Kevin Scanlon

Jessie Andrews

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Jessie Andrews was a 17-year-old American Apparel salesgirl in Miami Beach when company founder Dov Charney, impressed with her abilities, hired her to instruct the other area employees. She later began modeling for the company and then, at 18, was recruited by elite porn agent Mark Spiegler, who manages high-profile adult stars, including former client Sasha Grey.

By 2012 Andrews was so successful in that industry that the AVN Awards named her best actress for her title role in Portrait of a Call Girl, which finds her engaging in a six–person "blowbang," bondage, sadomasochism and all.

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Staci Silverstone

See also:
*Veruca James, Accountant Turned Porn Star: "I'd Always Been Wild"
*Top 10 Strip Clubs in L.A.
*Porn Star Tasha Reign's Secret Life as a UCLA Student
*Marilyn Monroe's Seven Never-Before-Seen Mostly Nude Photos
*10 Bars Most Likely to Get You Laid in L.A.

Los Angeles is home to lots of dreamers; would-be actors, musicians and writers all flock to our golden shores trying to find their place in the sun. But a little-acknowledged subculture of fame-seekers are those who hope to make a name for themselves in front of the camera, with their clothes off -- guys and girls who want to be porn stars.

Like in any industry, some will make it, some won't. Here are the most promising newbies in adult entertainment.

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W.B. Fontenot

Veruca James

On a cold, bright day, Veruca James poses in a stark spotlight on a stage in a downtown L.A. warehouse. Her black bob is perfectly straight, her almond-shaped eyes perfectly made up. Her breasts challenge the strength of the zipper on her shiny black half-shirt.

She tucks her thumb into the waistband of her skintight leggings and pulls the top of them down, then gazes up at the camera as if she's going to fuck its very lens.

But between clicks of the shutter, the seductive look falls off her face.

"Should I take my bra off here?" she says, in the way a mid-level manager might ask if a memo is needed by the next morning.

"Nah, leave it on," says photographer Kelly Lind. "But let's start displaying the vagina."

James' professional attitude comes naturally. A relative newcomer to the adult film industry, her pre-porn career was decidedly corporate: Before starring in triple-X films, she used to be a certified public accountant.

See also:
*5 Nude Photos from Suicide Girls: Hard Girls, Soft Light (NSFW)
*10 Sexy Photos From the History of Pornography (NSFW)
*Porn Star Tasha Reign's Secret Life as a UCLA Student

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Got Your Eyes

TigerLilly chokes out "pipsqueak" Sam.

See also:
*Competitive Ladies Arm Wrestling? Yes, Indeed
*Top 10 Bars With the Hottest Women in L.A.

On Saturday night, in the protected brick-and-mortar bosom of Lacy Street Studios in Downtown L.A., a MMA training enterprise called Ultimate Female Fitness launched Beat Down Girls, a "female supremacist" wrestling studio and collective, with a four-match, mixed wrestling tournament. Cassandra Lee, the company's founder and madame of fetish clubs past, describes the Beat Down Girls as an athletic "girl gang" that champions the physical, mental and sexual superiority of women over their estrogen-challenged cohorts -- and aren't afraid to get in the ring to prove it.

Several of the fit and fiercest from various corners of the women's fighting world, including pro boxer/Penthouse centerfold Hollie "Hotstuff" Dunaway; darling of online BDSM porn emporium Kink.com, Rain DeGrey; former competitive body builder Jennifer Thomas; and buxom-legged newcomer TigerLilly were there on Saturday to spar with more-than-willing male victims.

For those out of the professional fighting loop, this event involved "mixed fighting," meaning men and lady folk in the ring, together, mixing sweat and guff and grunts. One catch is, the ladies always come out on top -- each fight is thrown to the fairer sex to propagate an illusion of impervious female strength. Literally, the champion would, in the immortal words of Mortal Kombat, "finish him" by digging a dainty foot into a helpless lad's ribs and flash her biceps for the crowd. This is prime wank material for a large subculture of fetishists who prefer women of the Amazonian variety, and the fetish hinges on a flawless victory for the ladies.

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W.B. Fontenot

From porn star to UCLA women's studies major

"What is sex?" the professor asks her class, deadpan, on a hot August day.

The room is quiet except for the steady tapping of a nervous foot, belonging to a tan blonde. It's the first day of class -- summer session at UCLA. The students in "Sex and the Cinema" are a mix: curious female underclassmen, perplexed Asian foreign-exchange tiger children, a back row of overly excited young males in backward caps and board shorts.

