Rachel Elizabeth was a fashion model working in Japan, working the runways as well as appearing in print campaigns for various lingerie and clothing lines, including high-profile brand names such as Guess. Now she's the center of a multimedia content company founded by former employees of Odyssey, playing a fashion photographer shooting nudes, whose travels are documented for The Rachel Files.
Mike Frasca and Emiliano Valdez were working together at the now defunct Odyssey Group when they decided that they should start their own company.
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Frasca oversaw the aggregation of amateur content while at Odyssey and Valdez was the Webmaster for the now defunct studio.
After a short attempt at hardcore, Frasca and Valdez opted to go mainstream.
"We decided that the market was saturated for hardcore, so we decided to get out of adult. We wanted to work with prettier girls and do kinda the same thing – but mainstream," Frasca told AVN.com.
They picked up a new partner Jesse Valentine, a man with a background in publishing who will be the center of a spin-off series that will debut later this year. The name of their company became Jesse Valentine Productions.
They started looking for a woman that could be the centerpiece of the company and discovered Rachel Elizabeth. It was decided that they would use her background as a fashion model to launch the Rachel Files, a series casting Elizabeth as former model who becomes a traveling fashion photographer – taking plenty of nude photos along the way.
"We've tried to format this like the Playboy stuff and like the Peach stuff because we want to get it onto the shelves at places like Tower Records," Frasca told AVN.com. "But that's where the similarity ends. I think we use prettier girls than Peach uses. We're not using porn stars – well, they weren't porn stars when we originally shot them. We're trying to stick with mainstream models."
"The Playboy stuff is kinda of just poses without dialogue. We have dialogue and even a loose storyline," Frasca said, admitting that the eventual goal of the series is to take it to cable, possibly Showtime. "We're adding to it bit by bit increasing the complexity of the series – adding conflict and resolutions, stuff like that."
Not that they'll forget to include beautiful women in the nude. "We'll be a little harder than Playboy as well. We'll show a little pink, have some toy play – but for now no penetration. We've got to keep things clean for the shelves, but we have harder material available on our Website."
RachelFiles.com already has 25,000 photos of Elizabeth and models that appear in the DVDs, as well as plenty of video footage. That was content shot under Elizabeth's first year under contract to Jesse Valentine Productions – they recently signed her to a second year.
"This time we've given her a percentage to ensure she'll stay. Now that we're putting product on the market, she should pull in a hefty commission," Frasca said.
The Rachel Files has already picked up mainstream distribution – Goldhil Media International, a distributor of content in genres ranging from comedy to history, will carry all titles from Jesse Valentine Productions. Frasca expects to have three titles out by the end of May, and intends to release one a month after that.
The first volume of The Rachel Files streets April 27, with pre-orders being accepted April 7.
