LOS ANGELES—Exile Distribution founder and AVN Hall of Fame member Howard Levine makes the pages of alternative Los Angeles paper LA Weekly with an extensive profile detailing his work recruiting porn stars for mainstream productions like Sons of Anarchy.
Recounting how he got connected with SOA—he himself was recruited as an extra by another member of his sober-life bike club Messengers of Recovery—the article traces how Levine conveyed that into a sideline as a porn-to-mainstream liaison and has even gone on to pick up an associate producer gig on SOA cast member David Labrava's forthcoming film Street Level.
Discussing Levine's work on his show, apparently pun-partial SOA creator Kurt Sutter told LA Weekly, "Howard's a great guy but not representative of our casting process. He's an independent porntractor who works out of the back of his truck. A truck full of XXX DVDs."
The article later ponders whether the ever-narrowing borderline between the porn and mainstream worlds will at some point completely vanish, quoting Magnus Sullivan, the writer/producer behind LionReach/Adam & Eve's boundary-blurring Marriage 2.0, as saying, "The only thing that separates adult now from mainstream is the ability to shoot hard cock, pink and penetration. Mainstream goes right up to the edge, and I don't think it will be long until we see hard cock."
(Apparently Sullivan hasn't gotten wind of Gaspar Noé's Cannes sensation Love ... or seen Michael Winterbottom's 2004 film 9 Songs or the works of Catherine Breillat.)
Levine doesn't see a future where the two sides of moviedom become one, but he does concede, "People love love porn. They always have. They always will."
Read the full LA Weekly piece here.
[Ed. note: The above quote from Magnus Sullivan was originally misattributed by AVN to U.K. producer Ben Yates. We apologize for the error.]
