Oh those crazy…uh…Lake brothers.
You know who they are, they know who they are, most everyone knows who they are, but such is the contrast of their personalities—one of them didn’t want to be identified by his real name for this story; the other couldn’t give two shits. It’s this very contrast that helped the, uh, Lake brothers revive the once dead Homegrown Video and transform it into the successful entity that it is today.
But before we get into all that, let’s first try to identify these guys without really identifying them. One will go by his porn name, Tim Lake (haha…get it?). The other prefers to use his actual first name, followed by the same porn surname—Moffitt Lake.
I could explain, but the conversation that led to Moffit’s decision to remain incognito sums it up better than I ever could.
Tim (to Moffitt): What are you uptight about? Your name is already out there in print.
Moffitt: How am I going to be mayor of San Diego with this coloring my past? I just prefer not.
Tim: It’s just because your girl is going to flip on you.
Moffitt: No (he says incredulously). That’s not true.
Inquisitive writer (to Moffitt): Your girl doesn’t know what you do?
Moffitt: No. She’s my fiancee and she knows, but I wear the pants in the family, let’s get that straight.
Tim (to writer): He wears the pants, but he also wears the panties. He’s got them in a bunch.
[Laughter]
Tim and Moffitt occupy two different sides of the fence when it comes to their personalities, but they share a brotherly bond that’s enabled them to parlay their differences into building a strong business.
“I’m a grasshopper and Moffitt is an ant,” Tim says. “I’m good at going out and making relationships and finding opportunities. I’m good at the craziness that goes along with content production. Moffitt is very grounded and sensible. He’s good at holding everything down while I go and try to scour the blue skies for opportunity.”
“[Tim] is the guy that will appear on “ABC News,” “20/20,” or HBO, and my job is to keep things running smoothly and take care of our customers, whether they are mail-order-or wholesale buyers,” Moffitt says. “That’s what I concentrate on.”
To really understand the Brothers Lake, you have to go back to Connecticut, where it all began…
Truckin’
Tim and Moffitt were born to East Coast suburbanites—their father was an IBM executive and their mother was a college swimming coach. The boys attended boarding school but took two wildly different paths to the industry. Moffitt was a competitive swimmer through college, which brought him to Stanford’s prestigious program. Tim, meanwhile, found something else to occupy his time: the Grateful Dead. Moffitt spent his time in the pool while Tim toured with his favorite band, peddling hippie wares to make his way.
“We both started our rebellions at different times,” Tim says. “Back in high school I became a crazed Grateful Dead fan and started going on tours all over the country. That’s where I think I learned everything about community building and guerilla marketing. I was sitting out there selling silks and tie-dyes.”
“I never had time to do any of that fun stuff, which led to me being more disciplined and straight-laced,” Moffitt says. “[Tim] is the more creative one and I’m the more nuts-and-bolts guy.”
Tim, amused by his brother’s statement, chuckles in the background.
Both brothers eventually moved out west. While Moffitt attended Stanford, Tim came to Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., and continued his love affair with The Dead. It was at a stop in Seattle where he met his wife, and soon-to-be performing partner, Alyssa.
Two days later she was living with him in Claremont.
The couple soon moved to Venice Beach and discovered they both enjoyed watching amateur porn tapes. At the end of each tape was a message: “Make $20 a minute. Send in your home sex videos.” And so began the saga.
Tim Lake is born
Turns out that Tim and Alyssa’s favorite movies were produced by Homegrown Video, which was founded in 1981. They started submitting their homemade sex romps to the company so they could afford to see more Dead shows.
Although they loved amateur stuff, Tim and Alyssa became part of the L.A. porn scene as well, appearing in professional features for companies like the Odyssey Group and LBO and working with directors John Leslie and Paul Thomas.
Meanwhile, Moffitt had graduated college, was living in San Francisco and, “not doing a whole lot of productive things.”
Moffitt would occasionally visit his crazy older brother, but he wasn’t down with the porn scene. Problem was, Tim’s loft often doubled as a set, so Moffitt had difficulty staying away.
