Page 32 - AVN June 2013

Who's Who.06.13 5/20/13 6:09 PM Page 32
ADUL T WHO’S WHO
eases
IN MEMORIAM
E Ed dw wa ar 1 19 rd 92 d d 27 7- de -2 e G Gr 20 01 ra 13 3
az zi ia a, ,
ATTORNEY LED THE FIGHT AGAINST
CENSORSHIP FOR FIVE DECADES
Edward de Grazia, a tireless fighter for free speech and
author of several books about censorship and the law, died
April 11 at his home in Potomac at the age of 86, reportedly
due to complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
De Grazia was a great believer in education, and taught for
30 years at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, named
after the former Supreme Court justice who, along with Justices Louis Brandeis and
Harlan Fiske Stone, was one of the “Three Musketeers” of liberalism on the high court in
the mid-1930s. Following their lead, de Grazia described his work as defending “morally
defiant artists” against “reactionary politicians and judges.”
De Grazia had several run-ins with then-Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who
M Mo or 1 19 rt ty 93 y G Go 36 6- -2 or 20 rd 01 do on 13 3
n, ,
FOUNDED FETISH MOVIE COMPANY BIZARRE VIDEO IN 1985
Morty Gordon, the founder of Bizarre Video, passed away April 12 at age 76. Gordon,
who was born May 2, 1936, was retired
and living in Florida, and had in recent
years been plagued with health prob-
lems. According to Gordon’s former
office manager, Paula Rein, he suffered
a heart attack and died quickly.
Gordon started Bizarre Video in 1985 in his native New York, and it remained
there until 2004. Rein recalled working for Gordon in early 1992, when Bizarre
Video was based in the same building on Jay Street in Brooklyn, New York, with
Teddy Rothstein’s Star Distribution and the novelty company Nasstoys of New York.
The three companies spend about 15 years in the same building.
attempted to prevent the mailing of such books as Voltaire’s Candide, Mark Twain’s Tom
Sawyer, and even Greek philosopher Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, claiming that those and
many other works were “obscene” under the 1873 Comstock Act.
Later in his career, he spent many months getting such now-recognized classics as
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch freed from judi-
cial orders banning the titles. In the Tropic of Cancer case, he argued for its artistic worth
(and the worthiness of its publisher, Grove Press) all the way up to the U.S. Supreme
Court. De Grazia later represented Grove when it attempted to distribute the erotic
Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) in the U.S., again representing the film and its distrib-
utor in the Supreme Court.
But surely one of de Grazia’s most important achievements was the publication, in
1991, of his wide-ranging history of censorship, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of
Rein recalled that when she first applied for the job, she had no idea about the
position or the company. When she showed up, the office was empty save for one
employee: Keith Gordon, Morty’s son.
Keith Gordon reminisced about his father’s role in the history of the adult industry.
A lot of people, he said, do not understand the challenges that faced pioneers like
Morty Gordon. “They don’t realize what people had to go through,” Keith said,
explaining that his father was often accused of releasing material that was “immoral
and obscene.” And his father would ask, “Why is it obscene?”
“We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending these movies,” the younger
Gordon said. His father would say, “I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not breaking
the law.” At the time, most fetish movies didn’t even involve explicit sexual activity.
Keith Gordon got involved in the family business around 1991. First his father
Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. The book takes its title from the testimony of Jane
Heap when she and her partner/lover, Margaret Anderson, were put on trial for having
published excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses in their literary magazine The Little Review.
Prosecutors had attempted to prove that one section of Ulysses, where the protagonist
Leopold Bloom observes some young women lying back on the grass, exposing their
undies and bare skin, was obscene. When questioned about the passage, Heap replied,
“Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean
back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breath-
less bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things every-
where—seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom—and no one is corrupted.”
Sadly, the pair were convicted—and fined $100 and forced to cease serializing Joyce’s
novel, which is now considered a modern masterpiece—a widely held opinion that de
Grazia explores in depth in his book, which after the Little Review case proceeds to cover
censorship prosecutions and defenses all the way up to Karen Finley’s erotic stage perform-
ances in the late 1980s, describing and analyzing each in a way that showed that de Grazia
clearly loved his subject matter.
