Frank Kay, owner of New Jersey's International Video Distributors (IVD), is worried; worried and angry that people on the manufacturing end of the adult video business are losing the vision he's kept clearly in his mind for more than a decade.
"Some of the distributors that are selling at this moment are newer," Kay recognizes, "but the rest of us remember that seven, eight, 10 years ago, there were some serious busts and different [company officials] either spent some time [in jail] or spent a lot of money."
What's got Kay and several others worried is the proliferation of videos featuring depictions of pissing, fisting and (staged) violent sexual encounters, the last of which took up more than its share of bandwidth on the Internet discussion sites in January and February.
"I think someone will take a bust," Kay predicts. "I don't know if it's going to be for peeing, or if it's going to be black versus white, but some of the retail stores don't understand they'll have to sit in front of a jury of men and women and watch a video of a girl getting fisted or a girl peeing.
"I have nothing against any of this stuff personally," he adds cautiously. "To me, it's personal preference; but my feeling is, there's a fine line on where we need to go with this product, and it's difficult enough to stay legal and stay out of trouble with the zoning and all the different police agencies while doing things properly. But I just don't see IVD pushing the envelope that much further for a few bucks. I'd rather be in business another 15 years, and I just know I don't want to sit in front of a jury watching another peeing tape. It's something we all need to think about. Stores are making money on the product, no doubt; but in the long run, if they're making a thousand bucks, what's a thousand when the court can cost you $100,000 in legal fees? Or what's a thousand when it could cost you jail time, potentially? I'm not saying it will or won't, but I'm saying this particular type of merchandise is a candidate for the first bust of the new regime coming in."
Yes, election fever is already gripping some segments of the porn industry, but not in any way to which the major candidates could possibly relate.
"We've got an election coming up in November," chain-store owner Eddie Wedelstedt, of Denver-based Goalie Entertainment, recently told a group of manufacturers and retailers. "We're making tons of money. The important thing we have to remember is, let's take the air out of the balloons a little bit; we don't have to blow them up and break them. Let's try to put the product out that's making you money, and after the election, whoever gets in, a year from now, we'll know where we're at. But for your own sake - I'm saying it's for your sake - I don't want my friends to go to jail. It's not a fun place to be. I don't care if you're in a camp or you're in a heavy joint, I know one thing: You ain't goin' nowhere, baby; you ain't leavin'.
"So think about that when you put these products out," he continues. "If someone's going to make a mistake, let someone else make it. Don't you make a stupid mistake; you're too smart for this."
Of course, several of those who have expressed opinions on the controversy have not seen either volume of Anabolic's now-discontinued Rough Sex series, and Elegant Angel's The Fist, The Whole Fist And Nothing But The Fist, which had a release date of March 2 - but "pushing the envelope" is a topic that is discussed endlessly in the adult industry, with long-timers tending to take a more conservative approach to the material they produce and sell, and the "young bucks" angling to deliver material that stands out from the pack. And if a little micturation will do it, all the better.
"Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with girls peeing," states Jeff Steward of JM Productions. "It's a fetish. If someone wants to be able to watch that type of material, I think they should be able to, and for distributors or manufacturers to [try to] censor what other people in the industry are doing is insane. I've been around since 1987, and I've seen the busts, and I remember all that shit. I'm glad it's over, and it's unfortunate for anyone that had to go through it. Luckily, I never worked for a company that actually got busted, but I think porno, like everything else, is evolving; things are changing, and you've either got to change with the times or you're going to get left behind. If the government starts busting people for this type of material, that's different, but for a distributor to say, 'Hey, because you put out a urination video, I don't want to buy any of your videos,' I think is wrong."
No one is saying that, and in fact, all who've commented adversely on the situation have made it clear that in no event would they advocate censoring anyone. They do, however, see themselves as the people who have "been through it all," and they're worried - not just for the people who are making the material which, as the porn mythology goes, is ripe for busting, but also for what they see as a "splash effect" that they fear will drench the rest of the industry in the mud that prosecutors and censorship groups will (they are certain) heap on what some term "problematic product."
"Maybe it's because I've been in this business so long that you have certain things ingrained in your head, that you just don't do this," says Steve Orenstein of Wicked Pictures. "I do put out conservative product compared to what type of stuff hits the market these days, but that's what I am comfortable with; that is what I want to produce; that is the reputation I want to have out there. And I don't want to have to be put in the position of protecting people who are putting out product about which they're not being as careful as I am."
"There's no sense in asking for trouble," Goalie's Wedelstedt opines. "If the Republicans get in, if the wrong man gets in that White House, we don't have to worry about all this shit; we're all going to have a problem. If the right man gets in, even a person like Mr. Gore, and if Ms. Reno wants to retire and they put a new [Attorney General] in; let's say that person's views are not as [open] as hers. That person may not have the power to put a hundred people back in that office to go after us, but he may have the power to put another 10 on us, and say, 'Let's start looking for bad guys.' Well, who are the bad guys? It's us. And who are they going to attack? They know they can't touch this Internet; they can go play with themselves till they're blue in the face. Who's gonna get picked on? The guy on the corner."
