Hollywood gets in bed with porn

Ron Silver has been on many film sets in his career, but he saw something different at one this summer: The actors were having sex. Real sex. On camera. And what struck him was the nonchalance of those involved. "It seems like you become inured to it after a while," the actor says. "There are guys on the crew doing crossword puzzles while somebody`s having oral sex." Silver was visiting the set of an adult film, doing what he laughingly calls "due diligence" to prepare for his role in Skin, Jerry Bruckheimer`s latest TV series. Network viewers won`t get to see what Silver saw, of course. But they will see him star as an adult-entertainment mogul on the new Fox drama, premiering Monday (9 p.m. ET/PT). The show is the latest of a wave of mainstream projects on TV and film and in books, peeling back the plain brown wrapper from the world of pornography. Not too much, mind you, to turn off middle America, but just enough to peep into the neon glow of a culture that has long operated on the edges of entertainment. Cop shows use porn as a salacious plotline -NYPD Blue did so just this week. Comedies such as Coupling and Hidden Hills joke about porn buddies and Internet porn moms. Pay-cable channels have offered plenty of sex-oriented shows. But Skin, a Romeo-and-Juliet love story between the son of a district attorney and the daughter of a porn king, makes the X-rated trade central to a prime-time network series.