Word: porn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some of the skits are lamer: a kiddie show where the clown host reads the little ones porn, or a windy send-up of a typical series called "The Dealers," which has to do with the abortively comic exploits of a couple of hard-luck traffickers in grass. But overall the movie maintains high energy. There is one scene of true inspiration. At the end of the 6 o'clock news, the anchor man signs off and sits staring, smile firmly fixed, waiting for the fadeout and credits. Nothing happens. Soon the smile begins to stiffen at the edges...
This time Justice Rehnquist tried again to make the high court's definition of hard-core porn sharp and clear. Communities, he repeated, can prosecute "representations or descriptions of ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, [or] masturbation, excretory functions and lewd exhibition of the genitals...
Echoing Brennan. Some publishers and movie officials felt the decision might help force porn-hunting prosecutors to distinguish between purple movies and publications and those that are merely blue. The ruling, said Film Industry Spokesman Jack Valenti, had strengthened "the freedom of the film maker to tell an honest story without hard-core pornography." Others were less enthusiastic. Echoing Justice Brennan, Playboy Enterprises' Robert A. Gutwillig complained that Carnal Knowledge was "a pitching back to the case-by-case review. The court is saying we don't know what it [pornography] is, but we'll know...
...court did indeed see hard-core porn in a companion case. As if to emphasize that they had not really gone soft on obscenity, the Justices upheld the conviction of William Hamling and five other defendants from the Los Angeles area for mailing some 55,000 copies of an advertisement for The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The obscene ad included pictures "portraying heterosexual and homosexual intercourse, sodomy and a variety of deviate sexual acts...
...Beyond the legal confusion, some credit the failure of the porn crackdown to the quiet spread of a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward pornography below the level of judges and prosecutors. It may well be that both the Supreme Court and its critics have lagged behind the country. The national mood could be pointing to an uncensored future, envisioned by Justice Brennan, in which consenting adults will be free to decide for themselves what they will read...