a boyfriend. They still want a girlfriend, but just sex with guys once in a while is fun. It seems to be a Montreal version of straight which we are very grateful for; works very well for us.

MATT: You typically start guys out on www.squirtz.com, don’t you?

IAN: Yeah, that’s right. It’s easier and we need new faces on there all the time. With the sex scenes we can repeat the same guys in different combinations but we always look for a new face. It’s also less of a risk for us if it doesn’t work well because they make less doing a solo than a sex scene, so if it turns out that they are just horrible on camera it’s not such a big deal… which is very rare. But we always start with that then do the sex scene after if they turn out to be really great on camera. Some people cannot get hard or they can’t cum or they’re just demanding and complaining constantly, which is very rare, but when we see a guy like that we don’t want to work with that person. It’s not worth the trouble. Some guys are a dream to work with. They’re so friendly and easy going and they have fun, they’re very happy to make the money, but they’re enjoying it so much ’cause it’s a nice atmosphere here. We like to work with People like that, people who are here to enjoy as much as to make money. We want them to make money because they are providing a service and we want it to be an equal exchange. We don’t want to exploit anybody. So, yeah, it starts with Squirtz and if that works well they move on to sex scenes with Video Boys where they can appear again and again and again until either customers are like, OK, I’ve seen enough of this guy, or they just move on to different things. I did start the company when I was 18 right out of high school, or just before high school ended. And it was just me running it. A few years later I begged Kinsey to come in because I made a mess of the accounting and he needed to sort that out. I begged, please please please come work with me, I need you. He was already doing his masters at school and he already had a job, but he reluctantly agreed to come join me, now there’s more of us. It’s good that he’s here because he is invaluable. We all have our own unique talents here, I guess. It probably couldn’t exist without any one of us.

MATT: What is your biggest role in it now? Isn’t Jeremy Roddick your camera guy?

IAN: No, I’m the camera guy actually. Well, for Squirtz it Kinsey usually, then for sex scenes it’s me. Jeremy does the editing, William Godin does the programming and marketing, and they’re both amazing at that. Sometimes I do the Squirtz camera work too. It’s more like whoever meets the guy first, that’s who will do the video because the person’s comfortable, they already know that person. We don’t want them to arrive then say, OK, well here’s a total stranger. He’s going to be doing your video, and they’ll freak out. We want everyone to be very comfortable especially if it’s very new to them, they’re not sure what to expect and maybe a little scared and nervous. We want them to feel very secure and relaxed and know that they are in good hands and that’s very important to us. My main I guess… I do the camera work, I do all the photos. Every week that’s my main job really. Photos and photos and photos. We do hi-res photos now. We weren’t long ago, but now we are, which we send to our affiliates for promotional purposes and for DVD covers and stuff like that. Also, we go through the video and we do screen captures because the hi-res photos are really nice quality, but you can’t really catch the action with those like you can with the screen captures. Because we do progressive scan video each picture is a complete frame instead of an interlace. You know when it’s interlaced each frame is only every other line and then they get mixed together and all the edges are jagged and stuff. It’s more like film. Each film frame is a complete photo, so our video is like that. I can take a photo that way and it looks pretty good for a screen capture. And then I go through and I’ll capture like 300 pictures for whatever scene each week, solo or sex scene, work it down to the best fifty, color correct them and make them look as nice as possible and fix the color and lighting and then put them up in galleries and do the press packs and post the galleries for marketing. That would probably be my main job, and then once a week I just film a scene.

MATT: You really do have a good reputation in this business as far as the way that you and Kinsey treat the models. You go out of your way to make them feel comfortable.

IAN: Yeah, that’s true.

MATT: You have a strong stance on bareback, and that’s commendable.

