"Deep Throat" Goes Down in Memphis

The Setting for this ethereal circus, this ecclesiastical, Cromwellian P. T. Barnum extravaganza, is the courtroom of the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, Western Division, in Memphis, and here, as the sleight-of-hand artists like to say, nothing is quite what it seems. The courtroom is spacious, as it must be to contain its subdued but zany crew; but though admission is free, the stands are nearly bare. Jugglers and midgets work here, fat ladies and clowns, acrobats, bareback riders of noble proportions, sliders of poles and wires, sweepers of tanbark and dung, and a dashing ringmaster calls the acts, but all are disguised behind straight faces and business suits of the most ordinary cut. Because it needs no spotlights to heighten the drama, the courtroom is lit like a mental ward by cold fluorescents recessed above white-plastic panels. The wall behind the judge's bench is faced with gray marble, a feeble attenuation of symbolism alluding to the mighty lex Romani of ancient days. The bench, its lines classically severe, is walnut, built in two tiers, the judge dominating in his black robe above, the court reporter and the clerk ministering below; the clerk runs his Middle English oyesses in a Tennessee dialect, compelling the performers to stand and bow their heads. The witness chair is placed to the judge's right, under his magisterial wing, and no man may approach it except by his leave. Beyond the witness chair extends the crowded jury box, where one of the female jurors wears a bandage over her ear. The prosecutor and his assistant ply stacks of incriminating documents--telephone bills, canceled checks, a detritus of notes torn from personalized memo pads--at a table cozily near the jury, facing the bench. At a row of tables on the other side of the room, balefully confronting the jury, sit the angry defendants, those who haven't skipped the country, those at least who have physical existence (for corporations and the shells of corporations are also on trial here), and the presumption of guilt hangs heavy as cannon smoke in the air.

The First Amendment, libertarians say, is on trial in Memphis, in this severe, unlikely circus tent, but legally it is not: The First Amendment has been excused from attendance by prior decision of the United States Supreme Court. Not the First Amendment but one of its most impoverished representatives is on trial: Deep Throat, a reel of transparent acetate on which are reproduced images of the sexual organs of a species of mammal called Homo sapiens in the process of joining and unjoining to no apparent serious literary, artistic, political or scientific purpose. School Girl stood trial before Deep Throat (and was declared obscene), as did numerous other reels of acetate described variously as "hard-core," "pornographic," "sexually explicit" or "wet." and so will The Devil in Miss Jones, if the longevity of judges, prosecutors and defendants allows--for these are dogged, complicated proceedings.

Deep Throat is on trial and, with it, Harry Reems--the young actor who played the crazy doctor who diagnosed the lady's ailment--and a hefty crowd of businessmen who purveyed the film to an eager America, earning an estimated $25,000,000 or more for their pains; but Linda Lovelace, she of the wink and the girlish grin and the golden throat, is nowhere to be seen, nor has she been charged with the crime. The charge against the defendants, individual or corporate or fugitive, is conspiracy to distribute an obscene film interstate in violation of certain sections of the United States Criminal Code, a felony punishable by heavy fines and/or up to five years in Federal prison. Only one juror has ever seen a sexually explicit film.

The Federal conspiracy laws are shotgun laws. They are designed to catch criminals whose crimes reach beyond local jurisdictions--drug distributors, for example, or interstate-auto-theft gangs. They are also complicated laws. To help the jury understand the trial, the prosecutor eagerly steps forward to explain.

He is only 33 years old, but he is 6'1", broad as a yeoman, dressed in a dark suit of conservative cut, with his dark-brown hair cropped close above his ears, and his face is puffy and pale, despite the Memphis sun, because he has spent endless hours in windowless Federal courtrooms pursuing conspiracies, pursuing military-purchasing-kickback schemes, insurance frauds, illegal bombings, Mexican drug pipelines, multistate prostitution rings. Behind his back, some of the defendants call him Potato Face. He knows and cherishes their hostility and in the hall outside the courtroom, when they hiss him as he passes, he threatens with boyish humor to drop a "stink bomb" among them.

His name is Larry Parrish. He is an Assistant U. S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee. He was born in Nashville. He majored in political science at the University of Tennessee, where he also took his degree in law. He worked in Washington as a trial attorney for the Federal Trade Commission, specializing in consumer fraud. He was hired to his Memphis office in 1969, in the heyday of the Nixon years. He is married, the father of three, an elder in Memphis' First Evangelical Church. He has been officially commended for his prosecutorial skill by the Justice Department. His boss has described him as demonstrating "an almost instinctive ability to discern the true form and structure of perfidy."

He is pledged to enforce the law. He is also committed to the cause. A witness testifies that Parrish told him that he would "rather see dope on the streets than pornography." He means, he says, that "the commercialization of sex in violation of a statute stands to have a more detrimental effect on society at large than heroin. The heroin hurts the addict, but obscenity hurts us all. And there's absolutely no question that there is such a thing as obscenity. The Supreme Court has said that there is and Congress has said that there is." He paces metronomically back and forth before the jury and explains the law:

A conspiracy is simply a plan by people. It takes two to make a conspiracy, just like it does to tango. There can be two, a hundred and two or a thousand and two, but it can't be one. Two people or corporations or legal entities make a conspiracy, and those people or entities have to have a plan and they have to plan to do acts, to engage in conduct, and the conduct that they plan to engage in has to be against the law.

Now, I make this distinction, because this is very important. ... It is not necessary that they know that what they plan to do is a violation of the law. ... [The law] says "unlawfully combined, conspired, confederated, agreed and planned to engage in conduct against the laws of the United States. ... "Notice it does not say that they planned to violate the laws of the United States, [it says they] planned to engage in conduct, that conduct which would be a violation of the law. The indictment alleges that the conduct that they planned to engage in was to distribute Deep Throat in interstate commerce. It alleges that Deep Throat was obscene and, being obscene, it could not be distributed [legally] in interstate commerce in the manner alleged in the indictment. And what they planned to do was distribute it in interstate commerce for the purpose of profit.

