'Variety' Examines Hollywood's Porn Acceptance

HOLLYWOOD—With the Linda Lovelace biopic Lovelace and James Deen's mainstream debut in The Canyons both hitting movie screens in the coming week, Hollywood trade Variety took a look Thursday at the degree to which the movie industry primarily situated south of the hills separating Los Angeles proper from the San Fernando Valley has locked arms with the one north of them. Dubbing these times the "post-porn age" for media, Variety's Steve Chagollan surveyed the ways Hollywood has portrayed the porn industry in films from Canyons director Paul Schrader's 1979 picture Hardcore to James Cox's 2003 John Holmes biopic Wonderland to, of course, what Chagollan submitted "is considered the gold standard of porn sagas," Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 epic Boogie Nights. In addition, he discussed the success of mainstream films both with casting porn stars in straight roles—naturally focusing on Deen in Canyons and Sasha Grey in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience—and with dabbling in explicitness themselves, such as in Michael Winterbottom's 2004 drama 9 Songs and Lars von Trier's forthcoming Nymphomaniac. A primary consultant for the piece was film critic Glenn Kenny, who played the memorable "hobbyist" in The Girlfriend Experience. "As disreputable as [Hollywood's] own players might be, the porn industry is a red-headed step child of theirs that they'd rather not have," Kenny told Chagollan. Still, he advanced that Hollywood and Porn Valley have "arrived at this kind of detente." Read "From 'Lovelace' to Lohan: Hollywood Gets in Bed With Porn Biz" here.