I Went to a Porn Star Book Signing

In Hollywood, all that glitters isn't gold

A gallery featuring Rosie Marks’s photographs of the adult movie industry

The last time I stayed at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, I pulled into the parking lot and spotted porn star Ron Jeremy standing at the valet. A lot has changed since then. For starters, Jeremy was diagnosed with “‘severe dementia’” and is “‘essentially bedridden’” and living in a “‘private residence,’” after having been declared incompetent to stand trial on more than 30 counts of sexual assault and released from the Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles in late 2023. For another, I wasn’t at the Roosevelt to check in but to check out a book about porn stars.

In 2024, photographer Rosie Marks shot behind the scenes on a series of adult movies produced by Brazzers, one of the business’s leading producers of X-rated content. Her images of the manufacturing of porn and of those who work in adult doing things not necessarily adult related are collected in Raw Talent. The oversized art book, which was conceived to commemorate Brazzers’s twentieth anniversary, features an introduction by porn star Abella Danger (“I was 18 years old when I moved to LA to shoot porn,” she reminisces), an essay by writer Esra Soraya Padgett (“Will this book ruin porn for those who love it?” she muses rhetorically), and Marks’s making-of-porn photos coupled with text commentaries by her subjects.

It’s a porn star book signing

In a moodily dark bar off the Roosevelt’s lobby, a large security guard was making sure no one did anything untoward. Several porn stars—Abigaiil Morris, Kira Noir, Mick Blue—were sitting on a banquette while another porn star, Kayley Gunner, a former sergeant in the US Army, sat on a chair and flipped through a copy of Raw Talent while a Brazzers photographer photographed her. Marks made the rounds. Porn star Scott Nails, whose Instagram profile reads “KING OF BRAZZERS 👑,” arrived. At the bar, I bought a copy of Raw Talent (I paid $89.99 for the special edition version, which comes with a sleeve). Feeling like a porn fan at a porn convention, I approached the porn stars in attendance and asked them to sign the book. Briefly, I chatted with Mick, whom I had watched perform in person last summer while I was writing about adult director Ricky Greenwood for the Forbes website.

In the rest of the hotel, art lovers had descended on the scene for Felix Art Fair, a contemporary art fair that coincides with Frieze Los Angeles. Signed book in hand, I made my way up to the eleventh floor, where hotel rooms had been turned into art galleries. In a couple of adjoining rooms, Marks’s photos from Raw Talent hung on the walls. I asked her agent for the fair how he thought her work compared to the late photographer Larry Sultan’s The Valley. From 1997 to 2003, Sultan photographed adult movies being filmed in the San Fernando Valley, where he grew up. Sultan’s photos were staged, the agent asserted dismissively, and that was not the same as what Marks had done. Was Sultan representing a male-gaze-eye-view of the making of pornography and was Marks representing a female-gaze-eye-view of the making of pornography? I queried. The agent didn’t have an answer.

From the book Raw Talent

Later, I went home and paged through Raw Talent. I have spent some time on adult movie sets myself, and I was curious to see if Marks’s work captured what I had witnessed. At times, it did. In one image, porn star Madison Ivy is in a bedroom of a Hollywood Hills home. She stands behind floor-to-ceiling windows; outside, a pool awaits. She’s on the phone, wearing a white bathrobe that has fallen provocatively open. She’s vaping and a puff of smoke drifts through the air. It seems so glamorous. But was that the truth? It’s hard to say. Raw Talent had been produced by a porn company, which was showing me what it wanted me to see.

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