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Rob Black Ha! Yeah.
Roger T. Pipe People can read up on the history, but where does the case stand right now?
Rob Black Where it stands right now is that all of the bullshit is over now. We are going to have to go to trial so it is just a matter of when we go. There is a case before the Third Circuit where the ACLU is representing some facets of the internet and community standards. It is completely separate from my case, but there are elements of that case that can affect our case. Before our lawyer even filed the motions to throw the stuff out, we brought these things up. The judge who threw our case out said that there were elements of this case that he wanted to address before we get to our stuff. Lou has gone back to the judge and told him that we would like to hold off on our trial until this case is done because it might affect our outcome. Now we are waiting for him to say yes or no. If he sides with us then we won’t go to trial until the ACLU is done with their case. If that ruling goes in favor of the ACLU, it would affect our case. If it goes against them then it gets appealed. Either way it will get appealed actually. If the Government loses, they will appeal like they did with us. We might not go to trial for a few years. If the judge says no, then we will probably go to trial in March of 2007. This is the judge who threw our case out before so we are leaning towards the idea that he might let us wait and see how the ACLU case comes out. He doesn’t seem like he wants to bother with such nonsense as pornography in his courtroom.
Roger T. Pipe Ideally would you like this to go to trial?
Rob Black It’s going to trial regardless. There is nothing I can do, but yeah. For years and years we have done what we did and I bragged “I don’t care about getting busted” so ultimately yeah. I would like to have gone to the Supreme Court. I think that would have bolstered the legend more. We are the point where everyone can say that they are fighting or First Amendment rights and be half full of shit. First and foremost comes your personal freedom and second, you’re trying to figure out how to profit in some way. So going to the Supreme Court would have been great. Standing trial is pretty fucking good too though. That is pretty big. A lot of people think that as soon as jury gets a look at those movies, forget about it. I differ with those people. A lot of people haven’t seen those movies. They only know the legend. Six counts in our case involve the internet. They are video clips. Yeah, two of the clips involve pissing, but the other video clips are like a lot of gang bang and stuff that everybody does.
Roger T. Pipe So you are fairly confident that you will be able to find twelve reasonable people to look at this?
Rob Black Yeah. All you need is one. All you need is one to get a hung jury. One person to say “it’s disgusting, it’s horrible, I can’t bear to watch it, but it’s a movie and who am I to say that I am going to put someone in jail for making that.” We are going to go old school and put some of the people who were in the movies on the stand. Let the jury see that it is a business. That is isn’t me and Janet in some garage in downtown LA like in “8mm.” This is a corporation and we have actors and camera guys. Let the jury see the reality of what it is and let them deliberate and realize that we’re just making shitty little movies. Regardless of how people feel about me, I have a charismatic personality. Just letting people get to know us will be huge. Not a lot of people do that. Some of the old timers, Rush Hampshire and them sitting at a desk while the lawyer preaches First Amendment Rights. In our case the First Amendment is secondary. It’s a privacy issue. Yes the stuff is strong and hardcore, but it’s private. It is something that involves someone who is buying it from our internet or our company. People aren’t getting hurt. There are no animals or children involved. Let’s just to the extreme and say that me and Janet want to have my camera guy shoot us pissing and shitting on each other and eating our own shit. If we want to market that, how can somebody put you in jail for what a husband and wife decide to do. You can’t differentiate between different kinds of porn. It’s just a matter of taste. It’s the same in Hollywood. They make movies from G movies to NC-17 movies. For one person to say that this is wrong is just fucked. I think that in 2006 we can get someone to agree with us.
Roger T. Pipe This case involves internet content and stuff someone ordered. Someone had to seek this out. It wasn’t on the shelves of some local video store?
Rob Black No. If you read our preliminary transcripts when the judge threw it out you will see that the Government tired to argue that an unwitting minor or adult could be subjected to this. Our judge said that was bullshit because everything they had, you had to be a member to watch. An unwitting fucking person could not have stumbled onto the material. Everything was in the members area so they had to put in a credit card number. The mail order stuff, someone would have to seek it out, use a credit card to order and then request that it be shipped. There is nothing unwitting about that.
Roger T. Pipe And a minor would have to commit fraud to get to the material.