IAN: Yeah, for the first time on my blog, it just went up the other day (www.ianduncan.com) I put a big piece about what I have to say about that. It was the first time actually I think I wrote about it on that site, but I just had too. It’s out of control these days. Bareback sells very well, which is bad for us, but we’re still not going to do it. I would rather make less money and feel good about myself and sleep well and know that I didn’t ruin someone’s life just for a few extra dollars. I know so many people are getting infected all the time, even models who are working for companies and doing bareback and supposedly are provided tests and sometimes the test results are a false negative, which can happen. I know in one case the documents were falsified and the model did get infected. It was a European model. He was extremely angry about that, obviously. I don’t think it’s a good approach to try to avoid HIV and be ignorant about it. I think it’s better to know exactly. We’re very happy to work with models who are HIV positive ’cause we know that it’s difficult to catch if you’re being safe. We tell all our models just assume that every person you are with could have HIV and don’t do anything with them that you wouldn’t do with someone you knew for a fact had HIV. So, just be safe with everyone all the time. We are happy to work with negative or positive models. It doesn’t matter to us, but for us they have to be up front about it. If we have an HIV positive model we’ll tell the person who wants to do a scene with them, well, he’s HIV positive; is this OK with you? If he doesn’t know much about it we’ll explain how it all works. A lot of these young guys, they’re not getting a lot of information about this any more. Back in the nineties you were bombarded with safe sex messages all the time and information, back when I was growing up. It just doesn’t exist anymore. You talk to these young guys now and they don’t have a clue. One guy had not even heard of HIV before, a guy from Quebec City. He was like 21 years old. So, I try to talk openly about that with everyone I meet and remind them, be safe, take care of yourself, at the very least know what you are getting into. For us what people do in their own life is their business, you know. Two consenting adults… if they want to have sex without condoms, that’s their choice. But for us, we don’t want to encourage it, we don’t want to put it on video. I know some people who say it has no effect on the viewers, but I’ve seen the exact opposite. I’ve seen these young guys watching bareback porn all the time and they think it looks so exciting and they want to try it and they do it. Young guys, when they’re out partying and maybe they’re drunk or a little high that night, they don’t make a good judgment call and they end up getting infected and it’s because they see all this. I don’t care what anyone says. I do think it encourages it a little bit. It’s becomes so common that people don’t think twice about it. Before in the nineties when I was growing up if you saw that you would be outraged because you just heard condoms, condoms, condoms all the time. That was the only acceptable way of having sex. And the thought of not having sex with condoms was just abhorrent. And now it’s normal because we see so much of it that people don’t think about it that much. I don’t want be a part of that. I just want to take a stand on that.

MATT: You’re probably setting a lot of models off on the right track by doing that.

IAN: In straight porn there’s no condoms ever, so it’s very different when we get a straight guy and he’s like, I’ve never worn a condom before. I’m like, WHAT? Are you kidding me? In straight porn you never see condoms. When a female porn star had HIV there was a big freak out and they had all these stupid ideas like, don’t hire anyone who’s recently been to Brazil or something idiotic like that. There’s a dumb approach to it. I think you should just see it for what it is, know what you’re getting into, know the facts and be up front about it. If the model is comfortable with that, great, and if not, fine, find someone else who is. Somethings are very easy to catch, like gonorrhea or herpes or something like that. And if that’s the case we’ll wait until it’s gone, but for HIV, it’s difficult to catch if everyone is safe about it and everyone is informed about it. We don’t want to rely on just turning a blind eye and avoiding it completely. We just want to know all the facts and be up front about it. And that’s worked very well for us. I think it’s a safer way to approach it instead of thinking, that guys doesn’t look like he’s sick, so he must be OK, or things like that. We try to remind these guys. It’s not the death sentence it used to be. You can live a long time with it, but you don’t want to have to. If you can avoid it, do it. If it’s going to happen to you it’s not going to be on our watch, it’s not going to be while you’re working with us. Maybe you’re going to out partying and make a mistake, but when you’re working for us everything is going to be fine, and we want to keep it that way.

MATT: You mentioned that you’re releasing one DVD per month.