"I believe it's going to be horrendous for the retail sector," IVD's Kay echoes. "They don't need another problem like this. They already have their zoning and all their issues that they're dealing with locally. Why put this on the table, whether it be fisting, shitting, peeing, all this other product that really does cross the line a little bit, in my opinion? I'm very concerned about it. I feel there could be a domino effect, and these situations could be detrimental to our business."
Elegant Angel's Patrick Collins doesn't see it that way, and even as one of the long-timers, he sees the porn industry, and society's reaction to it, as constantly evolving and ready for change.
"I think that with the Internet and with the accessibility of various different kinds of 'sexual practices' that people are exposed to now, that they never had access to before, I think that it's certainly low on the list," Collins says, referring to the "bustability" of his recently produced fisting video. "I'm trying to make this a mass distribution thing; I think somebody always has to be the first one, and I don't think that anybody could have done the introduction of it any fairer or any better than I did. For me, it's a little bit ludicrous that we can stick 16 fingers in a girl's pussy but not a fist."
"It's a rough scene; I don't deny that," explains Khan Tusion, the creator of Anabolic's Rough Sex series, referring to the controversial scene with Regan Starr in Vol. 1. [See companion story -Ed.] "But it's a legitimate lifestyle for millions and millions of people. There are people in this world who derive enormous gratification from participating in this. And these people exist. Now, these people, myself included, are being attacked for what we are. We certainly can't be attacked for the acts, because the acts are consensual, and we insist that the people doing this are completely comfortable with what they're doing. So we're basically being attacked because it looks bad.
"That's what's wrong with pornography these days," he continues. "Nobody shoots anything real. The scenes that are shot today, there's no reason to have a girl; you might as well have an animated figure. There's no heart; there's no soul. If you can't capture the essence of the female performer, I don't think it can be erotic."
Collins heartily agrees with that sentiment.
"The evolution of this [fisting feature] has been that I always like to have girls do whatever they need to do in order to have a real orgasm in my movies," Collins summarizes. "And over and over again, over the last couple of years especially, I've had girls who really, really, really like fisting, so I've been leaving the fisting in because I don't want to break the tempo, and then I put a black dot over it so that I can maintain the intensity of the scene…. See, that's what gets me off; if the girl's having a real orgasm, that makes my dick hard. And it's a situation where a lot of the girls are getting off over and over and over again, and it's new to a lot of them because they've never tried it before. I love it. I think it's real interesting."
But Collins hasn't advertised his fisting feature, and though the existence of The Fist... has spread through word of mouth, his sales were about 20 percent of what is normal for a new Elegant feature. But as he told AVN, "I'm not doing this to get rich; I'm doing this because it's my belief that it's something that's practiced, that's sensual, that's not harmful, and that is enjoyable and it's representative of a practice that people don't get a chance to experience visually."
Trouble is, the genre's detractors would say that all of Collins' reasons for making The Fist... are beside the point - and their attorneys would add, "with good reason."
"We've had some pissing in movies in the past," noted First Amendment attorney H. Louis Sirkin of Cincinnati, "but they've usually been a single part of a whole movie. I know Mike Murray (another prominent attorney) and I had some cases way back in Fairfield (Ohio), some of the early cases that we tried for the video stores, and there was some pissing in the tapes at issue; but this was part of a 70 or 80 minute film. But now, what's coming out may end up being more difficult [to defend], and I personally will say, and I really mean it, we're going to see a tremendous increase in obscenity prosecutions within the next 12 months."
Sirkin sees two basic problems in dealing with some of the more modern material at trial. For one thing, too much of the "objectionable" material appears in gonzo or wall-to-wall tapes, making it more difficult to argue that however off-putting the roughness, pissing or fisting might be to a jury, the rest of the tape has plot, characterization, an uplifting message - any of the elements that might fit the "literary/artistic/political/scientific value" prong of the Miller obscenity test. Sirkin believes he would have to use expert witnesses to get around that problem... and qualified experts are getting harder to find.
"To be honest, there aren't that many experts, because it's really becoming politically taboo to get involved with the porn industry," Sirkin estimates. "Freedom of speech and tolerance ain't a popular subject anymore. It's something the industry had better start to look at. The stuff that's coming out is shit, and what's going to happen is, it's going to hit at the small business people, the video stores.
