Over the weekend I read on
Ain't It Cool News about James Gunn and Spike TV's "PG Porn," a series of short satiric films starring porn stars but which feature no sex. Here's Gunn from the AICN piece:
My brothers Brian and Sean and I came up with PG PORN years ago. We'd talk about all sorts of scenarios where you take the typical porn set-up and things would somehow go wrong. When I was a kid I'd go see X-rated movies in a theater with my friends. I would rarely get turned on -- it was all about laughing at the strangeness of the acting and cinematography and story lines.
The first episode is live on the Spike TV site. It stars Aria Giovanni but I decided not to link to it, preferring to wait until the
Sasha Grey episode was posted because Grey has been outspoken in her love for independent and transgressive cinema. (In
one interview, for example, she said, "I also wanted to say support independent films --go to an art house and watch something that confuses you and hopefully gets you to talk about afterwards even if you think it sucked.") Her
MySpace page lists as her favorite directors Jean-Luc Godard, Harmony Korine, William Klein, Antonioni, Gaspar Noe, Agnes Varda, David Gordon Green and Terrence Malick, among others, and she shoots with Terry Richardson and
Filmmaker contributor Richard Kern. But news events have apparently overtaken my blog editorial calendar. According to Adult Video News, Grey has been cast in a lead role in a film by another of her favorite directors: Steven Soderbergh.
Soderbergh's
The Girlfriend Experience is in production and
she is quoted as telling AVN, "To have the opportunity to work for an Academy Award-winning auteur is truly a great honor. I've been an admirer of Soderbergh's films for years, and I am elated that I have been given a leading role in a character-driven film."
Glenn Kenny previously blogged about this last April, linking to a Michael Fleming
Variety piece that said a wish-list performer was a starlet who cited Catherine Breillat as a hero. In the blog This Recording last Spring Molly Young issued four reasons why
"Sasha Grey is a New Kind of Porn Star." Writes Young:
Sasha is pretty in a bird-like way, with the frame of someone who fidgets a lot. She has brown eyes and root-beer colored hair. Her MySpace profile describes someone who is part ditzy teenager, (likes makeup and Tetris, plays the “guitar”) part bougie New Yorker (Carl Jung, War and Peace, Antonioni), and part dubious feminist (Anais Nin, the self-actualized porn star schtick). There’s also something of the hero’s quest to her self-presentation:
“I am Sasha Grey,” she writes. “There is no other. This is only a brief dossier because I’m not dead and don’t feel that a complete biography is yet warranted.” She sounds like the beginning of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield.
Comments (4)
There's this misconception that porn stars are uncultured airheads. That may be true for the most part but the ones who survive and become reasonably successful have a brain. Lex Steele has degree from Syracuse, Aurora Snow was an honor roll student who went to UCI, Ron Jeremy was a teacher (yikes!) and if you listen to Jenna Jameson she's actually quite intelligent.
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posted by Israel Vonseeger @ 10/15/2008 2:52 PM
Not disputing that at all. What I was trying to point to were her artistic inspirations and heroes, which are decidedly non-mainstream. (If you look at her list there are plenty of others in addition to the slightly better known people I namechecked.) In recent years a lot of art filmmakers have made films either about porn (like Lucas Moodyson's "Hole in the Heart") or, in rare cases, with porn actors (like Breillat's "Romance"). But usually these inspirations just go one way; Grey is the only current porn actor I can think of who seems to be inspired by some of these filmmakers herself.
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10/15/2008 3:14 PM
Oh okay. To be honest my comment was not really directed at this article exactly but reading it did make me think about this dumb pornstar stereotype. I looked at Sasha's list and I think the most surprising one is William Klein -- I think she made the list before Criterion released his films and even then he's pretty obscure. "Romance X" was a great film and Rocco Riffredi is terrific actor. Hopefully Sasha will be equally as good; I understand the two are "familiar" with each other. Great article btw.
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posted by Israel Vonseeger @ 10/15/2008 6:25 PM
Awesome. I've always thought that Sasha Grey was worthy of an 'uplifting'. If she can act there's no reason why she shouldn't go on to do more film work. She's got a great personality in addition to being beautiful and heroically perverted.
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posted by Wiley @ 10/16/2008 1:17 PM
