Does the man ever rest?
Not if the man is reigning XBIZ Male Performer of the Year Seth Gamble. Day in, day out, Gamble performs vigorously on set, directs both his own projects and for other brands, produces, plans future moves, maintains his sobriety, tends to his marriage — and now, he is launching his own paysite: LucidFlix.
Gamble does not think of his new venture, launching today and in partnership with YourPaysitePartner, as merely a performer-branded site. He sets the record straight right off the bat, clarifying his grand vision for the project.
“LucidFlix is more of a streaming network,” he explains. “It’s cinematic content. Things that I find to be interesting and creative, coming out in a landscape that is stuck on an algorithm. It will be home to films and shorts in different genres that are intertwined within the cinematic universe of the network.”
The Lucid name harkens back to an earlier era of high-quality content, winking at the semi-dormant Vivid brand and its legendary rival, Wicked, which is still going strong under the Gamma umbrella — in part on the strength of several glossy Gamble-directed series.
The “Flix” part, of course, denotes the streaming network ambitions of its creator, but there is no “and chill” in Gambleland. It’s all motivation and drive, Horatio Alger on several cups of pre-workout.
The magic word defining the LucidFlix vision, Gamble says, is “cinemacore.” He describes this neo-genre as “gonzo scenes with more of a thematic vibe.”
Gonzo goes to the movies, then? That does pretty much sum up the vibe on display when XBIZ visits the set of “The Void,” one of the inaugural shorts produced for the launch of LucidFlix. It is part of a series titled “Obscura,” and fittingly it is Gamble’s close creative collaborator Siren Obscura who beckons us over to the camera monitor.
“Look through here,” she instructs.
What appears to the naked eye as a black wall, a plastic tarp and smog from a noisy machine in the back, reads on camera like a marvelous red-tinted mystical dimension. Within this uncanny space, a figure clad in a gold bikini and matching bejeweled headdress emerges: Ivy Wolfe, who co-stars in the short with Gamble. She undulates to trance music, skillfully striking yoga-like poses.
This is just a rehearsal, however. When the music stops, Wolfe breaks her mystic trance and marks her return to conventional reality with her signature, endlessly disarming smile.
“Can we fuck now? I’m really horny, Seth.” Everyone laughs.
Fifteen years into his career, Gamble has assembled his dream crew of collaborators and backers to implement his exacting vision, this time not for a legacy brand but for his own nascent slate.
“Look at the details,” Gamble says. “There’ve been days when me and Siren and J Wolfe” — LucidFlix’s other director of photography — “spent three hours on the lighting setup. That’s because we all care. We put more effort into details, because that’s the shit that matters to me. Finding a group of people who like to work like I do and bringing them together was a very long process. But now I’ve found those people.”
As Obscura helps the makeup artist disentangle Wolfe’s elaborate gold-chain costume in preparation for the upcoming sex scene, Gamble beams. When he is on one of his natural highs, his drive and motivation are contagious, and fabled in the industry.
“Siren is a brilliant photographer,” he enthuses. “She’s done wardrobe, she’s done makeup — she’s the most creative person! I think that’s why it took me so long to put something like LucidFlix together. I needed to find great people like that.
“Because my mind moves fast and my brain thinks differently, I always want something I’m doing to be new, even if it’s color design or shot design,” he explains. “Now I can just say, ‘This is what I need; this is what I want it to be’ and J Wolfe will be like, ‘Okay, I want to do this.’ And Siren is like, ‘Oh my God, what if we add this to it?
“We’re all just vibing off each other like that, having fun while we make amazing stuff,” he adds. “That is what it’s all about, man.”
Empowering Talent
Gold chains and golden tresses meticulously arranged, Wolfe is now ready to do production stills. The task falls very naturally to Obscura, one of the industry’s noted photographers and an heir to the Suze Randall tradition of women making other women look amazing.
The photographer loaned her artistic surname to one of two initial series for the December launch of the site — excuse us, the network.
“Basically, I made ‘Obscura’ because I had Siren working with me on Wicked’s ‘Timeless,’” Gamble explains. “We became very close. I wanted her to shoot for Lucid, and I really wanted her to be on my team. We mutually agreed on the talent for the movies, we came up with the ideas for them together — we did everything on ‘Obscura’ together.”
The pair’s close friendship with Wolfe allowed them to create a very personal scene for the freewheeling blonde, in which she portrays the primordial spirit Lilith.