Early on, defense counsel interrupts to object that explanations of the law should be left to the judge, and the judge, Federal District Judge Harry Wellford, a short, handsome, athletic, impatient man with wavy silver-gray hair who came to the Federal bench from private practice after a stint as Senator Howard Baker's Tennessee campaign manager, reminds the jury that he will instruct it in the law, and then the prosecutor continues:

Now, obviously, all of the persons who are represented in the courtroom here, and all of the other persons who you will hear from and hear about, did not join this plan all at the same time. Everybody didn't get in one big room and say that is our plan. A conspiracy is a plan conceived, it is put into operation and others can join in, and when others join in, over a period of time they become responsible as if they had been there when it first started. ... For that to be prosecutable ... [it will have to be shown] that they joined in and that they knew of the plan and that they participated as a coconspirator in the plan.

Parrish is not exceptionally articulate, but he is intelligent and exceptionally thorough, and the conspiracy charges he has brought in the Deep Throat case have far-reaching implications. If the jury finds Deep Throat obscene, and finds that a conspiracy existed, then anyone involved in the film's production and distribution could be charged. The jury is a Memphis jury--eight black women, one black man, one white woman, four white men counting alternates; several of the defendants, including Reems, have never been in Memphis before; according to (continued on page 181) Down in Memphis (continued from page 108) testimony later at the trial, one of the defendants, a Memphis theater owner, was muscled into paying for showing Deep Throat after being caught by the distributors with a bootleg print: but the jury could judge all these defendants conspirators. Linda Lovelace would be a conspirator, too, but she has been given immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony (she never appeared at the trial; FBI agents were unable to track her down). Gerard Damiano, who wrote, coproduced and directed Deep Throat, would also be a conspirator, but, under immunity, he has come to town to testify, and from the witness stand he speaks of the requirements of art and fingers the defendants who put up money for his film and later bought him out.

Anyone, anywhere, who helped make Deep Throat, who handled a print, who paid money to the several individuals and corporations who produced and distributed it--the gaffer who arranged the lights: the Florida bachelor who lent the Deep Throat crew his swimming pool and his house; the laboratory that processed the rushes; the many projectionists in Los Angeles and New York and points between who loaded the reels; the popcorn sellers; the ticket takers: anyone who had anything at all to do with the film except the hundreds of thousands of Americans who went to see it--was theoretically part of the conspiracy and could have been indicted. In fact, 98 citizens and corporations were listed on the indictment as unindicted coconspirators, including the agency that designed Deep Throat's advertisements. The only reason the defendants don't fill all 11 floors of the Memphis Federal office building is that Parrish and his boss. U. S. Attorney Thomas Turley, as Parrish explains, aren't after "the low people--we don't want, the popcorn sellers and the ticket takers. The low people aren't the real people and prosecuting them at that level has no effect at all. It's analogous to getting addicts instead of pushers. So we resolved that if we were going to move in this area, we wanted action on a high level and decided to treat it as a national crime." And so they do: a national crime for which, had they so chosen, literally thousands of Americans might have been indicted, jailed, bailed, shipped to Memphis and required to remain there at their own expense for the duration of a trial that would prove to last a lengthy nine weeks, paying their counsel if they wanted better than a public defender. You see the possibilities.

The obscenity-conspiracy strategy, if it succeeded, would be a powerful new bludgeon for censors to wield (even as a threat, it had already had a profound punitive effect: Reems estimated the Deep Throat and Devil trials would cost him $150,000 in expenses, not including lost work). It had not yet succeeded for Parrish at the time of the Deep Throat trial; the School Girl jury had found that film obscene but had found only interstate transport, not conspiracy. A Kentucky jury had found conspiracy in a case involving Deep Throat--United States vs. Marks--in 1975, and Marks had been upheld on appeal and accepted for review by the U. S. Supreme Court. An immediate question that defendants and reporters raised was where the strategy had originated.

Turley claimed the Memphis cases originated locally. He also claimed that the guidelines established for preparing them for trial have been adopted as models by the Justice Department, which knows a good thing when it sees one. Turley is a Nixon appointee who helped rebuild the Republican Party in Tennessee, and some have seen the heavy hands of Richard Nixon and John Mitchell, the law-and-order boys, in the Memphis prosecutions. Richard Kleindienst announced the School Girl indictments from Washington in 1973, and Federal grand juries had begun working on the cases several years before, but the immediate indictments almost certainly originated with Turley and Parrish. Which is not to say that the ghosts of Nixon and Mitchell don't walk abroad in the Memphis courtroom, because they do: propelled by the decisions of the Nixon Supreme Court that make the trial possible; by the cooperation, since at least 1971, of the FBI, represented among other things by nearly 1000 depositions collected in most of the major cities of the land; by the approval by the Nixon and Ford administrations of grants of immunity, which are coordinated in Washington. Fred Graham, a CBS correspondent and former practicing attorney, came to Memphis during the trial, talked to Turley and Parrish and said afterward that he thought the conspiracy approach and the monumental series of trials had more to do with a climate of opinion in Washington than with any specific Justice Department scheme to crack down on "pornography," which nicely makes the point. Washington approves, and Washington is following and cooperating to give the strategy a chance. You see the possibilities.

The ten trials Parrish has scheduled are estimated to cost the Government $2,000,000. Since Deep Throat must be judged obscene before a criminal-conspiracy conviction can be sustained--if it isn't obscene, then conspiracy becomes business as usual--it might seem logical, and more economical, to test a jury's opinion of its obscenity first. Instead, Parrish has chosen to show the film to the jury at the end of his presentation, eight long weeks into the trial. Certainly, he hopes to stun the jurors as close as possible to their time of deliberation. Certainly, he also means to harass the defendants with expenses. These are standard, if deplorable, methods of attack.

But a remark Parrish made when I interviewed him at mid-trial suggests a further purpose. I asked him about the defendants. He said, with a touch of sarcasm, "It didn't surprise me to uncover mafiosi. It's that kind of business." Parrish denies using the obscenity-conspiracy strategy to get at organized crime. So does Turley, though he also describes the defendants as "some of the leading organized-crime figures who have taken over this industry." Both men believe that obscenity is crime enough. "We're going to get rid of all these perverted minds," Parrish chillingly promised a CBS producer during the trial. But he could hardly have failed to see the dramatic effect on the jury of the appearance and activities of most of the defendants, who were tough, physical, secretive men with Italian names. Or the dramatic effect on the jury of some of the testimony, which included allegations of violent threats made to witnesses to prevent them from testifying.

