Page 58 - AVN February 2016

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MILESTONE | | Brady Jansen
Titanic Anniversary The men are going down but after 20 years the ship is still sailing
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When Keith Webb joined a fledgling studio by
the name of Titan Media in 1997—just two
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years after its birth—he worked in founder
Bruce Cam’s garage in the Castro.
“Back in those days, if someone hit the
wrong button my office wall would open as it
was literally the garage door,” he recalls with
a laugh. “We had to be a jack-of-all-trades in
those days. I did the website, made some of
the box covers, produced films, starred in some
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films…whatever needed to be done, you did it.”
The first official release was River Patrol in
the fall of 1995. Webb notes that Cam had
been freelancing at Falcon and All Worlds and
thought he could do a better job at making
more masculine movies. Cam spent almost a
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year filming and producing River Patrol, doing
it almost entirely on his own—efforts that paid
off when it won “Gay Movie of the Year” in
1995 from the Adam Gay Video Awards.
“TitanMen started in response to trying to
show gay men’s sexuality as being strong and
proud. We were just coming out the backside
of the HIV/AIDS crisis, and as a community we
needed to show strong and confident sexuality,
and we felt we needed to eroticize and show
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safer sex practices and the use of condoms,”
says Webb, now vice president. “Bruce and
I had both lost partners and friends to HIV,
and we felt it was our duty to portray positive
and affirming visions of gay sexuality for the
”I think the biggest key to our longevity has been that
we treated our company as a business.
—Keith Webb, vice president, Titan Media
community at large. We needed to show gay
lot of dialogue in our films. We would rather show the
the industry.”
men that you could still have hot, passionate
and safe sex without fear.”
Now in its 20th year, the studio has racked
up more awards than it can count. And
thankfully for Webb and the rest of the Titan
staff, it occupies more spacious and luxurious
digs than it did during Cam’s resourceful
beginnings. It’s a testament to the man and
his mission that through it all—including
years that saw the gay adult industry prosper
and pinch pennies—Titan has maintained its
identity, a challenge considering the technology
advances that have redefined consumers’ tastes
and methods of consumption.
“I think the biggest key to our longevity
has been that we treated our company as a
business. We didn’t get too caught up in the
drama or ego of the business; we just kept our
heads down and made content we were proud
of. We also never had the delusion that we
were ‘filmmakers’; we knew that what we made
was porn, but that we could still make the best
damn porn out there,” Webb says. “As we like
to say, ‘We make porn with a plot, not movies
with sex.’ Which is why you don’t see a whole
audience than tell the audience. It’s the look in the eyes,
a nod of the head, or a touch of the face. … It’s not about
trying to get a hot guy to deliver dialogue.”
Through the years, the studio has produced a stream
of classics, including Gorge, Breakers, Carny, Cirque Noir,
Breathless, Folsom Prison, Men’s Room: Bakersfield Station and
Cop Shack on 101. It also created one of the most iconic and
enduring gay porn series with its multi-award-winning
Fallen Angel films.
“In the early days, leather/fetish was a niche market
and not something the industry took too seriously. As gay
men, we knew that leather/fetish was deeply ingrained in
the sexual DNA of the gay community, and felt it was not
getting the respect it deserved,” says Webb. “We created a
visual landscape and fantasy in Fallen Angel that had never
been seen before by a mass market audience. When the
first Fallen Angel hit the market, vendors were afraid to
carry it. As such, they drove a market hungry for this type
of content directly to our in-house sales and store.”
All of a sudden, up to 70 percent of its sales were direct
to consumers at full retail price, something that had
previously been unheard of for a gay studio. “And when
we became the first gay studio to enter the DVD market,
and re-master our old titles onto DVD, we quickly become
one of the best-selling and most profitable gay studios in
Webb notes that as the industry evolved with the rise
of the internet and the decline of DVDs, they had to adapt
and find a way to continue with the lofty goals they started
with—but in a way that would serve the new needs of
their consumers and community. The biggest change over
the past several years, he says, has been the rise of the
mega-corporations. “We’ve seen a lot of consolidation of
gay brands into much larger straight companies, and the
decline of smaller independent gay studios. These days,
you are either part of a larger corporation or a smaller,
one- to two-person niche operation. Everything in the
middle has been squeezed out.”
Webb says that as they move forward into their 20th
year, they’ve been able to navigate their path successfully
and will emerge a stronger and more focused brand and
company in 2016. By joining forces with partners such
as Gamelink and TLAgay, Webb says that TitanMen has
been able to outsource tasks better suited for its partner’s
strengths so that it can focus on making great content.
“As an industry, we got caught up in the treadmill
of having to churn our multiple new scenes a week to
feed the beast of what we thought the online consumer
wanted. We all got caught up in churning out scenes
instead of movies. And those scenes had little context,
little storyline and used the same performers across
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