Last Monday, Jerry Bruckheimer was anointed by Variety as the first producer in Hollywood history to field the top two highest-grossing movies in a single weekend, the buddy-cop fender-bender “Bad Boys II” and the Disney theme-park spin-off, “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Mr. Bruckheimer, as many are fond of saying, has that most prized of show-biz attributes: the golden gut. He knows what the American mainstream wants and he supplies it, often with a patriotic tinge. His two-decade hit parade includes “Top Gun,” “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and “Black Hawk Down.”
So what is Mr. Bruckheimer doing for an encore this fall? “Skin,” the first prime-time network series to take on what is euphemistically called the adult entertainment industry.
And with a soupçon of Shakespeare, yet. “Skin” tells of the forbidden romance between a 17-year-old Mexican-Irish Romeo, whose father is the Los Angeles D.A., and a 16-year-old Jewish Juliet, whose father is a porn king. Or as the show’s Web site sums it up: ” `Skin’ is about sex and race. `Skin’ is about politics. And most of all, `Skin’ is about skin: complexion, beauty, desire, attraction, obsession and prejudice in contemporary Los Angeles.”
Such an assertion raises a philosophical conundrum: How much redeeming social value can be shoveled onto two hot bodies in a single Fox TV series? If the smartly made pilot is any indication, there are more than two hot bodies and a fair amount of message, including the prospect that Ron Silver’s porn mogul may turn out to be more principled than Kevin Anderson’s self-righteous lawman. Mr. Bruckheimer didn’t get where he is by being ahead of the curve. He is the curve. His gut tells him, accurately, that porn is not just well within the American mainstream but overdue to be stripped of its plain brown wrapper in prime time.
We’ve come a long way, baby, from the supposed Sodom and Gomorrah nadir of the Clinton era. In retrospect, that was a time of relative cultural Puritanism. The country was outraged in early 2000 when Fox, seizing the post-Monicagate initiative, introduced a new show called “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” that seemed like nothing so much as a “game show built on prostitution,” as Howard Rosenberg put it in The Los Angeles Times. It was killed after a single episode.
But now essentially the same concept, “Joe Millionaire,” is a major Fox hit. Voyeuristic reality shows in which sex is a commodity traded for either money or celebrity by preening bachelors and bachelorettes are a staple of most networks. (Monica Lewinsky has even hosted one, “Mr. Personality.”) On CBS, “Big Brother” featured its first sex act this month, The Washington Post reported, though it was only disclosed to those buying the show’s 24/7 Web cast from CBS.com ($24.95 for the season). At Showtime, CBS’s cable sibling at Viacom , a reality series called “Family Business,” produced by some of the same minds behind “Big Brother,” graphically charts the life of Adam Glasser, the hard-core pornographer (“Tushy Con Carne” is a typical title) whose nom de porn is Seymore Butts.
Taboos are falling so quickly that the word taboo itself increasingly has an archaic ring. Wal-Mart may drop Maxim and hide the cover of Cosmo, but last month CMT, the country music channel, joined MTV and VH1 in raciness by exposing Joe Don Rooney’s tushy in a new video. Cirque du Soleil, its countercultural past well behind it, is readying its first sex show for Las Vegas, “Zumanity.” It arrives just as Nevada considers meeting its education budget by applying its first tax on the services provided by its legal whorehouses.
For all the jousting about which female author might be the summer’s nonfiction champ – Hillary, Hepburn or Coulter – the sleeper may yet prove to be the former porn star Traci Lords, whose new memoir, “Underneath It All,” just made its debut on The New York Times’s extended best-seller list. Ms. Lords, an underage porn performer until her career was ended in 1986 by an F.B.I. bust, is now a happily married 35-year-old actress and singer. Her book offers a redemptive tale of rising above a past in which, by her account, she was first coaxed to have sex on videotape with lies and drugs.
On a blazingly hot day two weeks ago, hundreds of fans lined up on East 14th Street in Manhattan for her book signing at the Virgin Megastore: men, women, couples of most ages and ethnicities. Though some thanked her for speaking out about the sexual abuse she had suffered as an adolescent, not everyone seemed to be there to celebrate the author’s current reincarnation as a healer. Others turned to the book’s photos, which are somewhat livelier than those in Hillary Clinton’s “Living History.”