Consider the defendants listed in the indictment, most of whom now sit lined up at their row of tables facing the jury, alternating with their expensive New York, Florida, Atlanta and Memphis attorneys: Anthony Joseph Peraino, a fugitive in Italy from a Federal warrant; Robert J. DeSalvo, a fugitive from a Federal warrant last located in the Bahamas; Michael Cherubino, business associate and trouble shooter for Deep Throat's Fort Lauderdale distributors; Louis Peraino, son of Anthony Peraino, coproducer with Damiano of Deep Throat and principal in its distribution; Joseph Peraino, Louis Peraino's uncle, another principal, a big man of nearly 300 pounds; Carl R. Carter, a Memphis theater owner already convicted of showing an obscene film and sentenced to three years and fined $10,000 in the School Girl case; Mel Friedman, a Los Angeles distributor who manages Tennessee theaters (Parrish remarks of him scornfully in his opening statement. "There is one instance where it will be shown that he engineered the film being seized by the police in Atlanta in order to get publicity for the film, and then raised the tickets two dollars so people would come and continue to make money in that respect"); Mario DeSalvo, Robert DeSalvo's brother and another principal in the Lauderdale operation, formerly a bricklayer: Angelo Miragliotta, whom Government witnesses would describe as a go-fer at the Lauderdale office, who suffered a heart attack during the trial the day after Judge Wellford admonished him for laughing at a witness' testimony, was awarded a mistrial and returned to a Miami hospital to recuperate; Anthony Novello, another Lauderdale go-fer; and, sitting as far away from the other defendants as possible, sitting not at the line of tables but in a corner, on the first row of spectator benches, looking wounded and forlorn, Harry Reems.

The witness whose testimony may be most damaging to these defendants takes the stand in the trial's fifth week. His name is Robert Bernstein and he has been chief booker for the Lauderdale office. He has a badly, perhaps recently broken nose. He wears a green double-knit suit, a pale-green shirt, a dark-green tie. He is balding, middle-aged and he sports a deep Florida tan. His father was a lawyer in the early motion-picture industry. He has owned adult theaters--owns them now and is still booking X-rated films when he testifies, though he claims he's getting out of the business as fast as he can--but a few years ago, his business failed and the DeSalvo brothers picked him up and gave him a job. Guided carefully by Parrish, Bernstein testifies under a grant of immunity.

He testifies that the system of distribution the defendants practiced was different from the industry norm and private to the point of elaborate secrecy. The defendants, he says, shipped Deep Throat around the country in the trunks of automobiles or aboard commercial buses in boxes labeled Projector Parts. They hired checkers who stood at ticket booths counting heads to make sure they weren't getting stiffed on the handle, and week by week they carted their 50 percent of the proceeds back to Lauderdale in cash, as much as $50,000 at a time stuffed into their suitcases and their pockets. Bernstein tells of clandestine meetings at airports, of territories marked off for other operators, of salaries paid partly by check and partly in cash, of money--"green." he calls it--carried off to the Bahamas. He also tells of violent action against a rash of bootleg prints. In one case, he says, in Kansas City, some of the defendants roughed up a projectionist, seized an offending print and dumped it into the Missouri River.

The jury isn't allowed to hear many of Bernstein's allegations of violence; defense counsel argues outside the jury's hearing that such allegations don't show furtherance of the conspiracy but would prejudice the jury against the defendants; and, for a change. Judge Wellford, whose sympathies usually go to the prosecution, agrees. The jury does hear Bernstein charge that some of the defendants have threatened his life, the wife of one of the defendants telling Bernstein's wife that her husband is going to send Bernstein an "Italian kiss," whatever that is. The jury also, on cross-examination, hears Bernstein admit perjuring himself twice before the grand jury that investigated Deep Throat, at which point Parrish steps in and asks Bernstein if his present statements are true, and Bernstein swears that they are. The jury, which has listened to Bernstein's long testimony without expression, hardly bats an eye, and he leaves the courtroom as he arrived, nervous but defiant. How much weight the jurors will give his testimony remains to be seen; if they weigh it heavily, it could be devastating, even though the allegations of violence have nothing directly to do with the conspiracy charges.

Parrish calls 77 witnesses in the nine-week trial, and one by one they index for the jury a textbook of office layouts, accounting systems, mail schedules, print-handling procedures, the comings and goings of various defendants--a short course in business management.

A few are more spectacular. Robert DeSalvo's secretary reveals herself to have been a secret informer for the FBI and the IRS, a role Bernstein also admitted to having played after the Government confronted him with his perjury. An expert witness, a psychiatrist, testifies that premarital sex is destructive, oral sex a perversion and group sex sick. Only one-on-one sex with one's spouse is healthy and normal, he says. Another expert witness announces that sexual freedom and pornography caused the downfall of the Roman Empire and other ancient civilizations. Ninety civilizations in all, a Parrish expert had testified at the School Girl trial, including Rome, Greece, ancient India. Babylon, Egypt and the Syrian Empire.

The case that most observers at the trial find appalling is the one of Harry Reems. Reems, who borrowed his crazy doctor from an old and classic burlesque routine, who says that, as an actor, he has not yet "exposed" himself, who got into sexually explicit films for the money and the fun when he was studying acting in New York, who once did Wheaties commercials in Puerto Rico, who thinks sex films "a very mechanical, physical job," who decided to get out of the business over two years ago, after starring in nine of the 11 explicit films that had grossed more than $1,000,000 by the time of the trial, was called to Memphis from Rome, where he was beginning to find roles in Italian feature films. Trim, tanned, handsome, a legitimate actor with union cards to prove it and stints off-Broadway and with the National Shakespeare Company behind him, he had worked as crew on Deep Throat for six days, earning $25 a day, and as an actor for one day, earning $100. He had not produced the film nor distributed the film nor promoted the film, but he was charged with conspiracy as certainly as the other defendants on trial, and would be tried again, along with Georgina Spelvin, in the Devil case yet to come.

