CHATSWORTH, Calif. - Scott Taylor, the owner of New Sensations and Digital Sin, isn't immediately thought of as an innovator and overachiever, unlike some of his more high-profile competitors, but that's OK with him. He remains low-key by choice.
Though his accomplishments have been largely untrumpeted, they are the reason his two-faceted company is among the industry's ongoing success stories. Once you start totting them up, you get an impressive list.
A boyish-looking 44, Taylor is emphatic about only one thing: the fact that he innovated the interactive one-girl video. "I was definitely the first, no matter what anyone says," he asserted. That breakthrough was Virtual Sex with Jenna Jameson, and it first appeared on CD-ROM when Taylor was president of Digital Playground (a company he started but later sold all his shares in).
Way ahead of his time, Taylor insisted on showing women's orgasms, even when told by distributors that no one wanted to see them. ("I want to see them," he'd reply, "so that's someone.")
He pioneered with streaming content on the Internet - New Sensations now has "72 to 76" different sites.
He mined the young girl genre more effectively than anyone outside of Larry Flynt with lines like Naughty College School Girls, Young as They Cum and Sex With Young Girls and Fresh Outta High School.
He produced one of the top-selling rap/porn crossovers, Groupie Love, in collaboration with megastar 50 Cent. It won AVN's Best Interactive Video 2004.
He ignited the monster cock craze with the distribution of Hush Hush Entertainment and their "Blackzilla" discovery Shane Diesel.
He produced a couple of big budget features that became instant classics - Dark Angels and Dark Angels 2 - and has had long runs with three different contract girls: Jewel De'Nyle, Carmen Luvana and, currently, Ashlynn Brooke. While running the company, he's put in time as one of the hardest working porn shooters, scoring frequent AVN nominations as Best Director - Non-Feature (usually as "Tyrone Shuz" and more recently as "Tyler Scott").
Taylor got into adult in the late '80s as a salesman for Fred Hirsch's AVC, then soon struck out on his own with a one-stop distribution company, National Video Supply. In 1993, he decided to start New Sensations. "I had about $20,000 to do it," he recalled. "I was like, ‘Do I build a pool, or do I start a company?' I started the company."
Taylor built up a thriving business in CD-ROMs (then, all the rage) for which he largely licensed product. He was among the first to jump on the DVD bandwagon, creating Digital Sin as New Sensations' DVD division. But studios preferred to make their own DVDs, rather than license, so "we split Digital Sin into its own company," releasing original product.
"That's how there came to be two names for one company. It is one company, but as far as the marketplace, we brand it separately," Taylor said. The difference between the two is that Digital Sin carries somewhat harder-edged material.
Taylor said the "idea that propelled" New Sensations was his Video Virgins series: "I came out with about nine a year. I shot it in my warehouse where my one-stop was, at night. Did it with two cameras and tried to capture real orgasms from women. We did the masturbation, the striptease, the interview, the whole process."
His passion for women's orgasms rolled over into the all-girl line The 4-Finger Club (which he may revive) and the solo series Screaming Orgasms.
A turning point for the company came in 1998 when Taylor made two important signings: Peter North for the North Pole series and Jewel De'Nyle as his first contract girl.
"It depleted all the money I had," he said, "but proved to be an absolutely fantastic investment. Jewel became very popular, and Peter's North Pole line was one of the most successful we had."
Through the years he's had distribution arrangements with various companies, most notably Shane's World Studios, which later "left the nest" and went out on its own.
Last year he beefed up his roster with two new imprints: Vengeance XXX and Greedy Video.
Vengeance, which focuses on all-black and interracial, came about when Taylor saw a gap in the market for such product, noticing that the few companies doing it well were selling big. It was an instant success, fueled by the distribution of Hush Hush Entertainment and their Shane Diesel Blackzilla titles.
Hush Hush moved on to distribution by Shane's World, but Diesel has remained with Taylor as an exclusive performer/director. His new Vengeance lines include. She Only Takes Diesel, MILFs Take Diesel and, for Digital Sin, Face Full of Diesel.
Taylor calls Greedy "reality porn - the latest term for Internet porn, where it's somewhat real, as, ‘Oh I'm walking down the street, and I just happened to find this girl who'll come back to my apartment and fuck,' or whatever." Greedy's top lines are Fuck for Dollars and I Film Myself.
Taylor recently started a new distribution deal with Lesbian Provocateur, a European line of all-girl Internet content, an offshoot of the 21st Sextury label.
Taylor currently ships 24 titles a month on his combined imprints, including his I Luv comp lines. MILFs, teens, lesbians, big butts, big breasts, sex machines (the Sybian), in addition to black and interracial, are some of the genres he exploits.
He is very high on Ashlynn Brooke, whose contract he recently renewed: "I kind of swore off contract girls after Carmen Luvana, who was fantastic. I figured they didn't get any better than that. Then I saw Ashlynn.
"She's been tremendous for us. This is the girl who embodies what New Sensations is." Her biggest showcase so far has been the Ashlynn Goes to College line, and Taylor plans to release the much anticipated My Plaything Ashlynn Brooke this year.
The My Plaything line, for Digital Sin, has been one of Taylor's strongest, most consistent sellers. The most recent release is My Plaything Brea Bennett directed by Eddie Powell.
As a director, Taylor still maintains a schedule of shooting once a week. "There was a time when it was Jonni Darkko and myself releasing all the titles in the company. I would shoot about 50 percent of what we did," he said.
The series closest to his heart, after Video Virgins, was Erotica XXX, which earned several AVN nominations. Very successful for years, it faded somewhat in today's heavily niched-out market.
"We have to be more aware of what the Web wants, what traffic wants," Taylor said, "and they seem to be very genre-specific." He doesn't want to stop shooting "really pretty girls and really great sex" just because it doesn't fit into a particular niche. So he's going to re-start the line under the title Pure Passion. He also plans to direct, from his own script, an ambitious big budget feature project, sometime in the near future.
After eight years on the Internet, he remains "very focused on our Web presence," more so now than ever. At NewSensations.com, he said, "We offer photos and streaming content and everything a membership site should have. You join one site, and you get access to multiple sites."
"As the market shifts, our focus is to put our material on the Web first, before it makes it to DVD. We're revamping all of our Websites in order to reflect that, to be able to say, ‘We can shoot a girl one day and put her on the Web the next.' Because that's what our competition is doing. We can't afford to be two months later because we're waiting for the DVD release."
As a manufacturer who rode the crest of the DVD wave, he sees the future as "not as clear cut" as when DVD replaced VHS as a superior delivery format.
"It's evident that as time marches on," he said, "material is not going to be delivered in a hard medium; it's going to be delivered through the Internet."
That, he added, carries its own headaches in the form of means of delivery and piracy through unauthorized file-sharing.
VOD, according to Taylor, is something "we need to get a better handle on. At this point, we are giving the lion's share of our profit to the VOD vendor, but we have all the cost of making the movie. I want to get much more in charge of my own product and my own VOD and get more in the model of ‘we sell it to them, and they make whatever money on top of it' - a more traditional kind of distribution model than is currently done."
It seems that Taylor has by no means run out of innovative ideas for whatever the future brings for the adult market.
For more on New Sensations/Digital Sin visit NewSensations.com, call 818.773.4999 or 800.748.6767 or e-mail [email protected] and [email protected].