“I was scared of the whole concept, so I would sequester myself up in the TV room. I didn’t want to meet these scary people from another planet, but with each successive time, I would get closer and closer to the set,” Moffitt says. “I stood in on a Max Hardcore shoot with Tom Byron, where I played the jilted boyfriend. That was fun, but then we came back to do the sex scene—it was some Asian girl and either Tim and Tom or Max and Tom doing a DP with me holding the C-light. That was sort of a raw immersion into the whole thing.”
Everything was right, but somewhere between endless jams of “Casey Jones” and “Friend of the Devil,” Tim and Alyssa stopped receiving checks from Homegrown.
Eleven years after its creation, Homegrown Video had filed for bankruptcy and the company was put up for sale.
“We were in the L.A. scene and we started to do some pro adult features, but our heart and soul was still in amateur,” Tim says. “When we found out Homegrown was for sale, we had learned enough about the industry to know that the real opportunity was in distribution.”
So Tim and his brother went to their mother to borrow the money to buy it. Mother, of course, had no idea one of her sons was slinging wood on camera—fittingly, perhaps, since Alyssa had discovered that she was pregnant.
“First we had to tell her what we were doing and that conversation was pretty funny,” Tim says. “‘Well, Mom, we have some news: We work in the porn biz and Alyssa is pregnant.’ She said, ‘Alyssa’s pregnant—ahhhh!’ A couple days later she says, ‘So, what about this porn thing?’ But she was cool. She got a kick out of it—she likes being able to tell all of her snooty, blue-blood, East Coast friends that she had sons in the porn business.”
The purchase of Homegrown was finalized in 1993.
The Lakes, along with their mother, acquired a porn company but didn’t really know how to run it. Tim and Alyssa knew their way around the industry, but admittedly, none of them had any real entrepreneurial experience.
Not to mention, Homegrown was broke, and years of mismanagement and shady business dealings had given the company a bad reputation in the industry.
Its fate was now in these relatively inexperienced hands. The brothers handled every aspect of the business from sweeping the warehouse to cold calling to shipping, working for little or no income. After one year, the Lakes had second thoughts.
“No one would buy our products. Every major distributor literally told us, ‘fuck you.’ They’d hear the word Homegrown and slam the phone down,” Tim says. “The only way we kept the lights on was because we had the mailing list we bought in bankruptcy. We were squeaking by on those core customers.”
That’s when they essentially decided to start over.
Homegrown’s Rebirth
In 1995, Tim and Moffitt founded Xplor Media, taking popular lines from Homegrown and repackaging them under the Xplor Media banner. It wasn’t the reinvention of the wheel, but free of the Homegrown name and its connotations, Tim and Moffitt were finally able to conduct business.
The brothers also came to another realization when they were reconstructing their approach: certain Homegrown lines focused on specific acts or features that were extremely popular.
“We learned through the sale of the Homegrown titles that certain types of action were particularly popular. We saw that cream pies, over 40, or hairy bush sell really well, so we started making titles that catered to specific niches like that,” Tim says. “We were the first company doing series based on hairy bush and cream pie. We were way ahead of the market on that. The only reason we were able to do that is because of those numbers Homegrown was showing us. Once we put the name Xplor Media on it – it was essentially the same content with a different name – distributors started to trust us again and realized we were totally different than the old ownership.”
As Tim explains it, the company was in a state of desperation, so they started catering to their most vocal customers.
That decision enabled the Lakes to rebuild their business to its previous heyday within a couple years. It also spawned the term ‘niche marketing’—a formula that Homegrown and Xplor largely embrace.
“We’ve dabbled in doing high-end and contract girl stuff and none of that has really worked out, so we’ve really worked at developing the branding of what Homegrown Video means and looking for new niches to accommodate that,” Tim says.
Homegrown Video’s Lazarus act was almost complete, but the fun was really only beginning.
The Dawn of a New Era
It was called the Internet, and, true to their nature, the Lakes dove right in.