His indictment was a direct threat to film makers everywhere. "I keep remembering," film critic Arthur Knight wrote in the Hollywood Reporter during the trial (he would later appear to testify), "that soon after the Supreme Court's Miller decision in 1973, the first film to be labeled obscene was not porno trash but Carnal Knowledge." Knight went on:

Fortunately, the charge was dismissed. But considering the climate in Memphis and our Government's all-out determination to secure convictions, this might not be the case were that same film to go on trial today. Instead of Harry Reems it could just as well be Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret standing in the docket--not to mention Mike Nichols, Joseph Levine. Jules Feiffer, Richard Sylbert. Sam O'Steen and all the others who contributed to that watershed film. ... [Reems's] conviction would imply that anyone--yes, anyone--connected with a picture that might conceivably be labeled obscene (Warren Beatty's upcoming Hard Core, for example) would be in jeopardy.

To underscore both the threat and the concern. Reems and his Memphis counsel, an intensely competent young trial attorney named Bruce Kramer, who is also president of the West Tennessee chapter of the A.C.L.U., arranged for Nicholson, Beatty, Knight, Buck Henry, Louise Fletcher, Tony Bill (coproducer of The Sting), Bert Schneider (who produced Five Easy Pieces, among others) and George Slaff (a Hollywood attorney who once worked for Samuel Goldwyn) to come to Memphis to testify to the general question of an actor's limited control over the films in which he appears. Knight made the stand, as did Slaff and Bill, before Judge Wellford, livid with anger, sent the jury out of the courtroom and announced to Kramer that he was not going to allow any more expert testimony to this point, that the First Amendment didn't apply, that actors who performed in filth were not above the law. Only days before. Judge Wellford had seen Deep Throat for the first time. Apparently, the memory still stung.

"I never took this thing seriously," Reems said outside the courtroom. "I'd had many times when guys from out of town, FBI, would come busting through my doors with the guns out. When the New York grand jury came around a few years back and subpoenaed me, the local morality squad talked to me about it. They said, 'We're not after you. We're not after the actors. We know you guys don't control it.' Actors have nothing whatsoever to do with the finished film. We do our work and sign away any control over editing or distribution. It's part of the standard contract. Hell, I've made soft-core films that people would later go back to and cut in hard-core inserts I didn't make. It's incredible." Reems also pronounced the last word on the technique that gave Deep Throat its title: "It hurts. It's not a very sensual feeling. It doesn't feel good at all. It's sort of like putting a ring on and off your finger. You don't feel anything up front, and then there's the ring, and then there's nothing." For doing something that hurts, Reems sits in a Memphis courtroom charged with conspiracy.

The appearance of the national press at the Deep Throat trial seemed to cause Turley discomfort. He was, at least, more defensive about his purposes than Parrish, who proudly identified his own standards with those promulgated by Congress and the Supreme Court. Turley, a tall, lanky, bald, weathered man of 62 who practiced law out of a one-man office for 30 years before accepting Federal appointment, is colorful and articulate, quick with original turns of phrase. He once described a rural hoodlum whom Parrish prosecuted as "typical of a breed of cocklebur bullies" that infests the countryside. His explanation for the Memphis pornography trials is appropriately ingenuous.

"I came to this office with specific ideas on writing," he told me. "I would willingly stand up on Milton's Areopagitica and wave a sword. I always thought it was every man to his own taste, that some people prefer opera and other people prefer burlesque. I thought that since I was raised a country-town boy and served in the walking Army and practiced law for 30 years, I could say with the ancient that 'I am a man and a Roman and nothing human is foreign to me.' I thought I was a man of the world. But these damned films are raunchy. The mafiosi were coming in to take over production and distribution and they were getting filthier and worse by the week. And they don't give me a problem. Responsible psychologists tell us that some of these things are destructive. We had a prostitution case here and we found crude efforts to recruit prostitutes by photographing them and turning them out. Girls as young as 12 and 13 getting recruited, beaten, hooked on drugs and then shipped and sold around the country. Sometimes in bunches. You tell me about victimless crime!" Which has nothing to do with Deep Throat, but Turley does not find it easy to justify the Memphis trials, or perhaps he fears that out-of-towners will take him for a hick, which he is not. He is, rather, a clever and quite possibly an ambitious man. He was appointed to the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1971, but such complaint was raised that he asked that his appointment be withdrawn. He may have been more interested in the Federal bench or in a Federal appointment, though he denies personal ambition and insists that he continues to pay rent on his one-man office in case he gets tired of his Federal job.

Nevertheless, he, not Parrish, authorized the Memphis trials, as he personally authorizes all trials in his district; and in boosting Parrish for the Justice Department's John Marshall Award, he was also forcefully and even heavy-handedly boosting himself. Only one other U. S. Attorney has successfully pursued a national obscenity conspiracy, and none other has assembled so large a list of indictments--in Turley's case, indictments against more than 60 individuals and corporations. Nor would any others necessarily find assistants willing to try them. "Tell most Assistant U.S. Attorneys," commented Fred Graham, "that they'll have to spend the next two years of their lives trying skin flicks and they'd say, 'No way, brother!' Parrish is obviously a zealot." But since Turley is obviously not a zealot, what explains his decision to spend millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours on obscenity prosecutions? The trial had, as it ground on, all the appearance of a grandstand play designed to catch Washington's eye. If the Marks case passes muster with the Supreme Court, as the court of appeals in sustaining it obviously thought it would, and if the same maneuver works in Memphis, then it will work almost anywhere, and Turley and Parrish will be credited with a monumental victory in the obscenity wars. And credit, as we know, brings reward.

•

Yet the Memphis trials could not have been staged without the decision of the United States Supreme Court to retreat from its past liberalism in matters of First Amendment protection.

In 1957, under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court decided a pair of cases collectively cited as U. S. vs. Roth. The Court was asked to judge if anti-obscenity statutes were unconstitutional because they denied freedom of speech. Justice William Brennan wrote the leading opinion for a three-member plurality. It questioned "whether obscenity is utterance within the area of protected speech" and held that it was not.

The Brennan opinion then proceeded to define unprotected obscenity. In the course of that definition, in what amounted to an aside, Brennan wrote: "All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance ... have the full protection of the guarantees." The phrase became the foundation for a new attack on the anti-obscenity statutes, and by 1966, in the case of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill), it was accorded what appeared to be the full force of judicial law. Brennan wrote of Memoirs that "a book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value." Brennan again wrote for only a three-member plurality of the Court, however; the Justices who made up the rest of the Memoirs majority found the book to be not obscene on other grounds.

