Porn Valley – Violet Blue writes in the SF Chronicle: Some porn lovers wax romantic about the good ol’ days of so-called classic porn. Made in the 1970s and ’80s, the classics, they say, exude a sexual playfulness and enthusiasm not found in today’s going-through-the-motions releases.
They say film quality was higher, taboo topics were explored and bodies were more realistic, more natural. Others, like me, will simply wish they waxed, period, and we’re more likely to think that “Deep Throat” www.xxxdeepthroat.com should have really been called “Hair.” Few of us wish we were stars in porn’s golden age — especially U.K.-based photographer Lara Jade, who discovered her image was being used to sell the repackaged 1982 porn release “Body Magic” last November. Lara isn’t exactly eager to line up for her long-awaited AVN award.
It’s not just that Lara didn’t want to be associated with green doors and deep throats and the “fun-loving” days of zero STD testing. Nor was it simply the violation of image use that capped the problems associated with becoming the unknowing face of a Sven Conrad (?) star vehicle. Perhaps one of the problems is that Lara is 17 and was only 14 when she took the self-portrait (with help from her mum). Or maybe, just maybe, that the porn film whose cover she’s on was made about eight years before she was even born.
At least, this was all the setting when Lara saw that one of her old self-portraits had been retouched to remove her watermark and placed on the online sales cover of 1982’s porn non-epic “Body Magic.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t Lara Jade’s first experience with her images being used by someone else. It’s also no news that buying porn online is a “buyer beware” environment where consumers must constantly be on guard for privacy and personal information issues (just like with online pharmacy and “cheap” travel sites).
But consumers might not know that online porn distribution companies routinely buy up old bulk films and scenes, repackage them and sell the titles, often with (ahem) less than accurate covers. So, to pretty things up, Texas-based TVX Films (tvxfilms.com) slapped an (arguably misleading) image of a pretty modern goth girl on the Olivia Newton John-era porn title and let it loose on the world through their distribution channels. The film description only compounded the issues:
“Take the sexually charged world of big time fashion photography…add to it an achingly beautiful twenty-two year old woman with talent, determination and innocence…and see where fantasy meets reality in a passionate tale of ambition and lust. Laura, as performed by fascinating newcomer Kathleen Kristel, brings to the world of photography a freshness and sensuality rarely found. Laura learns the ins and outs of the world of desire, captured for all eternity by a camera that never lies. A world of gorgeous women…bodies gleaming under hot lights. A world of fantasies…frozen in time. A world of magic…Body Magic.”
The main character, troublingly, is named “Laura” — and no amount of eloquent, nay, timeless and evocative porn box cover copy could distract from the confusion this causes. Lara Jade claims to have originally uploaded the photo to deviantART, an online art and photo-sharing community, from which she believes it was lifted without her permission. According to her May 25 posts on deviantART and Flickr, the situation is “still not resolved.” Jade had contacted TVX Films in February with a request to stop using the image and states that she received this thoughtful (albeit loud) reply from owner Bob Agustus, which she included in her posts:
“I’M SURE BY THE END OF THE MONTH YOUR FACE WILL BE HISTORY. WE HAVE STOPPED SELLING THE DVD UNTIL COVER IS REPLACED. WE HAVE FURTHER CHECKED OUT YOUR NAME AND ITS NOT LIKE IT’S A HOUSE WHOLE NAME. ACTUALLY, REMOVING YOUR IMAGE WILL HELP IMPROVE THE SELL OF THE DVD….. SO FAR IT BOMBED. … AS FOR COMPSENSATION;YOUR SILLY! … THEY ARE REMAKING THE COVER AS WE SPEAK SO YOUR TEN SECONDS OF FAME WILL SOON COME TO AN END.”
