By Peter Berton
EDMONTON, Canada – “Deadmonton” is the nickname some Edmontonians have given to this sedate governmental hub in western Canada. When it comes to porn, though, Edmonton is alive and kicking, thanks to the efforts of local adult studio Real Productions. The company has released more than 150 XXX movies, in addition to adult TV series including Make Me a Porn Star (ITV and Starz), Blue Revue (Starz) and The Boy Nexxt Door (Playboy TV).
“Last year we released Tight, a very unique project that included a 13-episode reality series and 10 full-length XXX movies,” said Real Productions owner and director Jason Danlilak. “The mainstream movie made over $3 million in DVD and sales, marking our third project to top a million dollars at a time when most studios are lucky to sell 1000 units.”
Real Productions also has been licensed to broadcast a Canadian adult cable TV channel called Northern Peaks.
Fascinated that the staid city of Deadmonton could be home to a porno powerhouse, YNOT.com had to learn more.
YNOT: How did an adult production company ever get started in Edmonton, of all places?
Jason Danlilak: I owned an advertising agency and was approached by a small adult studio looking for help promoting itself. At first I turned them down. My agency specialized in oil and gas, so what did I know about promoting a porn studio? But then I had a crazy idea for a television series and asked if I could own the TV series if a network bought it.
They agreed, and I pitched the idea for a reality series called Make Me a Porn Star on a network’s answering machine. I got a call back 10 minutes later with an offer. I didn’t know at the time how incredibly rare that is.
I ended up co-producing [the show] with Granada Television in the U.K. — ITV — and later selling it to Starz in the U.S. The show did so well I ended up buying the porn studio, Real Productions, and have been doing it ever since.
What was your first film?
My first movie was Alyse Johnson’s First Time. Alyse was a really hot university student who wanted to do her first porn movie in order to help pay her tuition costs. We shot [the move] over a weekend in a really cheap motel room, and I’m not sure who was more nervous — Alyse, the first-time guys performing with her or me.
Like most girls we shoot with, this would be her one and only movie. We shot seven scenes including her first girl-girl, first threesome and first gangbang, and the movie sold amazingly well via our site and mail-order company.
How did your company grow from there?
The company really took off as a result of Make Me a Porn Star. Before I got [Real Productions] a TV deal, they really hadn’t shot anything. They just had an idea for a different way to market porn.
When I bought the company, we started shooting a movie every week because our TV deal required us to deliver an episode every week. It was a crazy schedule, and we shot some really amazing first-timers including a schoolteacher, a wealthy divorcee who was doing porn to spite her ex-husband and a devout Catholic couple. Their episode was subtitled “The Porn-Again Christians” and earned us an invite to appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
At the same time, we were selling our movies directly to the guys who wanted to be in our movies via direct mail, so we were moving upwards of 3,000 units per movie at $30 to $40 a unit.
We learned early on that nothing promotes a porn movie like mainstream television. Viewers watched Make Me a Porn Star, but because it was R-rated they couldn’t see everything they wanted, so they bought the movie in huge numbers.
Tell us about some of your other successes.
We followed up Make Me a Porn Star with a talk show called Blue Revue and a Playboy TV series, The Boy Nexxt Door. That aired between 2008 and 2012 and was earning more than $1 million a season. Like Porn Star, the movies promoted on the show did big sales from our site and through our mail-order company.
Last year we released Tight, a multi-platform project about the world’s only all-girl, porn-star rock band. It came out as a reality series — a mainstream movie the New York Post called “the best mockumentary since Spinal Tap” — and 10 XXX movies.
The R-rated movie became a cult hit and earned more than $3 million in DVD and VOD sales. Not bad for a movie I shot for $180,000.
What are some of your most unusual projects?
Tight is probably the most unique. It’s certainly the most challenging. We shot it over 39 days and had to assemble the band, book a tour for them, film 14 hours of reality every day — with porn stars who hated each other so badly there were physical assaults almost daily — play actual gigs all over the Southwest and shuttle the girls back and forth to media appearances and sponsor meetings. All that while shooting 36 XXX scenes! I’d like to see Mark Burnett pull that off.
It definitely paid off, as the band got a record deal. The first album just came out — the official movie soundtrack — with their first studio album, Life of the Party, coming out in December.
Some of our other unique projects include SexAbility, a mainstream documentary about the sex lives of the disabled that I produced for a major university, and a reality series I just co-produced about the XXX scene in Montreal.
You’ve most recently done a unique reality video called Here Cums the Bride. What’s the story behind that one?
When we met the Christian couple in Make Me a Porn Star, they were getting married the weekend before we were scheduled to shoot their episode. At a pre-production meeting, they surprised us by asking if we wanted to shoot them having sex on their wedding night. We’re shooting a reality series and it doesn’t get any more real than that, so of course I said “fuck yeah!” We weren’t invited to the wedding itself but met them afterwards at their hotel and shot their first-ever sex as man and wife. Some of the footage was used in the episode.
I figured that was a one-time thing. Then a couple years ago, my friend Eric John asked me if I’d shoot his wedding to Vicki Chase at the AVN Expo and the sex afterwards, so now it was a two-time thing.
Literally a week later I received some footage from a Toronto couple who had shot their wedding night sex on a camera the bride’s mother had given them. I decided we were only one scene short of a full movie, so I put an ad up that we would pay for a couple’s wedding in Vegas if they let us film the wedding night. A couple from Denver agreed to do it, and we covered their costs and shot an amazing scene that night back at their hotel.
We put all the scenes together in Here Cums the Bride. We’re now looking to do another volume and are offering couples the same deal: We’ll pay for the wedding, including flights and accommodations in Las Vegas, in exchange for the video rights to their wedding night.
Were you surprised that people were willing to make the deal to get the free Vegas wedding?
Surprised is an understatement. I was shocked. It’s such an intimate thing to share with the world. But at the same time, who wouldn’t want such an important night on video? A couple is never more in love than their wedding night, and they never look better.
What have you learned about selling adult content that might be helpful to other video producers?
I think promotion is everything. We’ve done tremendously well because we promote so many of our movies via mainstream television series and movies. Porn does a lousy job of creating community, whereas people can become fans of a television series.
If money were no object, what project would you like to do most of all?
I’ve been very fortunate to be able to shoot just about anything I wanted. I’m doing some fairly large-budget mainstream movies and TV series currently — with no porn connection — so that may be the last goal I’ve wanted to achieve.