Rob Black Yeah. In that aspect, people never bring this up, but when a minor goes on the computer and gets porn on the internet, we should be more no liable than a beer company or tobacco company where minors smoke or drink. It’s not our responsibility to be the policeman of the world. We set up structures to keep unwitting minors from stumbling upon the material. But it ain’t our problem if a kid takes his parent’s credit card or if the parents don’t give a shit if he looks at pornography. Parents have to police their own kids and their own actions. It’s not our fault. When someone goes in and buys beer from Habib at 7-11 and gets drunk and gets in a car accident, they don’t sue Budweiser. Nine out of ten times, the 7-11 isn’t responsible either. The kid has a fake ID or has an adult go in and buy it for him. It’s bullshit that we are held to such a higher standard considering no one has ever been killed with a dildo or DVD.
Roger T. Pipe A few years ago Frontline did a piece on you guys. They covered the “Forced Entry” shoot and clearly implied that Veronica Cain didn’t know what she was in for. When you saw that piece, did it upset you?
Rob Black Did it upset me? Yeah it upset me, but I made the bed and I put the flowers everywhere so I had to lie in it. We set that interview up and we did what we did. Did they turn it on us? Yeah, but what the fuck am I going to do? I ain’t going to cry about it. It was kind of shitty, but other than having someone brought up on criminal charges, what difference does it make? It wasn’t a girl off the street. We all know that. The only people you have to take into account are the millions of people who saw it and say “Oh what horrible people they are.” Who gives a fuck about them? A lot of people say that that piece started the ball rolling for everything that has happened. I don’t 100% agree with that. I think that they already knew who I was and what we were doing. We were the company who mocked them. They were coming regardless. In some ways it helped us though because all of the publicity around it is still there. When you are able to sweep something under the rug it dies. When you aren’t able to sweep it under the rug, it builds steam and makes people aware of it. When we did Nightlight or any of the news shows, they brought up Frontline. Instead of the Feds coming in quietly and busting me, there was this big thing because everybody asked them in the interviews if they went after us because we challenged the Attorney General. People used those lines that we had told Ashcroft that we made hard core movies and there was nothing he could do about it. In that way it shed more light in on it. Personally I think that had 9-11 never happened they would have already steamrolled through the industry. As history has shown, there has never been a Republican administration that has not gone after porn. I’m young so I don’t know a lot before Ronald Regan, but he annihilated the industry. Bush Sr. went after porn, but it wasn’t as bad. They always wait for their second term to go after us. The boom period of the 90’s was when Clinton was in. I remember in the Regan years no one would do hard boxes. That was an industry no-no. When my uncle had Zane, all of the boxes were soft front and soft back. Then Clinton came along and things loosened up. So they were coming after us regardless. It was just a matter of who they were coming after first. If you have someone in the industry who has a giant mouth, who bitches and cries and moans you have to go after them. If you go after Vivid, they will point over and say “Why don’t you go after him? He is saying that he’ll piss all over girls.” They had to start with us, but I don’t think this is the end. They have two and a half years and they are going to leave their legacy. They have done what with the Iraq War, whether they fucked it or didn’t fuck it up. They did it with the Supreme Court and they will do it with our industry. From the 2257 on down, they are going to leave their mark on our industry. In the recent JM case they hit a distributor.
Roger T. Pipe For those who didn’t hear, they went after JM Productions and 5 Star DVD.
Rob Black Yeah, going after a distributor, that’s like old school shit.
Roger T. Pipe The case is similar to yours in that it was mail order.
Rob Black Yeah. They are going after JM for shipping obscene material to 5 Star in Arizona and then going after 5 Star for shipping it to the customer. They didn’t do that with me. They went right at me. Ashcroft is gone and the person who was head of that division is gone. They have someone new there no so they are trying new things. If people think that they got me and JM and they will get Max and then stop, they are nuts.
Roger T. Pipe The three you just mentioned are the most obvious targets. Do you think that if they get a conviction against one of you then they will move on to the next most obvious target?