IAN: One per month, yeah. Because we used to do one per year but we weren’t making a scene every week. The sex scenes we were making were not even online. We were just doing them for DVD. Myself, I was going to the post office every night and mailing stacks of these things. It was great. It was our biggest source of income for a while, but then DVD’s started declining because people aren’t buying them. They want downloads. We moved everything we had, all our sex scenes online and decided, OK, we’ve got to go all or nothing here. We’re gonna do one scene a week, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re small like us it’s a big expense to do a sex scene every single week when we were use to doing one movie a year. But when the scenes are done and they’re up in the site, they’re already paid for so we might as well put them on a DVD and make some extra money on that and get some more exposure. And our distributor, Eurocream USA, says that it’s best to constantly release something new to stay in the public eye or they forget about you. We put four sex scenes on a DVD plus two solos of two guys that were actually in the sex scenes. We’re trying to push the model as the star so people can get more information about them. We want people to know the real guy, and unlike a lot of other porn companies where everything is completely fake and they make up the whole story about the guy. We find the reality is far more sexy and far more interesting to hear what really turns them on and what they do for a living and see their real personality. They pick their porn names just because they like to have a funner name than their usual name, but other than that it’s the real story. We like to do interviews with them at the beginning to hear how they met each other, how they feel about each other, what kind of guys they like or girls if they’re bisexual or whatever, and when their first time was and all these things. On our solo site, Squirtz, it starts with the interviews and then a strip scene and then a cum shot, but the interview is the widely watched part, it’s the people favorite thing to watch, which we were surprised to see at first but we’re really happy about that now because they find it more interesting. The reality is more interesting than anything you can make up. You know, when you fake the story it just sounds like another cheesy porn cliche, especially for Montreal. People are very open here. They guys are very sexually laid back. They’re very open. Even a straight guy will tell you, “Oh yeah, I fucked a guy yesterday and it was great. I loved it.” So, we want to portray the culture here and the way people think and feel about sex because I think it’s unique in the world. Sort of the way Bel Ami owns Prague, they put Prague on the map, and when you think of Prague you think of Bel Ami. When people think of Montreal of French-Canadian boys we want them to think of Video Boys.

MATT: I’ve been a fan of Video Boys and Squirtz for years. When someone joins Video Boys what all do they get with that?

IAN: It’s changed recently because we are trying to focus on our on stuff. When you join Video Boys you’re going to get all the scenes we’ve done, all the Squirtz videos we’ve ever done. You’ll also get Jeremy Roddick’s site (www.jeremyroddick.com), Maximo Latino and Cruiser Boys. Mainly we’re just trying to fill it up with our own stuff. Before we were mostly like a portal site and people didn’t really know what Video Boys meant, what it was. You would join, come in and there was a bunch of different links going to totally different companies all over the place plus our own things mixed in there. Now when you come in the first thing you see are sex scenes. That’s the main focus of the site. We want people when they think of Video Boys to think of our sex scenes. And the other stuff like Jeremy Roddick, Squirtz, Maximo Latino and Cruiser Boys, that’s bonus stuff. But those are well worth it too on their own. I mean with Squirtz there’s almost 400 models on there now and we just redesigned the outside of the site, which is really nice, and the inside is going up soon, too, with the new design. Jeremy and William really work hard on good design. I used to do design like back in 1993 when it was so simple. Everything was just plain HTML. Now it’s so complicated that I just leave it to these little geniuses to handle. I just can’t do that. We like to get feed back, but people are not getting feedback to us, which is why we just signed up to Twitter with an account for each of those sites, and I’m pushing really hard to get as many followers on there and to get out the message and interact with people. Actually on there we’re getting feedback, and on our blogs too, people are commenting on our videos and telling us what they like and what they don’t like. That’s very good for us. We want to know what people like. It’s not just about what we find personally attractive, we want to appeal to a big audience too, because we don’t want to stay small forever. We’re trying all different things now, like our blogs are just going up and my personal one is gaining some steam now, that’s www.ianduncan.com, and the one for Video Boys is like a newspaper template called www.thegailyjerker.com. The template’s not up yet ’cause we only have a few articles. We were waiting to fill it up before we actually applied the template. When that goes up it will look like a real newspaper website. It’s supposed to be a little… not comedic, but a little bit fun in that we have our reporters going on the scene and reporting on the porn business and stuff like that. It’s supposed to be something original and entertaining, so I hope people are going to like that.

MATT: I love your blog www.ianduncan.com.