The Memoirs decision did not eliminate the possibility of obscenity trials, especially where hard-core films were concerned, but it did make conviction appear to be less likely and it deterred prosecutors and thoroughly confused the lower courts. The immediate effect of the decision was to embolden the makers of sexually explicit films. There had been only anonymous skin flicks before it; there were Deep Throats and Devils and Green Doors after it, and Americans in great numbers went to see them, many taking their spouses, many for the first time. The New York Times announced the era of porno chic; Johnny Carson was said to have seen Deep Throat, and Truman Capote, and some of the Kennedys, and Ed McMahon stood outside the theater in New York one day, quaffing his favorite beverage and talking about the movie to pedestrians.

But the Justices of the Supreme Court hadn't really agreed on what constituted obscenity. They had written no fewer than five separate opinions in the Memoirs case. Lower courts didn't know which to rely on and obscenity cases continued to work their way up to the Supreme Court on appeal. Between 1967 and 1971, the Court practiced justice by head count. The Justices took a vote. Whenever five agreed on the obscenity of the material before them, they refused to review the case; whenever five agreed on the redeeming social value of the material before them, or found improper procedures or decisions, they summarily reversed the lower court. In effect, without providing guidelines for the lower courts, they set themselves up as a national board of censors. They dealt with no fewer than 31 cases this way.

They didn't like the role and they didn't like turning cases back without explanation. They obviously had two options: They must either find a clearer and more reliable definition of obscenity or get out of the censorship business entirely. Given the trend of their previous decisions toward increasing liberalism in matters of expression, they might well have chosen the latter option, but at that point, the Warren Court became the Burger Court, and four new men came onto the Court in the short space of four years, appointees of Richard Nixon, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, at least, had no intention of allowing the open circulation of sexually explicit material in the United States of America: He knew the Nixon Administration's position on obscenity and basically agreed with it.

Nixon had announced it most blatantly in 1970, when he angrily rejected the liberal and enlightened report of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography that Lyndon Johnson had appointed in 1968. "So long as I am in the White House." Nixon had said, "there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and climinate smut from our national life." He had compared "the pollution of our culture" to "the pollution of our once pure air and water." He had theorized that "the warped and brutal portrayal of sex in books, plays, magazines and movies, if not halted and reversed, could poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization. ... American morality is not to be trifled with." Of the truth of the latter statement, at least, he would soon have reason to know.

Chief Justice Burger decided to try to find a way to assemble a clear majority of Justices behind a new obscenity decision, and on June 21, 1973, he succeeded. The decision he announced that day concerning a number of cases generically titled Miller vs. California expanded the definition of obscenity and made its prosecution a matter of local option; and for the first time in years, a majority delivered a common opinion on the subject. Justices Burger, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist and White joined; significantly, four of the five were the Nixon appointees. Justice William O. Douglas, who has consistently argued that the First Amendment means exactly what it says, predictably dissented. Justice Brennan, with Justices Stewart and Marshall joining, dissented separately on less absolute grounds.

Burger delivered the majority decision. He said that the Court was now undertaking "to formulate standards more concrete than those in the past." He repudiated the value test of the Memoirs case ("utterly without redeeming social value"), saying it "called on the prosecution to prove a negative ... a burden nearly impossible to discharge under our criminal standards of proof." His emphasis on the problems of the prosecution was prophetic of the rest of the decision: He went on to redefine obscenity as "works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." The last clause, changing "utterly without" to "serious," changed everything. Burger justified it by emphasizing the force of numbers: "We do not adopt as a constitutional standard the 'utterly without redeeming social value' test ... that concept has never commanded the adherence of more than three Justices at one time." The liberals, he said in effect, have finally been outvoted.

Burger expressed the local-option judgment this way: "Nothing in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable 'national standards.' ... It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City."

One of Burger's footnotes implicitly slapped the hand of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. It cited not the report of the commission's liberal majority, which recommended legalizing sexually explicit material for consenting adults, but the repressive report of its three-man minority, which had claimed that viewing erotic materials might lead to crime. And near the end of the Miller decision came a peculiar comparison of sex and drugs:

One can concede that the "sexual revolution" of recent years may have had useful by-products in striking layers of prudery from a subject long irrationally kept from needed ventilation. But it does not follow that no regulation of patently offensive "hard core" materials is needed or permissible; civilized people do not allow unregulated access to heroin because it is a derivative of medicinal morphine.

Commercial depiction of explicit sexual behavior was thus made analogous to the heroin traffic, and the stage was set for Parrish's more extreme formulation that he'd rather see dope on the streets than pornography.

The Justices of the Miller majority may have hoped that they had dispensed with the constitutional question once and for all, but they would soon discover that they had not, largely because their decision was inconsistent and even self-contradictory. Douglas' dissent raised one immediate issue that came up again in United States vs. Marks, the Kentucky conspiracy case.

"Today we leave open the way," Douglas wrote at the beginning of his Miller dissent, "for California to send a man to prison for distributing brochures that advertise books and a movie under freshly written standards defining obscenity which until today's decision were never part of any law. ... A brand-new test would put a publisher behind bars under a new law improvised by the courts after the publication. That ... has all the evils of an ex post facto law."

Deep Throat was filmed late in 1971 and released in 1972, before the Miller decision. The Marks attorneys therefore argued before the court of appeals that the retroactive application of Miller was effectively the application of ex post facto standards. The court of appeals ruled bluntly that Deep Throat and the other films involved in the case were obscene by any standards, whether those of Miller or Memoirs. Yet the Supreme Court Justices weren't entirely convinced, or they wouldn't have agreed to review.

The Marks appeal also struck at the local-option portion of the Miller decision, arguing that a locally restricted jury couldn't constitutionally decide the issue of obscenity in a national conspiracy case. The court of appeals upheld the correctness of the jury's composition in the Marks case, but judges in at least three other obscenity cases coming on for appellate review have not done so. The Supreme Court apparently overlooked the possibility of combining the obscenity and the conspiracy laws to force Federal censorship beyond local jurisdictions; as a result, it must deal again with the issue of national versus local standards of judgment.