Rob Black Rog you have to remember. We are the most obvious targets because we are the biggest speakers. I’ll tell you though, Evil Angel, you can count the number of things that they do that would fall into these guidelines. Belladonna sticking fruit into her. That is a no no. Cambria would tell you that if you insert anything into a woman’s orifices that is not a sex toy you are crossing the line. Bella does fruit and baseball bats. Jules Jordan, I have seen him fuck Taylor Rain with a wrench. Jules’ new movie? He ain’t nothing original the little jerk off. You can quote me, the jerk off. Dressing up a guy as a priest with Jenna Haze. Jules I did that six fucking years ago jerk off. That is something though. Are you going to go to a Bible thumper in Georgia or Oklahoma and bring that to a jury?
Roger T. Pipe Don’t you think that something like that, dressing people up like priests, is tougher to prosecute? You can argue artist merit more easily there than in a movie where there is no acting at all.
Rob Black If that were the case then you have to take me out of the equation and just look at JM and Max. “Forced Entry” was a sexual biography of the Nightstalker. Every act in that movie was taken from the book. Everything from the beginning to the end of that movie is exactly what Richard Ramirez did. You can argue artist merit, but the Government don’t give a fuck. They went after Maplethorpe for a bullwhip up a guy’s ass. You can say that it’s easier to defend that, but you can’t buy into that. Back in the 80’s Steve Hirsch and Russ Hampshire went down and there was nothing hardcore about those movies.
Roger T. Pipe That was a different time though.
Rob Black Was it? If it’s so different then why is there an increase in what is going on with porn? You read AVN. Every week there is a story about a porn store being busted. Movie Gallery is in the process of fighting an obscenity charge and they won’t take anything hard. They won’t take my stuff. All they take is vanilla stuff and one of their stores is being brought up on charges.
Roger T. Pipe Most polls show that around half of all Americans think that porn shouldn’t exist at all. You are going to find pockets where that number is much higher, but things have still changed significantly since the 80’s.
Rob Black I don’t think things have changed.
Roger T. Pipe Porn is so much more acceptable and mainstream, especially with a company like Vivid.
Rob Black OK, then it’s Vivid and then the rest of us. There is nothing vanilla about Anabolic's Gang Bang Girl 16.
Roger T. Pipe There is a difference though. It is going to be tougher to defend a Max movie where he has a woman saying “don’t tell my daddy, I’m only twelve” than it is to defend a Wicked feature. There is a line for many people.
Rob Black But why is that line crossed in our world when it isn’t crossed in Hollywood?
Roger T. Pipe You can’t compare what Max does to the most explicit scene of child rape in a mainstream movie. They just aren’t the same at all.
Rob Black The only difference is that we show penetration. The act in itself and the intensity involved is the same. We have this issue with sexual contact. That is where we draw the line. It shouldn’t be like that and you shouldn’t put that in your head. You shouldn’t even think like that.
Roger T. Pipe I don’t think like that, but you have to accept that other people do. Other people don’t share our view on this issue. As far as I’m concerned if it is consenting adults doing things with other consenting adults, then there shouldn’t be a problem. I understand that the mindset you and I share is vastly different from the mindset of the average person on this issue. Everyone has their own idea of what is “too much” and their own line that they don’t want to see crossed.
Rob Black My only line is children and animals. My wife is going to be thirty soon. If I put her in pigtails and her sitting on the ground sucking on a pacifier telling me to stick my cock in her ten year old mouth, how is that obscene? It’s acting. Hollywood murders people in movies all the time. The depiction of that is more extreme to me than a thirty year old woman pretending she is a child. There is nothing more extreme that a movie that shows a guy shooting a kid. So if that is all right, then why isn’t what we do all right? It’s all acting and both are different facets of our society that we are depicting on film. You can go out and get any number of books that involve a child being raped. For example, the movie Sleepers where the kids grow up and kill the guy who fucked them as kids. What if I did a porn version of that where I get give twinks who look like they are twelve years old, they get sent to a boarding school where they get raped by the wardens. How the fuck is that different than the Hollywood movie other than the fact that I’m showing it?
Roger T. Pipe There is no difference in my mind, but I can understand that there are people who disagree. Right, wrong or otherwise, that is just the world we live in.