Almost as important—and possibly more so for legal scholars—was his publication in
1969 of Censorship Landmarks, which reprints legal decisions in censorship cases begin-
ning in 1663 with Le Roi (“The King”) v. Sidley, an early French profanity case, through
1968’s United States v. A Motion Picture Film Entitled “I Am Curious—Yellow,” and cover-
ing approximately 200 cases in between.
De Grazia is one of the unsung heroes of freedom of sexual speech, and deserves his
place in the adult entertainment hall of fame.
taught him how to sell. “Then he taught me how to film a movie and edit a movie.
And then he taught me foreign rights and cable rights. … He sent to me to Europe,
Australia, Africa—I have friends all over the world because of this business.”
At one point, Gordon recalled, he convinced Playboy to put Bizarre Video movies
on TV. “My father was so excited,” Gordon said. “We made an impact. … We were
the largest fetish company in the world. We had over 1,200 titles.
“Nobody in the entire adult industry disliked my dad. He was a little wild, eccentric
reclusive at times,” Keith said, but he “had a phenomenal reputation.”
One filmmaker who agrees with that assessment is director Ernest Greene, who
shot more than 100 movies for Bizarre, though after the elder Gordon had retired.
“I never worked directly for Morty; he was already kind of out of the picture,”
Greene said. “I would say overall, though, that as a company, as a group of people, as a
family, they were fun to work for. I miss them. I liked them. Morty and I met on a
number of occasions, socially and professionally. I would say he was a colorful character,
very much of the ‘old school.’ His passing is yet another marker of generational change.”
Another adult industry leader who knew the Bizarre Video founder well was Elliott
Schwartz of Nasstoys, who grew up with Gordon. “I knew Morty from Nasswalk, a
street in Coney Island,” Schwartz recalled. “Morty knew me when I was born. … He
had such a good heart. He was very unique. He was a good friend for a long time.”
Schwartz said, “I shared an office with him for five years. He was the craziest and
most generous person I ever knew. There will never be another Morty Gordon again.”
Gordon leaves behind his longtime girlfriend, Naomi; children Keith Gordon and Ellen
Fiore; and grandchildren Joseph and T ara Fiore, and Kimberly and Brittany Gordon.
K Ki in nk ky y H Ho or rr ro or r D Di ir re ec ct to or r J Je es ss s F Fr ra an nc co o D De ea ad d F Fo ol ll lo ow wi in ng g S St tr ro ok ke e
Jesus ‘Jess’ Franco, a veteran director of more than 180 horror, “cult” and softcore adult films, died at the age of 82 after suffering a stroke at his home in Malaga.
Born in 1930, Franco was a child prodigy, having begun composing music at the age of 6, an interest he followed through most of his youth. He later branched out to become a
popular novelist, and then began studying filmmaking at the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematograicas, and later at the University of Paris (aka the Sorbonne) in
France.
As an adult, Franco got work at Agata Films S.A. in Bologna as a screenwriter and production assistant, and he began directing in 1959 with his debut work, We Are 18 Years Old,
a comedy involving two teenage girls on vacation. Franco continued making movies, including several horror films such as The Awful Dr. Orloff, and softcore sexually oriented fea-
tures such as Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party (whose musical score, composed in part by Franco, became a Top 10 hit in Europe in the ‘90s)—all the while avoiding the
authoritarian censorship instituted under Generalissimo Francisco Franco (no relation), which lasted until the dictator’s death in 1975.
Over the course of his career, Franco was able to work with some of Europe’s top actors, including Christopher Lee, who starred in Franco’s Count Dracula, and Klaus Kinski,
who starred in Venus in Furs along with Maria Rohm, who graced about a dozen Franco films. His wife also acted in many of his films until her death in February 2012.
Franco remained an active director until his death, with his latest feature, Al Periera Vs. The Alligator Women, opening in Spain just last month.
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