THE SOFT MACHINE: Digital Playground’s High-End XXX Vids Have Redefined the Craft of Making Commercial Porn With Solid-Gold Results

Originally titled “Porn Is Serious Business At Digital Playground,” this story ran in the April, 2011 issue of Hustler Magazine.

Hustler Magazine, April 2011
Hustler Magazine, April 2011
You can see Wally “Big Dawg” H. from a hundred yards away, which is good, because the person he’s protecting from the crush of about 200 eager fans at the 2010 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas is about half his size.

That person is Jesse Jane and, should the bite-sized Digital Playground contract star need it, Big Dawg would put his massive frame between her and any overzealous fan and literally carry her to safety.

Today the Sands Expo crowds are enthusiastic but respectful, and Jane is the only one doing the grabbing, which is the way Big Dawg likes it.

“If they touch her,” he says, “I let them know that I’m gonna touch them.”

Big Dawg is part of a 3-man security detail that shepherds and protects the Digital Playground girls at this, the largest of American adult fan conventions. Using vacation days from his regular job as a firefighter in a large Midwestern fire department, Big Dawg can be seen at the back of a line that includes Jane, Kayden Kross, and Riley Steele as it threads its way through slot machines at the Mirage Hotel or negotiates the pressing convention floor crowds at the Sands.

With Big Dawg literally shadowing her, Jane blithely signs hundreds of autographs and surprises fans—who would not dare make the first move themselves— with a quick squeeze. Big Dawg scans the crowd, every now and then smiling down at her, benignly.

“He doesn’t let me get in trouble,” Jane says.

Keeping things controlled is the way Digital Playground does it.

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The filming and selling of stories about sexed-up and seemingly-available girls involves walking that line between sentimentality and business, and Digital Playground has, like the other big companies in the adult space, struck an often-uneasy balance.

The company fits the excess and unpredictability of porn into a curated, tech-savvy, and business-oriented structure that, of its Porn Valley competitors, most closely evokes Hollywood’s bygone studio system. Its contract stars, which currently include Stoya, Steele, Jane, Kross, and Selena Rose, combine the flirtatious accessibility we want from porn stars with a calculated understanding of both audience and the bottom line.

This has everything to do with Samantha Lewis and Ali Joone, aka “Mom and Dad,” the formerly married couple who, as President/CEO and Founder/Director, respectively, have defined and crafted both Digital Playground’s public persona and its business profile for nearly two decades. They are a formidable team.

A film student at the University of Southern California in 1993, Ali Joone was 25 when he started Digital Playground as a company that digitized—on compact disc!—other companies’ VHS-based pornography.

“I had an Apple Quadra 950,” Joone says, “and I managed to license a Wicked title called ‘Barlow’s Affair.’ I digitized it to 320 x 240 format and added menus. I had to fly up to San Francisco with a hard drive to a company that had a CD burner.”

Joone, born in Iran and a student and admirer of the films of Jean Luc Godard and Federico Fellini (as well as their more populist protege Steven Spielberg), didn’t think that, 18 years later, he’d still be shooting porn. But he doesn’t regret it.

“My original aim was to make a bunch of money with these CD-ROMs to start my mainstream company,” he says. “It started out as paying rent, but through the years I changed it to what I want to do.”

Art through the filter of technology is a subject Joone warms to immediately. In an interview in DP’s sprawling Van Nuys building, he digs in when discussing the technical aspects of moviemaking.

“I keep up with technology trends every day,” he says. “As an artist I know it is a tool, and I don’t get sentimental about one particular machine when another might do the job better. You know, one of my happiest days was when I stopped shooting on film. I loved the freedom of going digital.”

And one of his luckiest was when the 1994 Northridge earthquake spared his computer full of porn.

“I was working out of my house that day (January 17) and we’d just started moving in to our first office,” he says. “The entire place was destroyed, except for the Quadra, which had been on this sawhorse table in the middle of the room.”

