LOS ANGELES — When someone's mind is already made up it's not polite to confuse them with facts.
Condoms may be a fait accompli in Los Angeles, but that didn’t prevent representatives from the adult entertainment business from meeting Wednesday morning with the Adult Film Industry Working Group. The Group is a panel put together by the Los Angeles City Council to augment the policy.
The council which is implementing the city’s mandatory condom ordinance, met for a second time to review a 10-page draft of recommendations to the mayor and City Council.
Picture a party where the guest of honor was neither welcome nor invited. That’s the extent of these sham meetings of which the first one was held under cloak and dagger circumstances until attorney Michael Fattorosi called the city on its apparent skullduggery to keep them private affairs. www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=53868
Nevertheless, www.xbiz.com reported on the one-hour meeting held at City Hall. Film LA, which coordinates and processes permits for on-location productions in Los Angeles, featured its President Paul Audley and Vice President of Communications & Public Affairs Todd Lindgren describing the process by which adult content producers are identified and whether there’s concern over First Amendment rights violations once a producer discloses that they’ll be shooting adult content.
The First Amendment concerns were addressed by the City Attorney’s office. Attorney Jeffrey Douglas disabused city attorney counsel Kimberly Miera of her notion that “pornography is not protected by First Amendment speech.”
Douglas was quick to point out that “Pornography is fully and completely protected by the First Amendment,” and that there were at least 2000 court cases to attest to that.
According to the XBiz report, Douglas criticized the city for attempting to regulate an industry while excluding it from the process. Douglas said that given only three minutes to speak was not enough.
[It is when you’re attempting to railroad an issue.]
Douglas, himself, was cut off amid speech. Industry attorney and XBIZ contributor Fattorosi used his three minutes to address the enforcement aspects of the ordinance.
Fattorosi brought up a point about jurisdiction.
“This is now a global business; this isn’t a Los Angeles business any more. There are producers that live in Europe, Canada, outside the state of California, and they are the actual people who finance these films."
Fattorosi asked if those producers are going to be charged under the law and whether there were any mandates locked in place for the possible confiscation of equipment.
[Law enforcement policy in the past has been to confiscate tapes and equipment on shoots where there were no legal permits.]
“These are all issues that this law has with actual on-the-street enforcement that need to be addressed and resolved before you can even think about putting this measure in place,” Fattorosi said.
“I think what you’ll end up doing is netting a lot of innocent people that don’t have a lot of control over their working environment. I don’t know if LAPD or the city is going to look at extraditing producers from overseas into the California court where there’s no jurisdiction, but it’s a question that I have to raise.”
According to City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana the next meeting, set for early May, would address First Amendment issues, associated cost with identifying permit seekers interested in producing adult films and an attachment from Cal-OSHA, which was not present.
