An Amateur Porno Set Off a Federal Witch Hunt

https://www.thedailybeast.com/deep-sleep-how-an-amateur-porn-film-set-off-a-massive-federal-witch-hunt

by eplanit • 7 years ago

215 65 7 years ago

thedailybeast.com

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

The beginning talks about how likable the guy is.

Greatly discusses the legal trouble his film caused.

The ends with him agreeing how the film sucks and maybe the prosecutor was right! (EDIT: he says this as a joke, apparently this needs to be pointed out?)

...

I get it. That’s a good story and he absolutely does come off as a likable guy.

unknownsavage• 7 years ago

For people who haven't read the article this is extremely misleading:

The ends with him agreeing how the film sucks and maybe the prosecutor was right!

He says that, only as a joke that it's so bad it should've been illegal. While in reality a great mis-justice was done to the man, and he was railroaded into accepting a plea-deal due to the gravity of the unfair charges.

SlowRobotAhead2• 7 years ago

Yea, that’s the point. I don’t remember saying “don’t read the article”. He makes a joke about his previous work and that’s a likable thing to do.

jseliger• 7 years ago

The '70s seem to have been an interesting time: https://longreads.com/2019/04/29/what-i-learned-from-doing-a... . Link is all text and presumably SFW, but caveat emptor.

joe_the_user• 7 years ago

I remember in an interview, Henry Miller contended that in the time before there was lot of media portrayals of sex that people actually engaged in sex more.

It seems like the 70s were something of the time when the media began honestly representing the social undercurrent of sex. But that representation was perhaps part of it going away.

dkarl• 7 years ago

I think when something is pervasive but hidden, there's an urgent need as members of a social species to find out and become part of it. When it's discussed so openly, there's no fear of being out of the loop, just a decision of whether you think it's worth pursuing or not.

Larrikin• 7 years ago

There was a sexual comedy that came out some years ago that said the openness of sex led to an increase in social acceptance of more things out the norm. The main characters however complain that they missed out because they grew up in the 80s when HIV hit which led to a massive backlash and obvious public health scare. The characters are all friends and they eventually plan a party based on what they think they missed out on. The theory makes a little more sense to me.

droidist2• 7 years ago

The 70s were also the last decade before HIV/AIDS, I always thought that had a big impact.

kurthr• 7 years ago

Seems like maybe the writers of Boogie Nights were aware of this fiasco...

kgwgk4• 7 years ago

What's "amateur" about that? It seems that the word appears only in the title.

Edit: he had a $25k budget at least (over $150k adjusted for inflation) and while it was his first movie he hired professional performers and the intention was the commercial exhibition of the film in movie theaters (as it did happen).

Nevermark• 7 years ago

He was clearly an amateur since he had never made any kind of movie.

But his intent was to make a professional/commercial film.

They are not necessarily disjoint concepts.

To top that off, at the end of the interview he gives himself a humorous critique suggesting he found his own work failed to make the professional grade.

kgwgk4• 7 years ago

I wouldn't classify as "amateur" a commercial movie where the lead roles are played by professional actors, but that may be just me. The downvotes I got agree with you. (Being a bad movie may make it look "amateurish", but that's something different.)

dmix• 7 years ago

That's pretty typical start in the film industry in that era which would very much be amateur.

Not everyone had cheap digital cameras, not to mention cheap video editing on computers to start out back then. Only in the early 1990s did random non-actors in the director's first "indie" films start becoming more normal.

vezycash• 7 years ago

Summary: Young man has a passion & dream to make movies. He has a thriving business but it's not enough to fund the movie. His friends agree to fund a movie but with a clause - it must be a porno movie.

He researches existing literature and it sucks. He won't make porn. He'll make a real movie that also has explicit sex.

He shoots normal scenes first, and sex scenes later. Sex scenes has some issues like the actors unable to get erection and him not knowing how to direct the scenes.

Movie is finished. He edits, distribution says he must include at least one lesbian scene, some cum shots... things he'd cut out.

Movie is a success in theaters and gets sold out every single day and then all hell breaks loose. The police comes after him. Lots of complaints were sent to officials - some by people who hadn't actually watched the movie.

The film maker had used a property owned by the church without permission and the church was the force behind the investigations.