IAN: It’s going very well. It was actually the first site I had up when I was 18. It was like a little journal site and I started putting up naked pictures that my friends would take and just my daily thoughts and whatever. It was probably one of the first 1,000 sites in the whole world at the time ’cause it was at the very beginning of the Internet. There was almost nothing at all. And it grew so much that millions of people were going to my site every year. Everywhere I would go people would come up to me, in Europe or Mexico, “you’re Ian Duncan.” It was so much fun., but I tool it down after a while because I just wanted to focus on other things and just have some privacy for a while. Now I’m start starting to feel like… I just love writing. Some blogs are like a couple of sentences but for me I’m writing a whole story each entry because I like that. Through my blog… I’ve dug up all these entries. I’ve been writing my whole life going back to when I was seven years old, so I’m putting every entry I’ve ever written going back to 1982 plus all the new stuff. I put up previews of our new scenes plus daily life stuff. It’s kind of unique in that sense, mixing hardcore porn plus daily life and childhood drawings and whatever. I hope people will like it. We’ll see. It’s growing, people are coming, so that’s good. I’ll give it some time.

MATT: I think it’s fascinating. I’ve been reading all of these blog entries and it’s like you are reading the evolution of someone’s life.

IAN: When I used to do it before I wasn’t doing it for money, it was just for fun; I liked it so much. People were emailing me all the time. I would write about very personal things, which seemed to very rare on blogs at the time when I was twenty or so. People would write to me ans say, “wow, I just read this post on your site and it had such a deep impact on me when I was really wondering about something,” or, “you really encouraged me and I’m so grateful for that,” or another person would write, “I’m so alone where I live and just to read about your saying, you feel so good about your life and your so hopeful, you got away from an abusive life at home and made a better life. It makes me feel hopeful for my own future.” Every day my in-box would be filled with messages like this and it was the most important thing in the world to me at the time.

MATT: It’s kind of crazy you said that. Pierre [Fitch] just popped up on my computer. He said you were a strong person. He said, “Ian is a great guy.” Of course Pierre has spoken to me about you before. I’ve never heard him say a negative thing about you.

IAN: Wow, thanks! He’s very cool. We’re not close friends but I see him around from time to time.

MATT: You have another site that I love, www.slimergames.com.

IAN: Hahaha, thank you. I put that up a while ago thinking it would make some money with advertising but it never really did. I haven’t given up on it. I love games myself. I love computer games. The new ones are so crazy, you have to spend an entire week full-time playing them because their so complex. I just miss these simple old games where you can take a break for five or ten minutes and play them at work or just to relax. So I put up the arcade that’s got like 4,000 something games on there. It’s a pretty crazy look because I just downloaded a template. I’m going to have William, when we have some time, re-do it so it’s very easy to use, a classy interface and simple to use. The one that’s up there is a little confusing. There’s stuff flashing all over and whatever. It is fun, there’s a lot of good games on there. I have a Twitter page for that too. I’m trying to build up a following for that, so we’ll see. Maybe it’s going to be a success too.

MATT: You made the decision in 2006 to step away from being in front of the camera. What led you to that decision?

IAN: Mainly, I don’t like to see myself on camera. I didn’t think I looked nearly as good as our other models. I was like, OK, I gotta just pack it in. Also, our models, we’re focusing on 18 to 25 for the most part and I’m 33 now. When I stopped I was in my late twenties. It was very fun for a long time. We did our live shows for three years and then I did just a few movies and I had a great time doing that. It changed my life for the better. It gave me a lot of confidence and I met a lot of guys I would have never met otherwise, and for a while it was my only sex life. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it but after a while it was like, OK, let’s just focus on the new guys, the new faces, better looking, in shape guys. I really like to be behind the camera ’cause I’m a bit pushy or a perfectionist with the camera, and when I’m in the scene yelling at the guy doing the camera work, “make sure you do this, make sure you get that, get that angle, get this,” it doesn’t work very well. The last one I was in was a disaster. It didn’t turn out very well at all. It took weeks to repair the footage from it because the camera guy did such a horrid job. It was just so bad. After it was fixed it wasn’t too bad and I don’t feel too bad about it now, but I wish my last movie had gone out with a big bang, something really spectacular. But it’s OK, it’s no problem. I like to be behind the camera because I want to make sure it’s going to look as good as it can. Everyone here has their own skills. Jeremy is good at editing, William is good at marketing, design, programming, Kinsey is very good at dealing with the models, they all love him. He’s very relaxed and friendly and he’s very good at doing interviews. He gets very good stories out of these guys. I’m better visually. I studied photography in high school and that’s what I wanted as my career for a while, so for me it’s just a visual composition. That’s why I do the sex scenes, because I try to get the best angles and all that stuff. And I’m good with the models. I’m not shy to tell them this doesn’t work or that looks bad, put your leg there, do this. Not in a bossy way, but in a way where they are still having fun, but they have to realize it has to look good. Doing porn isn’t real sex, it’s stop and go, stop and go. Sometimes the positions are very uncomfortable, but I tell them the worse it feels the better it looks. If you’re comfortable, you’re not doing it right, hahaha.

