from www.adultcybermart.com/Home.html – The worst thing to happen to porn was buying that whole idea about going mainstream.

While the mainstream might still love Sally Fields, it doesn’t necessarily share the same feelings about pornographers. When porn was tucked away in a nice little boiler room in Chatsworth minding its own business everyone made money and every one had fun doing it. Then along came AVN.

I remember having a Christmas Day conversation 20 years ago with a porn vet named Phil Vozo. An editor in the business from way back, Vozo, whose face might be right at home in a Sopranos episode, would occasionally direct under the name Jean Pierre Ferrand and make some pretty good movies in the bargain.

Even so, it was Vozo’s opinion that AVN was the worst thing that ever happened to the business.

Being the editor-in-chief of AVN, I wasn’t inclined to disagree with him. You don’t disagree with a guy especially one who looks like he should be in a Sopranos episode. Yet, Vozo who’d been around long enough to know, had a good point. He felt that porn stopped being fun when companies began obsessing about winning awards.

AVN, in turn, sold the idea that porn was very big business. So porn, which once boasted exclusive membership, became this anyone can join pyramid club. As long as you could pay the freight and advertise, you could join.

Congratulations, everybody, you got what ya wanted: ego, recognition and sufficiently reduced cash flow.

Twenty years later, we’re under the chaperone’s eye of Orrin Hatch, Morality in Media, the Aids Healthcare Foundation, Shelley Lubben, the Los Angeles City Council and now the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, of all people. Porn, in the process, has become the eccentric guest at the party who’s overstayed his welcome and is being asked quietly to leave; the 800 pound gorilla who’s outgrown its tuxedo and amusement value.

Miami’s probably had more than its fill of the antics of Reality Kings especially when RK went public with an anal sex movie shot earlier this year on a tresured piece of real estate called Monument Island, not to mention RK later serving as a recruiting poster for truant 15 year-old girls.

Occupying the local news this past weekend, Brazzers, fresh out of various Federal courtrooms for alleged trademark violations, tried its hand at testing the powers that be in Los Angeles with a similar “public” video like Reality King’s. As a result, everyone in a business suit is demanding heads and names.

Known as the city where you can get away with murder, Los Angeles is pretty tolerant about Hollywood star behavior, but it’ll go only so far with porn star antics.

Stands to reason. Even rubber bands snap if you try stretching them over and over again. Which has been the case with the Cameron Reid mess, the AIM mess, the privacy issues mess, the condom mess, the shooting permits mess, and now the Brazzers mess involving two on duty city traffic officers and a so-far identified blonde porn chick who may become the next Mrs. Charlie Sheen.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s Interim General Manager Amir Sedadi was on the hot seat twice last week. Sedadi got worked over with a rubber hose pretty good when a city audit conducted by Controller Wendy Greuel discovered that his people failed to collect $15 million in unpaid parking tickets by not aggressively pursuing ticket “scofflaws.”

Greuel apparently discovered that parking officers issued citations instead of calling for a boot or having repeat offenders’ cars impounded. The audit says the department also failed to use license plate recognition equipment to catch regular parking violators with five or more unpaid tickets.

If that wasn’t bad enough, some scamp must have had it in for poor Amir because, within a day, another embarrassing story broke.

NBC4 reported that a porn movie made several months earlier [by Brazzers] had just come to its attention involving two officers who appeared in it. It would appear that someone had ratted out Amir.

According to the NBC news story, the video’s available on an adult subscription website [it didn’t say which, but one assumes it’s one of the many owned by Brazzers], and it tracks the “interactions” of a porn actress as she approaches men in a range of work environments.

“Various men in the film appear to grope her and perform a range of sex acts with her,” read the report.

“In one scene, the actress jumps into the arms of an LA traffic officer, who spanks her and then fondles her bare breasts.”

A second traffic officer takes a few spankings from the woman, then allows her to get into his official city car, where she performs lewd acts [translation: masturbates] on herself.”

Jimmy Price, the city’s parking enforcement chief, acknowledged that his employee’s behavior was less than exemplary.

“In my mind, and legally, yes that’s misconduct,” Price said, with classic understatement.

By the time NBC reported it, this story was already old news. Price was apparently aware of his employees’ behavior more than two months ago.

In a February 21 memo addressed to his superiors and his employees, Price wrote about a “recent incident” involving “an inappropriate website” where a city uniform and car appeared.

Price said “city and department policy prohibit this kind of misconduct, on and off the job,” and “failure to meet the standards of conduct will result in “disciplinary action, up to and including discharge.”

One of the officers who had a prominent role in the video has declined to comment.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. When asked about his participation, the veteran officer jumped into his city car, and sped off.

Sedadi called the officers’ behavior “absolutely disgusting.”

Obtaining further details of this story has been the equivalent of Chinese water torture, and local news services have repeated its basic facts ad nauseam. Until early this week, that is, when Councilman Bill Rosendahl, reacting to the kind of pressure only an Aids Healtcare Foundation can exert [which is one guess], said there would be a full scale investigation going right to the top.

Investigations by three city agencies, including the LAPD, City Attorney and LADOT Personnel Department are already underway, and it was Rosendahl’s prompting that led LADOT to expand the investigation beyond an internal matter.

“There are no limits to where this will go at this point,” Rosendahl warned.

Speaking like an outraged high school principal, Rosendahl, who’s also chairman of the city Transportation Committee, said he was “appalled.”

“If there is any criminal aspect to this, there will be action,” he added.

What makes Brazzer’s reckless actions particularly troublesome to the porn industry, is the fact that Rosendahl is the key figure in the middle of the no condoms, no city permits debate.

It was Rosendahl who first instructed the City Attorney to explore the feasibility of conditioning the issuance of film permits to the use of condoms in adult film productions and it was Rosendahl as chairman of the city Transportation Committee who’s taking a lot of the heat for what amounts to a stupid, juvenile prank.

With AIM gone thanks to the Machiavellian tactics of the Aids Healthcare Foundation, I’m not feeling a whole lot of love for porn coming from the mainstream.

Remember that when the retaliatory condom mandate comes down and who made it all possible.