Rob Black I agree with you, but I think that if our industry as a whole thought more like that instead of this cowardly, passive phase of telling us we shouldn’t do this. If you are going to be in our business, you are in the business. You don’t get to walk this candy-coated line because those fifty percent would still throw them in jail. If I were a prosecutor Vivid would be the first company I go after. They have all the money and they like to go on TV and brag about how they make a hundred million dollars a year in sales and how they are thrusting themselves into the public. I would find out if they have a gay line, which they do and I would do what they did to JM. I would go to Oklahoma, order a gay Vivid tape from a retailer. Then I would bring them up on charges and bring a tape of two guys butt fucking to a jury in Oklahoma that is going to say that it’s obscene. That is very easy to do.
Roger T. Pipe It’s still easier to get you than to get Vivid. The product you put out is decidedly harder.
Rob Black But Rog I’m not a catch.
Roger T. Pipe You know how this works though. They are waiting to see if they can get you. If they get crushed, then you know they won’t be able to get the softer stuff. If they can get you, then they can go after the next company. If not, they are going to have to find another way.
Rob Black But Pennsylvania is different thank Oklahoma, Florida is different than Mississippi.
Roger T. Pipe The more times they try and fail, the more likely it is that they will have to give up.
Rob Black Come on, we’re in 2006. You would think that the Supreme Court would have just said “come on, we’re changing obscenity laws.” Why didn’t they do it during the Clinton years? The old way of thinking that “I don’t know what obscenity is, but I know it when I see it” is outdated. The Supreme Court won’t rule if they don’t have to though.
Roger T. Pipe The Government hasn’t won a case that has been fought hard enough to go that high. If they lose, the Supreme Court won’t be stepping in.
Rob Black If we win, the Supreme Court can wipe their brow. If we loose, we will appeal and they will have to look at it.
Roger T. Pipe If the Government looses and they appeal, then they risk the Supreme Court striking down local jurisdiction laws for obscenity and they won’t risk taking that big a hit.
Rob Black It is what we do and what we are. They are going after a ton of people. They won’t look at it the way you just laid it out. Most everyone just folds up and dies. Historically no one ever fights obscenity, from Hampshire on down.
Roger T. Pipe Wouldn’t it be easier for you not to fight?
Rob Black Yeah.
Roger T. Pipe That’s why people fold.
Rob Black But it’s only easier in the short run. It doesn’t stop. Now you’re a one strike felon. They never put you in jail, fine you and then let you go. They went after Carrier twice. If people in the old days would have fought, then we wouldn’t be in this situation today.
Roger T. Pipe But it is a more winnable fight today. You have more people on your side for a potential jury pool. Twenty years ago, hard core porn on someone’s TV was enough to freak people out.
Rob Black But you still have to fight. Porn back then was a lot more hard core than. Fucking Veronica Hart was doing rape scenes. There were a lot of rape movies. I think that stuff at times was harder.
Roger T. Pipe The psychology of the scenes was harder, but the scenes weren’t shot as hard then. It wasn’t as visually shocking as it is today.
Rob Black That’s true.
Roger T. Pipe It will all be fine if a jury comes up with a reasonable verdict or if you can get a ruling on appeal that strikes down some of this ridiculous local jurisdiction stuff.
Rob Black The ACLU case has everything to do with local jurisdiction.
Roger T. Pipe That is going to be very tough to defend when it comes to what can be shipped where. If a town wants to control what brick and mortar businesses can and can’t exist, that’s one thing.
Rob Black I say that all the time. The obscenity laws were written when no one had a DVD player. They were meant for the guy who opens the dirty book store in the neighborhood. They never anticipated what would happen with technology. What I love about Republicans is that when it comes to First Amendment issues they won’t see it as an absolute, but when it comes to guns, they are all about the right to bear arms.
Roger T. Pipe Have you had any support from our Democratic senators in your case?
Rob Black No, but it’s not the same thing.
Roger T. Pipe Is it logical to say that we don’t have a friend on either side of the aisle?
Rob Black No. Democrats have to go along to get along.
Roger T. Pipe Who has supported you on the Democratic side?