MATT: Then I’ve been doing it wrong all these years!

IAN: Sometimes I push a little too hard and they say, “you know what, I’m not going to do this. It’s not going to work.” And I’ll say, “OK, forget this, we’ll try something else.” We’ll just try, but I don’t come in and say, “OK, you’re doing this and this and this and this.” We have a check-list of things we need. We want them kissing and sucking and fucking of course, and a good cum shot, but the positions, you know, we’re open, and sometimes they have favorite positions they want to do, and we’ll ask them what they really want to do. Sometimes they say, “oh, I really want to do this,” or, “I’ve always wanted to try this,” or maybe something I saw in a video just the other day I may say, “let’s try this for a change.” It’s not very rigid; we have to get it done and there’s things we need, but there’s a lot of flexibility in that too. We just want them to have fun, just move along quickly and get it done. By the time they walk in to the time they walk out it’s about two hours, or maximum three if they need to take a break. So, it’s pretty good. We work pretty fast and get everything that we need. And they’re very happy working with us it seems because the keep coming back. We have a line up of guys waiting to work with us now. I wish we just had like $100,000; we could film fifty scenes in a row. There’s so many people waiting. Right now it’s a very bad economy so we just want to stay afloat right now. I think everybody’s hurting right now. Sales are bad everywhere. When I look at the graphs of traffic for so many big sites that we’re competing against, they’re just going straight down and ours is going straight up. We’ve had a 3,000% increase in traffic in just the last year alone. So, I think we’re doing something right that people really like. When we redo the site design to make it more user friendly and more attractive and grab their attention quicker and guide them towards joining and give them something worth while, so they don’t feel ripped off. They want to feel like this is money well spent and they want to stay here as long as possible. That’s our goal, treat people very well and give them something they will be happy with, and they’ll keep coming back. It’s like with our DVD sales, when we were selling those directly I was handling all the orders, so I would see the names coming in and I would see one guy order one DVD, I would ship it out and two weeks later he would order every single thing we had on the list. Now it’s happening all the time. They would just give us a try and they liked it so much that they would buy every single thing we had. That was the best feedback we could get.

MATT: It really is very high quality work, from the models to the camera work to the video quality, it’s really good quality.