“Ivy is a very spiritual person,” Gamble says. “We wanted to give her the essence of Lilith, dwelling in a kind of abyss or void. We wanted to make her feel like she is creating an open space inside that void. Then she is able to experience this empowerment because, like in a lot of my movies or scenes, there’s an underlying dynamic of making women feel powerful.”
Gamble says that making women feel powerful, on and off screen, is one of the programmatic goals of LucidFlix.
“When that happens,” he reflects, “then the man can come in and be sexually dominant and have that strong masculinity, that tool that can combine with the female’s power focus. It brings those two forces together to create great sexual intimacy. I find that to be enigmatic and beautiful.”
Gamble also envisions empowerment as a key component behind the scenes at LucidFlix.
“I wanted to create a network where the talent are excited to be there,” he says. “An environment where they can thrive, and feel like they’re not just getting hired but are part of something they actively want to be doing.”
Gamble believes the industry can go even further than the radical shifts in safety and performer consent that have taken place since he entered the industry in 2008. He feels particularly qualified to help facilitate more progress because he knows so intimately what it feels like to be a performer.
“I want to put more emphasis on catering to the talent and making sure they love being there,” he enthuses. “I’m trying to do everything for them that I wish had been done for me more often, to treat them how I wish all talent was treated. Because they are all superstars, and should be treated like they are.
“For a lot of my career I didn’t feel that people treated me that way,” Gamble confides. “I decided to go in the opposite direction. I want to create a space where everybody I work with, crew or talent, feels valued. That’s something that really matters.”
Gamble intends for the LucidFlix star treatment to start from the moment talent get booked and carry through all the way to release and promotion. He says this is even more important in the age of indie creators.
“We’re not in a time period where performers need to do shoots like this anymore,” he notes. “There are all these other avenues to make money. So how do you make it such an enjoyable process that they want to be there? It’s not just about the check. It’s about getting them stoked to be there because they’re having such an enjoyable experience.”
The initial roster of LucidFlix stars was handpicked by Gamble and his collaborators to ensure maximum rapport. Besides Wolfe, the first “class” includes Kendra Sunderland, True Kait, Kazumi, Ryan Reid, Chanel Camryn and Blake Blossom, all former co-stars of Gamble’s.
“As a performer, I’ve worked with a lot of girls,” Gamble says without a scintilla of arrogance; he is just spitting practical facts. “If I’ve established some type of chemistry, that’s always a great thing. But also, I see an ‘it’ factor in people. I see a way to cultivate their strengths.”
Alongside “Obscura” is a second inaugural series, “Ultimacy.”
“‘Ultimacy’ is voyeuristic, with a POV touch to it,” Gamble explains. “Think of those amateur sites where the girl goes on a POV date, except Lucid’s doesn’t look amateur at all. It looks as if you’re watching a montage in the middle of a film. You’re following someone, and then it leads into a sex scene morphing between POV and a regular third-person scene.”
His many years performing across a multitude of genres and niches have made Gamble a veritable living encyclopedia of on-camera sex, and he has very specific thoughts about what makes a scene work.
“All my sex is shot gonzo-style, meaning the hand-held movement of it,” he says. “In my opinion, that makes it more inclusive of the viewer, so they feel like it’s them in the scene. I also believe the best sex scenes are shot based on emotion, with the camera operator responding to how the talent are moving and the way that they’re doing it. The shots aren’t based on what looks good, but on what feels good.”
Gamble adds that imparting those lessons to nonperformers can be difficult.
“It’s hard to find people that get that,” he says. “But you can teach people to understand it.”
Still Getting His Feet Wet
Ultimately, Gamble predicts, the success of LucidFlix will hinge on maintaining consistent quality.
“If you can be consistent, not just with the updates but with the quality of the updates, and that consistency never changes, and you don’t compromise the material just because you’re trying to get a quick update, the members know you’re not trying to fuck with them,” he says. “That’s how you build a fan base.”
It’s showtime for “The Void,” which means Gamble takes off his producer-director hat and prepares for his own performance.
“Seeeeeth…” Wolfe coos with a mock-impatient pout, demanding to be mystically fucked.
“For now, a lot of the male talent for the site is me,” Gamble laughs. “At the point of launch, it just makes sense. Later, I will be bringing in other male talent.”
Reflecting on the whole endeavor so far, leading up to the launch, Gamble concludes, “It’s already 10 times better than it would have been when I first started directing. Back then, I was just getting my feet wet.”
“And I’m still getting my feet wet,” he smiles.
All photos by Gustavo Turner.
