HBO Series Planned: Porn Meets Larry Sanders Meets The Sopranos

Seymore Butts gets executive producer status when his TV pilot "Porn" goes before the cameras this April. The headline pretty much tells you what the concept will be.

Butts: "Basically it's a collaborative effort between myself and a gentleman named Michael Salzman who comes from four years at Murphy Brown and some other NBC shows as well. We're going to be using real industry people as themselves in this series. We're going to try to make it as funny as possibe and draw from the gritty side of the business as well, the realism. Even Seymore Butts might be involved in a peripheral way. But we haven't quite figured out what to do with Miss Klass, yet. Her acting ability is so great, Michael wants her to read for one of the regular roles. I think she should play herself. That will be one of the more interesting situations that we settle.

"Basically, I had this concept for a show. I'm working on it with another friend who has to drop out because he has another project. I'm at a party talking about it and I'm overheard by another gentleman in the industry who happens to be a fan. He invites me to dinner. During the course of dinner one of the poeple there is an agent from United Talent. He thinks the idea is incredible. He thinks he might have someone perfect to collaborate. He calls Michael Salzman whose exclusive deal at NBC has just run out and his timing is perfect. He also happened to have a similar idea that he wanted to pursue. The way everything fell together this show was destiny, so to speak. From there we got to together. Michael spent the entire CES shadowing me around, meeting people. We had dinner with numerous people in the industry. After some time we came up with a script. The script has been delivered to HBO and we're waiting to go to pilot." Seymore says the original working title had been "The Money Shot."

Seymore also says a crew from the TV show 20/20 will spend up to a year with him and Alisha in preparation for a one hour feature on them.

Butts: "This lady Anna Simms Phillip produced the award winning show they did on prostitution. She was at the CES show and the awards show. She came in with no knowledge whatsover of who anybody was in the industry. She came away with saying that the one person she had an interest in meeting was Alisha. She got in contact with us and did a preliminary meeting where she went down to Florida. Alisha was feature dancing at a club and she just kind of hung out with Alisha. The house was standing room only, people on South Beach recognized her and created this little party in front of the 20/20 camera everywhere she went. The woman was extremely impressed. The next thing you know she was at our house having dinner telling us she wants to follow our lives for a year.

One more thing, Wayne Wang of Joy Luck Club fame had a reading with Alisha and based on that, Klass gets the starring role in his next film. "Basically they told her she's the girl," said Seymore. "They're shooting around her schedule March and April. Whatever level it is, I gather that it's somewhat of a secretive project. But it's a mainstream big deal project," Seymore said.