| So you would think a small businessman like John Stagliano would be held up as a model of entrepreneurship in the United States of 2010. Stagliano built his Southern California company from scratch into a business now worth millions, creating dozens of full-time jobs with benefits (and providing well-compensated work to hundreds of others, too). Included among those jobs were hires necessary for the specific purpose of compiling the bureaucratic paperwork his industry is required to maintain by various levels of government. Despite the red tape, Stagliano's California business, Evil Angel, has thrived. Then in 2004, Stagliano invested millions into the Las Vegas economy with an original, dance-centered production show on the Strip. The Fashionistas ran for years, far outlasting better known competing Broadway-generated titles such as Avenue Q, Spamalot, and Hairspray. The show proved a surprise favorite with critics, myself included, who were awed by the artistically ambitious choreography, costuming, and tight storyline told through music and dance. I became friends with Stagliano after he closed Fashionistas to concentrate on Evil Angel, and so it seemed unlikely I would ever be called upon to write about him again. But then in 2008 something shocking happened: Stagliano was charged by the United States government with enough crimes to potentially put him in prison for the remainder of his life. How could this happen? Because outside Vegas, Stagliano's day job is as a pornographer. Indeed, within the subculture of pornography, Stagliano is revered for being the originator of the "gonzo porn" genre, in which the viewer is brought more directly into the proceedings, often via performers themselves holding cameras. Stagliano has won numerous artistic awards from his indutry peers, almost too many to count. His movies are taught in graduate film programs, and psychiatrists have used them to treat patients with sexual issues. Evil Angel not only distributes Stagliano's films, but also the work of other directors he hand-picks. In this, Stagliano turned out to be as good a connoisseur as director. By 2008, the year he was charged with obscenity, Evil Angel was perhaps the most successful adult DVD distributor in the country. [...] But none of this history explains the prosecution of John Stagliano in 2010 for making movies with consenting adults and selling them to other consenting adults. When did his business suddenly become criminal? Why has the power and majesty of the United States government, the financial and personnel resources of the FBI, all joined forces now to try and send Stagliano to prison? Here is the final piece of the puzzle. In 2005, under then-President George W. Bush, the Department of Justice formed the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force (OPTF). The ideological slant of the task force's "mission" is clear from its website: "Enforcement is necessary in order to protect citizens from unlawful exposure to obscene materials." In Stagliano's case, for example, an FBI special agent special-ordered movies that Evil Angel distributed. He then purchased the DVDs on the taxpayer's dime. There was never a single complaint from any actual citizen. [...] If [Stagliano] loses this case, almost any current adult content could be declared obscene. |
| According to Miller [the Miller test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test)], for a work to be obscene, it must first and foremost violate community standards. But despite adult stores selling hardcore porn of all kinds all over Washington, D.C., there has not been an obscenity prosecution here in more than two decades. Washington is not a community that seems to be at all concerned that adult films are being watched by local adults. Another way of looking at the community standard is one that Judge Leon has explicitly rejected. For example, a piece of evidence the prosecution apparently wants to share with jurors is a scene from the film Milk Nymphos which shows a milk enema being administered to an actor. Yet jurors will not be allowed to learn that you can find literally hundreds of similar enema scenes for sale at, for example, washingtonadultstore.com. Another prong of the Miller test is whether "the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." Here, too, the judge has helped the prosecution. Last week, Judge Leon ruled that jurors could not hear from Stagliano's two expert witnesses on the films' merits, on the grounds that they wouldn't have added much scientific value, and that the underlying material is the best evidence for whether a piece of work is obscene. One expert, Dr. Lawrence Sank, a respected clinical psychologist from Cognitive Therapy Center of Greater Washington, was expected to testify to the therapeutic and scientific value of the movies. The other denied expert, University of California Santa Barbara Film Studies Professor Constance Penley (see Reason.tv's interview with Penley here (http://reason.tv/video/show/ucsb-professor-constance-penle)), would have testified to the artistic value of the indicted films. And then in a shocking development late yesterday afternoon, Judge Leon indicated that he intended to issue a long ruling in support of his decision that the movies not be played in their entirety for the jurors in the courtroom, in apparent contravention of what Miller has traditionally required. The opinion is a strong signal that the judge is hoping to make lasting case law in this trial. |
he was charge in 2008 for something he did in 2005. meaning he would not know what he would know what he would not know what is illegal until it was too late.
If the jury is asked to decide whether a film is obscene, and cannot see the entire film, then the trial is bogus.
If I had a movie with one scene in it where a child was raped, would it be necessary to see the rest of the movie to determine if the film was obscene?
If the movie contains material sufficient to - in and of itself - be considered obscene, then the rest of the film couldbe about Saint Bernadette and it would still be obscene.
There is, right now, a thriving child porn industry that DOESN'T go away.
There are children and adults being abused sexually and recorded on film.
I know that the libertarian/liberal viewpoint says the government has no business controlling "victimless" behavior, but the issue of pornography (like the drug issue) goes far beyond the actions of consenting adults in "victimless" crimes.
I'm not even going to bother to go into battle on this issue, because I've heard it all before. But the fact is, some things are wrong and ought to be discouraged. There is a responsibility to protect freedom by using it appropriately.
| British obscenity trial When the full unexpurgated edition was published by Penguin Books in Britain in 1960, the trial of Penguin under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was a major public event and a test of the new obscenity law. The 1959 act (introduced by Roy Jenkins) had made it possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could show that a work was of literary merit. One of the objections was to the frequent use of the word "fuck" and its derivatives. Another objection involves the use of the word "cunt". Various academic critics and experts of diverse kinds, including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Norman St John-Stevas, were called as witnesses, and the verdict, delivered on 2 November 1960, was "not guilty". This resulted in a far greater degree of freedom for publishing explicit material in the United Kingdom. The prosecution was ridiculed for being out of touch with changing social norms when the chief prosecutor, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, asked if it were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read". The Penguin second edition, published in 1961, contains a publisher's dedication, which reads: "For having published this book, Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, 1959 at the Old Bailey in London from 20 October to 2 November 1960. This edition is therefore dedicated to the twelve jurors, three women and nine men, who returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' and thus made D. H. Lawrence's last novel available for the first time to the public in the United Kingdom." In 2006, the trial was dramatised by BBC Wales as The Chatterley Affair. [...] United States In 1930, Senator Bronson Cutting proposed an amendment to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which was then being debated, ending the practice of having U.S. Customs censor allegedly obscene books imported to U.S. shores. Senator Reed Smoot vigorously opposed such an amendment, threatening to publicly read indecent passages of imported books in front of the Senate. Although he never followed through, he included Lady Chatterley's Lover as an example of an obscene book that must not reach domestic audiences, declaring "I've not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley's Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"[14] Lady Chatterley's Lover was one of a trio of books (the others being Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill), the ban on which was fought and overturned in court with assistance by lawyer Charles Rembar in 1959. A French film (1955) based on the novel and released by Kingsley Pictures was in the United States the subject of attempted censorship in New York on the grounds that it promoted adultery.[15] The Supreme Court held that the law prohibiting its showing was a violation of the First Amendment's protection of Free Speech.[16] The book was famously distributed in the U.S. by Frances Steloff at the Gotham Book Mart, in defiance of the book ban. |
banned stuff should always be questioned
If I had a movie with one scene in it where a child was raped, would it be necessary to see the rest of the movie to determine if the film was obscene?
actually today we`re in certain areas alot more prudish than people think.