Three groups, and then one person who breaks the mold. The blonde. Rachel. Her hair is in pigtails, one hand wrapped around her rhinestone-encrusted iPhone, the other fingering her pink pen. She fidgets and she giggles, her light green eyes glancing from phone to professor constantly. She stashes her Louis Vuitton bag below her desk, tucks her feet under her petite frame and curls up in her seat.

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The main virtual hall

Most conventions are pants-mandatory kinds of affairs -- even those of the adult nature. For the world's first virtual porn convention, however, I'm not wearing any (relax -- I'm in my PJs).

This past weekend, XBiz and Red Light Center hosted the Adult Entertainment Virtual Convention, porn's first online-exclusive gathering in a 3-D web environment called "Utherverse." If that all sounds a bit strange and complicated -- you don't even know the half of it.

Trying to explain the very nature of this whole thing requires more nerd references than I'm capable of conveying to a broad audience -- but here goes. Imagine if World of Warcraft wasn't all about wizards and war but instead sex and stimulation, and was designed by Neil Stephenson and William Gibson's bastard love child. Did I lose you? What if each porn website you visited was a little 3-D world and all of the people looking at it were in it with you, rubbing pixilated elbows (or crotches). That's pretty much it. Only the Utherverse isn't all porn, per se. Or maybe it is. We'll get to that.

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Nanette Gonzales

After six years in porn, Crissy Moran is helping women heal from "sexual brokenness."

Crissy Moran holds a pair of drumsticks, her long, slender fingers clanking off-rhythm as she looks up at a monitor above, following along to the directions of Guitar Hero.

Eyes smoky, lips pouty and dark brown hair flowing over her shoulders, Moran, flanked by an all-girl band, shreds "With or Without You" on a dimly lit stage in a bar tucked deep in the Valley. The lead singer, blonde and doe-eyed, hits every note -- off-key. It's so bad that members of the audience join in out of sympathy. But Moran doesn't seem to notice, her gaze trailing off in space as if she's dreaming.

The crowd of a half-dozen at the bar doesn't know what to make of the group's music, FYI, but patrons are enraptured by the beautiful disaster onstage. A few boos are mixed in with catcalls, and then silence.

Moran and her "bitches," as the bar's MC repeats on the mic, are here for her birthday. Her 26th, her girlfriends joke, taking their seats to down Cadillac margaritas and munch onion rings. Rotating in their atmosphere, a steady stream of hanger-on Casanovas crash like asteroids. She looks familiar, they say.

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This guy got away with some crazy shit.

Porn and experimental cinema. Natural bedfellows. Unfortunately, at a certain point the porn world starting cranking out a standard set of scenes for all occasions. But before porn was an industry, notorious experimental filmmaker Fred Halsted got away with making some crazy shit in the name of art and sex.

So says filmmaker and Halsted admirer William E. Jones, author of the just-released biography Halsted Plays Himself. Tonight at Human Resources, in addition to signing his book, Jones is hosting a screening of Halsted's notorious 1972 L.A. Plays Itself.

After watching the film when it was screened in New York in the 1970s, the eccentric artist Salvador Dalí reportedly is quoted as muttering "new information for me." Have you seen some of Dalí's work? Need I say more? You might learn something new yourself.

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Actors on the set of the live action Simpsons porn parody...really.

What's the old adage? "If it exists, someone's made porn out of it." I suppose it's not really an old adage...but I've been told it's The 34th Rule of the Internet.

Recent controversy about condom use in The Industry has cast another dark cloud over Porn Valley, as highlighted in LA Weekly's cover story this week. This controversy comes on the heels of an, er, explosion of pornographic light-heartedness in the form of porn parody -- a development that for better or for worse seems to be making more than a few folks smile. For those of you out of the loop, there's a parody of almost everything you can think of -- and some you'd rather not.

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Miles Actually

Dixie De La Tour

​ "I can't tell a story without the word 'fuck' in it. I can't tell a story without saying 'ass rape,'" says Dixie De La Tour, hostess of Bawdy Storytelling, a monthly San Francisco show that had its first L.A. outing at the downtown Brewery arts complex Saturday night.

Fortunately, De La Tour is in good company. She brought down a crack team of fellow perverts to initiate the show's Los Angeles incarnation and regale the audience with ribald tales of one-nighters, group sex, tantra, porn stars and sex changes.

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