Ron Jeremy in Killing Zoe

THE HEDGEHOG, STORMY AND OTHERS

Roly-poly porn actor Ron Jeremy has parlayed his schlubby demeanor and singular talent into a peculiar career as a porn mascot, playing dirty uncle to the likes of former teen stars Corey Feldman, Corey Haim and Scotty Schwartz, and introducing them to adult film actresses as they reached their as-a-result-less-painful respective puberties. A bit part in a scene full of porno stars in John Frankenheimer's 1986 thriller 52 Pick-Up led to a friendship with Frankenheimer, and the director later cast him in a bit part in Ronin, although as with Stardust Memories, Ron didn't make the final cut. He's done a little better in the films of Roger Avary, cameoing in Killing Zoe and The Rules of Attraction. The 2001 documentary Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy, is most notable for Jeremy's endless plaints about the mainstream success and respect — let's not forget respect! — that continues to elude him more than 20 years after he started making porn. He's also rather embarrassingly lacking in self-awareness, not really facing up to the fact that whatever mainstream work he is able to get is along the lines of an inside joke, one that is a least partially on him. (See also his appearances on VH1's The Surreal Life.) One imagines that his recent memoir Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man In Show Business persists in these themes.

Stormy Daniels in The 40 Year Old Virgin

We should also point out those cases wherein a mainstream film features an adult-film subplot or some such, and directors, seeking verisimilitude, cast from the actual adult industry. Classical pianist and now-retired porn star Asia Carrera appears as Sherry in the Jackie Treehorn production Logjammin' in the Coen Brothers' 1998 The Big Lebowski. Kobe Tai, working under the name Carla Scott, was genuinely engaging as the hooker who ends up dead at the hands of Jeremy Piven in Very Bad Things, also 1998. And Wicked Girl Stormy Daniels, who has been both writing and directing for that company, had a genuine comic turn as the sex fantasy of Steve Carell in Judd Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin. She went on to play a lap dancer (alongside fellow adult star Nautica Thorn) in Apatow's Knocked Up. Indeed, Apatow's brand of raunch comedy offers a fair amount of employment opportunities for porn stars; Jenna Haze and Aurora Snow were the "Vagtastic Voyage" girls of the Apatow-produced Superbad. Whether any of these performers has a chance to graduate from porn window-dressing to "real" roles remains and open question. As does, to be fair, whether all porn performers actually want mainstream acceptance. There's a big part of the industry that doesn't give it a second thought.

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