While Hollywood has for the most part supported George Bush, at least since 9/11, his administration’s recently launched attack on adult entertainment finds the traditionally liberal entertainment sector once again at odds with conservative Republicanism of the current president.
And so it seems is the viewing public, a point noted today in the Daily Variety.
Last weekend’s two-hour special Jenna Jameson: The E! True Hollywood Story earned the E! channel one of their highest ratings of the year, Adam Glasser’s Family Business was picked up for a second season after generally positive reviews and there’s more than one movie being made about the Wonderland murders that John Holmes is reputed to have been involved in.
There’s even a new Fox show, Skin, produced by Jerry Bruckenheimer, that casts a porn distributor as the patriarch of one of the two families the show follows.
Not that the Bush Administration is giving up on legislating morality. This past month, they’ve launched a new offensive, including the first major obscenity case in a decade with the indictment of Rob Zicari and Janet Romano, aka Rob Black and Lizzie Borden, directors and owners of porn studio Extreme Associates.
Then on Monday, the Bush Administration appealed to the Supreme Court to reinstate a law that would hold adult Website operator accountable for failing to prevent minors from viewing porn.
Members of the adult entertainment industry suspect this is just the beginning.
"You've got the worst example in our industry," Tim Connelly, publisher and editor-in-chief of AVN and editor-in-chief of AVN.com told the Daily Variety in an interview yesterday. "(Extreme) likes to think they're the Larry Flynt of their generation. They're the Three Stooges of their generation."
Connelly also told the Daily Variety that he'd take the stand to defend the company's right to produce that material – both sentiments of the majority of the adult industry.
"I think they're awful human beings and I hate what they do, but do they have the right to do it? Yes, they do," Connelly stated. "You always have to defend your worst enemy in this business. I wish they'd just gone out of business."
The Daily Variety also notes that besides the success of porn-themed mainstream entertainment, porn itself seems to have gained mainstream acceptance, pointing to the failure of Los Angeles prosecutors to convict Max Hardcore or Adam Glasser aka Seymore Butts on obscenity charges last year.
