Duck Dumont, founder of fetish video giant Redboard, defends his nest

The first thing Allan “Duck” Dumont, veteran adult film director, says to me when we begin talking is, “Whattaya wanna know?” I laugh, and it doesn’t take long for me to see that while Dumont is easy to talk to, he’s hard to get to. Questions tend to roll off him like the proverbial water off of his namesake’s back, and with the wry wit of many a New York Jewish comedian, he bites back with a joke at every difficult query. “What makes you furious?” I ask. “Interviews,” he quips, then, “No, nothing special, you know, starving babies. Same as everybody else. Nothing specific.” “And what tugs your heartstrings?” I venture, aware of the corniness of the question. “I’m a goddamn pornographer, what are you saying?” he jokes again. “I don’t know, a puppy, a baby smiling.” “No particular buttons, then?” I remark. “None that come to mind.”

But Duck Dumont is not entirely impenetrable; in fact, once he’s warmed up, he speaks freely about his work in fetish film, his own personal kinks, his previous live-in relationship with Kym Wilde and his childhood in Staten Island. And if you really want to get him going, start talking about censorship, political correctness, Jaime Gillis, and John Ashcroft.

But what everyone here wanted to know was: What the hell kind of name is “Duck?”

“There’s a slight problem there,” he admits. “I’ve told so many stories; I’m not sure which one is real. The story that I think is true, but I’m not sure, is when we were in a Chinese restaurant; I was looking for a first name, and we ordered duck. [I was with] Sam Weston, the director, during the early days. He said, you’re making fun of the adult world, you’ve gotta use a real name! And that solidified it for me.”

It’s a typical answer given the interview thus far; if there is any way for Dumont to be contrary, especially if it amuses him, he’ll do it. It hasn’t been an easy name choice for him, though: “It took me at least a decade to respond to Duck.”

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DUCK DUMONT: Where are you located?

SEXHERALD: We’re in Boston.

DUMONT: I was madly in love with a girl who went to Harvard many years ago.

SH: A Harvard girl, eh?

DUMONT: Yeah, sure. It led me into porno. (Both laugh) No, no, I was in my late teenage years, early 20s, then.

SH: Tell the story.

DUMONT: What?

SH: Tell the story!

DUMONT: No, I don’t want this published! Forget it!

SH: You can trust me!

DUMONT: Okay, I’ll talk. Here, here’s a joke, you’re a writer, you’ll like this one. Guy goes into a bar – there’s nobody in the bar. He walks over to the bartender, says, “Scotch.” Bartender pours him a drink, walks away; he’s drinking the scotch – “Nice hairdo.” Looks around, there’s no one there. So he calls the bartender over, gets another one, drinks it – “Like your jacket.” No one around. Calls the bartender over, has another one. “Good haircut.” Bartender comes over, guy says, “This is weird, I’m hearing voices, there’s no one here!” Bartender says, “Oh, that’s just the peanuts – they’re complimentary.” (Laughs)

SH: (groans) Oh, god!

DUMONT: I just heard that this morning, I thought it was great!

SH: I had no idea pornographers indulged in puns.

DUMONT: Okay, I’ll give you a porno joke. How do you get a nun pregnant?

SH: How?

DUMONT: Fuck her. (Silence) Okay, anyway…

SH: How long as Redboard itself been around?

DUMONT: Approximately 17 years, 18 years. I was making a lot of videos for everybody – VCA, Cabellero, Essex – those are regular adult features – I had done a few hundred, and someone showed me a spanking movie. I said, “People buy those?” I really knew nothing about S&M at that point. Went out, and actually I got Jaime Gillis, who is a friend of mine - he was a technical assistant, initially - and we went out and shot some movies and I started Redboard. And that was the beginning of it.

SH: And where’d you get the name Redboard?

DUMONT: The shaman answer: it came to me in a dream. (Both laugh) If you look at the early Redboards, they all open up with the logo, which is a girl’s bottom, and this red two-by-four comes across, freeze-frame, and the picture dissolves out, and the letters Redboard stay there. So that was cool.

SH: So, you just told me the story of how it happened, but what made you decide to start doing fetish videos rather than straight adult features?

DUMONT: (Snooty voice) “Adult fare?”

SH: “Adult fare,” yes.

DUMONT: What happens is, making adult features is very formula based, it’s like a kung fu movie. It doesn’t matter what’s in between the fight scenes, you just have to get good fighting in. I had made two to three hundred adult features at that point, and I could do it blindfolded. [Fetish] allowed a lot more flexibility and freedom. It’s now in fact gotten to the point where I have a series called Uncut: it’s a one-hour movie, there are no cuts. For me, the fun of it is not knowing where it’s going to go, and the spontaneity of it – it’s kind of like shooting Cops on TV. And generally, they’re people who are very much into what they’re doing. Except for some of the series called Virgin Kink.

SH: I’ve seen some of the Virgin Kink series, and some of it is very exciting, and some of it is very disturbing.

DUMONT: Yes, I find some of it very disturbing in fact, too.

SH: Now, you don’t know where it’s going to go. And sometimes you’re working with someone like Jaime Gillis. And I watched some of these. (Duck laughs wickedly) Do you ever have anything really scary happen? Do you ever have anything happen that you just say, ‘you know what, we can’t show this, this has gone too far?’

DUMONT: No. Because say you’re about to do a scene for me. If you have a problem, there are no safewords, you say “Cut.” And if you say “Cut,” sometimes it’ll stop, but if you say “Cut” a second time, it’ll definitely stop. Everything comes to a halt.

SH: So “Cut” is like a safeword on its own.