Jade may not be famous as a “house whole” name for 10 seconds, but to say this response was disappointing is an understatement. Seeing that her individual efforts were ineffective in removing all traces of the image’s continued use, she posted an appeal to online communities for help — first on deviantART and then on Bay Area-based, 2.0 photo-sharing and social-networking site Flickr. In another classic case of seeing old-school porn totally miss the boat with 2.0, TVX Films began to take a serious beating from Flickr users, as the issue leaked over into blogs (such as Gawker Media’s Consumerist and respected local photographer Thomas Hawk’s, my own blog and Fleshbot.com, to name just a few).
TVX Films, perhaps not ambassadors of goodwill from the porn industry, did immediately remove the photo in February and replace it with a more, um, appropriate cover image, with huge ’80s-metal blond hair and all. According to Jade’s Flickr post, she isn’t financially solvent enough to pursue restitution for use of her photo. When reached for comment, TVX’s Agustus told me, as he stated in his e-mail, “ALL WE KNOW.”
In an upbeat Southern drawl, Agustus explained that he’s been in “the business” since 1974 and goes “all the way back to Traci Lords, so you better believe the minute someone e-mailed and said ‘I’m 14′ we took it down. That was back on February 27, we probably had it removed in 30 minutes, and the next day we had the new art at the printers’. That means it’s dead to us. We e-mailed back and asked to talk on the phone to her parents to verify any of this stuff, and we did talk to someone who didn’t have a British accent but we still don’t know exactly who is involved here.”
Agustus explained the porn reseller distribution food chain by telling me that his company only sells repackaged classics with soft-core covers, and that they seldom change the covers but “only the back cover has to show who’s in the film.” And they don’t sell their product to individuals, but to other distributors and retailers.
After about 30 more minutes of quality porn chat time with Bob, and hearing about how I “wouldn’t believe the clowns who contact him” about all kinds of stuff (OMG, like me) and the viruses he has to deal with (from “Body Magic”?), I asked him where the photo came from. He told me he didn’t know, but that it “was AJ’s.”
“Who’s ‘AJ’?” I asked.
He told me AJ was his business partner AJ Cohen, who does all the art and “brochures” for Bob’s porn repackaging business and who had worked with him since 1980.
“What’s the name of AJ’s company?”
“AJ Cohen”
“Oh.”
Bob explained that in the original and probably totally amazing-for-its-time film, then-starlet (now grandma) Kathleen Kristel wore a top hat on the box cover and that “The top hat was important. AJ needed a picture with a top hat.” I agreed, the top hat was clearly the key.
Bob explained to me that he preferred the original cover but that he deferred to AJ’s expertise and “OK’d it.” He assured me that AJ was a good guy and would never take “copyrighted material.” I asked Bob if he knew where good ol’ AJ got the image, and Bob said he had “no idea” and that he thinks “AJ forgot” but that he must have got it from a site.
I asked, “Would AJ remember the site?” Bob told me that it was a while ago, back in October probably, and that AJ had moved and had a crash “on his Macintosh.” But that I should ask AJ myself. (Personally, I always lose my bookmarks when I move.)
When reached for comment about the photo’s origin, AJ told me in an e-mail:
“The photo was taken from a freeware adult shareware site I came upon this past January, I visited once and really did not make a note of the url. The photo (DVD cover) was immediately replaced with the current one on February 3 of this year also when TVX was contacted by Lara. Contradictory to what was convened about TVX’s intent with the cover, it was not a malicious nor intentional act to use her image, in any way.”
In our long, extended dance-remix phone chat, Bob also told me that he was “very confused” by all the different names on the e-mails he was getting from “whoever Lara Jade is” and why, when they removed the image in February, this was suddenly a problem again. The problem, in Bob’s eyes, was already solved long ago. However, since his company sells to distributors and all of their channels and outlets, Lara Jade’s problem is unraveling the already-tangled web of porn DVD marketing and distribution and figuring out who’s responsible for its cleanup. And for those of us who love porn, we still have the problem of porn being made and distributed by people who have no earthly clue how to undo their Caps Lock key.
At time of publication, Lara Jade had not responded to my requests for comments on this piece.