Adult Movie Theatres in Memphis

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The government picked the jury pool first

By the mid-1970s Deep Throat had become the most profitable and most notorious film of its kind ever made. The federal response was not to prosecute where it was playing. It was to find somewhere the case could be won.

They chose Memphis, described at the time as the buckle on the Bible Belt, and the case was led by Larry Parrish, an assistant US attorney of thirty-two, a father of three and an elder of the First Evangelical Church. The film was not showing in the city. That was the point.

The charge was conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines, which let the government reach anyone who had touched the film anywhere. More than sixty people and companies were caught up in the Memphis cases. Harry Reems, who had acted in it, was arrested by the FBI in New York in 1974, indicted in Memphis in June 1975, and convicted in April 1976 alongside eleven other people and four corporations.

His lawyers made the point that stuck: he was the first actor in the United States prosecuted by the federal government purely for appearing in a film. He had been paid a few hundred dollars for a week’s work in Florida four years earlier and had nothing to do with distributing it. Reems called it forum shopping, which is exactly what it was.

Alan Dershowitz took the appeal and the conviction was overturned within a year. The reason was technical and telling: the case had been run on the obscenity standard set in Miller v. California in 1973, and the film was made in 1972. The government had tried him under a rule that did not exist when he did the work.

It did not need to win. Sixty defendants, federal charges and years of legal costs were the deterrent, whatever the verdicts. Read the other pages on this site and you will find the same method in Cincinnati, where an art gallery was acquitted and still paid over $200,000 to get there.