The Miller decision made the obscenity-conspiracy strategy possible, however, giving the people of Maine or Mississippi control over public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City, and now in Memphis, on a sunny spring day, the Deep Throat jury, which has finally seen a sexually explicit film and been enlightened as to the true form and structure of perfidy, goes out at 4:30 P.M. to deliberate, having first been charged by Judge Wellford that neither the First Amendment nor cruel censorship is among the issues it must decide.

Since some of us are still free men and also have opinions in these matters, perhaps we should constitute ourselves an imaginary jury and go out to deliberate as well.

•

By the force of both legislative and judicial laws, there exists today in the United States of America, one of whose most eminent founders, Thomas Jefferson, long ago swore "eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man," a category of materials--inanimate objects--declared to be criminal and obscene. These materials may be possessed in the privacy of one's home, but they may be neither created nor distributed nor bought nor sold. They are not drugs of powerful and potentially asocial effect, nor Governmental secrets whose loosing could precipitate distant wars or proximate humiliations, nor counterfeit bills that might debase the currency on whose bloating certitude we depend. They are materials far more dangerous than these: They are photographs, still or motion-picture, of naked, priapic human beings at work imitating play.

Almost uniquely in American law, the criminality of such images has never been precisely defined. Such terms as "appeal to the prurient interest in sex" and "patently offensive," for example, describe not the criminality of these images but merely two possible responses jurors might have when they view them.

Yet the images that judges and legislators have consistently condemned as obscene can be simply defined. They are images of human beings engaged in sexual play or intercourse with engorged genitals fully displayed, images frankly offered for sexual stimulation and used by other human beings for purposes of recreation.

Authorities have chosen not to define obscenity in this straightforward way, because such definition includes no assertion of social harm. Without an assertion of social harm, without an imagined appeal to prurient interest, without patent offensiveness, images of sexual congress, no matter how casual, take their place beside other images--of human beings being born, eating, suffering pubescence, loving, voting, marrying, praying, dying, giving birth--as mute but eloquent expressions of the enormous glory and the tragic brevity of human existence. And such expressions, however lulling or shocking, are protected from limitation by the First Amendment.

No one goes to jail for taking baby pictures, but people have gone to jail for taking pictures of the plain connection whereby babies are conceived. The crucial term of the definition is recreation. Its counterpart in legal phraseology is prurient interest. Erotic images, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, are freely available to scholars and scientists, and they are sometimes required viewing for judges and juries, as are images of accidents and violent death. They become criminal only when purveyed to the common man. Charles Rembar, the distinguished New York attorney who defended Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer and Memoirs before the Supreme Court, writes in his book The End of Obscenity:

A curious phenomenon in censorship is the censors' personal immunity to the infectious [material]. The moral fiber in jeopardy is always somebody else's. In not one of these trials did the prosecution produce a witness--or his doctor, or his clergyman--who, as a result of his [exposure], suffered physical, moral or spiritual deterioration. But prosecutors are certain it can happen--to other people.

We may look at the obscene with impunity as long as we have our thinking caps on. Take them off, go out for a lazy afternoon or a hot evening, and we risk becoming criminal, we risk being doomed. The Supreme Court, having achieved its majority, is weary of these apparent scholasticisms and would remand them to lower jurisdictions to reduce its burdensome load. Only Justice Douglas saw the point, though even without his paralyzing stroke, his age would not have carried it. He declared his exposure to such images a matter of taste, not of law, and being a man of taste, he never bothered to look at them, and, like a sovereign or a Jefferson, he pronounced them free as the birds. He was busy with the business of the Court and fertile with young wives. He had to hike the Appalachians. He had other fish to fry.

These erotic images, whether in written or in pictorial form, have been the curiosity and the common entertainment of mankind throughout its history and continue to be today. Most of us have seen them at one time or another (84 percent of American males, 69 percent of American females, according to the President's commission report), and there is reliable scientific and statistical evidence that not to have seen them--or, more precisely, to have grown up in an environment where they were strictly forbidden along with any other open expression of sexuality--predisposes men to vicious sexual crime. The majority of Americans do not believe these images should be outlawed among consenting adults. Americans who are older, who are less active politically, who have fewer years of education, who more frequently attend church, tend to favor outlawing them more than Americans who are younger, who are more active politically, who have more years of education, who less frequently attend church. An overwhelming number of professionals in such fields of science and social service as sex research, psychology, sociology and marriage counseling believe that erotic images are at least harmless and may even be beneficial to love, marriage and mental health. And yet they are outlawed, and for trafficking in them. Americans are arrested and are sentenced to jail.

We came to this madness by so slow a progress that few of us now even remember the steps of our descent. The history of Western attitudes toward explicit sexuality--toward sexuality itself--is long, subtle and complex. It is intimately connected to the rise and ultimate dominance of Christianity: obscenity is now and has always been a religious crime, though it is cast today in other words. The early Church found sexual pleasure to be a grievous sin by a subtle and most peculiar argument: because at the moment of climax, of orgasm, it suspended reason and temporarily blotted out man's consciousness of God. "It was as much the suspension of reason," writes the historian Wayland Young, "as the narrowing and averting of love from God which made Saint Augustine look askance on desire and the pleasure of love. To Saint Thomas Aquinas, it was the main objection." Outside of marriage, or for purposes other than procreation, it still is.

But the line of thought, even the line of terrorism, that leads most directly to Memphis is more immediately anchored in 19th Century England and America, in a body of pseudoscientific medical theory, concerned primarily with the evil effects of masturbation, that was taken over and exaggerated to the point of hysteria by clergymen and reformers. The theory, which paralleled early theories of capitalism, held that the body had a finite quantity of vital fluids, semen preeminent among them. Saving semen produced health; "spending" it produced sickness, mental illness and eventually death. Sexual activity was thus stigmatized as a disease: "spermatorrhea." But since even the most continent of men had nocturnal emissions, the disease must inevitably be fatal. In the immensely popular works of the leading proponent of the spermatorrhea theory, writes Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians, "Sex is thought of as a universal and virtually incurable scourge. It cannot ultimately be controlled, and it serves as a kind of metaphor for death, as cancer does today."