IAN: Well thank you. We’re trying. There’s a lot we need to learn. Now we are trying to learn photography lighting, which we’re having trouble with, but we’re getting better. We find that in small rooms it can look really nice but in larger rooms we’re having trouble getting it to look good. With video it’s easier. It’s grown a lot over the years. We still haven’t switched to hi-definition yet, but a lot of people don’t seem to care from what we’ve heard, ’cause once it’s compressed down to the internet you can’t tell a big difference anyway. I’m not for sure that people want to see too many details on these guys, haha. Sometimes a little less looks better, you know? Everyone is saying it had to be HD, it had to be HD. We’re going to have to buy an HD camera at some point, although, a lot of the people we know use HD, like Bel Ami, everything’s a little orange and there’s a lot of clipping. We want the scene to look as close to life-like as possible. We don’t want a color take over. We’re looking for a camera that will get a more realistic tone, that’s why we’re waiting for that. We also need progressive scan. I don’t care what anyone says, the hi-res pictures are wonderful for promotional stuff but for a gallery I like to catch the action; and you can only do that with a progressive scan screen shot, which will give you a pretty good quality picture for a screen capture, because it’s very clear. So, we are going to wait and find the camera that works for us. When we were doing movies with actual acting and stuff I would go through every second of the movie and I would color correct and make everything look as good as possible. We don’t know how long the DVD market is going to last. We expected it to be dead by last year, but our DVD sales keep increasing all the time in a dying market which is surprising. We’re grateful for that. I think our distributor love’s working with us because we are very accomodating for them and we’re not too proud. If they suggest a change we’re going to do it because we know this is their area of expertise. They know how to market something, if they say it’s going to work better by having someone else on the cover, we’re going to do that. They’re working really hard to sell our DVD’s and they are guaranteeing to buy so many a month from us for now. I don’t know how long it’s going to go ’cause I don’t know what will happen with DVD’s, but we’ll milk it for as long as we can.

MATT: If you’re DVD sales are going up while everyone else’s is going down, you’re doing something right.

IAN: Yeah, it’s weird. Our site traffic has skyrocketed while everyone has hitting rock bottom, and our DVD sales are going up while everyone’s are dying, which is really good. We’re not getting rich at all but we’re staying afloat when a lot of people are going out of business. That in itself is a pretty good sign. It would be nice to live up to the image people have of porn producers rolling in millions of dollars in cash but that’s just not the case. I don’t know anyone like that. It’s really difficult. There’s so much competition, there’s so much free stuff now. If you don’t do bareback you’re going to sell less; all these things. You just have to change with the market as it changes. Not a lot of people are getting rich at the moment. There’s a few, but after twelve or thirteen years we’re still waiting for that moment to happen. I think we found the formula that works for now and we’re going to keep working on that the best we can.

MATT: We’ve talked a lot about the business and the sites. Let’s talk more about you. What do you do when you’re not working?

IAN: Well, that’s not very often. We work almost seven days a week here just trying to keep up with it all. Especially on a filming day we just want to crash and relax, watch tv, eat something. We’re not party people here, which is rare in this industry too. We have the four guys who work here full-time, me, Kinsey, Jeremy and William. Jeremy and William went down to L.A. for one of the big conventions and everyone was drunk out of their minds, everyone was on cocaine. We don’t do drugs, we barely drink at all, so we’re very unusual in this business.

MATT: The Video Boys parties were really, really popular in Montreal. Almost legendary.

IAN: Yes, they were invitation only. Sometimes we would get some people crashing the party, like some hustlers and stuff. We had a place that was very good. It was four suites at a bed and breakfast. They were beautiful, beautiful suites. Some of the people that came to the party were staying in them so they rented them out and actually through the party for us, because we had shut Montreal Boys down and this was like their fair well party for us, and oddly enough it was better than the parties we had but it was because the location was perfect and they opened up all the suites so people could just wander around. No neighbors to complain about the noise, no one could see the terrace, it was total privacy which was nice. Amazing food. They prepared everything for us. We had to restock the bar like three or four times ’cause people were drinking so much. The party got a good reputation. We looked forward to it every year. We really want to get that back. I think it would be good. We just need to find a good location. The problem is there’s a lot of good locations around town but at some point in the party it descends into clothes flying off and sex happening and people jumping in hot tubs. It has to be certain kind of place where you can get away with that sort of thing. I don’t know, we’ll figure something out. So, for the next one for sure you’re going to come?

MATT: I will definitely be there, you just let me know when. Well Ian, I really appreciate you’re time. I know you have a lot of work to do and I ran out of tape about a half hour ago.

IAN: You ran out of tape? Well, that’s just me. I just go on and on and on.

MATT: Just kidding. I switched tapes, haha. Thanks again for you’re time. I have really enjoyed it.

IAN: Oh, you’re welcome. Any time.

And there you have it, a whole smorgashboard of secret tidbits! I hope you enjoyed it. And be sure to check out gaystarinterviews.com for more fascinating interviews with gay pornstars interviewed by Matt the Great.