Ron Hightower leaves a pretty big shadow these days. And not just because he trains at the fabled Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, either. Hightower left the adult business a couple of years ago and began making his mark in mainstream music videos. One night he met Tupac Shakur at a party and the rest as they say is history. Having an itch to get back into adult, Hightower just signed on with EvolutionErotica, a company that certainly has a nose for sniffing out good directors. We had the pleasure of having a lengthy chat with Ron whose been non-stop since his return.
Gene: Back in the game, huh?

RH: I’ve started shooting for Evolution and Tom Byron.

Gene: Who’ve you been shooting.

RH: Girls like Ashley Long, Kayla, Rhiannon Bray, Cytherea, Sheridan Leigh, Devin Deray…but if I hesitate, it’s because everybody’s new to me. We shot two days this week; three days last week. One of those days we shot three scenes. It was a long day.

Gene: What is exactly your new series.

RH: It’s called Race Mixers. It’s an exciting idea that Kevin K. came up with. It’s something like a mini-soap opera/gonzo where the characters from one vignette interact with characters from another.

Gene: Where have you been. You were in the mainstream. What were you up to.

RH: In 1996 I started doing music videos with Tupac Shakur.

Gene: How did the two of you meet?

RH: I decided that I just needed a break from adult. I wasn’t do anything and decided to hang out and have a life. I wound up going to this party for Death Row over at the Santa Monica airport. I wound up meeting with Pac there. Long story short, he was excited to talk to me because he said when he had been locked up, that’s all people talked about, Ron Hightower this. Ron Hightower that. Back then we really didn’t have any black video lines. So pretty much it was that and me working with a lot of the black magazines and stuff like that. Then I got to work with a lot of the black rap artists. I was getting a lot of press with The Source and Vibe magazines. After we had met, Pac said I got to do his video. Of course I thought he was joking. But we did it a week later after we had spent a weekend at his house just talking about the project. I couldn’t believe that the great Tupac Shakur wanted me to work with him and stuff like that. A week later we did it and they still talk about it. I said, wow, this is what I want to do. I stayed in the music video game for a few years after that. I would up doing about 20 music videos, 15 of them were like number one on MTV and BET. I worked with everybody from Master P., Slick Rick, Outcast, Faith Evans, Too Short, KC and JoJo, Silky Fine…

Gene: So working with Tupac was your gain entry.

RH: Pretty much. If it wasn’t for Pac I don’t think I would have been able to cross. Because I had been trying to do music videos for a couple of years prior. Just going to the sets with Master Ace and a few of my other friends. I always found myself pretty much helping the director out and the way to capture a shot. I said, man, they should just let me do this. But trying to shoot film as opposed to a video- cause they shoot 35mm- was like trying to get credit. If you don’t have credit, we can’t give you credit. Until you get credit, you can’t have credit. If you don’t have a film reel, something to show them that you’ve done film already, nobody was going to touch you pretty much. After two years of being promised here and there and people leading me on, when Pac said I was going to do the project, I thought he was totally kidding because he had just finished working with Hype Williams who at the time was like the god of the music video industry. That’s like, in the movie industry, Robert DeNiro wanting you to do his film after he had just finished working with Martin Scorcese.

But you’re right. Staying in the game was a lot of word-of-mouth. You’re dealing with artists who pretty much have creative control over their projects. The labels were still leery. I may have done one video but the budget we had was a quarter of a million dollars. So they felt I had plenty of ‘room to air’ even though I saved them money. So that was kind of hard to break in, but the artists who did have creative control, said, hey, we want him. So I got the projects and they were fun. After that I kept getting offers to do mainstream films. But then every time I’d pick a project that I felt would be the right one, then you’d have to deal with the politics of getting it shot, and then something would always happen where the plug gets pulled- and during that time a lot of that had to do with the 9/11-stuff. After a few years of that I said to myself I don’t want to stay in entertainment. I wanted to start fresh. I think I pretty much accomplished what I wanted to do in a major way. All my life all I ever wanted to do was one porn movie and brag to my friends that I was a porn star.

I snuck into X-rated movies on 42nd Street in New York ever since I was 13 years old. That’s all I wanted to do, be on screen just one time. I got in at a time when it was video, and there was no film being shot to be put in theaters. However I lucked with a movie that I did with Tiffany Mynx. It was called Black to Basics. It was showing in a theater in Santa Monica. I had to pay just to go inside to see it. It really wasn’t the same effect. It was a big screen, but it was a video. It wasn’t the movies like John Leslie, Jamie Gillis and those guys were doing.