Page 40 - AVN February 2017

GAYVN
THE STARMAKER
Studio 2000 founder John Travis passes
movies he said to do, at the end of three years I
would be a superstar.”
One high point of their work together
is Powertool (1986), which Stryker describes as
“still the biggest selling gay movie of all time.”
It was also, according to the book Bigger Than
Life: The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to
Hardcore, Catalina’s first movie shot on video.
Back then, Stryker recalled, “they were
real movies. His budget for a movie would be
$100,000 to $150,000.” Shoots for each scene
would take three days, he said. Filming the sex
alone would take 14 to 16 hours, and a day would
be devoted to the storyline.
“He was just a creator. That’s what he did.
He liked to make movies,” Stryker said. When
working with Sterling, Travis liked to concentrate
on the “sex stuff” and leave the storyline to his
co-director. Travis would “get under there with
close-ups underneath the performers, you’d be
standing on apple boxes, bright lights everywhere.
Wow. It was a lot of work.”
Of course, those were also the “money days,”
Stryker said. “When I got in, it was VHS. We used
to have galleys [preorder sales] of ten to twenty
thousand units and 35 bucks a pop … before the
title even seeing release.”
Travis made plenty of money—and spent it,
too. “He was just overly generous to everyone,”
Stryker said, describing one Christmas where he
gave 30 or 40 of his friends “the most expensive
he refers by his real first name). “After working
with Falcon, Jim worked with my company for a
few years before branching out on his own with
Bill Sheffler in Studio 2000,” Higgins said. “I can
tell a few anecdotes about Jim.”
“Back in the day gay porn was quite
incestuous,” Higgins recalled. “There were
so few producers/directors. Jim was known
around town as ‘The Closer.’ Despite popular
myth, models, back then, were much harder
to find than nowadays. Never mind porn was
much more profitable and there was MUCH less
competition. John Summers was the model ‘bird
dog’ par excellence. He could find them, wine
and dine them, but wasn’t very good at closing
the deal. For that you’d need to call in Jim. No
matter how long it took, Jim could almost always
talk them round. He frequently told me he was
a ‘trap door spider.’ He didn’t go out on the trail
hunting very much, but if something fell into his
trap. ...
“Jim used to tell a great story,” Higgins
continued. “I don’t know how much is mythical.
He’d shot a loop for Chuck Holmes down in
L.A. Chuck was in SFO. Turns out one of the
models was the son of a local district attorney.
When dad found out, he was not amused. Jim
got wind that some guys were coming over to
his house to seize the film. He called Chuck,
who was watching Dynasty and had given strict
instructions never to be interrupted while the
IN MEMORIAM | By Sharan Street
Studio 2000 founder John Travis, one of the pioneers of the gay
adult industry, passed away January 7 at his home in Shadow
Hills, Calif. He was 75 years old.
adult star Jeff Stryker, a longtime associate and friend of the
director. “He and Matt Sterling started selling 8mm loops out of
the trunk of their car in Florida.” (Travis is pictured above at left
with Stryker; photo courtesy Jeff Stryker.)
be said to have created the gay porn industry in California in the
1960s and ’70s. Travis worked closely with both men, serving
as cameraman for Sterling’s Huge Video and Holmes’ Falcon
Studios. According to an anecdote in the documentary Seed
Money, Travis was Holmes’ first collaborator and was a co-
founder of Holmes’ studio in 1970, when they started it out of
Holmes’ house in San Francisco.
S
Travis was “one of the founders of the adult industry,” said
Travis, along with the late Sterling and Chuck Holmes, could
Travis has 104 titles as a director listed on IAFD.com,
running from 1982 to 2009. But that apparently doesn’t scratch
the surface of his filmography. Many of his contributions
were uncredited. Travis worked on hundreds of films, Stryker
estimates. “I dare say over a thousand.”
Many of those movies were for Catalina Video, where Travis
worked before starting his own company. Channel 1 Releasing
co-founder and veteran director Chi Chi LaRue said, “We have
lost a true legend! I owe a lot of my start to this amazing man!
It’s an honor to have his work in the C1R library!”
In 1993 Travis co-founded Studio 2000 with Scott Masters,
the man behind Nova Video and also a director at Catalina. The
two noted at the time that their goal was to deliver the type of
high-quality, high-value productions they had made for other
companies.
In addition to making movies, Travis also made stars.
Paramount among these was Jeff Stryker, who reminisced about
how he came to work with Travis.
“He created everybody that was anybody,” Stryker said,
explaining this was “back in the days when directors were
starmakers.”
Stryker recalls that a photographer back in Illinois shot
Stryker at “a modeling interview thing” and sent them to Travis.
The photographer called back and said, “I’ve got a modeling job,
but it’s not exactly a normal one. … I negotiated my first deal
over the phone for one scene.”
Travis was “a key factor” in Stryker’s success. The director
told him, “‘I think I can do something with you that hadn’t been
done with any other model because they won’t follow the plan.’
He had a three-year plan that if I stuck to it and did only the
40 | AVN.com | 2.17
‘HE CREATED EVERYBODY THAT
WAS ANYBODY … BACK IN THE
DAYS WHEN DIRECTORS WERE
STARMAKERS.’
—JEFF STRYKER
highest-quality DVD players, when DVD just
came out.
“He lived his life like a king for decades and
decades,” Stryker said. And that was fitting for a
man whom Stryker calls “the true pioneer of all
of them.”
Over the years Stryker stayed in touch with
Travis, last communicating with him just three
days ago. “Anyone in the industry who knows
him loves him,” Stryker said. “I don’t think I’ve
ever heard anybody say a bad thing about him.”
In recent years his life was quieter. When
asked what Travis enjoyed most outside of
working, Stryker said, “He always had the top-
notch, highest-quality, biggest television screen.
And his idea of a perfect life would by lying
on the bed and eating whatever you want and
watching a movie. And he did that. In fact ... he
did that the last two and a half years of his life—
and loved it.”
Catalina Video founder William Higgins also
talked about his history with Travis (to whom
show was on. Jim called him anyway and was
duly chewed out. He said Chuck told him, ‘If
they come over just throw the film out the
back window, climb out after it, and run away.’
Apparently there was time to do neither and
Jim had to surrender the film. I don’t think, if
memory serves, Chuck was too pleased.”
Higgins continued, “There’s another story
that’s just too priceless to leave out. Back in
the day, Jim always said, ‘You’ve go to learn
how to read a Polaroid.’ Photos of prospective
models almost always arrived in those days in
the form of Polaroids. They had notoriously bad
quality. Hence, one had to be able to see through
the poor quality and lousy lighting to see the
potential of a model.
“A friend of Jim’s sent him the famous
Polaroid of Jeff Stryker. Jim first took it to Chuck
Holmes, who accordingly glanced at it briefly,
and dismissively threw it across the room at Jim.
Jim then brought the Polaroid to me and Matt
Sterling. And the rest, as they say, is history.”