Rob Black There is not one person who has. Janet Reno couldn’t give two shits about porn. If our Senators had to go along with something criminalizing movies depicting girls as young, that was a compromise. I could go with a compromise. If they came in and said “we don’t give a shit about 2257, but here is the thing. You guys can’t do THIS.” If that is within reason then I’m up for that. But our founding fathers of porn, their reasonable compromises were just retarded. I could roll with a compromise. If they say don’t depict a woman as a twelve year old, I can go for that. I can still gape her ass, I can still piss in her face, fine. But if that means no oral cumshots, no interracial, no gay, no fisting, no depiction of rape, to me that is silly. I am up for a compromise, but it has to be a give and take.
Roger T. Pipe Extreme is rolling along, perhaps a little less visible than it once was, but here. What is the state of the company right now?
Rob Black We are trying to rebuild, trying to find our identity again. People think that the court case was the crippling blow. The court case was this big, but the crippling blow was that wrestling company. That was the thing that destroyed us. The wrestling company sucked every dime from Extreme and dumped it into a black hole. Me, not giving a shit about porno and fighting with AVN and people I didn’t need to fucking fight with. Me being stupid. Fighting with people who before the AVN thing were my friends. I can honestly tell you that I used to work out at the same gym with Steve Hirsch and could call him up any time. Then I went to war with him, why? It was fucking retarded. Fishbein. I would go to lunch with Paul. Were we butt buddies? No. But I could call him up when I needed a favor. Then I went to war with him for not fucking reason except my own twisted, retarded psychology that did not make sense. That is what crippled us, not the government. They came in, busted us, I had to spend six month trying to get people not scared to take our product. We set up another company and say it was soft. That was easy. People are setting up companies all the time. They do it when there is a stigma from the old company for making shit product. The crippling thing was the wrestling and alienating people in the industry. As you know this industry is very small. It is still controlled by a lot of the same people who controlled it thirty years ago. The internet has changed it, but the same fuckers are there who were there years ago. We’re trying to rebuild from the damage we did. We are now diving headlong into the internet. In that world, having a web master throw up a piss gallery is no big deal. I’ve got eight hundred movies our library. We could throw up fifty niche sites if we wanted to. It’s really just trying to rebuild a structure to get us solvent again. The wrestling thing was the crippling fuck up our ass.
Roger T. Pipe So you’re done with wrestling?
Rob Black Oh yeah. We’re done with anything that doesn’t involve naked people having sex. If two guys want to wrestle each other and then fuck each other up the ass, OK. If it doesn’t involve something that people can jerk off to then we aren’t doing it.
Roger T. Pipe Zupko is back at Extreme. What makes you think it will work better this time around?
Rob Black The only problem I ever had with Tom was over wrestling and AVN. That was it. Other than that, him being drunk and rambling, I could deal with that. We had issues because he would have great ideas for promotion or a movie and want to talk to me about it. I had three wrestlers in my office talking about a TV show. I would have to tell him that we can’t shoot a movie because I just laid down twenty five thousand dollars to the Olympic Auditorium. Those were our issues. If you took those elements out, we were fine. He would come in with these ideas and I was happy to tell him to do it.
Roger T. Pipe So you are in a completely different place professionally?
Rob Black I am and I think he is too. Back then I used to tell him that one day he would appreciate everything that I did for him because no one would let him do the things let him do. I also you used to break his balls about doing gonzo movies. He would say that he wasn’t a gonzo director, but when we was gone from Extreme, it forced him to become a gonzo director. He had to do a straight five-scene gonzo movie and come up with something creative to make it good. I think he is a better pornographer now because he can go and make a cheap gonzo and make it hot and exciting. He is in a different place. Now it’s all about business. He gives me an idea and I can listen. When he comes into my office and I’m busy, I’m never busy doing wrestling. It isn’t busy thinking up ways to torment people. Everything is associated with porn now. I would say that the change is thirty percent new Zupko and seventy percent new me. I just want him to make movies now and have input in the creative process. Just yesterday Tom Byron emailed me and said that Jewel De’Nyle’s mom was performing. I told Zupko and after he got done laughing for thirty minutes he started coming up with all these ideas on how we could shoot her. We used to do that kind of stuff before the wrestling. When we had the wrestling all of our creative ideas went into that.
