Page 32 - AVN August 2018

BUSINESS
SAVAGE
SPIRITS
Jack The Zipper, Lexington Steele
and Nikki Hearts explore
the art of porn
OUT TO LAUNCH | By Mark Kernes
you’ve begun reading this article, but
frankly, the best way to begin to get a real
understanding of its subject matter is to
It might seem a bit of a detour, now that
visit this site: NewSavages.com.
OK, you’re back. Suitably impressed?
Pretty spiffy for a couple of veterans from
the adult industry—one director with a
whole 15 movies under his belt, and an
actor/director/former Wall Street broker with more
than 170 directing credits, and another 900-plus as a
performer.
The director and creator of the site is Jack The
Zipper, whose works Squealer, Blacklight Beauty and
Stuntgirl 1 all won AVN Awards for Best Feature
and himself for Best Director, and most of the rest
at least had nominations. The actor/director is the
multi-award-winning Lexington Steele, now ready to
open his new site on NewSavages.com.
So ... take two staggeringly creative guys, put them
together in one coffee shop, and what do you get?
We’ll let them tell a bit of it:
“Lex is my neighbor,” Zipper (as he prefers to be
called) starts. “He lives down the road from me, and
we just started having coffee at The Coffee Spot all
summer; we would sit there for hours and we would
talk about conspiracy and business—I mean he used
to work on Wall Street and he’s from New Jersey,
I’m from New York, so we started hanging out and
talking.”
“I guess I’d call it cerebral conversation,” Steele
jumps in, “and that’s hard to find, too, because a lot
of people that are aware of certain things that require
research and study, very often you can’t share that
with someone because it might fly over their head
if they’re unfamiliar with certain things that are
happening or certain things that you have to search
to find out about, so our conversations can range
from the metaphysical to the triple d.p. that the
latest hot porno chick just did.”
When they began talking, Steele was in a state of
transition because he was no longer directing scenes
released by Evil Angel on DVD and by Gamma
Entertainment online. Since there would be no new
content coming to his Gamma site, he needed a new
arrangement for his main site, LexingtonSteele.com.
Said Steele, “I saw what Jack is doing, and what he’s
putting together makes a lot of sense.”
“What he’s putting together,” of course, is in
part NewSavages.com, and its purpose is to be a
go-to place for adult performers to host their official
websites, merchandise sales and clip stores, free
from some of the complexity and regulation they
get from other similar sites. And they’ve just hired a
32 | AVN.com | 8.18
director of artistic relations—Nikki Hearts—who can make that happen.
“The original goal of New Savages was taken from the idea that performers should have the ability and
opportunity to have control of their own website, of what they want to do, and then recognizing what holds
them back from that and being able to provide them with the resources they need,” Hearts explained. “So our
entire goal is to make it a smooth, seamless, easy but productive process to make a fully functioning website
that they can have constant income from, and to fully have creative control over. It’s really driven by the needs
of performers.”
“Site memberships are sort of on the wane, so yeah, that model is available,” Zipper noted. “Products come
and go with the public, but the clip store model and the à la carte vibe seem to be where the public’s heads are
at these days.”
Hearts agrees—sort of.
“The way we have it set up is, each person’s site is fully customizable,” she explained, “so you could make
your site a clip-driven store, which is, buy a clip and you get a private download so there’s no streaming; it’s a
private download to own. And then there’s also the option of a membership site if they have enough content.
We want to make it as open as possible, so some of our performers will be offering everything from clips
to Skype shows to Snapchat to custom videos; you can buy all that, and then everyone will also be having a
tangible site, or part of the site, for merch like T-shirts, postcards, even magazines if they’ve been in them. I’m
working with all these different design companies to get a thing going where we can just pump out the merch,
get everything smooth.”
She added, “We’re also trying to keep everything nice and elevated, more than just an average clip store. We
want everything to be artistic and have put a lot of effort into that. If you check out any of our sites, even our
NewSavages.com site, it doesn’t scream ‘porn.’ They made a great start to that website, and with that, we plan
to develop that a little bit more, make it a little easier to understand.”
“WE WANT EVERYTHING TO BE ARTISTIC AND
HAVE PUT A LOT OF EFFORT INTO THAT. IF
YOU CHECK OUT ANY OF OUR SITES, EVEN
OUR NEWSAVAGES.COM SITE, IT DOESN’T
SCREAM PORN.”
—NIKKI HEARTS
One of Hearts’ projects is to try to attract some big-name actresses to make New Savages the home for their
personal sites.
“At first, New Savages signed a handful of performers, made some websites just to kind of give it a test
run, see how everything works,” Hearts stated. “Right now, we have Riley Nixon, Kaylani—you know, when
I applied for the position, I didn’t even know Riley had a site, and she’s a good friend of mine, so I said to
them, ‘Obviously, some marketing needs to be done.’ My idea when I took the position was, beyond Riley,
we have some performers who have sites, probably have five or six including Kaylani; we have Savana Styles,
Lexington’s wife, a few other people, but those sites just got up and running and then came to a halt because
there was no one to manifest things happening, help with marketing.