Porn Valley- Everyone’s heard the cliché about the girl who came out on the bus from Omaha, failed in Hollywood and fell into porn.

Sasha Grey is not that girl.

She tried waitressing. She went to community college for a bit. She developed an interest in French cinema. She watched a lot of pornographic movies and found them boring. So she decided to do something about it.

“I’ve always been an exhibitionist, so it was a way to explore my sexuality and my art at the same time,” she said. “And knowing that would be a great challenge because a lot of people in and outside of this industry don’t consider porn (to be) art.”

So shortly after she turned 18 last year, she got herself an agent, left Sacramento and moved to Los Angeles. Four days after she officially entered the porn business, she met with gonzo pioneer John Stagliano, who agreed to give her a chance.

Her first scene was in “Fashionistas 2,” a pornographic extravaganza filmed in a Woodland Hills house, that catapulted her to stardom.

“All the other girls my agent represented were booked,” she said. “It was just luck.”

Performers in the adult industry often start soft and progress their way into hard-core material. A woman starting out might begin with
pictures only, then solo scenes, same-sex performances and then through a hierarchical progression of sexual acts.

Grey stepped right into the top tier — group sex.

Within three weeks, she’d contracted gonorrhea, which she says she understood was a risk she took upon entering the business. She got treated and went back to work.

Grey quickly gained a reputation as an adventuresome performer willing to do just about anything on camera. She averages $1,300 for each of the five or six scenes she films each week.

Well-versed in glam rock and independent film, she comes across as far more mature than the average 18-year-old. She can rail at length about the “puritanical society” that ostracizes sexuality in movies in favor of violence.

She seems very conscious of the fact that when you take your clothes off and have sex on camera, you become a commodity.

And a commodity with limited shelf life. She realizes that as much as she’s in demand right now — directors must endure a two-month wait before they can enlist her services — she could very easily become overexposed. When you’ve on pace tocompleted nearly 200 scenes before your 19th birthday, it’s hard to stay fresh, new and mysterious in an industry that thrives on such qualities.

“It’s something I’ve been actually thinking about a lot lately, since it’s almost a year that I’ve been in the business,” she said. “It definitely helps that I have outside interests, so I diversify. I’m not just sticking with porn, whether it’s a book or a film or a documentary or all three, which I’m doing right now.”

And she hopes that in her time in the business, however long it lasts, she leaves a mark. Her brush with an STD influenced her to speak up for better health care for performers. She hopes to get fans to open up about their sexuality by watching her explore her own.

At an age when most girls are still hanging out at the mall or working their first job, she’s considering her image and the woman she hopes to become.

“This business really forces you to grow up and mature faster than you normally would,” she said. “It’s taught me a lot about myself and a lot about discipline. … I’ve definitely learned to deal with people in the world because I’m now an adult. That transition happened so quick — high school, college, porn.”