<i>LA Weekly</i> Profiles Adult Industry Personalities

The May 9 edition of LA Weekly features erotic photographer Dave Naz, adult film director Paul Thomas and sex therapist Dr. Susan Block as part of its "LA People" cover story.

"This issue aims less to commemorate L.A.'s most powerful and beautiful people, though there are certainly powerful and beautiful people profiled here, than to celebrate the incredible range of its citizens, up-and-comers as well as hardened survivors, the unknown as well as the famous, the enclaves covered by Us magazine and subsets more likely to see print in the Japanese daily Rafu Shimpo," wrote the Weekly's Laurie Ochoa.

Hailing Vivid director Thomas as "The Auteur of Sex," the Weekly's Steven Mikulan noted the director's commitment to the dying art of plot-driven adult features. "People want some story with their eroticism," Thomas said. "If you can make them believe in the characters and their conflicts, it heightens the inevitable sex in the screenplay."

On the current state of porn, Thomas remarked, "There's so much of it...so many more agents, so many more girls. These people are more businesslike, but they want business like a bunch of whores. They're a bunch of young kids who love to be paid for fucking. Which is great, but the mentality to create motion-picture stories is not there as much as it was when I started."

Former LA Weekly contributor Block made the list in another profile written by Mikulan, who hailed her as "a quixotic crusader, championing our bodies' unruly desires in a country that equates sex with pornography and confuses love with a box of cherry cordials."

Jonathan Gold's profile of Naz describes a picture of Naz's girlfriend Oriana Small (a.k.a. porn star Ashley Blue) displaying her extracted wisdom teeth on her tongue. Gold calls the photo "One of the most disturbing images to appear on the Internet this year," and goes on to comment, "Naz's gift is the ability to make something like a mouthful of broken teeth look and feel like love. [...] The fact that he draws this kind of emotional power out of porn stars, for whom the decontextualization of emotion would seem to be vital, is nothing short of astonishing."

"I was thrilled just to be included," Naz told AVN.com, "and kind of surprised. But it's good to be a part of it."

Naz's adult-industry credentials include directing Vivid-Alt's Skater Girl Fever, shooting countless spreads for Larry Flynt Publications and contributing music to the Dark Brothers' Between the Cheeks 2 and New Wave Hookers 2 with his band Chemical People. The band featured Jeanna Fine on the cover of its album So Sexist! and later issued a compilation of its instrumental porn music on the album Soundtracks.

On the photo of Small, Naz related, "It was in December, and she had just got her wisdom teeth pulled; she got done early in the morning, and then she asked for the teeth, and later that night, she was just really kind of out of it and recovering from it, and she just threw the teeth in her mouth, and we took some photos -- just some snapshots."

The piece also plugs Naz' upcoming showing, "Candids," at the Todd/Browning Gallery in West Hollywood, opening May 19. For more details, go to DaveNaz.com

To read the full LA Weekly article online, click here

Pictured: Ashley Blue, Dave Naz