Intellectual Property Law

Today?s Secret Word: Porno

By Deven Desai

Yes the favorite oddity of American culture is back and just in time for Halloween. We don’t mind ultra-violent films but say porno or show some nudity and it’s time to ban a film. First, note that part of the ad campaign for Zack and Miri Make a Porno have dropped the “Make a Porno” part of the title. Yes it is such a bad word. Now it seems that Larry Miller, owner of the Utah Jazz and the wildly cleverly named Megaplex Theaters has banned the film from his theater chain.

Fair enough. That is his choice. The odd part is that the chain has happily run Saw V “which features beheadings and explicit self-mutilation” and is “Rated R for sequences of grisly bloody violence and torture, language and brief nudity.” And runs Quarantine “Rated R for bloody violent and disturbing content, terror and language.”

Now suppose that the issue is, as claimed, that Porno has “‘graphic nudity and graphic sex’ and that it was ‘too close to an NC-17.’” How does one explain that Sex Drive, Rated R for strong crude and sexual content, nudity, language, some drug and alcohol use - all involving teens. is playing on a couple screens within the Megaplex chain?

It is perhaps one word, a five letter word, porno. AHHHH!!!!! RUN AWAY!! RUN AWAY!!!! The horror. The horror. Oh no that’s the porno. The porno.

Family Safe Media claims some rather wild numbers for the porn industry ($13.3 billion spent in the U.S. and $97 billion worldwide) and concludes “As you can probably see from reading the above statistics, it is important to have a complete Internet safety program in place consisting of an Internet filter and parental controls” which it happens to sell. Yet a Fox News story from 2007 claims that the U.S. porn industry had “Total revenue for 2006 … at an astounding $12.92 billion.” compared to $9 billion for “legitimate mainstream American cinema.”

With all that money being spent and all that media being consumed can just the word porno really cause such a stir? Apparently so.

Then again it may be that Kevin Smith just upsets folks. For some it is the subject matter of his films. For me, it is that some of his films are decent and some are rot. In fact, they’re all rubbish! That’s it! My theater chain hereby bans all Kevin Sm.. What? Oh the kids like his stuff? I don… Huh? He is doing a new movie called Jeb and Rebba Make a Gorno? Brief nudity and lots of dismemberment? All right. I kind of like that. Let’s run it on four screens.

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on October 31, 2008 (boomark / email).