Jeremy Babcock is in a good mood as he jumps on the phone with XBIZ to discuss Next Door Studios, which has recently joined such all-male companies as Active Duty, Pride Studios and the newly launched Disruptive Films under Alpha Studio Group, the rebranded production arm of Zubb Media.
Babcock holds the title of CCO and despite having joined Next Door four years ago, everything still feels new. “Blame it on the pandemic,” he states. “I feel like we were on an upward trajectory. We had months and months and months of shoots that were planned and COVID just squashed it. We just went into a holding pattern.”
We have this platform and the opportunity to try and tell more thoughtful, longer stories.
As the industry has slowly emerged from the pandemic lockdowns over the past year, Babcock has methodically guided Next Door to find its groove. Notably, he has reconfigured the company’s prolific shooting schedule, which keeps him and his San Diego-based production team — including directors Walden Woods, Big Mike and Conrad Parker — very busy.
Babcock has also introduced a new studio brand with Next Door Films. It is the studio’s first major new project of the pandemic era and it has him creatively energized.
As the company moves forward with cautious optimism, Babcock has been working to balance his vision for the company with the practicalities of running a studio in the COVID era.
“It’s been a matter of having enough content to release if things go totally terrible again,” he says. “We’ve had to really dig deep into our contingency plans. The last two years have been pretty wild.”
ADAMS: You’ve been with Next Door Studios since 2018 and I understand you were new to adult; in fact, this is your first interview. How did you find your way into this job?
BABCOCK: The owners were working to revitalize the brand. I had a friend that worked at the company, and I ended up taking a freelance editing gig with them. So that was how I made my introduction to the company. Some of the brands, like NextDoorTwink, had gone dormant. And we have all these other brands — NextDoorBuddies, NextDoorTaboo and others that fall under the Alpha Studio Group umbrella, like Active Duty and Rod’s Room, which was just introduced. And we just brought out Next Door Films.
ADAMS: I want to come back to that, but first I want to ask about your rapid rise from freelance editor to CCO in just four years.
BABCOCK: Yeah! I had been a manager for an ad agency, and I wanted to become more like a creative director. So that’s where my next steps were going. And then I just happened to go from a freelance editor gig to a behind-the-scenes role and it was fun! It was something I had definitely not done before. I’ve always been a post-production guy, so it was fun for me to be on the set and get involved. I ended up, in the course of that year, shooting 15 scenes when one of the directors was unavailable. I always get my hands in the dirt somehow. I’ve got a film degree, so I have the skills to jump around like that, but production was never my strength. I just jumped in.
ADAMS: That’s not an unusual origin story for people in this business. People tend to fall into this field and find they’re suited for it. What makes being the CCO of an adult studio a better fit for you than the ad world?
BABCOCK: I was given opportunities here. It would have taken me a lot longer in the ad world. And I actually like the porn world better. So I knew it was a better fit for me.
ADAMS: Can you expand on that? How was it a better fit?
BABCOCK: Coming out of the ad world, everybody I worked with was like, “How do you feel about porn, morally?” I was in Portland, Oregon, where people are not that uptight, but everybody still had, you know, a “clutch their pearls” moment with it. But I’ve always said that when I was in mainstream advertising, I sold people shit they didn’t need. In the porn world, we’re selling people something they actually want. I’m not tricking people into consuming something.
ADAMS: How would you describe Next Door Studios, between all of your different brands? Apart from the “Next Door” in the name, of course, which suggests a certain type of attitude. Does “wholesome” feel accurate?
BABCOCK: Yeah, that’s fair to say. When I started it was basically NextDoorRaw and NextDoorBuddies and so forth. There wasn’t a lot of brand differentiation. That’s where my ad agency experience came in and we started to redefine the brands. The core of the brand is almost always these jock types who are your fantasy guy next door. We definitely veer into twinks, but our core casting is always centered on those guys who don’t feel like they’re unattainable. There is a wholesomeness to it.
ADAMS: One of the things I appreciate is that there’s a certain level of humor in a lot of what you do.
