An informational meeting of adult industry elites was held at Chatsworth’s Radisson Hotel to discuss threats to the Porno-Industrial Complex by California’s Occupational Safety And Health Administration (Cal/OSHA).
Chaired by Vivid’s Steve Hirsch, the meeting took place on September 9, timed to coincide with the release of The Beatles Rockband. Despite this, the small room, which cost $300, was not equipped with a microphone.
“Coffee and tea cost $45 a gallon,” a Radisson spokesperson said, “and soft drinks were $1.50.” No official word on beverage consumption has been released.
About 25 people attended to hear Hirsch and longtime adult industry attorney Paul Cambria address the latest challenge of the many facing Porn Valley. I was not invited, nor was anyone from adult trade publication XBiz. But I attended regardless, disguised as a simple shepherd.
Invitees contacted by Vivid’s Marci Hirsch included the other heads of the Big Six (Digital Playground, Wicked, Hustler, Adam & Eve, and Evil Angel) as well as emissaries from JM, Mercenary, Anabolic, Third World Media, Kickass, Zero Tolerance, Playboy, New Sensations, Bang Brothers, Red Light District, Teravision, Vouyermedia, Evasive Angles and, for some reason, Sex Z Pictures. Distributors IVD and Pulse, Spearmint Rhino, independent producers X-Play, and sundry other industry players were also invited.
Conspicuously off the list were representatives from adult lobbying group the Free Speech Coalition and Adult Industry Medical, the de facto STD testing organization of Porn Valley’s performers.
At a front corner of the room sat Steve Hirsch at a small table. He introduced Paul Cambria, who spoke for most of the meeting. The tone was not convivial or congratulatory, the way many adult industry conferences are. Indeed, at times it seemed downright dour.
The meeting began with a bit of history; the case against Evasive Angles, a company headed by TT Boy. It was on an Evasive Angles set in 2004 that the performer Darren James was exposed to HIV, spurring Porn Valley’s penultimate HIV crisis that also claimed the adult career of Canadian performer Lara Roxx.
The 2004 scare resulted in a self-imposed 45-day industry shutdown and several larger, louder summits than the one at the Radisson. Cal/OSHA fined TT Boy’s company, which then agreed to be a condom-only outfit.
In addition, savvy companies with legal counsel began referring to what they did by different names. Vivid, for instance, seemed to get out of the porn business altogether in 2004.
After mentioning that his company had been visited by Cal/OSHA and had valiantly refused the state agency’s demands both to view raw footage and to visit a porn set, Hirsch said that Vivid now merely “assembles video.”
In theory, this means the company hires a group of independent contractors who may or may not supply the company with material containing condomless or otherwise “unsafe” content that Vivid will then “assemble” and pass off to yet a third party to distribute.
In practice, however, and as was later mentioned in the meeting, independent contractors might be liable on paper but Vivid tacitly agrees to handle fines, as it is generally understood that porn directors, unless they are heirs to a snack cake or cosmetics fortune, don’t have a pot to piss in.
It is generally understood that porn plus condoms equals poor sales. Consumers have also weighed in that the presence of condoms decreases the fantasy element of porn, something that isn’t compensated for by seeing Evan Stone dressed as Cliff Claven. Furthermore, performers have also stated their preference for working condom-free in the athletic and non-realistic settings of a porn set.
So the already tenuous financial fortunes of Porn Valley are doubly imperiled by the threat of a condom mandate.
Cal/OSHA believes that technology exists whereby condoms could be digitally edited out in post-production. Hirsch said his company “looked into it” and said that the cost of removing condoms in post, frame by frame, was prohibitive.
Porn companies have become, if not used to, then not surprised by, visits from the authorities. One of the recent prongs of the War Against Porn was FBI 2257 raids, in which feds would show up to demand to view proper documentation.
A Cal/OSHA visit, Cambria said, would be slightly different. Agency representatives would look for faulty wiring, slippery work surfaces, exposed extension cords, etc. in addition to asking about the porn company’s policies regarding hazardous materials and blood-borne pathogens.
In a recent L.A. Times article, Hirsch – perhaps glibly – suggested that the adult industry would just move to another state if Cal/OSHA’s demands – which include condoms, dental dams, and face masks – were to be enforced.
But 1989’s Freeman decision effectively made California the only state in which filming porn was not expressly illegal. In addition, out of state companies would be liable under the Mann Act if they were to import California’s most precious resource – it’s porn performers – for purposes of sex for money.
So Cambria suggested several possible routes, including drafting complicated variances to Cal/OSHA’s demands and challenging the agency on First Amendment grounds. After all, Cambria said, don’t professional televised fights constitute a similar risk of transmission of blood-borne pathogens? Why is the porn industry being unjustly targeted?
A legal challenge might also be just what Cal/OSHA wants, Cambria said. His speculation was that a challenge might help the agency define the legal viability of future efforts against the porn industry.
Also a consideration was the cozying up to a sympathetic state legislator. Cambria hinted that he knew a likely assemblyman who might put pressure on Cal/OSHA to tone things down. While this might prove to be most effective, Cambria said, it would also be the most expensive, as the porn industry would have to retain a lobbyist.
The question that was not asked, because it was answered by the absence from the room of anyone from the Free Speech Coalition, was “Doesn’t the adult industry already have lobbyists?”
An industry wag suggested to me that, if Big Porn made all the money people said it did, why was there not a Watergate Hotel full of lobbyists in Sacramento and Washington D.C. representing the industry’s interests? And why didn’t today’s meeting feature a catered lunch?
Without going so far as to pass the hat, Cambria noted that it was historically the bigger companies that paid the lion’s share of fines and attorneys’ fees, and for which the industry as a whole benefitted.
“It isn’t fair for the large companies to shoulder the costs of litigating or lobbying,” he said, “while smaller companies ride on their coattails.”
Despite this, the Radisson spokesperson said, Vivid did pick up the tab for the conference room and several gallons of coffee.
Cambria suggested that attorneys for all the companies should meet to hash out a unified plan and that no one should go to court alone. At this point the meeting was adjourned, and I was happy to see all the attendees forego their leased Lexuses to ride back to work together on an articulated Metro bus, not a single person wearing a condom.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: HIV2k9 – How the dust will settle; Porn luminaries discuss testing and condoms
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