The court case was a sham. The investigators invokes anti-fornication laws 100s of years old. And the cops (probably) sets the film maker up.

One of the lead actors commits suicide just as the case becomes a federal one. The government takes all the earnings of the film, fines him, bans him from film making for a few years and gives him a suspended jail sentence.

akvadrako• 7 years ago

Are you implying laws should be ignored after a few years go by?

That’s not how laws work. Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.

bradleyjg• 7 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude

madsmith• 7 years ago

I think that’d be a wonderful thing if all laws had a natural sunset clause and were forced to be renewed to see if they confirm to the standards of the current society.

Private lewdness was one of the charges. Even the prosecutor said that it was all a bit over the top but he had these laws as tools so he used them.

cblades• 7 years ago

After a few decades of no enforcement? I think that would be reasonable.

barry-cotter2• 7 years ago

Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.

Any law that’s important gets used and enforced regularly. The incentives of the modern bureaucratic state mean that any law that is used regularly will eventually be superseded by a more specific law that covers the circumstances more specifically; that’s why there are laws for mail fraud, computer fraud,, wire fraud etc. instead of just prosecuting people for fraud.

Any prosecution that relies on using a law that hasn’t been enforced in multiple decades is an obvious instance of prosecutorial discretion, i.e. injustice.

It’s like how the FBI works; they may not be able to prove you did what they started investigating you for but if they catch you lying about anything you can be prosecuted for it and it’s really easy to catch someone in a lie if interviews aren’t recorded but reconstructed from the agent’s notes after the fact.

Law enforcement can either follow rules and principles or it can be “We’re going to get these bastards.” The latter is corrupt. Laws long unenforced should lapse unless explicitly renewed.

amazingman• 7 years ago

Dumb ones, yeah.

craftinator2• 7 years ago

Laws should have a given lifespawn, and be re-evaluted at the end of that lifespan for relevancy and effectiveness given the current culture. Too many laws remove freedom and power from the average citizen, and are actually dangerous if left un-audited. We have so many laws, you can't know them to follow them, thus making people criminals without knowledge of wrongdoing.

marcus_holmes2• 7 years ago

I think we have enough laws. I think at this point, we should have a "one in, one out" rule: government can't make a new law without repealing an existing one.

mindcrime• 7 years ago

Are you implying laws should be ignored after a few years go by?

Most of them should be ignored from the day they're enacted.

ineedasername• 7 years ago

Laws that have been unenforced for a long time, like the 100 years cited here, can absolutely be struck down and ignored by the court. The word for it is desuetude [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desuetude

bonzini2• 7 years ago

Film maker goes on to have a successful Hollywood career.

rayiner5• 7 years ago

The more I learn about the 1970s the more the 1980s makes sense to me.

sharkweek• 7 years ago

I was born in the 80s so I have zero context for either decade.

Recently watched the CNN documentaries on each decade and it was truly eye opening how nuts things were essentially every decade in one way or another. But above all of then, the 70s seemed like the WEIRDEST time to me.

Highly recommend the documentaries - super informative. Was fun to re-live the 90s and 00s a bit too.

ohashi• 7 years ago

How unapologetic the prosecutor still is offends me. Trying to use anti fornication laws from 1796 and knowing it's a miscarriage of justice? Yet still thinks it's the right decision.

devereaux• 7 years ago

And he has blood on his hands. One of the actors committed suicide.

There should have been some prosecution: not of the film maker, but on those who abused their power to harass people to the point of suicide.

rayiner5• 7 years ago

The laws were on the books, and the public's opposition to what the movie-maker was doing seems to fit in with the intent and scope of the laws. Maybe you can blame him for selective enforcement, but I don't think that qualifies as a miscarriage of justice. (That is, of course, assuming we take at face value that his denial that he didn't steal and ship a copy of the movie to Oklahoma.)

The prosecutor took measures to avoid normalizing what he and the community saw as deviant behaviors. That's one of the key purposes of law: it allows society to express its condemnation of certain conduct.

balfirevic• 7 years ago

All of that seems to equally apply to a prosecutor going after runaway slaves and their accomplices at the time when slavery was legal and accepted in community, does it not?

ouid• 7 years ago

Selective enforcement is absolutely a miscarriage of justice. Justice is the character of law that makes it fair. If you disagree with this, I would like to hear your defense.

bryanrasmussen• 7 years ago

one of the things that the founders of the American Republic attempted to do was to avoid the tyranny of the majority, that the public is opposed to what someone does and thus, for political purposes, laws are selectively enforced to punish the person the public dislikes seems to be a clear incident of such a tyranny.