Roger T. Pipe Other than Zupko back, and Tom Byron back in front of the camera, who else do you have?
Rob Black Ivan is going to do some more stuff. He is our in house editor so he gets strapped with editing a lot of shit. He doesn’t necessarily have a lot of time to shoot his own stuff. We’re trying to change that and give him a more consistent release schedule. I think that his strength is doing campy little movies and not the gonzo thing. He does Youth N Asia, but his strength is the feature stuff. His strength is Dawn of the Head, not a gonzo movie where Japanese girls where bright make up. If you want that you could tune into a Red Light District or Zero Tolerance Asian movie. He has one coming up called the “Sex Sense” which starts Paris and is a take off on The Sixth Sense. Lizzy is starting to put out more movies, but more importantly than that she has become more of a figurehead for the company. She is doing a lot of photo shoots and started something up with Evil Threads. She is starting to go out there and do some stuff. She will be doing some girl/girl stuff. The first thing she is going to do is with Gina Lynn. It’s going to be a take off on the Bella Loves Jenna stuff. It’s going to be called Lizzy Hates Gina. We are going to do a full mock up on that stuff. My cousin Mark Zane is working for me as Alias. He does the POV line and some other stuff. I am going to start doing some of the stuff you like, some real gross stuff. Paris had such a great appearance on Howard Stern that we’re going to shoot a whole movie called “Roman Showers.” It will look like Roman Times and have Paris just throwing up on people for five scenes. It’s sick and stupid. I am going to do some other type of movies. I have always threatened to do that. I want to do something edgy, but not a gross out thing. We are really submerged in the web thing. We have our own VOD site that is ours. It’s not someone else’s back end. We can shoot a scene here and put it up in twenty minutes. We have an affiliate program starting next week. I have a couple of webmasters who are banging out web sites. That’s the future.
Roger T. Pipe Five years ago would you have predicted that it was going to be as huge as it is?
Rob Black No. I should be sitting on twenty five million dollars. While I was fucking around with the wrestling all of the guys like Dave at Platinum Bucks came along. The guy was a fucking butcher and in 1998 his friend was selling trading cards on Ebay. They put a movie up and realized that porno sells. So then they come to guys like me and say “I’ll give you two thousand dollars for those scenes” and we all went “sure, go ahead.” Back then if you put a scene up on the internet it was like watching the fucking robot dance. I remember thinking “who the fuck is going to watch porno this way?” These assholes developed that and all of a sudden they are making two million a month. They have a thousand affiliates and I’m rolling around with wrestlers. People kept telling me that the content was worth millions and I’m like “millions of what? This is shit. No one is going to watch porn on the web.” Here were are five years later and it’s retarded. In the DVD sense where the video store is shrinking. Mom and pop video stores are becoming a thing of the past. People are buying DVDs off the internet. That market is shrinking, but the internet market is growing. Selling to stores who sell on the web still has to go through the same distributors. In the internet world every day a new pocket of America gets broadband. Every day there is something new. DVD distributors aren’t growing. The internet is where things are happening.
Roger T. Pipe It is the perfect distribution system for porn. No one has to worry about being seen in the back room of a video store.
Rob Black And the quality is great. With a lot of VOD they stream it at 512 for regular dial up. We only offer ours at 712. People who are buying pornography are buying it on broadband. A guy in dial up isn’t going to spend money on it. That’s all we offer. Look at AEBM. They made 100 million last year. The only company selling DVDs and making that much is fucking Vivid. All the rest of us are struggling to sell ten million and AEBM made 100 million to stream fucking Heatwave movies.
Roger T. Pipe The technology is incredible.
Rob Black It really is. We have our IPod thing too. Instead of putting little trailers on, we put all the extreme stuff. It’s the cool stuff to show your buddies. We’re working on doing whole movies, but the first thing I put up was all the piss. Who wants to see the title sequence of House of Ass. Fuck that, give them something with substance. They can pass around the IPod in college classes and watch a girl drink two glasses of piss. When they figure out a way to hook that up to your TV and can hold 300 movies, then that’s the next wave.
Roger T. Pipe Anything else you want to add?
Rob Black No.
Roger T. Pipe Thank you very much
Rob Black Thank you Rog.
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