I was going to post something long and complicated about Sasha Grey being picked to star in Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience," but then I was like, eh, fuck it. And then I wrote that, and I was like, eh, fuck that.
In terms of media cycles, coverage of porn goes up and down, so to speak. Over the years, I've tried to figure out if there's some kind of pattern to it. I think there may be regular pops in porn reportage in the spring and the fall. Maybe it's something in the air. Or your pheromones. Or the stock market.
In the last year, I've gotten more sex-related queries from various big money entertainment entities than ever before. At one point, I talked to one of the guy's who wrote the Soderbergh movie, one more Hollywood hustler, who interrupted me so many times in his quest to get the digits of some high-end call girls for his research "process" that he made me feel like Temeka Lewis to his Eliot Spitzer. And there are other stories like that I can't talk about yet, if ever. That's how it goes, I suppose.
Now that porn's gone mainstream, big money is looking to cash in on the sex trade game. A decade ago, it wasn't like that. They wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole. Now they say: Tell me what you know. Somehow, I've been cast in the role of their fixer. ("When bombs are falling and western journalism is the only game left in town, 'fixers' are the people who sell war correspondents the human tragedy and moral outrage that makes news editors happy.")
In the end of this story, the fixer ends up feeling like a border patrolman between two countries where everybody stays on their own side, but they spend all their time looking over the wall at the other side. Mostly, I watch what I say. Want to find out what's in the jungle? I want to tell them. Take a trip up the river, motherfucker. What am I? I'm not your fixer. But then I just answer the phone, tell another story, get another headache, put my head under the water, and wonder when it ends.
Update: Celebrities.com has footage of Soderbergh directing Sasha (who is misidentified) in "The Girlfriend Experience" on the streets of New York City. [via AVN]
Update 2: And here's the Variety item.