Joone is so consumed with the technology that when the conversation turns to the business aspects of the company, he begins texting and lets Samantha Lewis do the talking.

Lewis, who looks like Jesse Jane’s older sister, occupies a special place in the porn world. While all the major adult companies feature women in executive positions, only Lewis is co-owner of a studio, and she is very proud of her achievements with Digital Playground.

And, like Joone, she never expected to find herself here.

“I was in Real Estate for 11 years,” she says. “And I really had a misconception—as most people do—about what adult is. But since mainstream sales experience is what I came in with, that’s what I applied to selling porn.”

At first it wasn’t easy. Hired in 1994, Lewis called the porn world at that time, both in its businesses and fans, a “boys’ club.”

“I guess I was naïve at the time,” she says. “I thought, since these movies featured women, that since the women are on the boxcovers, that there’d be more women buying it or running things. But throughout the 90’s, I’d say 90 percent of the people I met on business calls and at the conventions were men.”

And while Lewis quickly established herself as an able negotiator in a business that was generationally entrenched east of the Mississippi (“I dealt with the Cleveland boys, the Philadelphia boys, the New York boys,” she says, “and they eventually figured out that I talked business, too”), her newcomer status allowed her to take shots at new markets.

“We got our movies into Tower Records and Virgin Megastore,” says Lewis, “and I begged them to publicize it. We’d be at big box trade shows and we’d be at the booth over from Mattel. Even back then (in the 90’s) we tried to create a marketing strategy that took into account mainstream penetration.”

Long before 2005’s “Pirates” became by all accounts the best-selling porn feature since “Deep Throat” (and sparked, though Joone is loathe to admit it, today’s porn parody craze), Digital Playground was angling to make porn just a little safer for mainstream audiences.

And this has involved making porn for porn lovers as well as porn for people who’d never seen it before, which is why it was such a coup to secure a spot at Blockbuster Video for an R-rated version of “Pirates,” a movie that owed its ultimate origin to a Disneyland ride.

“The only difference between us and Disney is the content,” says Joone, dead serious. Meaning, we think, that he aims for a company with high production value and worldwide name recognition that doesn’t skimp on facial cumshots.

When the window of CD-ROMs closed around 1998, Digital Playground began distinguishing itself from a high-gloss porn market teeming with Wicked and Vivid material by again relying on technology.

With 1998’s “Virtual Sex with Rocki Roads,” the company launched a (trademarked) series that grew to more than 20 titles, including incarnations with Janine, Jenna Jameson, Teri Weigel, and most of its contract performers over the years. Later, Digital Playground allowed other directors in, including big budget helmer Nick Andrews for slick titles like “Loaded” and “Stripped.”

In 2002, Digital Playground invited gonzo genius Robby D. into the fold. Formerly a Vivid mainstay, Robby D. has launched several series, including the multi-award winning “Control,” “Deeper,” “Jack’s Playground,” “Jack’s Teen America,” and “My First Porn,” as well as several features.

(“We’ve got to get Joone directing again, too,” says Lewis. “He’s happier when he’s directing.”)

And then, following the success of the Joone-directed “Island Fever” series, the company began releasing tentpole movies every year as well as smaller series-based high-end gonzos. After “Pirates 2,” viewers were treated to several “occupational” movies that were reminiscent of the late Jim Holliday’s 80’s and 90’s ensemble films: “Cheerleaders,” “Nurses,” “Babysitters,” “Teachers,” and “Fly Girls” were both light in tone and heavy on sex, selling well with gonzo and couples’ audiences.

Unlike its old school peers, Digital was not the remnant of a venerated business plan that evolved out of East Coast girlie magazine publishing. But it shares with all its competition the challenge of handling talent.

While Joone recently accompanied his contract stars to this fall’s Venus Fair in Berlin, it is Lewis who has been the main talent contact, helping to shape the careers of a dozen contractors over the years, including Teagan Presley, Devon, Stoya, Jesse Jane, and Tera Patrick.