JumpCrisscross• 7 years ago

I’m surprised the ACLU or an analogous force didn’t step in to set a precedent to get the law off the books. The interstate trafficking charge might have complicated that. But were there really no liberal First Amendment NGOs in the 70s?

lmm• 7 years ago

We have an adversarial system by design. We generally think it's a good thing that defence lawyers will defend even a guilty person as vigorously as they can; shouldn't the same apply to prosecutors?

90002• 7 years ago

No, because the point of the value of defending people no matter what is to protect against government overreach. The government has a significant asymmetry of power against its citizens (it can, you know, arrest or kill them), so there are legal limits placed on what the government can do to its citizens. It has to justify to a judge why it needs to infringe a citizen's rights (e.g. warrants for search or seizure), whereas citizens are assumed to be allowed access to information about the government, and the government has to make a case to keep it confidential (see: FOIA, FISA, security clearances, etc.). In addition to these legal limits, we have social norms, like the one you mentioned, to reinforce this adherence to citizens' rights. We must protect all defendants against the government in order to hold the government to proper processes. If we think the government should have been able to get an awful person, we need to change the laws going forward, not retroactively.

Additionally, selective enforcement is primarily a tool of corruption. The law is supposed to apply to everyone. If it doesn't, then those who enforce it get to selectively choose to not enforce it against themselves and only enforce it against their enemies. And, as we've said, the government has very disproportionate power against its citizens, so to give prosecutors, police, or other enforcers of the law very broad, rarely used precedents is extremely dangerous.

marcus_holmes2• 7 years ago

Sure, if we also provide every citizen with the entire set of laws that they are supposed to obey, in an intelligible format. As the prosecutor said in TFA, "everyone is guilty of something", because there are too many laws in force, and no-one knows them all.

Add to that the costs of defending a court case, and the prosecutor has more-or-less complete power - they can financially ruin someone at will, just (as in this case) by deciding to enforce an obscure law that the defendant didn't even know about.

So making the prosecutors adverserial to the citizens, while giving them absolute power to destroy anyone they don't like, is a recipe for corruption.

mikeash3• 7 years ago

The system is not symmetric and it's not supposed to be. For example, the prosecution is required to disclose all of their evidence to the defense, but the defense has almost no requirements to disclose evidence to the prosecution.

A defense attorney who has proof that their client is 100% guilty must still defend their client to the best of their ability. A prosecutor who believes that the accused is innocent is ethically required to dismiss the case. (Obviously, this doesn't always happen, but it's supposed to.)

closeparen• 7 years ago

Social conservatism didn't disappear. It remains a political force and an electoral majority in some places. There's no reason to doubt that this kind of prosecution is exactly what the voters had in mind when they elected him.

gumby• 7 years ago

A friend of mine looked after his parents' house while they were on sabbatical. He rented it out for porn shoots. His mother was furious when she found out -- because he'd kept all the money himself.

Now they use airBNB.

Also a porn film was shot at the Stanford AI lab (the DC Powers building) in the 1970s. The first image I ever saw transmitted over the arpanet (around 1978) was a (very grainy) frame from this film.

reilly3000• 7 years ago

There are a million jokes, memes, fake stats, and even an Avenue Q song about how the Internet is for Porn. I just can’t believe it has roots that far back!

Jedd• 7 years ago

So he shot all the non-sex scenes first, then went back to film the required sex.

This sounds a lot like the film Caligula, from 1979.

They got Malcolm McDowell, Teresa Ann Savoy, Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole, John Steiner, John Gielgud etc - but re-shot a bunch of pornographic scenes long after principle photography had wrapped, and then edited the whole thing into what's now a bit of a cult classic, but at the time was banned by most countries censorship boards, disavowed by many who were involved in the production, and the subject of a swathe of legal attacks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(film)

pontifier• 7 years ago

I hate our legal system. I don't have any faith that justice is found there.

lioon121• 7 years ago

tl;dr