Northern Peaks is the name of Canada’s newly-licensed, homegrown porn TV channel. (Yes, the double entendre is intentional.) Operated by Alberta’s Real Productions (-www.RealProductionsXXX.com), which produces programming for HBO and Playboy TV, Northern Peaks promises to produce at least 50-percent Canadian porn content. In other words, at least half of the beavers seen on Northern Peaks will be indigenous to Canada. In a country that reveres the non-human beaver as its national symbol, this matters.There’s been a lot of witty banter on the Web about Canada getting its own porn channel (not in service yet, because it still has to negotiate carriage on domestic cable and satellite TV). Mindful of our commitment to cutting-edge adult industry journalism, YNOT.com offers this exclusive interview with Northern Peaks’ producer Shaun Connelly.
YNOT: Tell us about your company and yourself.
Connelly: Real Productions was founded in 2001 by Jason Danilak and Jenna Satcher. The company’s first offering was a pro-am series called the First Time Series, which paired first time female performers with first time male performers. The series became extremely popular with adult video fans who were bored with glossy L.A. porn and wanted to see something real. To date, the company has released more than 200 full-length movies.
I joined the company in 2005 to develop television programming suitable for cable networks like HBO and Playboy TV.
YNOT: What noteworthy content has your company produced over the years?
Connelly: Real Productions bestselling series continues to be the First Time series, although World’s Horniest Home Videos (a series filmed by the performers themselves) and Real Canadian Girls are giving it a run for its money. On TV, Make Me a Porn Star was a hit on networks worldwide, most notably Granada in the U.K. and Starz in the U.S. Our newest series, The Boy Nexxt Door, is one of the most watched series on Playboy TV and we’re currently shooting Season Two.
YNOT: How did Real Productions you get “discovered” by the U.S. majors?
Connelly: Make Me a Porn Star made a lot of companies take notice of us (if only to wonder who the hell we were and how we rated a TV series). This has increased exponentially with the success of The Boy Nexxt Door on Playboy TV. In the coming weeks we’ll be working with RedLight Districts, XPlay, Adam & Eve, and Club Jenna. I also have a monthly column in Cheri starting in January.
YNOT: Tell us about your studio set-up; what is it like?
Connelly: We are not a studio company. Because we shoot in cities right across North America, we tend to shoot on location rather than in a studio. So, lots of hotels, houses, and the occasional video store, yacht, or garden tractor (episode 6 of The Boy Nexxt Door!). I think we’re close to setting some sort of porn record for most consecutive shoots not utilizing a bed. Having just done XXXena: The Porn Princess, we did a lot of outside locations.
YNOT: Where do you find your talent?
Connelly: Increasingly, our talent is referred to us by other people we’ve shot: Jane does one of our movies, and than all of Jane’s girlfriends want to do it, too. We also place small ads in the Adult Help Wanted section of daily newspapers and in adult magazines such as Cheri. Increasingly people find us online, usually after seeing one of our TV series. When an episode of Make Me a Porn Star airs in Israel we’ll suddenly get a lot of enquiries from that part of the world.
YNOT: Canadians have a reputation for being polite and easy to get along with. Does this translate to porn production?
Connelly: I’ve found that people are just people. I think the main difference up here is we don’t have girls who have moved here to become movie stars and find they have to do porn instead. Most of the girls and couples we shoot with specifically want to do adult. They have no dreams of becoming the next Julia Roberts.
YNOT: Tell us about your new TV channel, Northern Peaks. What will be on it?
Connelly: Adult movies, of course, but also adult-themed TV shows like our adult game show Jizz Quiz or our adult talk show Blue Revue. We hope to develop really funny programming akin to what we do for Playboy TV; dirty documentaries, a kinky cooking show, a series where average joes compete to win a threesome, that sort of thing. We’ll also air the xxx-rated version of formerly r-rated cable series like Make Me a Porn Star as well as other company offerings.
YNOT: Will you really have enough made-in-Canada content?
Connelly: I don’t foresee any problems here. More than 80-percent of our content currently is Canadian and we’ve never really tapped into Eastern Canada, where the majority of the population resides. There are more than half a dozen cities across the country with populations near or above one million so finding talent isn’t really that hard.
YNOT: Finally, what are your future goals?
Connelly: Personally, I’d really like to be able to green light adult TV series without having to wait for a mainstream network to make a decision. That would be sweet.
