Xtreme measures: Washington's new crackdown on pornography

Reason, May, 2004 by G. Beato

The vice hunters press on, though, organizing, proselytizing, and constantly demanding that police and prosecutors enforce obscenity laws. While a few figures in the adult entertainment industry have defended their rights with a similar zeal, passive expediency is a more common reaction.

"Too many people in my business haven't stood up and fought," exclaims Robert Zicari. "The feds are kicking themselves in the balls right now because they hit me first. Anybody else in this industry would have already copped a plea, and that's just what the government wants. They don't want millions of people debating this issue. They don't want a big firestorm of publicity. They want to do this quietly."

Son of a Pornographer

Zicari is a second-generation pornographer. In the late '60s, before he was born, his father owned nearly 40 adult bookstores in upstate New York and the surrounding area. By the time Zicari was a teenager, his father had scaled back his operation to just four stores. Zicari started working at one of them at the age of 14, sorting quarters from the peep show booths into rolls in an upstairs room. "I got to keep whatever didn't fit into these $100 boxes, so I'd hit the batting cages with, like, $80 worth of quarters," he remembers.

When Zicari turned 18, he started managing his father's store in Rochester. But he had other ambitions too, including college. In 1996, however, without telling his father, he used some of his school money to produce and direct his first porn movie, Tender Loins. After Zicari completed a second video in similarly clandestine fashion, his father found out and they had a temporary falling-out. During that time, Zicari moved to Los Angeles and created the character Rob Black, a loudmouthed provocateur who was determined to shake up the porn industry by producing filthy, twisted porn that boasted as much violent misogyny as standard Hollywood fare, along with lots and lots of spit, gaping orifices, and surreal images like men ejaculating onto crackers at an outdoor picnic. The difference between Zicari and Black? "I have bad taste," explains Zicari, "but Rob Black has even more bad taste."

Zicari immediately alienated many of his porn industry brethren. In 1996, when he first started releasing videos, the aggressive federal crackdowns of the late '80s and early '90s felt like a thing of the past. Suddenly, the industry was penetrating the mainstream in a completely consensual, very profitable manner, everyone was making money, and almost no one was going to prison. To keep things this way, virtually every producer of commercial consequence scrupulously obeyed a set of unwritten guidelines: Urination, defecation, and rape and incest themes were all taboo, and bondage videos could not show penetration.

Then people like Zicari and a former UPI photographer who called himself Max Hardcore started flouting standard industry decorum. Their tapes were controversial, but thanks to their novelty, the attention they received, and their taboo nature, they were also popular. In 1998 AVN named Zicari Best Director at its annual awards show. Soon other producers were jumping on the shock porn bandwagon, and with the Internet making it increasingly easy for anyone, including international producers, to make and distribute pornography, the kind of material that was relatively hard to find just five years ago is now only a mouse click away.