She straddled what?!
Oh, the spectrum. Never mind…
An actor rather than an actress, but this guy did an infamous softcore movie before moving to regular film work. Whatever happened to him anyway?
A lot of people in a lot of threads have called Playboy porn, too. We have a weird attitude toward sex and nudity in this country. Playboy had to fight legal battles in an era when the Playmate might not even have shown a nipple. She suggested that she had naughty bits and that was sufficient.
Was Playboy porn for arty shots of side boob? What about when it went full-frontal? Full-frontal with pubic hair? Full-frontal with shaved pubic hair? A teacher in Texas was fired last week because of Playboy photos taken a couple of years ago, well before she started teaching.
I agree with you. There are times when people use the word porn to mean anything that might be called sexual. I think that’s wrong and often damaging, as it was with the young teacher. But that’s the way language works.
And yet, the OP asked about “adult films.” In our shared agreement about language, adult films have a pretty specific meaning. That meaning excludes films put out by Hollywood. It usually excludes films that have a hard R. Skinemax films that do everything but… may be part of the fuzzy boundary in some times and some places. Mainstream Hollywood probably isn’t one of those places. It discriminates and everybody knows that it discriminates. You cross a certain line and you put yourself on the unspoken blacklist. Joan Collins playing a steamy sex scene is on one side of that line. Sasha Grey is on the other. She appeared on *Entourage *and played nude, one of probably 100 women who did so over the run of the show. Those other woman are not blacklisted by Hollywood, because they don’t see nudity or simulated sex as porn. They see porn as porn. Sasha Grey did porn. That’s a difference she’ll always have to live with but Emmanuelle Chriqui and Malin Ackerman will not, even though they take part in a three-way on the show.
I agree with Exapno on this. Claiming that any actress who’s ever done a nude scene has done porn is ridiculous.
According to IMDB, Sasha Grey has a couple of mainstream movies coming up, including one with Michelle Trachtenberg, Eliza Dushku, and Gina Gershon. Not bad.
The adult actress Stoya, in addition to being mind-boggling sexy, can actually act. Some of her films put an obvious effort into the set up and production values, and she shows some acting ability. I imagine she could do reasonably well in mainstream movies if she wanted to.
On the male side, Rocco Siffredi starred in movie called “Romance”. I didn’t see it. Wiki describes it as an art house film with some hard sex scenes. Romance (1999 film) - Wikipedia. He doesn’t seem to have pursued other non-porn roles that I saw at a glance on his IMDB page.
Um, topless AND bottomless nudity. :o
I don’t disagree with this, for the most part. Just pointing out that Softcore can be porn. I certainly agree with your points about American prudery and its effects.
That said, I think a reason a lot of porn actresses don’t do mainstream work is that they are simply terrible actresses. There’s a reason the ones who do quasi-mainstream films mostly do screamers. It’s easy to transistion from “Oh yes, I’m coming!” to “Ahh! A monster!” doing the more subtle emotional work even mediocre films require is probably out of their range. Of course there will be exeptions. Sasha Gray might be one of them. She did a good job playing herself on Entourage.
And Traci Lords. Is that her highest-budget film? Ah, no, maybe Blade, although she wasn’t billed as high.
Lots of porn stars in exploitation or cheap horror films, as well as in cameos in stuff like the Girl Next Door. And actors doing non-simulated scenes (rumored or openly) in things like Shortbus.
Simon Rex (the later Scary Movies) did gay-oriented solo porn. I won’t say that Dilara/Sibel Kekilli was that prolific, but she’s made a few films. Yes, there not stereotypical German scheisse porn, but one in particular is rather weird. Something about android sexbots delivered in crates, I got out of it. (Link to her ~11 films: http ://www. iafd .com/person.rme/perfid=Dilara/gender=f.
(Link has no nudity but elsewhere on the site might and it is a porn-related site, so wait till you get home).
And if blacklisting porn stars is prudery, it’s worth it to not hear from Sasha Grey again.
Michelle Bauer, who was a bondage model/actress and also did vanilla hardcore under a pseudonym back in the late 80s and 90s also did quite a few horror films, so many and she was so well received that she was considered a leading “scream queen.” And fans of her scream queen roles did not necessarily know of her adult stuff, so she did have dual success in the adult/mainstream world. In porn she was in the classic film “Cafe Flesh” and in scream queen mode she did Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers. Although she did not get lead roles in any A films, she was pretty durned successful within her genre.
I know it looks like a bikini bottom, that’s a majestic 70s bush, so full nudity.
Not an actor, really, but Frederik Ecklund of Million Dollar Listing did gay porn prior to becoming a real estate agent.
Cite (with link to the scene, please)? 
While there aren’t a lot of crossovers between Ron Howard and Greg Dark films, there is a sort of gray area in movies that feature both porn and mainstream actors. Boogie Nights, Caligula, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and anything by Peter Greenaway exemplify this. Also, lots of early 70s films that are pretty respectable now (Midnight Cowboy, A Clockwork Orange, Carnal Knowledge, maybe Last Tango in Paris and I Am Curious (Yellow)) initially got an X rating but have in some cases come to be regarded as R.
“Adult films” is a term that has had a couple of different meanings over the years. The Aristocrats is an “adult film” starring Robin Williams, George Carlin, Sarah Silverman and Tim Conway.
Am I missing the sarcasm? There is this thing called The Internet. Took me about 60 seconds to find clips from her first.
I can’t guarantee they showed the naughty bits because of course I didn’t really view them. :eek:
And there are scenes like “The Brown Bunny” where Chloe Sevigny gives an explicit, real -deal blowjob to her ex-lover (Joey Gallo, I think) onscreen. I’ve seen the clips, it’s hardcore stuff. You see things going in and out of things. Does that make the whole film hardcore porn (cause there was just the once scene, I think)?
More examples can be found here, if that’s what you’re into.
I’m not going to google, but I have seen porn sites explicitly (heh…) ban all her videos, even the legal one(s), because they don’t want to get in that quagmire.
I have not seen it, but by all accounts that entire film is an obscenity, as is Gallo’s entire career.
The difference between “porn” and a sexually explicit “arthouse film” is that in the former, the characters are generally supposed to be enjoying themselves (or at least one of the characters in a scene is). In sexually explicit arthouse films, like In the Realm of the Senses or Romance, nobody actually enjoys sex - they have joyless, desperate sex that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
Shortbus is the rare exception where the characters appear to be enjoying the sex.
Actually, I’m not, but I thought it was an interesting question.