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'Japanese Doggie 3 Way' Producer Sentenced To 4 Years In Prison In Obscenity Case
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The Hollywood fetish filmmaker and self-proclaimed "shock artist" Ira Isaacs has been sentenced to four years in prison in a long-running federal obscenity case that ended in mistrial twice before he was convicted.Isaacs, 62, was convicted of violating federal obscenity laws for his films depicting bestiality and fetishes that involved poop and bestiality last April. The film titles involved give you an idea of the subject matter: "Mako's First Time Scat" and two volumes of "Hollywood Scat Amateurs" and "Japanese Doggie 3 Way." A local jury convicted Isaacs of five counts related to the production, sales and shipping of the films.
U.S. District Judge George H. King ordered Isaacs to pay about $11,000 in fines, and serve four years in prison, according to City News Service. Isaacs will also be subject to three years of supervision after he leaves prison.
Isaacs was indicted during the Bush administration by a task force to crack down on smut. The unit no longer exists, according to the Associated Press. The first trial against Isaacs ended in a mistrial when a judge in the case recused himself. Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, had some indecent photos with some bestiality themes on his own personal website. The second trial ended in a mistrial when the panel voted 10-2 in favor of conviction.
The jurors in the third trial were shown four films, and they convicted him.
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The anti-porn group Morality in the Media praised the ruling in a statement and called on the Obama Administration to strictly enforce federal morality laws (something Mitt Romney would likely have continued). The group's president Patrick A. Trueman said in a statement: "U.S. District Judge George King, a Clinton appointee to the federal bench, is to be praised for understanding what the Obama Justice Department fails to see - that the sexual exploitation of women by the porn industry is a serious crime."
Susannah Breslin interviewed Isaacs for Radar Online to ask him about his "art" (via Boing Boing). This is what he told her:
What is art? Art is what artists do. If it shocks you, it's art. One of the things art should do is make you think and question things. Shock art has always been something that has been a very popular thing through the 20th century and the 21st century. People used feces as shock art. There was a guy who shit in a can and sold it for the price of gold. [In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni canned his feces in 90 tins and sold them for the price of their weight in gold.] So, the Internet allowed me to be an artist, to reach a lot of people. It allowed me to be on the edge, to do what I would never do as a fine artist. If you're going to paint, you've got to compete with Picasso. If you want to write a great classical music piece, you're competing with Mozart. I would never write anything like Kafka's The Trial. If I was going to make a mark, I was going to do it in some extreme shock way.
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