LOS ANGELES—At last year’s AVN Awards Show, director Will Ryder thought he had a pretty good shot at a second consecutive win for Best Comedy with Bad Babes Inc. Directed by Ryder and produced by his longtime partner, Scott David, for Adam & Eve Pictures, it was just as ambitious and entertaining as their 2016 Best Comedy winner, Love, Sex & TV News.
And in Ryder’s estimation, Bad Babes Inc. was his strongest screenplay ever. That belief was confirmed when Bad Babes was honored for Best Screenplay—even though his hope for a Best Comedy win was dashed.
“I actually enjoyed winning Best Screenplay the best because I’ve never won it before, and I’ve been working on my writing intensely the last couple years. So for me personally that was a fantastic victory,” Ryder said.
But he did miss “the joy of sharing in an ensemble victory. When we win Best Comedy, it’s not just me or Scott winning. It’s the team, the crew.”
Ryder is no stranger to bringing his crew up on stage at the AVN Awards. Not Bewitched XXX, Not The Cosbys XXX and Grease XXX all won big at the AVN Awards, and Ryder’s movies have also been recognized for their music and marketing campaigns. And in 2010 he was AVN’s reigning Director of the Year—a fitting achievement for the man widely credited with reviving and modernizing porn parodies.
The music awards—Best Original Song for Not the Wizard of Oz XXX (X-Play/Pulse) and Best Soundtrack for Not Jersey Boys XXX: A Porn Musical (X-Play/Pulse)—are hardly surprising, considering Ryder’s entrée into porn.
At this year’s XRCO Awards, when the AVN Hall of Famer finally nabbed Best Comedy for Bad Babes Inc., he wearing all white. Performer Dakota Skye looked at him and said, “You look like you could be in the Backstreet Boys.” When Ryder responded, “I kind of was before,” Skye replied, “Yeah, right.”
In fact, that is right. Throughout his career, Ryder found success in two worlds: pop music and porn.
And there are two more facets to Ryder’s résumé: publicity and parties. He and David also founded publicity company All Play Media and started an annual tradition: the Heaven & Hell Halloween bash. Those who haven’t experienced this industry event can attend on October 27. And this year the party also is a celebration of his latest project for Adam & Eve Pictures: the paranormal thriller The Cursed XXX. (To see the trailer, click here.)
Above, cameras on the set of The Cursed XXX (Adam & Eve Pictures)
Though Ryder’s IMDB credits begin in 2004, his porn past is rooted in a much earlier time, back when he was known as Jeff Mullen.
“The first time I ever went to a porn company was Gourmet Video in the ’80s. I had met [director] Roy Karch; I was in California to be a musician. And my roommate in Hollywood made money on the side scoring music for porn videos, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world,” Ryder recalled. When he made a delivery for his roommate, Ryder was immediately drawn in. “I later went on to do dozens and dozens of movies for Roy and guys like John T. Bone and all these people who were the earlier video pioneers.”
That stint in California didn’t last. “I didn’t realize how stiff the competition was out here,” Ryder recalled. “I was not prepared. I was good, but I was a little immature and I wasn’t really ready for it. So I moved back to Milwaukee and continued doing music for Roy and sending it by FedEx.”
Ryder recalls an early on-the-set experience in California. “I was fascinated. I couldn’t believe it. This guy and this girl were having sex so good that I was, like, ‘That’s how sex is supposed to be? Oh my god, that is amazing.’ And they took a break and she came out … I started talking to her, shyly, and asked her, ‘How long have you been dating this guy?’ She said, ‘Dating? I just met him this morning.’ I literally couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that they had just met and they were fucking with such perfection.”
After laughing at the memory, Ryder turned to more serious matters. “I’ve been around the periphery of the business I think longer than 95 percent of the people. I saw it when it was illegal. … There were a lot of people getting arrested. I love the perspective I have on the industry. The girls of today have no clue this was going on. It should be mandatory to watch Woody Harrelson in The People vs. Larry Flynt.”
After leaving L.A. to head back to the Midwest, Ryder moved to Minneapolis during Prince’s Purple Rain days (“I never knew there was a place 10 degrees colder than Milwaukee”). Getting established was a struggle—he shoveled snow while his musician roommate sold his blood for the rent—but eventually he met the musical director for R&B artist Alexander O’Neal. “I went and auditioned for his band and I got the gig. Traveled the world playing before Gladys Knight and the Pips. My whole life had changed.”
Later, he got into working with boy bands. He was original keyboard player for the Backstreet Boys, but he didn’t think they were going to make it. Then he took a job with All-4-One, famous for the Grammy Award-winning hit single “I Swear,” and later went on to manage a boy band called 3Deep. Though the band was big in Canada and Europe, 3Deep couldn’t get a record deal in the United States. Perhaps it was the bandmates were soap opera stars, Ryder mused, noting wryly, “Now, you can’t get a record deal if you’re not on TV.”
