Pat Dollard | Young Americans

No, that’s not a law firm founded by erstwhile art school students.

One of the last deals I negotiated for Steven Soderbergh was his six picture deal with Mark Cuban. And so, through the commissions from that deal, the financier of “Redacted”, the filmmaker of “Che”, and the world’s hottest porn star, will now be making this website available to you. As I once said to a journalist regarding a story he was writing about me, “It’s all about irony.”

Multiple Sources Including Martini Boys:

When the Elliot Spitzer prostitution scandal broke, it was inevitable that there would be a movie made. After all, its not every day that governors of major states are caught with their fingers in the pie of a several thousand dollar hooker. Well, I’m sure governors and hookers are together every day, but they are rarely caught every day. My only real concern was that the project would end up being some terrible “movie of the week” with a member of the new 90210 cast struggling to create a tragic portrayal of Ashley Dupre. There’s a good chance that movie will still come to light, but fortunately it won’t be the first movie made about the controversial issue.

No, that honor will fall squarely on the shoulders of director Steven Soderbergh, who is already prepping a new film entitled Girl Friend Experience.

Yes, the Oscar-winning director of “Traffic”, “Erin Brokovich” “Oceans 11 through 13″, and gets made fun of perennially on The Simpsons, is making a film hearkening back to his “sex, lies and videotape” era. The Girlfriend Experience is the term for what high priced call girls offer their clients - the illusion of dating to go along with the coitus. He’s chosen the notorious Sasha Grey, touted as the next Jenna Jameson, which certainly suggests that there will be a great deal of scandalous material in the movie.

Explaining the project to Interview magazine, the Oscar-winning director says, “(It’s) about someone who feels as though she is in absolute control of the way that her life works and, over the course of a week, comes to realise that’s not true.

“It’s a subject I’ve been totally interested in since the beginning of my career. This is just a milieu that I’ve never explored before.”

The 20 year old Porn actress Grey entered the skin business after her 18th birthday and has appeared in scores of XXX flicks. In January she became the youngest recipient of AVN’s Female Performer of the Year award.

Her casting is likely due in part to the fact that she’s a cerebral film buff herself, citing Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci and Catherine Breillat as her favorites. Grey’s comments would seem to echo this.

“To have the opportunity to work for an Academy Award-winning auteur is truly a great honor,” Grey told AVN. “I’ve been an admirer of Soderbergh’s films for years, and I am elated that I have been given a leading role in a character-driven film.”

The film will be part of Soderbergh’s ongoing six film deal funded by Mark Cuban. The movie will be released simultaneously in theaters and on DVD (though hopefully with more success than “Redacted”).

Steven Soderbergh, winner of the Best Director Oscar for “Traffic”

Girlfriend will be her third film deal in 2009. She has already won some small parts in movies like Dick Rude’s independent film Quit and Canadian horror project Smash Cut.

Will there be actual porn in the film, or is this Grey’s chance to step to a different career?

Given Soderbergh’s tendency to experiment at the expense of his audience (ie Full Frontal), I can’t help but wonder if he will be including actually intercourse in the film. That seems to be the latest trend in the art film world, with directors like Lars Von Trier (The Idiots), Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs), and John Cameron Mitchell (Shortbus) all jumping on the X-rated bandwagon. Will Soderbergh be the next to join them? We’ll find out soon enough. One thing’s for sure though, he’s going to have make something even more mainstream than the Ocean’s Eleven franchise to get back in Hollywood’s good graces after the double whammy of this and his 4.5 hour Che Guevara epic.

We’ve reported before about porn stars crossing over into the mainstream as of late - Tera Patrick being considered for QT’s remake of Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! and Jenna Jameson playing a frightening zombie stripper - but so far the projects have been specialty stuff and horror flicks. Let’s face it, Tarantino hiring a porn star (if it ever happens) seems like the natural progression of his career.

We thought the trend would be stuck in slasher flicks when Sasha Grey was tapped (yes, tapped) for little-known Lee Demarbre’s Smash Cut, but now Grey has found her way onto a project that could win her an Oscar. Isn’t that exactly what we would next expect in America? Porn star wins Oscar in film by America’s best director, and deserves it?

Brian Koppelman and David Levien who penned Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 13, wrote the film which has already started production in New York.