Porn Valley – A joint venture between Arrow Films, www.xxxdeepthroat.com, and Digital Planet that would add a new wrinkle to celebrity porn is pretty much a done deal. www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=2483

Adultfyi.com spoke to Don Jackson of Digital Planet Thursday afternoon. Digital’s a company that came up with the bright idea of discovering celebrity clones and doing videos with them. And Digital’s deal with Arrow certainly expands the resources of Digital’s brainchild www.britneydoesanna.com website that features a Britney Spears lookalike having sex with an Anna Kournikova lookalike.

Then there’s a juicier twist. More intriguing is the fact that porn star Monica Mayhem plays Spears while Phoenix Ray plays Kournikova.

Jackson has a background in feature films. “I’ve worked for a major studio for a few years and have produced a lot of independent features,” he says.

Jackson: The Britney Does Anna was kind of a joke when we started it. I tested the waters to see what would happen with something like that. I hadn’t known of anybody to come out with a big fake tape and have a lot of hype around it. We shot this this thing in a day. We used Monica Mayhem as Britney Spears and Phoenix Ray plays Ana Kournikova. We shot it in a day. Had a little script and made it funny. Then we created this website making it seem like, possibly, maybe it could be them. We put it up online and within a week without a search engine, there was a lot of people from the adult industry that got wind of it. All of a sudden I did a big spot on KROQ. After that it exploded. That week we had a thousand units sold just from southern California alone and it sort of snowballed after that. Other radio stations got wind of it and I was doing a radio station-a-day kind of thing hyping the tape. A lot of the deejays knew it was fake but they loved the idea of it. Some of them would say, here’s the gimmick, we’re going to act like this is real. Some said we know it’s not real but we want to find out what’s behind it.

Gene: With all this FCC shit flying do you think you’d get these kinds of interviews now.

Jackson: Probably not. Because we were able to play clips from the film on most of the stations. There are some funny things where they’re playing tennis and she’s asking are you really Russian. Just dumb stuff. But nowadays I don’t know if that’s going to fly. A lot of the porn talk on the airways is long gone, now. Hopefully it will resurface some day but everyone’s on pins and needles.

Gene: Monica Mayhem has an Australian accent. How did you get around that?

Jackson: She did a little bit of a drawl. It’s funny. The English and Australians are much better at doing our accents. We worked with a dialect coach with her for about three hours before the shoot. She was great.

Gene: Of the possible Britney lookalikes, what brought her to your door.

Jackson: I did a regular casting call for non-union talent. There was a couple of decent lookalikes but they just didn’t have the sex appeal that I was looking for. Although Monica Mayhem really looks nothing like Britney, she had a great sex appeal and a wonderful attitude. Plus I had a good hair and makeup person. We did the best we could to make her look like Britney Spears and put her in the outfits and everything else. But in the long run it was about the attitude and the overall sexiness of her that made it work. And it’s really a fantasy. We made her look like Britney Spears and talk like Britney Spears. We put her in a Britney situation and that’s what people wanted. They weren’t looking for an exact match. People were very happy with our casting. And Phoenix Ray does kind of look like Anna Kournikova. They look at Phoenix Ray and ask is that really Anna Kournikova?

[Jackson acknowledges the lawsuit and resultant hot water Penthouse found itself in when it published alleged topless pix of Kournikova when it turned out to be someone else. To that extent, Digital posts a few disclaimers to that fact on its site.]

Jackson: But if anyone had tried to sue us, we would have gone straight to the wires and that would have made us even bigger. I know that Britney Spears agent looked at the site and I know her managers and lawyers looked at the site. And she personally looked at the site and thought it was hilarious. What I got from her agency was that they didn’t want to make any waves over this because that would just bring more light to it. And we’ve already had millions and millions of hits.

Gene: And of course there were the rumored stories involving her and Jenna Jameson.

Jackson: We were around that time when there were the rumors that she watched lesbian porn, wanted to do lesbian porn. Something to that effect. We were sort of in the right place at the right time. And she hadn’t had any new albums out and she was kind of in a downward slump. I’m not going to say that I revived her career but we kept her popular at least on the Internet for awhile.

Gene: You’ve got another website ready to go.

Jackson: It’s not fully active yet. Because we haven’t officially released it yet. We’re going to wait until we sign everything on the distribution then we will go ahead and release it. That’s going to be Sarah Michelle Gellar, Christina Aguilera and Laetitia Costa. To tell the truth that’s a much better film. It’s a longer film. It was about 40 pages of dialogue. There’s better acting. There’s better sets. We went bigger and better.

Jackson notes that one out of every ten orders have been from women who have been ordering for bachelorette parties and Valentine’s Day types of things.

Jackson: Women are really, really liking our style of filmmaking. We’re not too hardcore but we’re not light, either. We’re a little more than softporn but we’re less than XXX-stuff. We’ve been able to find a happy medium and have created a couples genre of celebrity porn. The guys love it and their wives/girlfriends love it. We want to keep it in that genre, just because the response from women has been phenomenal. And from what I know about the industry, that’s pretty rare to tap into that market. Now that we’ve done it I want to follow up on it. We’ve added more scripts and better shot scenes and lighting. The nice thing is that we have the edge in coming from the backgrounds of real films. We run like a union set more or less.

Gene: How did Arrow get involved.

Jackson: I went to the AEE show back in January. I talked to a few people about distribution. When I got back to Los Angeles I had a few meetings. I went over to Vince Miller. He loved the idea and he loved the project. He wanted to take it to Flynt at VCA. The problem was that what I wanted from all this, I didn’t want to sell them off. I wanted to sell them but have some back end points as well. because that’s what I’m used to. But this industry, I didn’t realize, doesn’t give residuals.

Gene: Welcome to adult.

Jackson: I didn’t want to go with that. So basically there was some problems with legal and they didn’t want to give back end points. Screw that. I didn’t want to sell it off and be done with it. I wanted to start a series and basically I’d be handing over a multi-million dollar series and I’d get a 3-picture deal out of it that would pay me nothing. That was basically the same run around that I got from a lot of companies. Vince then put me in touch with Ray Pistol because they go way back. I talked to Pistol and I got this old school vibe which is what I like. I’m a younger generation but I grew up with a lot of Seventies porn. And that’s the school he sort of came from.

We agreed on a lot of things. The main thing was he was willing to give me some sort of percentage, some sort of back end on the sales. I thought this is a good deal. We want to do the same kinds of films. I knew a lot of his older films, so I thought this was the guy for me. Plus, a lot of companies were like, well, there’s some legal issues, we don’t want to get in trouble. Basically, Raymond’s idea was, well, that’s why I have lawyers. We’ll test the waters and, if needs be, we’ll use our lawyers. With the political climate, a lot of people are afraid of that where I don’t get that from Raymond. He’s along the school of well, screw it, we’ll do it until someone tells us not to. I like that. I decided he was a great guy and Arrow’s a very prestigious company. I was very honored that they were willing to work with us on a lot of things. I’m very happy to be with them and very excited for the next couple of projects that we have coming up.

Jackson says he has another series in the works but wants to keeps its idea on the q-t for awhile. As a sneak preview to the next celebrity video, however, Jackson says he’s hired Kiki D’Aire to play Laetitia Costa. “She’s wonderful to work with,” Jackson says. “We had a 40 page script and Kiki was able to memorize everything in minutes. She did a French accent and was wonderful.” Lainey Baron, according to Jackson, plays Christina Aguilera while Ashley Fires plays Gellar.