One way that 19th Century doctors sought to control the disease was to eliminate a powerful source of infection, female sexual desire. Good women were raised to be passionless; but for those who were not, American gynecologists perfected surgical cures. Gynecology, historian G. J. Barker-Benfield points out in his brilliant new study, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life, was the only branch of American medical science to achieve an international reputation in the 19th Century, largely because a few leading practitioners honed their skills on submissive women, including female Negro slaves. Women who went to such practitioners complaining of excessive desire or compulsive masturbation found themselves treated by having their clitoris cut off or their ovaries removed. The last known clitoridectomy for psychological reasons was performed in the United States in 1925. The last known female castration for psychological reasons was performed in the United States in 1946. The surgical expression of the quaint sexual theories of the Victorians reaches down almost to the present day. "It may be noted," Barker-Benfield writes, "that clitoridectomists and castrators tested women for indications of the disease of desire by inducing orgasm, manipulating clitoris or breasts." Rape thus preceded mutilation in the name of medical science and mental health.

Medical violence against the disease of sexuality had its counterpart in movements of reform, and here the line that leads to Miller and Memphis grows taut. One man, more than any other, shaped the attitudes and lobbied into existence the laws that, duly revised but hardly improved upon, are the basis for the Memphis trials. His name is a joke today: Anthony Comstock. It was not a joke in the years between 1868 and 1915, when Comstock almost singlehandedly defined the obscene.

Comstock was a Connecticut farm boy whose mother died when he was ten. He grew up with an intense and religious desire to keep himself as pure as his mother had piously taught him to be. He volunteered to fight for the Union in the Civil War and afterward found work in New York as a grocery clerk. Images that stimulated sexual desire enraged him and he began fighting them on his own. When he was 28, in 1872, he emerged to public notice by raiding two New York stationery stores with a police captain and a newspaper reporter in tow. That year he acquired the backing of a group of powerful and reform-minded men, and with their financial and moral support, he founded the Committee for the Suppression of Vice within the Y.M.C.A., the forerunner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. With a bundle of obscene materials to display, he went to Washington in 1873 to lobby for legislation (which he wrote) outlawing the mailing of obscene matter interstate. He got his law; he also got an appointment as a postal inspector with broad discretionary powers and free passage on the nation's railroads.

From that moment until the day he died, Comstock scourged the land. He achieved such power that his word alone was sufficient to convict in almost every American court. He claimed once that he had driven 15 people to suicide, and he boasted in 1913, near the end of his life, that he had personally arrested more than 3600 men, women and children and confiscated hundreds of thousands of pounds of smut, including tons of contraceptives and wagonloads of printing plates.

Comstock believed fiercely that his purpose in life was to protect children from exposure to mental infection. He insisted that "a single book or a single picture may taint forever the soul of the person who reads or sees it," and from the diaries he kept as a young man, it appears that the soul he knew to be tainted was his own: He was for much of his youth a secret masturbator, and he fought his "sin" for years before he brought it under control. He believed with the medical men and the clergy that desire was a disease that sapped the body and drove men and women insane. He was terrorized by his fear of his own infection, as someone would be terrorized who believed he had been deliberately infected with cancer, and he resolved that those who similarly infected others would receive the full measure of his revenge.

He promulgated not only Federal but also model state laws against obscenity, and the Comstock laws are the immediate precursors to those under which Larry Parrish prosecutes in Memphis today. They are thus founded on a species of illogic that would be merely a historical curiosity if it were not embodied in harsh, punitive laws: that erotic images sometimes stimulate men and women to masturbate, and masturbation is a fatal disease and, therefore, the state must interdict erotic images as it interdicts pollutants or powerful drugs.

Yet they are also, like all laws, political, and the political suppression they mask has been of far greater consequence than the discredited theories on which they are based. Not for any artistic virtue that they may possess, but for the hard core of protected political expression that they mutely define, do such meaty images of sexual congress as Deep Throat deserve to be unchained, how-ever much they may disturb us. Charles Rembar:

Sex in literature provided the field on which the struggles [I have] recounted ... took place, but the war was wider. The true censor has objectives beyond the masking of the erotic and the indecent. The end in view is an established principle of suppression, available anywhere in the world of the mind.

Steven Marcus discovers a similar and more insidious connection:

We have in our own time been witness to a sexual revolution which has ... been split off from what might have been expected to accompany it--impulses of a social revolutionary kind. ... The socially radical impulses with which the sexually revolutionary impulses have, historically, been symbiotically connected seem to have been almost systematically thwarted in their search for legitimate means of expression.

Think of the connection between open sexual expression and social revolution and examples immediately come to mind: early feminism, with its emphasis on free love (it was forced to disavow that emphasis before it could achieve female suffrage): the radical sexual reforms advocated by American and Soviet Communists in the Twenties and Thirties: the counterculture of the Sixties, with its rejection of middle-class moral values: the women's movement itself. "Those who have spoken out in defense of pornography from the expert realm," Parrish told me in Memphis, "are speaking a political philosophy, not a scientific view." And again, more bluntly, his remark to the CBS producer: "We're going to get rid of all these perverted minds."

It should come as no surprise that the Nixon regime was fanatical on the subject of "smut," of denying radical--or, for that matter, even normal--sexual expression. Nixon saw such expression for what, potentially, it is, a source of social revolution. Since he feared such revolution, he thought sexual expression could "poison the wellsprings of American and Western culture and civilization." It could also help them run clear again.

It should come as no surprise that Nixon appointees are trying erotic films in Memphis or that the Nixon Court has rigged new standards to help police and prosecutors suppress what they consider obscene.

They wish to control expression, and sexual expression, whether in images or in person, is expression of the most radical kind. It distracts men and women from the love of God and from the love of the state, and it teaches them a fact that no fanatic and no fascist would have them know: that they are human and beneath the clothing of circumstance have their humanity in common with others of their kind, and might, if they choose, assemble to defend it from all oppression. It teaches them not with words, which are paltry things, but with the immutable senses themselves, with sight and hearing and taste and smell and touch, beyond denial or contradiction. We had a long, hard task to free ourselves from political authoritarianism, and the central document of that freedom is the Bill of Rights. We have not yet freed ourselves from moral authoritarianism, and the authorities still seek to convince us that to do so would destroy what we have gained. Freedom didn't destroy us last time, in the political realm, 200 years ago this year.