They embraced streaming video during its early days, launching their first site in 1995 and two years later created a content site.
Stunts like the 1997 Orgy for World Peace – an orgy streamed live on the Web to raise money for charity – epitomized the spirit of the Lake’s company. The streaming charity orgy was duplicated in 2005 and the company is planning to make it an annual event.
Homegrown’s online products also have done well. The company is earning almost a 50-50 split between online and DVD revenue, according to Moffitt. And although they’ve embraced new technologies, they’re retaining some of the old, still doing decent business in the VHS and mail-order markets.
“I think there will come a day when every library is online and portable devices will make it possible to take it offline more conveniently than needing to have a disc for every movie, but not anytime soon,” Tim says. “DVDs will dominate the market at least as long as cassette tape formats did.”
Still, a 50-50 revenue split is impressive, particularly when many studios haven’t fully tested the online waters.
However, it hasn’t been all beach balls and bikinis in the online pool for Homegrown. In 2002, Homegrown became one of the first companies to be hit with a lawsuit from Acacia Research, who claimed Homegrown’s use of streaming video on their websites violated Acacia’s patents. While some companies didn’t bother to reply to the suits and others simply settled, Homegrown is part of a battle that continues to this day.
Clearly, the Lakes don’t intend to back down.
“The people that rolled over probably didn’t have as much at stake as we did,” Tim says. “They probably didn’t realize what Acacia was asking for.”
What they were asking for was a licensing fee for using streaming video and/or audio technology—technology for which Acacia felt they held the patents.
“In a nutshell, we feel what they’re doing is wrong,” Moffitt says.
Tim concurs, “We’ve been doing streaming media since the earliest days the technology was on the market, and we knew enough about it to know that they were full of crap.”
Another drawn-out legal battle featured Xplor taking on former partner Voice Media, the parent company of CECash, which housed and marketed the Homegrown website for four years. Details surrounding the highly contested lawsuit are vague at best.
Nevertheless, Tim insists that he and his brother aren’t hard to work with, despite rumors that circulated after the CECash affair.
“We’re very loyal and we do everything with a passionate resolve for integrity. We do everything above board. We’ve never had any problems other than Voice Media and Acacia,” he says. “We’re not contentious at all. That’s a rumor that came out of the CE situation. But if you look back at our history, we’ve had many successful relationships with solid companies.”
And really, how could the guy who played ‘Mr. Fun’ be difficult?
Tim’s Mondo Adventure
The 1993 Cat in the Hat porn spoof Mr. Fun’s Mondo Adventure featured none other than Tim Lake in the lead role. If you can’t find a copy, then let your imagination run wild.
He is also the guy who helped South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone turn one of their early films, Orgazmo, into a reality. Tim helped rewrite the script about a Mormon porn star who becomes a superhero, earning him an associate producer credit and a small part in the film.
Tim, who has starred in more than 50 adult films and directed 16, is considering a return to the screen.
“I just needed to get in shape and I’m in pretty good shape now,” he says. “I’ve been wanting to do it for a while, but I didn’t want to see myself on camera. Now that I’m feeling a little less self-conscious about my body I feel I can get in there. I was nominated for a couple AVN Awards back in the day, so I got to get back on that saddle. You know what I’m saying?”
Moffitt, meanwhile, has no such plans. “My goal is to play more golf.”
It’s good to be a Lake these days.
They’re not sweeping the warehouse anymore, distributors always take their calls, they’re worrying more about new productions than lawsuits, and Tim is more focused on AVN Awards than his waistline.
There is one area of unfinished business, however. The split with CE left their online presence with nothing and Homegrown has slowly been rebuilding.
“We had to start from zero members, so we’re really still in comeback mode. I think this year is the year. We’ve built a great foundation and fortunately we’re now the masters of our own destiny” Tim says.
If what they did on the video side is any indication, getting their online operation back to where it was shouldn’t be a problem.
“I really want us to reclaim our crown as the kings of amateur,” Tim says.
But, Tim, who says you ever lost it?