Through all of this, Ryder spent a lot of time on the road. He was a hired-gun keyboard player for dozens of acts, including the barely legal Brandy. He estimates he’s been to Japan 16 times; he recalls playing a private show for the Sultan of Brunei and appearing on the Tonight show and Arsenio Hall. “Never living an adult life,” Ryder said, he did his share of “liquor and booze and strippers. Never into drugs. Just into drinking. Mostly beer. And fornicating. Women all over the place. … When I got the opportunity to get into porn, it was an easy step.”
He took that step with then-hair stylist Scott David, whom he met through TV and movie actor Eddie Cibrian, who was also a member of 3Deep. “So I sat in his chair and he said, ‘What do you do?’ And I said, ‘I’m in the music business but I’m thinking of getting into the porn business.’ And he said, ‘Oh everyone’s a multimillionaire in that business, right?’ And I said, ‘I think so. It’s easy. How hard is that?’ So he put up $5,000, I put up $5,000. … We were so naïve, we shot 10 scenes in one day, hard and soft. … And we proceeded to make the worst movie ever made. That’s how I met Scott.”
Next they tried shooting two movies in Brazil. “We were down to our third strike. We lost money on the first movie; we lost money on Brazil.”
Then Ryder got hired as a publicist for New Sensations. “I said, ‘I’m going to go work for a company—I’ll learn the business and then we’ll reconvene.’ So when we reconvened, we reconvened as a PR company. When I left New Sensations as director of marketing to start All Play Media, they became our first client.”
Throughout, Ryder continued to keep one foot in the music business as manager of a funk and R&B band called the Brothers Johnson. Started by brothers George and Louis Johnson and produced by Quincy Jones in 1976, the Grammy Award-winning band broke apart and reunited in 2002. Though Louis passed away in 2015, George has continued to tour. In fact, Ryder and Johnson just came back from touring Jamaica, Cozumel and Atlanta.
Above, George Johnson and Will Ryder
But his main focus back in the early 2000s was on adult entertainment. “We were down to our third strike and this girl walked into our office and I looked at her and I said, ‘You know, you kind of look like you could be Britney Spears’ cousin.’ And that night I couldn’t sleep, I was tossing and turning, and I bolted up in bed and said, ‘Britney Rears!’ And I called up Scott … at 4 in the morning. The next day I said, ‘We’ve got to do a spoof of Britney Spears.’ And Scott’s been cutting my hair ever since.”
After getting their bearings with three more Britney Rears parodies and various Hustler series (Barely Legal, Beaver Hunt), Ryder and David were ready for another turn at bat. They pitched Not the Bradys XXX to Adam & Eve Pictures and Vivid, but were turned down. Finally they produced it under their jointly owned studio, X-Play, with distribution by Hustler. Asked if that was their most lucrative movie, Ryder replied, “Yes and no. We made more money off of this movie than any other, even though we never got a broadcast deal. That was because there was implied incest with Greg and Marcia having sex—even though it was a dream sequence. … Now if you don’t have incest in a movie, you don’t have a movie. Everybody’s fucking their uncle and their mother and their brother and their father.”
“When the first two seconds of the Not the Bradys XXX trailer played on the massive video screens during the AEE Vegas show, everybody—and I do mean everybody—stopped dead in their tracks to look up and watch it,” Ryder recalled. “We knew we might have a mega hit on our hands, but no clue we had created a game-changer.”
He continued, “I have a soft spot for The Bradys XXX. … I really don’t think the parody explosion happens without The Bradys. I don’t think it happens. That’s a mouthful to say. … It influenced a whole generation of porn. I realized how big the parody explosion was when every company started doing it. But what really convinced him was when Jules Jordan took out an ad that said, ‘No parodies here—only real porn.’ I said to Scott, ‘Look at this; we are even influencing Jules Jordan.’”
Above, Scott David getting Chad Diamond ready for Not Jersey Boys XXX (X-Play/Pulse)
While producing parodies, Ryder said, “I still kept my foot in the music by doing my own scores.” To see these two worlds intersect, check out “Behind the Music” on Not the Cosbys XXX, in which the director shows how he created a theme song that is “very reminiscent” but doesn’t infringe on any music in the original show. The segment is one of ten separate items on the extras menu—a throwback to the days when X-Play would produce double discs, packed with interviews, blooper reels and audition footage. The lack of such features in DVD releases is also attributable to shrinking budgets in the age of piracy. Released in 2009, Not the Cosbys XXX was part of the porn parody heyday, Ryder said, noting it is considered the industry’s biggest-selling interracial movie.
