Ty Lattimore, president, CEO, founder, and sole owner of Atlanta-based Ty
Lattimore Entertainment, incorporated his production company one year ago after nine years as a porn star.
While modeling for gay magazines in his native Oakland, California, he “had rejected contacts about doing videos in L.A.,” but in 1997 accepted an offer from nearby San Francisco’s Brush Creek Media “to see what it was like.” He went on to make "quite a few movies” with Chocolate Drop, and had considerable hits in Glory Holes of New York for Oh Man! Studios, Black Men in Black for All Worlds Video, and Chained Heat for Vivid Man, making about 50 movies altogether.
“I turned down most movies I was offered, because I didn’t want to be overexposed, or because I was tired of traveling to New York and L.A. so often, or because I didn’t like the projects. Porn was never my main job. I was a paper-pusher for corporate America. I love Atlanta and finally settled down here.
"I figured, after being on fifty sets, I must have picked up something about moviemaking, but I call mine an ‘amateur’ company not only because so far I’m the only professional in the movies, but because I know how much I need to learn. I knew I wanted to cast everyday, nontraditional types, the kind you might actually meet. Because I was accessible through my fan club site and my column in Black Inches magazine, hundreds of men were always contacting me, asking how to get into the business. Most of my casts so far have come from right here in Atlanta. My actors improvise from suggestions made by me that come out of my own observations and experience.
"My first, A Little off the Top, took place in a barbershop. My biggest hit so far, Dial a Freak, was inspired by all the men I know who live in front of their computers. No Security Deposit shows sexual encounters among ordinary house-hunters.”
But he’s expanding the genres he explores. “Jacking: The Auditions, is an eight-man solo movie. People expect me, as a black man, to use only African-American casts. That’s not my agenda. Jockstrap Brothers will be all-black, but Jockstrap Twinkies will be all-white. A Latino player, Marco Ortiz, will appear in Break His Back End. We just want hot men of any race.
"My goal in 2006 is six new titles. One might be an orgy movie. I haven’t felt secure about directing something that complex before. My movies so far have been what you might call ‘black vanilla,’ but eventually we’ll get into more extreme things. I look forward to having a live-cam site now that I have a base of models, moving to HDTV, and to having streaming movies on my site when the budget allows. I chose not to have investors so that my choices would be my choices and my mistakes, my mistakes.”
Ordering info: 888-599-8326; [email protected]; or TyLattimore.net. Distributed by AVNS, 800-526-1663; AVNSinc.net.
Photo courtesy of TyLattimore.net
