Mutt

Jay is mostly right, thanks for the nice words Jay. Photographers have always been my favorite people in the industry - they are the 'underdogs', there is no industry without the guys who find and shoot these girls, softcore or hardcore, and while their job is harder and more frustrating than most in the industry they are on the low end of the payscale, some photogs like Steve Lightspeed, Spunky, Phil-Flash ,Rob from FTVGirls have had the wherewithal or right circumstances to make fortunes by not only doing the photography but also the web side, many photogs try going this route but fail, they came in too late or don't have the resources to do their own sites and still make enough to feed their families, photogs usually are not as young as the rest of the industry, most are mid thirties to fifties.

So I found Brian from Wanton's work on ATK galleries and I was very tired of lonely grunt work webmastering and because content was really what interested me, I love to critique content, I think I have a real eye for what good content is so I was a big fan of Wanton's photography and models, at the time i had no idea where he found them all, i didn't know much about agencies at the time, so I found Brian's contact information and emailed him and then spoke to him, I wanted to open up a content shop with Brian's work, thought it would go over well - miscommunication between me and Brian, a few days later Brian emailed me in a panic 'Are you planning to resell this stuff?' I said 'yeah i thought I explained that was what I was doing' he said 'noooooooooooo can't do that' - i was puzzled why, he said he owed his business success to Kim at ATK and didn't want to jeopardize that relationship with his content all over the place for 40 bucks a set licensed content. So i was disappointed.

I thought about it for a few days and talked to Brian again and if he wouldn't let me sell licensed content I suggested I could find customers for exclusive content and I'd just broker it for a %. So that's what I did until customers were paying late and Brian was freaking out on me - so I just started paying Brian directly and billing customers myself. Brian can be a cranky man but he does have a big heart - he told me about MarcoP who was also in L.A. and that he was a friend of his and if I had any customers who were looking for teen video than MarcoP was the man, even though it would cost Brian business later on. When he said MarcoP I was excited because when I was looking for Brian's contact info I was also looking for MarcoP since I was also a big fan of Socal Coeds, which at the time was probably one of the top 3 teen sites on the Net. I couldn't find any way to contact Marco - I did email the owner of SocalCoeds or his dad, i was told to 'fuck off' - which is fine, I don't think if I had a great exclusive content shooter I'd be passing on his contact info either to anybody who just emailed me - the 'fuck off' was pure punk behaviour and later on Andreas would reveal himself to be the punk I thought he was.

So for the next couple of years I became really good friends with both Marco and Brian and we all did well together. I certainly wasn't making a ton of money and I didn't need a ton of money - there's a limit to how much content two guys can shoot but we did ok. I kept my eyes open for other shooters I thought had talent and potential - guys not from L.A. because the L.A. girls I realized were becoming shot out so fast I didn't need them, Brian and Marco had L.A. covered, often shooting girls for their first time because both had good relationships with agents. I wanted to get a rep for having the cutest newest girls in the biz and pushed Brian to work with agents he didn't get along with because I now knew who had the best girls consistently - John Steven and Roy Garcia - the list of girls John and Roy have recruited is amazing - if both those guys had gone into the solo girl site biz instead of agenting they'd be rich men.

I was kind of dumb - but really more lazy - I did think about approaching those guys with that idea but L.A. people are very difficult to deal with and I didn't really want to be running paysites. I began posting pics on GFY and Oprano of mostly Brian's work and models - that's where I began to get this rep for finding/having really cute fresh girls. Many times I posted here to people who thought I was shooting these girls myself that I was not the photographer.

Anyway along the way here on GFY, I found Nikki Nevada aka Ashley Brookes posting - I had no interest in solo girl sites and really didn't know much about them other than through my friendship with MikeAI - I knew Steve was tearing it up with Tawnee and Brian was shooting a fair amount of content for Lightspeed's multimodel sites and the guys from SolarCash would hit me up looking for new solo girl site models. I also met Rico from Panchodog who was buying some teen foot fetish content from me and Brian.
I really wasn't aware about how wide my connections were becoming in the teen niche - i just kept getting new customers and chatting with them - learning new stuff from different perspectives. I had no interest in Nikki Nevada - other than the more I saw her posting pictures on GFY I thought she was the most amazing 'girl next door' nude model I'd seen so far. So being a fan of adult photography I had also had a small relationship with the man I consider to be the greatest glamour centerfold photog of them all - J Stephen Hicks, I grew up whacking off to Penthouse and remember his name on all my favorite Penthouse Pet centerfolds. I thought Ashley was that caliber. I expicitly told Ashley that I didnt want to piss off her webmaster who I didnt know anything about at the time - Aron from TNACash - I thought if Ashley got to be a Penthouse covergirl it would actually help her and Aron - it would have actually but Aron talked to several friends and thought it wasn't such a good idea. Stephen flipped out when I showed him Ashley's photos - but I told her if Aron said no then that's it. She asked me if she could get a rain check - would the offer still be available later on - in January - when her contract ran out i found out. Things unravelled fast between Aron and Ashley and I was caught in the middle of it - not what I had planned - all I wanted to do was a favor to the girl and to Stephen Hicks - I didn't even take the usual referral fee from Hicks, I had him give it to her. At the time I was in the camp that these girls are all exploited to some degree - that has changed a bit since then for me.

I still believe they'd all be better off if none of us ever approached them. I'm not like Donny though - I don't believe in religious boogeymen. Well now I was in a situation - I had a girl I was very fond of at loose ends - I didn't want to do a website with her, mostly because I didn't want anybody to say I was a model poacher and had stolen Ashley from TNACash and number 2 I really didn't want to be running a paysite for the next 5 years. Ashley also was concerned that if she did a new website that she'd be torn to shreds like another girl had been on here when she quit a site - Midwest Mandy. I told her if she did a site on her own - she had a bf at the time who was shooting her for things like the Miss GFY contest - that I didn't think people would give her much of a hard time. Plus she was probably the most popular models posting on here at the time - take a look at her original fansign thread - it is by far the longest in GFY history. She seemed to be heading off the adult Net and I was kind of relieved of that - then one day she popped up on ICQ and asked 'Hey how do you register a domain?' - i asked why and she said 'you said you woud help me' - and I knew where she was headed. I really didn't want this responsibility - I told her since I didn't want any part of her site that I'd help her/ advise her, hook her up with hosting, i'd do her design work for her because I actually do enjoy that but she'd be the one running her site. At the time I was pretty naive - I really thought Ashley would run with the ball and in a few months she'd be off and running on her own. I had no idea if she'd succeed or not - I made her promise to commit to doing 30 hours of work a week being a webmaster/model before I agreed to help her. I don't think she understood how serious I was about that - i repeated it a bunch of times. The road to AshleyBrookes.com was horrible - nothing went right - mostly on her end. And now I was feeling pressure that if it failed or never came to fruition I would come out of it looking like the failure or flake. So I stuck with it.

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