But through the law out of spermatorrhea by way of Comstock, censors still belabor us. They strike today, in their increasing desperation, at the shock wave of the advancing revolution, at images that we have not yet admitted to our living rooms and therefore still suspect of danger and therefore still fear, though they are no more fearsome than the barnyard or the meat counter, though they are far less fearsome, and so also far less promising, than the bedroom itself and that mysterious other who voluntarily, out of love and lust, joins us there. They strike at a few of us caught up in cynicism and profit, but thereby they most certainly strike at us all.

•

So the jury returns, the real one in Memphis, having deliberated for less than an hour on a Thursday afternoon and merely four hours on a Friday--at 2:30 p.m., Friday, April 30, 1976, our Bicentennial year--and the foreman announces that he and his 11 peers "had to follow the law," and the brute verdict is guilty: Louis Peraino is guilty, and Mario De-Salvo is guilty, and Mickey Cherubino is guilty, and handsome Harry Reems is guilty, and the others, and the corporations with which they dressed themselves, of obscenity, of interstate transport, of conspiracy, and the clowns roll their barrels and the lion tamers crack their whips and the ringmaster affects a somber mien to disguise his righteous delight and they are all guilty, guilty, guilty all.

[On July 9, 1976, Robert Bork, U. S. Solicitor General, confessed error in applying Miller to Deep Throat in the Marks case; the confession could supply the defendants in Memphis with grounds for a new trial. Judge Wellford took the issue under advisement. The outcome remained unresolved as Playboy went to press.--Ed.]

Hollywood and Harry Reems

A number of prominent film people have declared their support for Harry Reems, and many were prepared to testify on his behalf but were not allowed to. After Reems's conviction, Richard Warren Lewis asked some Hollywood notables to state their views for Playboy.

Tony Bill,producer, actor: I'm planning to direct a movie. If there's reason to show frontal nudity, I'll certainly have to wonder whether I could be arrested someday for that film. I would do everything in my power to prevent such a state of affairs from developing in this country, which is why I flew to Memphis to testify. Indicting Reems was like arresting a model who posed for a painting that somebody hung in an illegal place. Or like arresting the girl who posed for the cover of Playboy because the magazine found its way into a convent.

Louise Fletcher,actress: I'm a Southern lady, a minister's daughter from Alabama. I've never seen a pornographic movie, but I was packed and ready to testify for the defense in Memphis, because I felt the whole concept of the trial was so unjust. Particularly the wording of the charge: "A national conspiracy to transport an obscene motion picture." The fact that Reems was ever indicted for participating in such a conspiracy was theater of the absurd. He was simply an actor who was paid to do a job in a movie. If I did a film where I appeared in the nude, or did anything that could be construed as obscene, I could probably be indicted in the same way he was.

The Reems conviction reminds me of the days of black-listing in Hollywood, as a result of which movies became more boring, less mature, safer. It took years to come out of that cycle, for studio heads and the people who make the decisions to take a chance on something new and different. It could happen again.

Buck Henry,writer, actor: If producers and studios began to pre-edit with an eye toward the lowest common denominator, that could ruin film production. The Reems decision has already done harm in several cases that I know of, projects that people are now hanging back on just to see what will happen. I know of two scripts that were moving ahead with an eye toward a probable X rating. They were scripted by well-known writers and had well-known people ready to act in them and direct. These projects have been put in the freezer to wait and see what's going to happen in the court of appeals. Several very important foreign films have suddenly had their backing by American distributors withdrawn.

It would just be a shame if all of us in Hollywood ultimately wound up working for Walt Disney.

Stanley Kramer,producer: The Memphis decision poses a threat to the motion picture as an art form. Censorship is the most dangerous thing that can be done to the creative process. It simply dismisses the entire idea of adult choice. Whatever is regulatory, whatever is delimiting, whatever is negative, whatever is an imposition by a noncreating outside source on the work is a threat to the creativity of the people who are doing it. I recall well the days when film censorship did not confine itself to the bedroom. It also included social and political censorship. If Harry Reems can be convicted, then this type of censorship can return. Once you censor a bedroom act, it's really a tiny step to the censoring of a social or political act.

Rod McKuen,poet, composer: It's very difficult now to raise money for films whose plots require any kind of honesty regarding sexual matter. Not only does the money man not want to be involved but producers, stars, writers, technicians are all worried. In my new book, Finding My Father, I use the word fuck because it happens to be the most appropriate word in context. Does this mean that I could be hauled into court in Memphis or any other city in America and made to stand trial for offending public morality? Worse, does it mean my publisher, the people who printed the book, the secretary who typed the final manuscript and the mail-room boy could be nailed as well? I have just done the music for a film that may or may not get an X rating. If somebody finds the film obscene, I could conceivably be forced to stand trial. This case doesn't have just a chilling effect on artistic freedom, it's a fucking blizzard.

Jack Nicholson,actor: Had the Reems case been national precedent when Carnal Knowledge was released, I could have been subpoenaed and put in jail by some self-seeking religious fanatic functioning as a prosecutor in East Podunk or Albany, Georgia, or wherever. Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Mike Nichols also would have been vulnerable.

In this modern day, it's hard to believe that what happened in Memphis is a reality, it's so outlandish. The poor guy is just an actor who worked one day on a movie. And they want to put him away. The guy's got hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. You know how hard it is coming back from a hundred-grand deficit? It's tough. And the state doesn't pay your legal expenses if you beat the charges.

This judgment makes a crime of an act that wasn't a crime when it was committed. That's why most of us wanted to trek down to Memphis to give Reems support. If similar prosecutions began happening around the nation, an actor would practically be afraid to say hello in a film unless there was a confessional screen between him and the person he was talking to. Some actors would be afraid to appear in certain movies, fearing what some Savonarola like the Memphis prosecutor could do to their careers.

Rod Steiger,actor: I cannot see why any actor should be convicted of a crime when he's trying to communicate life, just because that view of life does not agree with someone else's. This debate has been going on ever since the time of Socrates and Plato. If the artist is afraid to be free, it means that his most precious right has been taken away, the right to be wrong. An artist must make mistakes in order to progress. Since I'm an actor, the Memphis decision poses a real threat to me. I'm horrified by the idea that I may do something in a picture that somebody in some obscure town may call obscene and find myself in a legal battle. The stifling of artistic courage is much more important than what's obscene or not obscene.