Nxt Lvl, Mark Wood’s new production company, is aptly named: it represents a new career plateau for this tireless shooter and performer. He has made an exclusive distribution deal with JM Productions, which also distributes the LeWood Productions of his wife Francesca Le.
His first Nxt Lvl line will be Rated T for Teen. The first volume will ship the last week of January.
After nearly six years in the business and an estimated 1200 sex scenes, Wood says he had come to feel like the Rodney Dangerfield of porn. The work was there but not the recognition. But with the JM deal it seems he is finally getting the respect he deserves.
For three years at Legend Video, Wood was a workhorse, shooting six series, three releases a month. Here’s what he cranked out: 16 volumes of Try A Teen (co-directed with Brandon Iron), ten volumes of Teens Goin’ Wild, 17 volumes of All About Ass, 11 Bangin’ in the Hoods, 10 Foot Traffics, seven volumes each of Rapid Fire and Interracial Nation and two of Fresh and Pure (a brief re-titling of the teen series). He was the main male talent in all of those four to five-scene videos, except for Interracial, which had all black men. And concurrently he was performing in other people’s movies—lots of them, sometimes two in one day.
Wood has nothing negative to say about Legend. “They treated me real nice, they always paid. I had limited budgets but I got to do what I wanted.” The only reason he left, he says, was the chance to own his own product, which JM’s Jeff Steward gave him. It’s the same deal as his wife has. “We own all the rights,” he says, “Jeff distributes it and gets a percentage.”
For Nxt Lvl he would like to do an interracial line, a series of two girl-one guy scenes, and perhaps something along the line of the Rapid Fire he created for Legend: ten girls in short scenes. He wants to do “as much as Jeff will let me do. The more product you have, the more catalog, the better off you are.” He’ll release one a month, simultaneous DVD/VHS
The JM deal allows Mark to work as much as he wants as talent for other producers, which he intends to do, pending breaks in his own production schedule. He spent the last two weeks of October in Prague, performing for Zero Tolerance. He was the only American talent producer Greg Alves took along for a marathon video shoot, and he got to work alongside Eurostud legends like Claudio Meloni and David Perry.
“I did a scene every day,” he says. “The girls there are just incredible! Beautiful—not necessarily better performers, just beautiful.” It was his second working trip to Europe, and he was glad for the respite from the work pressures and gossip-mongering of Porn Valley.
“I missed my wife,” he says, “but not the rest.”
