Porn Valley- I meet up with Craig Valentine Wednesday afternoon.

Valentine has flown into town to shoot a reality porn movie. You might argue the point of “real” in any sense of the word, although, more importantly, Valentine’s got his wrestling show lined up for Sunday. Which is in Bakersfield, in a 1700 seat arena.

As it is, Valentine who’s bringing an untested product into town- albeit populated with some big name wrestlers like The Vampire Warrior and Buff Bagwell – says he’d be happy right now just to fill 500 of those seats.

Valentine and his girlfriend – a hot woman by any measure- have been living out of a motel room in the Valley this week. Air conditioning set at full throttle.

Valentine’s also brought his work with him. The room’s full of porn product sitting in brown cardboard boxes. And Valentine’s whittling away at the computer. He’s got a meeting with Van Damage in a couple of hours but isn’t dressed for the occasion.

Valentine’s just showered and, despite the arctic temperature of the room, is wearing nothing but a white towel wrapped around his waist. My guess is that his new movie’s titled Tarzan Goes to the Bath House if one look at Valentine, hair in a ponytail, is any indication.

In a publicity stunt P.T. Barnum might have embraced had he been drinking heavily, Valentine’s brought together two of the trailer park culture’s favorite confections – porn and wrestling- in one appetizing candy store.

Resultantly, Valentine’s created something called NPO, the New Porn Order.

The tagline of Valentine’s first wrestling DVD release, www.newpornorder.com , which is distributed by IVD and features action along with the sex that you don’t see in the arena, describes it as “where pro wrestlers and porn stars collide.”

Whether Valentine will emerge unscathed from that collision or not, is something yet to be determined. He’s already suffered broken bones, dislocations, concussions and a head full of stitches thanks, in part, to a vicious mat battle with porn star Evan Stone who’s apparently taking this whole wrestling notion very seriously.

Valentine’s highly amused particularly because Stone has even offered up his girlfriend Syren as sexual sacrifice if Valentine wants to feature her in a movie. From the sounds of it, it may not even have to be a movie.

As well, Valentine’s been using another tagline a lot lately: “Your drama’s my paycheck.”

Valentine’s been devouring the porn gossip sites and taking real happenings from the world of XXX and forging them into outlandish company story lines. Valentine says his wrestling league is not so much about muscles but more about goofy characters. The more cartoonish, the better. If that’s the case, porn certainly provides enough drawing material.

On an entirely different issue, the timing of Valentine’s new enterprise, isn’t exactly ideal. He’s going through a divorce similar to a Royal Rumble with Summer Haze. Some suggest it was prompted because of the wrestling venture. There were rumors that Haze was tinkering around with a few of the male wrestlers. There have been rumors that Valentine was doing pretty much of the same thing with the female talent.

In any event, Valentine says he’s going out on a personal limb, financially, to make NPO a go, but, just the same, is exuberant over his business dealings with IVD.

Yes, in the past Valentine has had his share of drama with other distributors. In one case, he flew to Arizona to literally put one of them in a sleeper hold over a $5,000 bounced check. I didn’t know about this story, but Valentine assumes I had. He explains that Rob Spallone goaded him into it by calling him a pussy.

“Rob said to stop complaining about it and do something- so I did,” smiles Valentine. The distributor immediately forked over $4500 in cash. Then, at the beginning of this year, Valentine got into it with another distributor, Nectar, and that was just recently resolved after a time-consuming back and forth legal hassle that’s been keeping a lot of mouths shut over exactly what happened. The juicy parts I think I’ll save for my book.

Regarding the New Porn Order, Valentine’s quick to dispel the notion that his is a Rob Black invention only with a different Frankenstein monster. Black, who owned a porn company, Extreme Associates, created a wrestling venture in 1999 called the XPW which was populated with a mix of local talent, luchadors and exiles from Paul Heyman’s old ECW.

Staging shows, first, at a niteclub in Reseda, a local high school gym then at LA’s Olympic Auditorium, Black got pretty successful with it until both his ego, eyes that were bigger than his belly, and an unrestrained check book got in the way.

Consequently, Black lost something to the tune of $2.5M by chasing rainbows with the name Shane Douglas on it. There were other nasty rumors, too. Those were about Black allegedly having had a hit put on one of his wrestlers for flirting with his girlfriend. The wrestler walked away from that without a finger, according to the story.

Then, on a PBS documentary, with Black actually daring US Attorney General John Ashcroft to come get him, Ashcroft did. A federal porn bust pretty much put Black out of both the wrestling and big time porn business, though Black’s legal case has yet to be resolved.

“Rob wanted to be Vince McMahon,” reflects Valentine who likes to consider himself the consummate P.R. man who’s now emerging from the shadows of a marital union that kept him for years flying relatively below the radar.

Valentine’s telling me this story about how Summer Haze was approached by a porn industry publicity firm that wanted to rep her. I’m curious how much they wanted a month for doing this. Valentine holds up five fingers which I assume is $500, since I’ve heard this is a pretty standard deal. Except Valentine’s saying, no, that it was five grand.

“Five grand!” I go, choking on a tongue sandwich made of my own tongue.

Valentine’s laughing, suggesting that I’ve been pretty much giving away services similar for relatively nothing. But even the P.R. whiz in Valentine’s discovered a few stumbling blocks when it comes to touting porn people in what’s considered a pure mainstream Middle American situation.

Aside from TMZ [the break through gimmick was Valentine and Evan Stone going at it in a parking lot of a local restaurant]; then Playboy Radio and the NY Post, Valentine says a lot of news sources just don’t want to hear the word “porn”.

On the other hand, a lot of porn people want to hear about wrestling and be in the ring in some capacity. [Sometimes the osmosis process doesn’t work- for instance, bringing in Mary Carey as commissioner was a bit of a disaster.]

To that extent, Valentine fields calls constantly from those in the adult industry looking for an NPO berth. Except Valentine’s talent ranks have swelled to the point where he can’t accommodate any more bodies. That will all change, undoubtedly, once Valentine moves, permanently, lock, stock and Full Nelson to the Valley.

For now, Valentine, who hails from Florida, has pretty much given up on the idea that porn will ever be a viable commodity in that state. But even with a move to Porn Central, Valentine still believes that things have got to change within the industry. In one aspect, he says the agents are killing the business right now by holding talent prices non-negotiable in the wake of a weak economy.

“Talent will work cheaper,” states Valentine, flatly, and mentions a few performers [off the record] who are working for half their normal fees.

He should know – because he’s booked them.