Many people hope so.
As with JM’s indictment several months ago in Virginia, Max Hardcore’s recent obscenity indictment is a return to form. Porn producers are being busted for obscenity, a constantly reinterpreted definition that is nevertheless closer to the hearts of actual people than are 2257 restrictions.
Companies like Hardcore, Rob Black/Extreme Associates, and JM Productions have always been lightning rods for the Feds. Recently, however, the fear of being nabbed for faulty recordkeeping has superseded the fear of an obscenity conviction. Had the revised 2257 regulations not been so poorly conceived, they would have landed more producers in trouble.
Many producers feel that as long as they don’t produce content like Hardcore, Black, and JM, they will be fine.
I usually get a lot of angry e-mail when I write something about Hardcore that doesn’t call him Satan. For whatever reason, it is easy for me to think Hardcore is a nice guy simply because of the porn he makes; I count as friends a number of pornographers whose work I hate. Not that I hate Hardcore’s work – it delivers what it says it will deliver, which is a different criterion from liking what it delivers.
Many pornographers are ambivalent about Hardcore. They say that his methods offscreen are just as distasteful as those on camera (I have not experienced this) and therefore want him to fall. But they also feel that Max Hardcore is the Feds’ gateway drug to easier obscenity convictions for the rest of the industry.
“I don’t know if I should be happy or sad about Mr. Little (Paul Little is Hardcore’s legal name),” one director told me today.
Sending DVDs to a hostile county is one thing, delivering them via the U.S. Mail is another.
One of the DVDs Hardcore was indicted for was delivered to a P.O. box. “I’m surprised that people still use the USPS when everyone knows that it’s one of those technicalities that can get you popped,” a reader commented.
A more surprising issue is the number of pornographers who draw a distinction between their work and Hardcore’s. Everything is consensual on paper; is Hardcore’s work worse because his subjects appear to be having a bad time? What about the contract star who appears to be having a good time but actually isn’t?
If Hardcore is convicted, he will be forced to cede to the government his house, his websites, and his means of production. The Feds want him gone more than his detractors in the adult industry do. But if Hardcore goes, and Extreme and JM and Chatsworth Pictures follow, nothing stands between those convictions and your sensitive couples’ porn.
Because chances are the actress doesn’t really want to be there, either, and that’s obscene, too.
My story on Fleshbot:
Somehow, the 10-count indictment against Max Hardcore (nee Paul Little) issued from the U.S. District Court, Tampa Division, this week seems conventional. The indictment is for obscenity, not 2257 recordkeeping infringements or, like what befell Al Capone, tax evasion. Hardcore has beaten obscenity charges before during G.W. Bush’s first administration, but that was in porn-friendly Los Angeles. This time the 10-count cocktail includes several instances of two-minute clips from Hardcore’s websites as well as the European versions of “Fists of Fury” and “Golden Guzzlers”.
For consumers of “extreme” porn, which gets more extreme every day, few producers can approach Max Hardcore‘s reputation or content. Vaginal fisting (the Department of Justice press release notes “insertion of an entire hand into a vagina or anus”), vomiting, and urination figure prominently in the European versions of Hardcore’s movies, available online or by DVD. In recent years, many companies have shied away from carrying Hardcore’s fare, so he either distributes himself from his headquarters northeast of Los Angeles or releases the less edgy material through Porn Valley’s JM Productions.
It has not yet been brought to light how Hardcore’s products were obtained, but in order for the indictment to have been filed in Tampa (from which a great many of Porn Valley’s strippers hail), the DVDs need to have been purchased and sent from/to that area and the Internet content needs to have been accessed from a local terminal.
If the requirements for obscenity are met, i.e. if the content is found to be offensive to local standards in Tampa, Hardcore stands to lose his house (which the Feds two years ago shot a hole through), his production equipment, and his websites, including pissedonpornstars.com (image of “Britney Rears 4” co-star Jamie Lynn above).
“I just put up the hardest stuff I have on my site,” Hardcore told me in March (close to the date of one of the recent indictment counts), and also on my Euro version DVDs.”
This is why the Federales did not hedge their bets, including both Internet and DVD content.
“They love it in Europe,” Hardcore said, “and I’ve never heard of anyone, even a store owner getting busted for obscenity.”
Previously: Untitled Briana Banks project; Anastasia Blue, Where Are You?
See also: Indictment text on The Smoking Gun
as an owner and fan of max harcore’s early work –
(which makes me sound like a first amendment absolutist AND a max hardcore supporter, which makes me a little uncomfortable, because his most recent porn lacks what made his early stuff enjoyable: genuine enthusiasm)
– some of which includes the poorly edited fists of fury comp series, i’m obligated to point out an error in the DoJ’s fisting note:
“insertion of an entire hand into a vagina or anus”
having enjoyed multiple hardcore fisting scenes, i’ve never seen max actually insert his entire hand in any single orifice.
in fact, max’s consistently incomplete fisting (which, from what i’ve seen, is always of the vaginal ilk) has left many fellow hardcore consumers feeling sorely disappointed.
also, that these indictments were filed in tampa (TAMPA? seriously? what the fuck?) is almost as awesome as the possibility that max could get off on partial fisting grounds.
Incomplete fisting is, I believe, The Greatest Crime of All. I would think that if someone was in the market to get fisted, he/she would feel shortchanged if he/she didn’t feel the watchband and maybe a few cufflinks up there.