An Amateur Porno Set Off a Federal Witch Hunt
thedailybeast.com
thedailybeast.com
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.
That’s not how laws work. Many of the laws that our important to daily life are hundreds of years old.
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.
This way the legislative branch has pressure to amend the criminal code as it becomes obsolete---in this case, imagine if people had started accusing others of fornication and private lewdness left and right, and DAs through the state were forced to follow up on those accusations...
There are huge holes in that. What if, hypothetically, the DA looks at a situation and says 'there is no chance of criminal charges', but some 40-60% of the population thinks there should be?
There is even a fairly topical case of that where a substantial number of Democrat lawmakers are upset with how Barr is handling the Muller report. Imagine squaring a similar case with a law that says prosecution must proceed - I think Barr would be quite happy to claim there is no chance that an Obstruction case would lead to criminal charges.
In the confrontational Western-style justice system the prosecutor always has discretion. Not to acknowledge that just muddies the water in difficult cases. It is much safer to accept that selective enforcement happens, that sometimes the justice system fails to deliver justice and that there need to be release valves in how people are appointed so the abuses don't get out of hand.
Germany has compulsory prosecution (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_prosecution, the German article Google Translated has mich more detail) and it’s subject to review by the courts (https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klageerzwingungsverfahren and https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ermittlungserzwingungsverfah...)
Note that as a result of this plea bargaining are a rare thing.
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.
The third amendment is an important law, but active enforcement is...rare. Even in criminal law, arguably, the ideal is that the existence of the law itself acts as a deterrent—an infrequently enforced law isn't necessarily unimportant, it may just be successful.
Active enforcement of important laws may occasionally be rare but if you can’t pass legislation to keep the constitution of your state in effect you probably have an incipient civil war on your hands, or incompetence at a level that makes the Brexit Tories look like Bismarck.
The overwhelming majority of important laws are enforced regularly. People don’t have to hunt for laws to get thieves, murderers or slavers[2], they’re enforced multiple times per year. Theft and murder have been illegal as long as there have been states, and slavery has been illegal in the US since, what, 1864?
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_slavery_in_the_Un...
Look how hard it is to do stuff like raise the debt ceiling, which wasn't a partisan football until just a few years ago.
Most of them should be ignored from the day they're enacted.
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.
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.
However we can't formally accept that as a society without kicking out one of the main pillars supporting the justice system. If we expect and accept that the justice system to produce unfair outcomes it becomes challenging to justify having court appearances. We could get unfair outcomes much more efficiently by just letting the police and DA arrest whoever with regular internal purges against corruption.
Those laws should never have been used, and if the community wanted to dissuade future productions, they should have passed laws at the city, county, or state level that allows for the proper checks and balances.
I'd argue that there's a qualitative difference between selective enforcement that involves informal standards that evolve over time (e.g. police ignoring anyone who breaks the speed limit by less than 10MPH) and selective enforcement that involves a law that hasn't been enforced for centuries being pulled out of retirement and aimed at a single individual.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
I'm not sure you've gotten anywhere, describing what professional means, when you make it dependent on other entities as an explanation. There are plenty of bad SAG actors. What about just saying "union production"? Although I think that's the minimal bar, there have been non-union successes...which don't look professional to me. eg https://www.reddit.com/r/acting/comments/a59tum/what_are_the...
Based on what? There are many unions and they have changed and stabilized over time. SAG-AFTRA https://www.sagaftra.org/about/our-history is the one that is distinguishing. The Director's Guild (which George Lucas and others, had spats with) or a writer's guild, etc have traditionally been little more than elitist extortion committees.
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.
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.
> 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.