But Ms. Lords, out of porn for 17 years, seems taken aback by how semi-respectable her discarded vocation has become. “When I was in porn, it was like a back-alley thing,” she said when I interviewed her the next day. “Now it’s everywhere.” As if to prove the point, she appeared with Matt Lauer on “Today,” with Larry King for a full hour, and on “Dateline NBC,” which all illustrated her appearances with flashbacks to images of the pre-literary Traci. Soon she was sharing the bill on Fox’s “Big Story” with the other big story du jour (and possibly de l’année), the Kobe Bryant rape case, although the irony of that pairing seemed to be lost on everyone.
Is the mainstreaming of porn the end of civilization as we know it? Even SpongeBob may have to hold on to his SquarePants now that Playboy is collaborating with Stan Lee, the creator of “Spider-Man,” on “Hef’s Superbunnies,” a new animated series for a major network.
But few bemoan the porning of America these days. Except for the usual fire-and-brimstone sermonizers in pulpits and on the Supreme Court (one of whom, Clarence Thomas, has himself reportedly been a porn consumer), most conservatives have joined most liberals in giving up the fight against all but the scourge of child pornography. (The San Fernando Valley porn industry, eager to avoid costly disruptions post-Traci Lords, long ago joined the battle against child porn as well.)
A classic example of the political turnaround is the current attorney general, John Ashcroft. In his 2000 senatorial campaign, he attacked his Democratic opponent for “standing with the producers of pornography and Hollywood’s worst trash” by accepting a $2,000 contribution from Christie Hefner, the chief executive of Playboy. You no longer hear Mr. Ashcroft, or anyone in the Bush administration, complaining about far larger political contributions from News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch, AOL Time Warner , Viacom or Marriott, to name just some of those who stand with the producers of pornography by either making their own soft-core variants or taking a cut when porn-industry videos are beamed through cable and satellite into hotels and homes. In its latest issue alone, Adult Video News, the industry trade journal, reviews more than 500 new movies. Some of those profits fuel the ambitions of Democratic and Republican politicians alike.
The only major cable operator that refused to distribute the stuff, Adelphia Communications , has reversed itself now that its family-values-preaching founder, John Rigas, and his sons have been indicted and ousted for Enron -style shenanigans. Meanwhile, the administration’s hand-picked F.C.C. chairman, Michael Powell, is in the process of giving other porn-spewing media giants even more power over the marketplace. The best Mr. Ashcroft has been able to do to fight back against adult porn is to requisition a blue curtain to hide the bared breast of the Spirit of Justice statue at the Department of Justice. If nothing else, this poignant gesture on behalf of decency provided welcome comic relief to a grateful nation during the early months of the war on terrorism.
Paul Cambria, a lawyer who represents Larry Flynt and Vivid Entertainment, among other porn potentates, argues that even if Mr. Ashcroft were to go on an anti-porn crusade, he’d be shocked by how unwilling juries are to rule that it violates community standards.
“There used to be a hypocrisy factor in juries,” Mr. Cambria says. “We don’t see it today. Jurors realize that adult entertainment is no big deal and don’t have a problem saying it’s no big deal.” Ten days before Mr. Ashcroft lost his Missouri Senate race in 2000, Mr. Cambria won a case instigated by Citizens Against Pornography in a small Missouri town, where a largely middle-aged, all-female jury refused to rule as obscene the tapes “Anal Heat” and “Rock Hard,” both available for rent at the Family Video chain.
The cliché has it that when the formerly contraband becomes accepted, it loses its cachet. With sex, that is not really an option. What does seem to be happening is a digitalization of sex – and not only in the sense that porn is distributed digitally, whether by Internet or DVD or television or spam. In a more profound sense, the erotic is being figuratively and literally dismembered as it is broken down into its various discrete bytes, like albums that are atomized into their individual songs to be downloaded from the Web. Paul Fishbein, who founded and runs Adult Video News, says the newest trend in hard-core porn movies is the “eschewing of plot”; each body part or type, sexual taste, fetish, whatever, boasts dedicated videos catering exclusively to that particular niche as clinically and single-mindedly as possible.
In the mainstream movie industry, paradoxically enough, sexual content is actually declining: the number of studio movies rated R for sex (as opposed to violence) is down to eight this year, a fall of more than 50 percent from last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. In other words, porn-industry product is eroding the market for conventional sexy movies to the point where an adult visitor to the multiplex may have to settle for either the sex-free “Pirates of the Caribbean” or head to the video store for a hard-core rental.
Surely there’s still a lucrative market for adults who want something between these two extremes, a whiff of that all-encompassing R-rated body heat of yesteryear. This, of course, may be exactly what that cunning master of the market, Jerry Bruckheimer, has in mind as he prepares to sell America his idea of prime-time “Skin” this fall.