ADULT VIDEO VS. MORAL WATCHDOGS

It was only a matter of time before America’s moral watchdog groups caught up with the video revolution and made their presence known to the new entrepreneurs running America’s video stores.

Censorship . . . the First Amendment . . . obscenity . . . community standards.

To many of the people gathered for this week’s Video Software Dealers Assn. convention in Las Vegas, those words and concepts had always been somebody else’s problems--just abstract notions that occasionally penetrated their consciousness through news reports about this publisher or that movie theater owner being prosecuted for dealing in material that somebody claimed was filth.

However, to dealers attending a seminar titled “Adult Video: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Future,” it was made clear that XXX-rated adult films, a segment that represents about 15% of their current rental income, may claim a disproportionate share of their future problems.

The seminar started with a cheerfully light 20-minute video on the history of sex in cinema, edited by Adult Film Assn. founder David Friedman, but quickly turned into a dark debate on how to deal with local parent, church and political opposition to the renting of those images.

Ed Chamblee, who runs Star Video in Mobile, Ala., related how he was arrested and convicted for renting an adult tape to an undercover agent, how his family had been humiliated by the public notoriety, of how he finally--barely--won his appeal, at a cost of $20,000.

It’s just the beginning, warned Michael Goode, whose Video, Etc. has successfully warded off prosecution in Memphis, Tenn. Goode sounded a more general alarm.

“These people (decency groups) will not stop at adult films,” he said, dissenting sharply with another dealer who said stores have to compromise with the protesters. “It’s not their nature to stop. If they get adult films out of stores, then they will want to look at the rest of our stock.”

A member of the audience chimed in that in his neighborhood in Illinois, he is being pressured to get rid of everything that has been rated R or “worse” by the Motion Picture Assn. of America.

Some of the dealers in the audience said they have already sold off their adult films rather than take the heat and face potential prosecution.

Friedman pointed out that the anti-adult video movement may be counter-productive to the people behind it. It was the publicity over prosecutions and protests that helped launch the spread of X-rated theaters into the suburbs in the ‘70s. It was the advent of video stores, and the availability of sex films on tape, that reversed the theatrical trend.

Friedman said there were more than 800 sex cinemas in America at their peak. Today, there are fewer than 200, and the vast majority of those are in downtown, non-residential areas.

If video stores acquiesce and stop renting adult films, he said, it will simply assure a resurgence in suburban adult theaters.

The video store operators at the seminar acknowledged some of their obvious--in some cases, legal--responsibilities. They should not rent to minors. They should not handle films for which laws were broken in the making of them (foremost, the use of children as actors). They should segregate their sex tapes from their mainstream displays.

Video dealers were told that they were inviting grief on themselves by not supervising adult film sections in their stores and by having underage store clerks renting them. If the business from adult films is significant to them, they should invest the money to properly seal those areas off from children and to have adult clerks handling the transactions.

It was clear that the dealers are concerned with the impact the growing adult film controversy may have on their businesses. It was also clear that many of the people who got into the video-store business just to make money aren’t going to be comfortable taking on such abstract issues as First Amendment rights.

Earlier in the video convention, Motion Picture Assn. of America president Jack Valenti urged the video dealers to embrace the MPAA’s “voluntary” ratings system for mainstream Hollywood films as a way to stave off inevitable local legislation.

The MPAA formula might be embraceable if two major problems could be solved. One is what do you do about all the films made before the ratings system went into effect? The ability to make films too intense for children and teen-agers is not limited to film makers working after 1968. The other is that the MPAA ratings system needs to clean up its own act before it pushes itself on other enterprises. The ratings system may be as popular with parents as Valenti says it is, but it has a long history of dictating how the work of some very good film makers is edited.

Right now, the video outlets are the only hope that serious film buffs have of ever seeing the directors’ versions of certain films. “Crimes of Passion,” “9 1/2 Weeks” and “Angel Heart” are among those films that had to be edited in order to be released and which you can now rent, unedited, in stores.

If video dealers embrace the MPAA ratings system, there will be no escape. The Video Software Dealers Assn. is rich enough to afford its own ratings system and it could go the MPAA one better. Instead of having a panel of parents see unreleased films and guess how most other parents would rate them, the VSDA could actually poll parents who have seen the movies and do rate them.

Valenti is right in warning video dealers that they will eventually have to deal with parents upset about their kids being able to surreptitiously rent and watch movies they were not allowed to see in theaters. But why embrace a flawed system just because it exists when you can create one that is fair, commercially beneficial and your own?