Porn Valley- On a number of occasions, including her most recent visit to KSEX this week, AVN-nominated Best New Starlet Sasha Grey has been critical of the article written about her in LA Magazine’s November 2006 issue. With a couple of pictures posing her as glum, depressed and dour, the article, loaded down with provocative drama, asks the question if Grey will be the industry’s next Jenna Jameson. Then it deconstructs her over the next nine pages with an intellectual ice pick.

If the article, which embellishes porn stereotypes, sets out to do a number on Grey, it certainly covered all the ones on her bingo card. And Grey’s agent, Mark Spiegler gets a pretty good going over, as well, being painted in one instance as an inveterate gossip.

“He knows which agent just impregnated a client, which producer was banned from the set for hitting on the talent, which actress recently suffered a meltdown on a Maui shoot [Taryn Thomas], and which magazine editor was known in a former life as the sadomasochistic Lord Master Damien [AVN’s Mike Ramone].

“He talks in jag: sick clients, lost clients, stranded clients, penniless clients, upset clients, and clients who have just crashed one of the other five cars.”

[Spiegler reportedly drives six fancy automobiles including a Cadillac Escalade, a Range Rover, a Hummer, and a Mercedes S430 and two CL500s.]

“In part because he was once on the money-lending side of the business and because he enjoys Shakespeare’s plays, Spiegler’s business card reads Mark ‘Shylock’ Spiegler, Patron of the Tarts,” according to the article, noting that Spiegler also maintains a dorm for girls who lack their own lodgings.

Then, again, Spiegler’s described like some Edgar Allan Poe character: “a small man with marsupial features who walks with a limp and both elbows hiked back in an unnatural crook- more or less what you’d expect a porn agent to look like.” But it’s also mentioned that Spiegler’s genial, self-effacing and well read. Talk about disembowelment with a complementary anesthetic.

As the piece states, Spiegler handles over 170 phone calls a day and his agency is considered one of the top four in porn along with LA Direct, Gold Star Modeling, and Exotic Star.

Spiegler, who grew up in West Hollywood and attended Hollywood High, also has a BA in economics from Cal State Northridge. He began investing in financial markets and in 1996 started producing movies at the time World Modeling was pretty much the only agency you could go to to get girls. Spiegler admits that having someone like Grey could be very important to an agency and thinks she’s the “it” girl.

“She’s smart, she’s responsible, and she’s old for her age [18],” says Spiegler. “I’ve never said this about an actress before, but with the right money behind her, Sasha could be another Jenna Jameson.”

The article begins with Grey’s first adult shoot. She’s having sex with Rocco Siffredi for Fasionistas Safado: The Challenge. Grey urges Rocco to punch her in the stomach. Can anyone spell the name Belladonna?

Grey later explains that she probably asked Siffredi to punch her because, “when you’re having sex, all the wind gets knocked out of you, and that’s a really euphoric feeling for me.

“Rough sex sometimes hurts, but that’s the point,” she continues. “That’s when the endorphins kick in and I feel good.” Later, Grey is described as liking sexual degradation.

“I have a high threshold for pain,” she says. “I love the energy, the passion, the enthusiasm in being degraded. I want to have that.”

But Spiegler comments that he won’t allow his girls to cross certain lines or work with certain producers.

“But in the Valley where every imaginable transgression has been caught on tape, it’s hard to say where Spiegler’s line exists anymore,” the article states.

“It’s true I would do stuff that might not be publishable,” Grey admits. “Slapping, peeing, spit, vomit.”

Grey, reports the LA magazine piece, was also scheduled to fly to San Francisco later in the summer to have her vagina “electrocuted”.

Like someone out of a Charles Dickens’ novel, Grey is described as “small boned,” “pale skinned,” “thin stemmed”; “delicate,” and a working class kid from the North Highlands area of Sacramento with “a spotty high school education”. A gratuitous geographic discourse on Sacramento is offered along with observations that Grey’s from a neck of the woods below the Mendoza line when it comes to economic status.

“I come from an underprivileged community that doesn’t have a mission,” Grey relates for the article. But, according to Grey, she earned A’s and B’s in school.

“Those grades mean nothing to you,” she admits. “I became one of those anti-everything kids…nothing could make me happy.”

Grey’s parents are divorced, and all she’ll say on the subject is her mother works for the state and her father is supported by the state. When Grey was 12 her mother remarried, her step father had drug habits and the family moved into a better neighborhood. At the age of 16 Grey told her mother she was moving out because of the stepfather. She hated her stepfather.

“He had a split personality,” says Grey. “One minute he could be sweet, the next minute a dick.”

According to the piece, Grey loved her mother but loathed the fact she could be manipulated by overbearing men.

Grey also claims she was never abused as a child and when her mother moved back to North Highlands, Grey drifted from school to school.

The article says she spent a lot of time in her room getting stoned or getting drunk with friends at the park. Grey finished high school in May, 2005 after which she bused tables at a steak house.

And references to Grey’s former occupation are consistently repeated as if you didn’t get it the first time or perhaps more so to rub it in. Grey apparently dated a cook there, eight years her senior, who besides A-1 steak sauce, introduced Grey to various forms of “consensual degradation”.

“He unlocked a lot of things inside of me I hadn’t explored before,” explains Grey.