“I tell them that this is porn, and that this is a family, but if they think they’re going to walk out of this job the next Julia Roberts, that they’re in the wrong place,” says Lewis. “I make sure to grill these girls before we offer a contract.”

Though Lewis did not say so, it may be through the company’s experience with Tera Patrick that anyone signing on with Digital Playground from Jesse Jane onward knows exactly what she’s getting into.

“Tera and I were inseparable,” says Lewis, and says nothing else on the subject of the company’s first big contract star.

In her 2009 book “Sinner Take All,” Patrick (born Linda Roberts) confirms her close relationship with Lewis, but also complains she settled for too little money ($5,000 a month), laments not reading her contract before signing it, and advises readers to avoid contracts that include the words “throughout the universe” and “in perpetuity.”

In a section titled “Before you sign a porn contract,” Patrick enumerates a few business mistakes she made when embarking on her deal with Digital Playground in 2000, including “Don’t let someone else own your website,” “Don’t forget to trademark your own name,” and “Don’t make less money than your manager” (her manager was Lewis at the time).

When asked if there were any mistakes they had made or if they had learned anything through adversity since Digital Playground’s founding, neither Lewis nor Joone could think of anything. The message was relentlessly positive.

“Well, we’re not going to send out a press release when someone leaves,” said former Digital Playground Marketing Director Adella Curry a few years ago. “It would defeat the purpose.”

After the Patrick affair, Digital Playground seemed to circle its wagons. Visits to sets were curtailed if not eliminated (we were not allowed on set for this interview, though we were given uncharacteristically generous access to Lewis and Joone), and access to performers was granted—or not—by the company. (This reporter was gently chided for contacting some interview subjects directly.)

Lewis muses about loosening the reins a little bit. “We really should have people visit us more,” she says, allowing a professional photograph of herself and Jesse Jane to be used (though Joone is still camera-shy).

That said, current and even former employees tend to say positive things about the company, lauding Digital Playground above all for its worldwide marketing potential.

“I loved the exposure,” says former contract performer Raven Alexis, who left the company this year. “You reach a huge fanbase. I would never criticize the company in any way.”

Stoya, whose creative shaving hijinks while dating Marilyn Manson also spurred a contract dispute, says that everyone is getting along better.

“We’ve settled into a nice working relationship where Joone rolls his eyes when I feel the need to blog about my love of armpit hair and I listen to their advice on things like licensing my brand for a Fleshlight,” she says. “It’s comparable to the
relationships I see between artists and record labels. (DP) will interject if they think I could be doing something better, but mostly they just let me be me and package it in the most commercially successful way possible.”

Kayden Kross, who chose Digital Playground after successful contract terms with Vivid and Adam & Eve, agrees that the company lets her be herself.

“Digital is good about just leaving me to my own devices and emailing the schedule as it comes through,” she says. “I return the favor by not giving them things to complain about.”

Digital Playground products, which include its movies, their stars, and the novelties bearing their likeness and vaginal dimensions, are available wherever porn is sold, and the contract performers—Jesse Jane in Oklahoma, Stoya in New York, Riley Steele, Kayden Kross, and Selena Rose in Los Angeles—converge at regular intervals for movies or marketing blitzes either alone, in pairs, or in full force, such as events like the AVN show or movies like “Top Guns,” due in January, 2011.

All this activity in service to the pelvic exertions of several very attractive women can sometimes take its toll, but the company is having a little more fun and learning to hang loose a bit.

“Each of these women is such an individual,” says Lewis. “The brains on them—Kayden, Stoya, Jesse—they wear me out.”

Now that sounds like a parent.

Back in Las Vegas for an XBiz event at the Hard Rock Hotel, Big Dawg is standing between Kayden Kross and a gaggle of fans by the pool.

“Easy now,” he says, in a manner so gentle you will absolutely not mess with him. “This pretty girl means business.”

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Gram Ponante is America's Beloved Porn Journalist

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