BABCOCK: That was one of the things I found appealing when I first started. We’re just telling stories. When I was filling in as the director, I would just improv with the guys on the spot and the humor just came out naturally. Of course, now we do more preplanning and scripting; we’re shooting two scenes a day among all our brands. So we try to tailor the scripts to the guys and their own natural personalities and the rhythms of how they normally speak and interact.
ADAMS: Let’s talk about the brands, because you’ve introduced a new one recently.
BABCOCK: NextDoorBuddies is where we try to drop in the new guys; there tends to be less story, and we get to know the guys a little bit as human beings. With NextDoorRaw, we tend to let them go, sexually, as hard and wild as they like. That’s where they get to have the kind of sex they’re really having in their own life. And then NextDoorOriginals is where we get to tell stories; we produce about twice as much for Originals as we do for the other brands because that’s what our customers seem to appreciate. The stories aren’t meant to be realistic, but you kind of wish they were, you know? A couple of straight guys casually fucking each other for the fun of it; that’s the world where Originals exists.
ADAMS: How will Next Door Films differ from Originals? Will they be features?
BABCOCK: Yeah, our crew has been filming for Disruptive Films once a month and the themes there tend to be a little darker and more “out there.” I wanted to bring that same level of production value and the big crews and different locations to Next Door. We built the infrastructure for deeper, more thoughtful content that we were using for Disruptive, so we decided to try telling some longer stories over here with a more lighthearted tone. It’s a three-act version of the one-act content we’re already doing. Some of them are super-sized versions of the Next Door scenes that our audience tends to love. Some of them are more dramatic, like a cheating boyfriend storyline. We’re going to try a few different things and see what works. We have this platform and the opportunity to try and tell more thoughtful, longer stories.
ADAMS: It seems like a natural expansion of what your audience already expects from you. It’s not a dramatic revamp.
BABCOCK: What we’ve seen with Disruptive is that people really connect with characters and become invested. On Next Door, we’re telling one part of a story, so nobody is looking for a sequel, necessarily, because there’s usually not enough of a story to really dig your teeth into. That’s what intrigues me about telling longer stories with Next Door Films. I want people to feel the need to see the sequel because they want to see where the characters are going next. That is really exciting for us.
ADAMS: How do you work with guys who aren’t necessarily trained actors? I mean, you have someone like Dakota Payne, who is a natural-born performer, but how do you get these guys to develop characters and sustain a performance?
BABCOCK: We know the guys we’re casting. We know the ones who can act, or have strong potential, because we’ve been observing them on set. You mentioned Dakota, who is really amazing. Trevor Harris is always good. There’s Jayden Marcos, who can act like I’ve never seen a model act. He really cares; he asks after every take, “What can I do better?” For some of these guys, they end up really liking it. They were originally hired for their physical attributes, of course, but they end up feeling really proud of their acting work. It’s something they can feel comfortable showing other people and feel good about it. We’re going to be doing safe-for-work versions of Next Door Films that go on YouTube and they can send to people. Nico Coopa is a really strong actor. And Brandon Anderson, we’re starting to write for him and the way he speaks and how you can see him thinking about what he wants to say. Our writer is the same age as most of these guys and he understands how guys that age actually talk. We’ll recast if something is a bad fit. We try to create characters that fit into the dimensions of their personality as much as possible.
ADAMS: You’ve certainly had some roadblocks the last couple of years, but you seem to have successfully pivoted.
BABCOCK: When COVID hit, I was still basically new. And during this time, we’ve changed ownership. Like everyone else, we were really just treading water for a couple of years — and it’s not over because now we have to keep an eye on monkeypox. But apart from our casting team, which is mostly still intact, almost everyone is new, from the people holding the cameras to the executive side. Most of our core creative staff have only been with us for a year. But now we have two really great directors on staff and we’re at that stage where we can really just start exploring some of these ideas. I give a lot of credit to Walden and Conrad for raising our profile in the talent community. Walden sits on the board of the Free Speech Coalition and really cares a lot about performer advocacy. So we’re all just really fresh and excited to make cool stuff.
