It is in Scottsdale, Arizona, an affluent suburb of Phoenix, with its plentiful golf courses, all-year sun and its reputation as "the cleanest city in America," that one will find Jenna Jameson these days, set against a background of high-end German cars and plush 4X4s, bathed in the scent of money and success.
The starlet has affected a major change: Formerly known to her international fan base as a delightfully mad blonde bombshell, Jenna has become a sort of captain of industry. Teamed with partners Jimmy and Jay, Jameson has debuted a new Internet venture known to the cyberspace masses as ClubJenna (www.clubjenna.com).
Jimmy, 41, had spent five years in retirement after making his fortune in the telecommunications field before joining Jameson in the ClubJenna venture. Thirty-two-year-old Jay - better known in the adult Industry as Justin Sterling - gave up his career as a sound stage manager to direct the kind of blue movies he's always wanted to make - not one-day-wonders or gonzo shoots but high-end faire of the sort produced by Michael Ninn, Jay's best friend in the Biz. He loves the technology, he says, and producing beautiful images. The triumvirate of the Js, or "J3" as they like to be known, joined forces to bring the new ClubJenna site into being.
One look at the site's first few pages reveals it to be one of the most beautiful and most ambitious projects on the Net in years.
A project of such scope isn't realized in one day, of course. It would require a six long months of hard work and arduous nego- tiations to find the best Webmasters, the best prices, and an investment of more than $250,000. But in the opinion of all in- volved, thanks to Jenna's notoriety, success is all but guaranteed.
"One day I put my name into a search engine and it brought back 175,000 sites having something to do with me," Jameson says. "I also discovered that someone was selling my domain name with the slogan 'More than 1.3 million hits per month'." Jay breaks in: "Jenna's name represented more than three million hits on search engines. So why not capitalize on your own name? She wanted to stop doing videos, and she didn't want to dance . This is the ideal solution for Jenna to retire very quickly."
During the first months, the trio discussed the site's content and look. "As with porn, I wanted to do different things, to address myself to the general public and not exclusively to my fans," Jenna explains. "Of course there are porn pictures, but there is also columns dealing with lots of other stuff, too."
Jameson receives more than 200 pieces of mail every day. She is always surprised to see mail from women asking for advice with their day-to-day lives, or their relationships with men. "I still don't believe that people are going to follow my advice, but I'll respond in my own way. Nicely ... not forcefully ... but in my own way," Jenna muses playfully.
Near the site's "Judge Jenna" column, where the proprietrix dispenses advise, you'll find also a column in which the star will publish various thoughts and reflections, commentaries and various little scoops about items of interest to her readership. And if you know Jenna, you know she isn't one to hold her tongue.
Of the many questions she's asked, for example, lots have to do with plastic surgery, how one ought to have one's breasts or lips redone, etc. With the help of her plastic surgeon, Jameson responds to these questions, and offer advice and before and after shots, photos and video - a good medium for explaining various procedures and preventing various types of unpleasantness. Clearly, clubjenna.com isn't just a fan club, even though the majority of contents have to do with the site's star.
A Guaranteed Success
When you get to know the team running ClubJenna, you feel the enterprise will be a success. A big success. Nevertheless, the whole team has had some difficult tasks to face.
"First of all, there are technological questions to research," says Jimmy. "We had to find the best Webmasters and the best carrier so that the site would have a dependable route, and I honestly think we've found these."
One company helping to see to the site's technical needs is Digital Atmosphere Development (DAD), a well-known entity thanks to its association with Danny Ashe, a one-time amateur Netizen who has become a real-deal star after just five years on the Web.
"They had already suffered by trial and error and paid their Internet dues," Jimmy says of DAD, "so they already had infra-structure and programs guaranteeing secure payments."
Because of the expected volume of traffic at ClubJenna, the risk of chargebacks is considerable. "To me, this question was essential from the beginning," Jimmy says. "Digital Atmosphere had a program that permits you to pass all credit cards through a screening mechanism, and to detect invalid cards and reject them before they're transmitted to the bank. This way we won't have quite so many problems."
And of course, there's the task of updating the site's content and information every day - which brings Jay's talents as artistic director to the fore. With ClubJenna, he supervises the photography, directs the videos, puts together the site's montages, chooses music and governs the site's design and sense of style.
"When we began to prepare our site, I stared looking at other porn sites. All the time I saw things I didn't want to do - no black pages or neon colors," Jay explains. "I wanted something more stylish. I looked at magazines like Gear and Maxim. We worked to produce images which are certainly pornographic, but very stylish, that might well be fashion photos if you took out the porn element. We apply the same concept with the videos. They're closer to the clips you might see on MTV than typical hardcore videos."
Currently, ClubJenna has about 50 exclusive photo series - shoots featuring Jenna with other starlets, still photos, videos, backstage shots, images shot in strip clubs - for a total of more than 7,000 images and videos.
But Jameson has bigger plans for the site. "When everything comes together, I'd like to take other girls under contract and show them how to become celebrities," she says. "There are too many girls out there who don't know anything and who set themselves up to roll with people with no scruples. For a porn actress, I find it embarrassing to have to work until you're 45. Like I always say, Hang on to your titties, ladies!"
So that's why Jenna took her own retirement so early ...
Among other projects in the works is the planned opening two years hence of a strip club in Scottsdale, with cameras throughout for live Webcasts. There will also be, at the same time, the creation of a magazine; and then, as is often the case with young companies which embark on the Net, there is a desire to go on the stock market.
That's Jimmy's specialty. "A year ago, Internet companies were making a lot of money, but that's not the case today. Now we're waiting to see how the economy evolves. From the beginning, we've wanted to build a very profitable company and to make an entry into the market and for that that we put up sufficient general content," he says.
"The monthly subscription will be $29.95 per month," he continues. "The first month we expect 10,000 subscribers, which will bring $300,000 in revenue for a site that cost $250,000." He believes that, ultimately, turnover on the order of a million dollars per month is a very attainable goal.
"I want to make my mark on the Net," says Jameson. With Club Jenna she has struck a resounding first blow.