That heyday came to end not so much because of changing tastes but because of changing budgets. Not only were DVD sales falling, but also there were fewer broadcast deals to make as the industry consolidated under fewer companies. And producing a parody that looks and feels authentic is an expensive proposition. “We used to shoot movies over nine, ten days back when the gold rush was happening. … In the old days we used to shoot eight, nine, ten takes of each line. I remember shooting M*A*S*H and working with Alec Knight on set to become Frank Burns. ‘Give me that Frank Burns exactly the way it should be.’ And he nailed it, but it took time. Money means time, and time is what it takes to make good product.”
Above, from left, James Bartholet, Mac Turner, Seth Gamble, Nina Hartley, Maddie O'Reilly, Gary Lee and Dick Chibbles in Not the Wizard of Oz XXX (X-Play/Pulse).
X-Play’s ultimate rush job was the 27-hour shooting schedule for Not the Wizard of Oz XXX, which nonetheless garnered Ryder a Best Director – Parody win. “We decided to make The Wizard of Oz for X amount of dollars so we had to find people who would be willing to work for less than their normal rate. When you do things like that you get the reputation of being cheap, and or money hungry or greedy, and all the things that were cast at us. We could have NOT made the movie and then nobody would have worked that day, nobody would have won awards and nobody would have gotten up on stage.” (Click here for a trailer of the movie.)
Contemplating what now seems like a bygone era, Ryder mused, “All in all, it was a fun run—and like the great producer Jerry Weintraub once said, ‘Don’t get too used to anything because every ten years somebody comes along and resets the table.’ But what a run.”
To mix things up, Ryder decided to leave parodies behind and work on original screenplays. “The first one was Love, Sex and TV News,” Ryder said. “My train of thought was that since parodies were dying, I wanted to work on my skills.”
Above, Ryder with the cast of Not the Jersey Boys XXX (X-Play/Pulse). From left, Chad White, Eric John, Chad Diamond, Tommy Pistol, Ryder, Roy Karch and James Bartholet.
This year, Ryder switched gears again. “We made a very fun movie with The Cursed XXX—completely different than anything I’ve ever done.”
He elaborated, “The reason I did the paranormal movie was because Adam & Eve said, ‘Let’s do something different.’ … I picked the genre I was most afraid of. I’m afraid to watch them. No thank you—I’m scared. I went after my fears. A drama, a paranormal mystery—what I never had any experience at.”
To get into the right mindset, he had to watch scary movies. “The Ring, Insidious. A couple of times I ran out of the office,” he said. Ryder expressed his delight with the cast, especially Riley Reid in the lead. And he made a surprising choice when he cast fellow AVN Award-winning director Brad Armstrong as the manager of a cam house that is terrorized by Reid’s character. “He’s the Tom Hanks of porn,” Ryder said. “This guy, he’s pretty much the shit. I fell in love with him on the first day of shooting and I told his girlfriend that I thought I was in love with him and she said, ‘That happens.’ He turned out to be perfect for the role. … He knows exactly what’s going on. Brad Armstrong anticipated everything I did. … He’s got no fucking ego. So everything that Brad gets in life, he deserves.”
Other Ryder favorites also appear in the movie. “Kat Dior, she’s a go-to girl. But Sarah Vandella’s my go-to girl, really. And every once in a while I get Misty Stone, who I think is one of the best actresses porn has ever seen. … I gave her her first acting role as Denise Huxtable in Not the Cosbys. One of my favorites of all time.”
Above, Brad Armstrong and Sarah Vandella in The Cursed XXX (Adam & Eve Pictures)
Those names are just the short list of favorites that would no doubt include many other leading ladies of his parodies, including Hillary Scott and Sunny Lane. “The truth of the matter is that I fall in love with every single girl who walks on my set for at least an hour. I really do. I love every one of them. There’s very few that I thought weren’t worthy of being there. Some of the girls who are just it in for the money, you can tell right away. But you have to love the deed, what you’re doing.”
What he’s focusing on now is his writing. “I wrote on instinct; I didn’t write on any known form. … I didn’t have any architectural blueprint on how this business works,” he said.
So the porn parody king began studying—hard. “I started taking classes; I started reading books. I took it really seriously to get better at writing. … I almost feel like I’ve gone back to college.”
This informal course of study in screenwriting has produced results. “It’s improved my writing. The next thing I write is going to be even better. I want to be much more than just the Judd Apatow of porn,” he said.
Given his success in pop music, does Ryder ever think about taking a crack at another form of mainstream entertainment?
The director admits he’d love to try something new, and he believes that his work in adult would be an asset. “It’s the same skill to write a parody as it is to be in a TV writer’s room,” he said. “You’re following the template. You’re writing a new script.”
But making any jump into mainstream would be tough. “The politics are ten times as fierce,” he said, and “the porn thing will wipe you out.” He joked, “If anybody in the movie business asks what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years, I’ve been working for UPS or loading trucks for Walmart.”
