Adult Filmmaker Flouts Order to Stop Cameras

He may have toned down the wild sex parties at his beach house, but adult video producer Stan Brunt says that he is still making movies and will fight any attempt to run him out of business.

Brunt was told last month that he could no longer shoot videos or stage live sex shows in the palatial home because Ventura County zoning laws prohibited it. He has refused to stop, but he conceded Monday he now uses three or four people in a video instead of 40 or 50. And he said he no longer does live shows.

“Nobody is giving me a filming permit but they can’t stop me from making a living. The county can’t just come in and tell me what to do,” Brunt said, sitting at the bar of his spacious living room.

The county says that it can, and Supervisor John Flynn wants Brunt cited and shut down.

“I am outraged, he cannot still be doing this. He’s not acting legally,” said Flynn, whose Oxnard-based district includes the unincorporated beach community near Port Hueneme where Brunt lives. “The sheriff needs to shut him down.”

Flynn recently handed out 13 certificates of commendation to residents of the beach community’s Hollywood Boulevard, where the home is located, for their part in trying to shut down Brunt’s operation. The supervisor sees Brunt’s admission that he is still filming as a slap in the face.

“If this is what freedom of speech means, then I wonder about it,” he said.

Brunt has turned the issue into a rallying cry for the 1st Amendment. He says top adult film producers are supporting him, and he has begun holding semimonthly barbecues at his house for those supporting his right to make videos and offer an adult Web site from his home.

County officials say that the zoning regulations are clear: No commercial filming is allowed in the harbor and beach area. Private videos can be shot but not sold. Film permits Brunt had received earlier were a mistake, officials say.

“If you are shooting your grandmother’s 100th birthday party, and it will be placed in the family archives and not packaged and put on the shelf of a video store, then that is legal,” said Todd Collart, manager of the county’s zoning administration.

If zoning officials document that filming is continuing, they can issue a notice of violation, Collart said. If Brunt ignores that, the matter can be referred to the courts as a criminal violation, he said.

“At worst it’s a misdemeanor,” Collart said. “The hard part is proving it.”

Brunt, 38, moved to the pink, three-story home in October from an apartment in Canoga Park. He and his wife, Kim, 27, have been making adult videos since 1990, Brunt said. They own Raw Talent Productions and run a Web site featuring explicit sexual activities going on at what they call “The House of Sex.” Until last month, those who paid the $34.95 monthly fee could attend sex parties at the house and be filmed if they produced a health test showing they had no sexually transmitted diseases, Brunt said.

But after neighbors complained about noise and people hanging around outside, Brunt was told he had been given the film permits by mistake.

The former personal trainer from Brooklyn, N.Y., says that the county’s effort to shut him down has been the best thing that ever happened to him. He says his Web site is getting 50,000 to 100,000 hits a day, and he is talking to a lawyer who wants to challenge the county’s position.

His $500,000 home is in a densely packed neighborhood near Channel Islands Harbor. The filming is done on the third floor, where Brunt has hung blankets and heavy curtains to muffle the noise.

A house guest from England, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said neighbors harassed her recently when she left the house.

“They yelled, ‘We know what you are doing in there!’ ” she said.

Lauri Koenig, 41, lives a few doors down. At one point, her 10-year-old daughter, unaware of what was going on inside the neighbor’s house, went over and sold them some Girl Scout cookies.

“They have gotten quieter. You still have people lost, drunk and loaded wandering around,” Koenig said. “It’s not so much a matter of what they are doing inside, but it’s an adult business in the neighborhood. I am concerned what kind of people it brings into the neighborhood. I am concerned about my children.”

Marge Peet, 84, lives across the street.

“They ought to go into an industrial area to do that,” she said. “It’s not the place for that kind of business.”

But Bill Lyon of the Chatsworth-based Free Speech Coalition said Brunt should be left alone.

“If he is making an effort to tone down the show, and he is not hurting anyone, why should the county get involved?” asked Lyon, whose organization is the trade association of the adult film industry.

Zoning official Collart said neither content nor free speech is the issue.

“You could be filming for the Discovery Channel and you still can’t do it at this location,” he said.