"In the next county over, Butler County (Ohio)... they're [Citizens for Community Values, a censorship group] just all over that prosecutor. He's running in an election next fall, and it's already started that he's not prosecuting porn. Prosecutions are starting to spring up everywhere, and it's going to be a campaign issue. The groups are really pounding on it, and it's becoming a real issue. The problem is, on the one hand, [manufacturers] are coming out with all that kind of stuff, and in Ohio, [trafficking obscenity] is now a felony. It's not a kids' game anymore. You're talking the mom-and-pops, and there's a lot of mom-and-pops out there with it, and they don't want to get busted, so they're going to sell out quickly."
It's not just the mom-and-pops that are looking at trouble. Even upscale stores and chains are worried.
"We try not to carry that material," informs Bill Murphy of Orlando's Fairvilla Superstores. "We depend on our distributors, but we also screen for the material ourselves. We're viewing [tapes from] high-risk companies; companies we have known have done that. We're in the sex business, not the violence business. Whatever consenting people do is fine, but we draw the line there as to what we'll stock.
"But a lot of the material you're talking about is illegal in our state," he continues. "It's in the case law. If you have two tapes with fisting and they're adjudicated as obscene, it would be in your own best interests to try not to carry that product unless the product becomes so pervasive that it's worth a lawsuit. We just have found in the past that it's wiser to choose our battles, and that's not a battle that I choose to go after."
"I've gone literally to a couple of thousand stores over the years," notes Goalie's Wedelstedt, "and usually the way it works is, these smaller video stores give their buyers a certain percent that they can spend. So they'll call up, let's say, Harry at one of their one-stops or wherever they buy their videos, and say, 'We need videos bad here. We need so many gay, so many features, so many compilations, whatever.' Now, those movies come in, and most of these people haven't got a clue in their life what's in them. So they put that movie on the shelf.
"Now, all of a sudden, the wrong district attorney or policeman comes in and says, 'Wait a second; I want to bust this guy,' and sees this movie and says, 'Man, I've got me a dandy here. I'm gonna get this guy.' Now he busts this guy, and this guy has absolutely no knowledge of content, but that doesn't make a difference.
"Now they've got this poor guy busted on a movie that he did not know that a person was inserting something into a woman's privates that's not supposed to be there, or that they were doing things - urination or defecating or beating people up. If you don't know that scene's in there, that's a problem, and if our people weren't screening them, we'd never know that scene was in there. That's why we have screeners screening all of our movies, because we're in so many different states."
What Wedelstedt has decided to do is to create a database of what he and his staff consider to be, in a legal sense, potentially dangerous material, and he'll offer the information to anyone who asks.
"Last year in Cancun (at AVN's Annual Conference)," he recalls, "it was asked of me if I would rate these movies. I said I will not ever, ever; because I don't believe in ratings. But I will do this: Our people look at every movie that comes out, and if there's a fisting scene, if there's a urinating scene, I don't mind writing it on a piece of paper, and people who want to get on the mailing list, we could send it out to them. We could say, 'You can buy the movie but it does have this scene in it.' That's for the storeowners who want to know what movies have in them. Nothing bad; we're not going to tell them that's a bad urination scene, but just, you know, if you get busted this week, there's a urination scene in this one movie. Now you know what you're buying. That way, when you go to trial, you know what you're going to trial for.
"We're not going to rate them. I don't do that; I don't believe in that. I won't hurt a video company - they're trying to make a living. It's only for legal codes, is why I do it for my stores, because I'm in too many states and I'm not looking for trouble. But as long as we're doing it for our stores, I'll score them - for me, but I won't score them for people. All I would do is tell them that [this video] does have this certain scene in it. If you want to buy it, it's available."
But even that step isn't enough for some.
"We're definitely not pushing the envelope with any product; we're trying not to, anyway," says Metro's Greg Alves. "And as far as distributing it, we're going to stop distributing anything that's really pushing the envelope hard, because it's not worth it to us."
Frank Kay is going even further.
"IVD is taking a stand, and unfortunately, I wish I were supported by the rest of the manufacturers and distributors out there, that we all make a decent living, and [there's] not any necessity to put out this product that could be controversial. And my feeling is that we're not going to distribute the peeing movies, the fisting movies. We're probably going to lose some business over it, but we feel that we're protecting our retailers' better interests. If one of them takes a bust, they're going to come back to their distributor and say, 'Hey, why did you sell this stuff to us?'"
Others disagree.
"Porno has become so mainstream that regardless of who becomes President, I don't think they could get a conviction on a fisting video," opines Jeff Steward. "I don't see it as something that could happen. I could see them maybe busting somebody for it, but I don't think a jury would find whoever it is guilty of obscenity."
"I'm sure that if I have to go to court on [The Fist...], that they would play hell getting a conviction," Collins echoes. "I also realize that I am risking about $1 million in legal fees on top of my time and the stress and everything else that's involved, but I believe that it's something people should be able to see; and certainly the girls - because they really like doing it - should be able to do it without a stupid fucking black dot."
