pornorgraphy-makes-money2

By Alex Johnson
Reporter
msnbc.com
updated 8:12 a.m. ET April 30, 2010

The Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation estimates that the industry generates $12.6 billion a year, as much as 90 percent of it in the Valley.

It’s 20 percent more than what the industry’s legitimate Hollywood cousins made in 2009, which was a record year.

Was HIV positive status identified in porn actors?

The controversy has been on the front burner since 2004, when a male adult film performer tested positive for HIV and was found to have spread the virus to three women he had performed with. The latest wave of activism gained impetus last June when the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, which tests performers for the industry, confirmed that an actress who has not been publicly identified had tested positive.

What do pornography producers say?

Executives of adult entertainment companies say most studios would leave California if the proposal is approved because they would lose too much business under a strict reading of California workplace safety laws.

“Condoms are only part of the issue,” said Steve Orenstein, president and chief executive of Wicked Pictures, the only studio in the San Fernando Valley that enforces a 100 percent condom policy in its productions. Clinic-style regulations imply “goggles and rubber gloves,” he said, which “I imagine you agree [is] a bit too restrictive.”

Orenstein called on regulators to work with industry leaders to establish rules that would acknowledge circumstances “specific to adult productions” — that is, demand for explicit depictions of sex acts. Otherwise, he said, “many companies talk about plans to shoot in other states if they needed to.”

What does former pornography actor and anti-pornography crusader say?

But Shelley Lubben, a former adult film actress who runs the anti-pornography Pink Cross Foundation, said that wasn’t likely.

Under a 1988 state court ruling, California is the only state where production of hard-core pornography for profit is explicitly legal — in other states, prosecutors and courts have equated paying performers to engage in sex with prostitution. That means the studios are “not going to run away,” Lubben said.

Money matters

If it’s Orenstein who’s right, the stakes for Los Angeles and the greater San Fernando Valley could be enormous. While it’s impossible to precisely calculate overall revenue for legally distributed pornography — many studios are privately held and don’t report such figures — the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation estimates that the industry generates $12.6 billion a year, as much as 90 percent of it in the Valley.

And even though that’s well down from the industry’s heyday of the 1980s and the early 1990s — before free Internet pornography and easy pirating of studio films began gobbling up profits — it’s still 20 percent more than what the industry’s legitimate Hollywood cousins made in 2009, which was a record year.

continued > > > > >