The next time you hook up online, you might end up with a sexy, successful business in addition to a good time. Just ask Dire Callahan and Jim Rhatt, who parlayed an online encounter into Steel Mill Media, a fast-growing fetish studio that specializes in extreme bondage play with muscle hunks.
"Dire does all the Web stuff, but we met playing," says Rhatt, who directs and edits. "We're both into bondage, we set up a play date online, and then after a while we were like ‘You do Web and I do video and editing!' So we were covering the bigger part of that business with our own talents, so we got started and have been going ever since."
Founded in 2005, Steel Mill intentionally started slow - and as a hobby. But member site BoundMuscle.com started to take off, and when Can-Am Productions and Zeus Studios hired Steel Mill to make Takedown - a gut-punching, ball-torturing, bondage bundle of aggression - things took off. The studio also released its first film, Bound Muscle 1: The Gauntlet, and its solid reputation - built on creating original, high-quality content with superb technical skill that puts the typical grainy fetish stuff to shame - helped it snare top talent.
"We've been fortunate to have some of [the performers] actually contact us.... I also did some editing for Falcon a little while back, and there are a couple models there I know are into BDSM as well," Rhatt says, adding he likes to find models willing to explore their limits. "We interview our actors meticulously to see what they like. And we plan scenes around that, so we never know what a bondage scene is actually going to be like until we've fully cast it."
Rhatt says they let the doms decide the course of action ("A true sub really doesn't want to know what's going to happen; they just want to know that they're going to be safe."). Steel Mill had already worked with Derek da Silva - who hit the big time at Titan - and was able to get him back for current hit The Mechanic, along with Robert Black, a connection it made through Zeus. The film features electrical cord stimulation, knife play, pissing, bondage with tools - and a belt sander used on Black's cock and balls.
"It deals with the dynamic of what BDSM players do to surprise each other, capturing the adrenaline and the fear. If you do BDSM with the same person all the time, it stops being BDSM and just ends up being ‘Oh, we tie each other up,' because you don't have that element of surprise or fear," Rhatt says. "There has to be some kind of mental connection."
Callahan stresses that it's important to relay a back story, something he finds lacking in a lot of porn. "We make our movies much more like feature films than traditional adult fare, and I think that there's really a market for that," he says. "You can't just slap on leather and call it BDSM. There's a synergy that really needs to be there or it just looks fake. And what I like to stress is, even with our BDSM, we know what's real and fake, and what we have to fake. But we try to make it as real as possible, because people that watch our stuff all the time know what's real and what's fake."
Callahan notes he wants to do a military-themed film, and they are also experimenting with the idea of interactive DVDs, where viewers can "become" the dom and pick the punishment. The studio aims for four releases a year, using Marina Pacific for physical distribution and Maleflixxx for streaming. BoundMuscle features fresh content (later compiled onto DVD), partly serving as an audition process for potential models. Steel Mill itself aims to add a social networking component, and is also looking to develop steel gear and other leather/bondage products. And with Tober Brandt headlining the studio's latest feature - Stalker, which lands in September - Steel Mill has hit its stride.
Both men are truly hands-on, testing out their techniques before filming them: "As a rule, there are very few things that I as a dom do to others that I haven't done to myself first," says Callahan with a laugh. "We want to keep it as safe as possible, so we try almost everything out beforehand.... Both Jim and I are both very experienced in BDSM, so if there's something to be done, we've probably already done it."
Well...not everything. For the next movie, Rhatt has something special in mind: "I just tried this last week - we want to actually weld a guy to a table. This guy who makes steel stuff had this idea, so I tried it with him and it was awesome. A little scary, but it was really cool.... He took a chain and welded me to a table, and it was awesome."
CONTACT: SteelMillMedia.com; BoundMuscle.com; [email protected].
GayVN
- By
