Frontline goes behind the scenes of
one of the most controversial industries in America
'American Porn' airs on Maryland Public Television on February 7

OWINGS MILLS, MD: Easier to order at home than a pizza, bigger than rock music, it's arguably the most profitable enterprise in cyberspace. AT&T is in the business. Yahoo! has profited from it. Westin and Marriott make more money selling it than they do snacks and drinks in their mini-bars. And with estimates as high as $10 billion a year, it boasts the kind of earnings every American business envies.

It's pornography - and with adult movies, magazines, retail stores, and the growth of the Internet - business is booming. But the leaders of the adult industry are worried. They see the election of George W. Bush and his appointment of John Ashscroft as a signal that there may be renewed interest in mounting obscenity prosecutions.

On Thursday, February 7 at 10 p.m. on Maryland Public Television (MPT) Frontline reports on the forces behind the recent explosion of sexually explicit material available in American society and investigates the pending political battle that may soon engulf the multibillion dollar pornography industry. The report contains explicit images and explicit sexual language. PBS will air strong viewer advisories throughout the broadcast. Viewer discretion is advised.

"Once the rules were clear: If pornography offended the community standard of decency, it was obscene. But the digital age and a political moment changed all that," says Frontline producer/director Michael Kirk. "In a wired world who can say what offends a community? That's the question about to be asked of juries all over the country. On their answer rides billions of dollars and the fate of American porn."

In "American Porn," Frontline goes inside some of the most successful pornography businesses - Larry Flynt's Hustler organization and popular Internet site Danni's Hard Drive - to see how their profits have exploded in the past few years. According to Flynt, Hustler's enterprise -a conglomerate of movies, strip clubs, sex shops, and the Internet - is worth $400 million. Danni Ashe, a former exotic dancer turned dot-com millionaire and CEO, tells Frontline she earned $8 million last year alone.

While most Americans decry the avalanche of sexually explicit material, the profits speak for themselves. Large numbers of Americans are finding something they like in the adult entertainment arena. Both Flynt and Ashe credit the 1990s explosion of adult material to the ease of viewing and ordering from the Internet. Equally important, they say, was the Clinton administration's laid-back attitude toward pornography.

"I think the adult entertainment business has experienced a lot of freedom in the last eight years," Ashe says. Pornography producer Mark Cromer agrees. "When Clinton came in," he says, "it was definitely blue skies and green lights."

Some former Justice Department officials say that corporate America felt it was safe to enter the profitable porn market. "Companies like AT&T bought up a cable company, signed contracts with the Hot Network, which is a hard-core pornographic site," Patrick Trueman tells Frontline. The former head of the Justice Department's obscenity section in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Trueman now represents the American Family Association, a non-profit organization promoting traditional family values. "Other mainstream companies thought that 'We can do this, too,'" he says. "And why not? There's a big market and no penalty.

Former Justice Department attorney Bruce Taylor concurs. "If there had been continued federal prosecutions [for obscenity], you wouldn't see the Internet presence of the porn syndicate as big as it is today," says Taylor, who maintains he has prosecuted more obscenity cases than anyone in U.S. history. "The combination of the industry's willingness to go on the Web in a big way and the prosecutors not indicting them for it allowed it to explode beyond anybody's imagination."

Until now, companies like AT&T have argued they are like the post office - delivering material people have ordered. They claim they are meeting a popular demand and see nothing illegal or wrong in what they are doing. But the U.S. Supreme Court may soon arrive at new standards for obscenity that could challenge these assumptions.
In Los Angeles, city attorneys are about to bring the first obscenity case since 1993 before a jury. "Somebody has to stand up for the community. I have to at least allow them to see this is what's going on," says deputy Los Angeles city attorney Deborah Sanchez. "Do you think that this is acceptable to your community? And if a jury tells me 'yes,' then so be it. If they tell me 'no,' then let's see where that really goes."

"American Porn" is a Frontline co-production with the Kirk Documentary Group. The producer and director is Michael Kirk. The co-producer is Jim Gilmore. The correspondent is Peter J. Boyer. The writers are Michael Kirk and Peter J. Boyer. Frontline is produced by WGBH Boston. Funding for Frontline is provided through the support of PBS viewers. National sponsorship is provided by EarthLink® and NPR ®. Frontline is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. The executive producer for Frontline is David Fanning.

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