“In bed- smacked, slapped, yanked and sodomized- she felt whole,” the article states. “Viewing porn with the cook, she could sense a future assembling, a mission that North Highlands hadn’t equipped her with.” Grey says she began to study porn movies to understand how the scenes played out and if she could simulate the positions. The thought occurred to her that this is what she should do with her life.

Grey came to Los Angeles in April with plans of becoming an adult film star. She found Spiegler through the Internet and when another actress slated for Fashionistas came down with the hives, Spiegler suggested Grey to Stagliano. And Grey’s subsequent performance got her instant recognition and notice. After that, Grey was getting booked for as many as four features a week.

Driving a Hyundai her mother bought for her, Grey moved to the Valley where she found, from Craigslist, a backyard pool house with no stove and no air conditioning. As she saved her money, Grey moved into an apartment in Studio City.

A point is made that despite an inconsistent education, Grey, during a stint in junior college, developed aesthetic tastes in filmmaking, embracing the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Antonioni and Werner Herzog. She also reads William S. Burroughs, Anais Nin and Hunter S. Thompson. Grey took courses in film, dancing and acting.

Bearing some resemblance to her, Grey originally wanted to use the porn name Anna Karina, after Godard’s ex wife but was urged to drop that on Spiegler’s advice. Grey had also believed her porn career could last six or seven years but Spiegler advised her to downsize that projection to three or four. Grey also entertains thoughts about directing and producing. But Spiegler says the only people in the porn business making steady money anymore are the talent.

Described as having a personality that comes off “bleak,” with sentences that seem to “drift out of an emotional desert,” Grey’s also described as an enigma wrapped in a riddle.

“One day [writes the author, Dave Gardetta] I might find myself talking to her about the novelist Philip Roth, and the next I’d come across an image of her on the Internet being sodomized by a man in a bear suit. There were two disconnected Sashas, or maybe nine Sashas, all adding up at that moment on the [Erotica LA] convention floor to wild incoherence.”

Grey mentions that she relishes playing the part of an exhibitionist.

“I like the feeling of being in front of the camera, of having someone watching me have sex,” she states. During the course of the article, Spiegler is interviewed as he accompanies seven of his girls, including Grey, to Erotica LA.

“Business-wise meetings are the reason to be here,” Spiegler says, indicating that if his girls are signing autographs, they’re not doing their job of meeting producers and directors.

According to the article, Grey’s Fashionista buzz got her approached by ClubJenna for a contract offer. But she passed.

“Her schedule was so busy by late June, she was on track to earn $200,000 within the year by filming as many as 150 movies.” Grey supposedly watched her first porn movie at the age of 11 and is part of the new porn culture spawned from the Internet.

The boom in porn “requires a steady supply of Sasha Greys who were sexualized by the same easily accessible porn they now show up in,” the article goes on to state.

For her part, Grey declares that she’s not in the business to make love or be romanced.

“I’m here to fuck,” she says. Grey believes that if a performer has to be on drugs, they don’t belong in porn.

“Sasha estimates that about a third of the people she works with are high on something, but if you throw marijuana on that list, many in the adult film industry place the number closer to 80 percent.”

Grey also doesn’t like the fact of directors who attempt to dress her up as an adolescent, describing the extent it goes, through wardrobe, hairstyling and makeup.

“But no one should be jacking off to a 14 year-old,” she feels.

“It doesn’t help matters that, naked, Sasha has the body of a young teenager- small breasted, tiny limbed, with a 14 year-old’s pouting mouth and unsure gait,” the article adds.

On one occasion, director Pat Myne is seen as very creepy. Grey’s doing a shoot in Agoura Hills in which she’s going to be DP’d and Myne is photographing her.

“That’s it, so cute, so innocent, but dirty, dirty, dirty, so dirty at the same time,” Myne is quoted as saying. “Oh my little girl! My sweet little 18-year-old! Do you understand how beautiful and cute you are?” But after all is said and done, Myne gets down to business.

“Okay, let’s fuck her.”

The feeling is that Grey’s on-screen popularity seems to stem from the fact that she’s “scary”.

“It’s porn,” she explains. “Make it ridiculous, make it disgusting, make it loud and filthy- that’s what I want to do on film. That’s why I’m in the business.” Grey says in another part of the article that the best scenes are when the men want to slap her around, when they want to pull her hair and smack her ass.

“They’re getting what they want and I’m getting what I asked for,” she says. “I guess I’ve just been blessed.”

Except Grey doesn’t consider porn to be exploitation but more a test of her strength and inner resolve. She dismisses women in the industry that she considers “weak” or “needed to be babied”.

Babied or not, on one occasion, according to the article, Grey had hemorrhoids and couldn’t do a scene for Skeeter Kerkove so another Spiegler girl, Lorelei took the assignment.

At the time Grey was being interviewed for the article, there was speculation that she was being considered for the AVN Best New Starlet category.

Says the LA piece in a subtle rub: “Imagine the editors of variety choosing the Academy Award nominations- then handing out Oscars to the winners- and you have a pretty good idea of how much manipulation can go on behind the scenes during the run-up to the AVNs. Coincidentally or not, companies that advertise consistently in Adult Video News often take home awards in Las Vegas.”

As much as Spiegler concedes theoretical importance to the awards, he mentions that it can also be a curse.

“The Valley’s best known actresses also disappear by other means,” states the article. “Shauna Grant, Nancee Kellee, Megan Leigh, Alex Jordan and Savannah- all ‘A’ list performers in their time- committed suicide.”