One year after Richard Nanula was forced to resign as the chairman of Miramax amid accusations he paid porn stars for sex, his ripped-from-the-headlines downfall provided the plot for Sunday’s episode of “Ray Donovan.”
Nanula, 54, a former exec at Disney and Starwood, left Miramax after stills from a sex tape were posted on a website, that show him having sex with X-rated actress Samantha Saint.
Two other actresses, Sarah Shevon and Penny Pax, came forward to claim they had also been booked to perform with the divorced bachelor.
In Sunday’s episode of the Showtime hit, starring Liev Schreiber as a Hollywood fixer, a producer named Stu Feldman agrees to help Donovan get his daughter into a posh private school if Donovan can persuade a porn star to have sex with him.
“I offered her $20,000, but she won’t do it,” Feldman says.
Donovan reports back, “She doesn’t f–k for money. She’s a professional actress. She only has sex on camera.”
Feldman proceeds to hire the actress for a porn film he is producing and co-starring in. She discovers the ruse when his hand-held camera falls on the floor, but he keeps the scene going.
In Hollywood, where a blind eye is usually turned to people’s sex lives, movie execs believe Nanula resigned because the majority owner of Miramax is Qatar Holdings, the investment arm of the oil-rich Arab emirate.
Qatar, which owns the Al Jazeera network, is the most conservative nation in the region, whose citizens follow the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam. And it was recently revealed that Qatar is funneling arms to Hamas for its terrorism against Israel.
“No one in the movie business cares what Nanula does in his spare time, but they care in Qatar,” a former colleague said.
Showtime representatives did not respond to requests for comment.