DUMONT: I’d refer to it more as a stopword. There’s been a number of times – there’s been about five or six scenes where girls just say stop or run away. But that’s a problem with new people, especially in the Virgin Kink series, they’re not used to S&M, and when you do this – even without a camera, but particularly in front of the camera – and you’re a bottom, and it goes a little too far; you try to please. You’re in that submissive mindset. And often, new people just go too far.

SH: They don’t know their own limits. Any really regrettable moments?

DUMONT: There was one scene I shot which was with Jaime Gillis and Jewel Valmont, I don’t remember who the girl was, the bottom, but she was unfamiliar and not used to it, and she really just broke down. I cleared the room and I held her for about a half-hour afterwards. And she was crying. And I just felt horrible. I felt horrible not because I had done anything that I considered wrong, but there was no way of me telling that the girl was going further than she should have allowed herself to go. So it made me feel creepy and bad. She needed someone to just hold her and be human with her. And I struggled to be human, and I held her! So I try to pay attention more, to when someone new is going beyond where they should go. And I do go over it repeatedly, you know, “Say ‘Cut,’ Say ‘Cut.’” You know, this is only a movie, and I want the best movie I can, but I don’t want people emotionally damaged. Did I answer the question, whatever it was?

SH: Yeah, it’s kind of a complex question. But now I’m curious - You said you didn’t really know anything about kink until you saw those spanking videos. Are you into it yourself, and if so, in what way?

DUMONT: Kym Wilde, if you know who she is?

SH: Oh I know who Kym Wilde is.

DUMONT: She and I lived together for about eight years. I was shooting a regular Redboard, and Tom Byron was working for me as a production person, and he brought Kym in, and she and I ended up shooting a movie and spending the next eight years together. Am I into it now? Depends on the person. I find it – (Quickly) to answer your question, yes.

SH: Is there one role of the other that you’re more likely to play?

DUMONT: That’s funny. Usually the top. At one point Kym wanted me to bottom. So I remember she asked me to strip down, crawl around. I did. I felt a bit – odd, and not comfortable, but I did it. I heard her laugh, when I did that, and then she spanked me. I didn’t particularly like it. And then she slapped me in the face, and I said, “We’re done.” But the funny thing is, it’s still a fantasy – I know I have really no desire to do it in the real world, but it’s still an interesting fantasy.

SH: Well sometimes you just need the right person to be the top.

DUMONT: No, I don’t think I’m really interested in doing it outside of my head. I mean, I do like being a top a lot.

SH: What do you get out of topping?

DUMONT: Pleasure.

SH: And…

DUMONT: Well, it’s…BDSM is, as I’ve become more familiar with it, seems to be a whole lot less about sex and more about power. And…I found I enjoy power. I’m sure if I could rule the world, I’d clean it up!

SH: Well power is one of those things that is so difficult to talk about, isn’t it?

DUMONT: (Instantly) No, not at all.

SH: I mean, in a politically correct sense.

DUMONT: I honestly don’t think so. I think what S&M allows one to do, especially by viewing the movies, is it gives you a porthole or a window to another world, one that you may not necessarily want to participate in real life, and with a movie you do get to participate in it. And the political correctness of it – I think PC has gone way out of hand here, on the planet, especially in this country. But is it politically incorrect? Probably, based upon the way we’ve defined it, but I think the definition is wrong. Oo, that sounded good – that’ll sound good when you write it up. (Both laugh)

SH: What about – again, I’m sort of fascinated with this Jaime Gillis character. You get into some stuff here that is very, very edgy, not in terms of pain play, what we typically think of edgy, for example, some of the race play that goes on –

DUMONT: Right. He does that, and it’s his own particular fascination. He did come up with an idea – one of Jaime’s and my favorite videos is “Humiliated White Boy.”

SH: I saw the column he wrote about that, and I thought, just because he goes both ways with it, does that make it okay? I’m not sure.

DUMONT: Well, the funny thing was – well, what I use as a gauge is my mother. She’s a Holocaust survivor. So I called her, and she said, “If you wanna do it, okay!”

SH: Now, I’m going to play psychiatrist with you – tell me about your mother.

DUMONT: (Jokingly) She beat me savagely as a child. (Laughs) No, it was a very middle-class upbringing. The standard East Coast upbringing. I grew up in Staten Island.

SH: Ah, I’m from New Jersey myself.

DUMONT: What part?

SH: Jersey shore, Bruce Springsteen country.

DUMONT: Oh – we used to summer at Bradley Beach!

SH: Bradley Beach! How wonderful!

DUMONT: Kymmy and I about five years ago went to an Atlantic City show, and I hadn’t been to Bradley Beach since I was like, ten years old. And the big thing when I was a kid was to go to Asbury Park. And I thought it was a million miles away – we walked there on the Boardwalk! It was funny, because there was this run-down building on the Boardwalk, that I remembered from when I was a kid, and we found a way to get in, and that’s where the bumper cars were, and we walked around –

SH: The funhouse, with the big clown face on the side –

DUMONT: Yes! But it was really bizarre for me, this is like thirty five years later and I’m walking around there. It was like a bizarre science fiction movie. But yeah, I grew up in Staten Island, very middle-class, we summered on the Jersey shore.

SH: So what does your mother think, basically, about what you do?

DUMONT: She doesn’t have a lot of opinions, she’s never seen the product. My father, before he died, was for decades a college professor – he called me a “sex educator.” But I think he only said that to butter me up and keep the flow of free porno to him. (Both laugh)

SH: What did he teach?

DUMONT: (laughs) Fine-Art photography!

SH: Does 'Fine-Art' have big quotation marks around it?

DUMONT: Well, my initial training into the art world was – my father taught the school of visual arts in New York, and I would sit in on his classes!

SH: You’re sitting there looking at the nude models, thinking, ‘Now what could we do with this?’

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