Extreme Associates owner Rob Black (real name: Rob Zicari) is arguably the most controversial figure in a controversial industry.
    Bursting onto the scene in the mid 1990s with a crude, violent, ugly, highly irreverent, yet wildly wankable and critically acclaimed vision, this son of a Rochester, N.Y., adult bookstore owner stomped all over the norms of porn decorum by directing such Extreme Video/Elegant Angel titles as Fuck My Dirty Shit Hole, Sexual Atrocities and Moral Degeneration. The 20-something enfant terrible outraged more conservative elements in the industry when his Miscreants, featuring, among other charming scenes, the pseudo rape of a wheelchair-bound gimp, took home Best Director - Video honors at the AVN Awards in January 1998.
    Black (along with AVN Hall of Fame woodsman Tom Byron) soon thereafter acrimoniously parted ways with Elegant, and founded Extreme Associates, where he continued to aggressively push the edge of the adult envelope with productions like Fuck Pigs and Slap'er in the Crapper. In 1999, Black expanded his business interests beyond adult and founded the Xtreme Professional Wrestling League. The following year, for reasons known only to Black and his then-close associates, Extreme declared a propaganda "war" on AVN and much of the rest of the industry, leading the magazine to stop accepting Extreme ads and stop reviewing Extreme titles.
    In April 2003, federal agents raided the Extreme offices in North Hollywood and seized copies of four Extreme titles - Forced Entry, Cocktails 2, Extreme Teen 24 and Ass Clowns 3 - resulting in Black and his wife, Extreme director Lizzie Borden (her real name: Janet Romano) being indicted in August 2003 by a federal grand jury in Pittsburg, Pa. (where authorities acquired the titles from Extreme's Website in a mail-order sting), on 10 counts of distributing alleged obscene materials via the United States Postal Service and the Internet. If convicted at their pending trial - the first prosecution of a Porn Valley producer by Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department, one that is being closely scrutinized as a litmus test of sorts by both the adult industry and anti-porn groups - both face up to 50 years in prison and a $2.5 million fine. Extreme Associates, Inc. faces a possible additional $5 million fine and might have to forfeit its domain name (www.ExtremeAssociates.com).
    Black, however, is, as always, brimming with bravado - at least on the surface - and vows to beat the charges. And on another positive note, he and AVN have of late buried the hatchet, with Extreme ads already starting to appear in the magazine once again. On a personal level, Black, now 31, has a new maturity about him and says he's all but done with the XPW, a move that has enabled him to relocate his adult focus and concentrate on the re-birth of Extreme. Just as soon as the company starts releasing new titles, something it didn't do for much of 2003, they'll once again start being reviewed in these pages.
    AVN Managing Editor Mike Ramone, who's known Black since back in the day (and gave him his first AVN Editor's Choice for 1996's Shooting Gallery for Extreme/Elegant), recently interviewed him at the AVN offices. Wearing a Michael Vick jersey adorned with a huge gold crucifix (he apparently really has come a long way from the blasphemous Extreme title Ass Clowns, in which Kendra Jade rips pages out of a Bible and shoves them up her bum), he asked us which Rob Black we wanted to interview: the sanitized, ready-for-prime-time version who appeared on a recent 60 Minutes broadcast, or the foul-mouthed tell-it-like-it-is real thing. See if you can guess which one we went for.

    AVN: We're going to concentrate primarily on your case in this interview, but before that, I'd like to go back a couple of years. I just have to ask you, what was that whole b.s. "war" you declared on AVN about?
    Black: One of the things I could say is I think part of it, it's almost like the child actors, so to speak, they rise too fast, and I think, I got in the business when I was 20 years old, moved out from Rochester, New York from cleaning booths, to within eight months making $190,000 for Elegant Angel and it never slowed down from there and I think you feel, you start to feel invincible ... So I grew disenchanted with the business and ... I got fucking stupid and I got blinded and I let people, not influence me, but I got lost in the whole ego thing and in the arrogance thing and I felt I was so big that I didn't need anybody anymore and I didn't have to play by the rules of everybody else and I could bully people and just be an asshole.
    It's like an alcoholic when he hits rock bottom and when you've totally lost everything and you kind of look around and you're standing alone on the mountain top and then you examine your life and go, okay, what did I get out of this, what was this grand of plan that I achieved and I sat back and I said "Jesus Christ, I got nothing out of it."... For me to shit on people was a horrible thing, but I re-examined my life and I sat there and I said, these people supported me, these people were there for me, they helped me get where I got and like I said, I think a lot of people go through it. I think a lot of people go through it at a later age. I'm glad I went through it when I was 27, as opposed to being 39 and having a mid-life crisis.

    AVN: O.K., let's move on. It seems to me that maybe the reason you started to re-exam your life and figure out who your real friends were, was because of your legal troubles. Is that accurate?
    Black: No, because this started ... I was in the process of trying to make up with AVN before the legal problems started, which is documented.

    AVN: So what's the latest with your case?
    Black:Right now, there's no court hearing set. There's a pending motion to dismiss and the court has requested additional briefing by both Lou [Sirkin, Black's attorney] and the government as to what, if any, impact last spring's decision [by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in ACLU v. Ashcroft] has on the enforceability of federal obscenity cases. The ACLU case discusses the Internet as a "global community" and defining what is meant by viewing material as a whole when considering a Website. As a result of the pending motion and request for additional briefing, Lou believes the case will not go to trial until late spring or summer.

    AVN: He (Sirkin) could try to delay your case until after Bush is hopefully booted out of office.
    Black:Ultimately I guess that would be a win on a forfeit, but I honestly feel, and this is another one of those statements, I always felt that this was something that was going to happen ... I believe that every "X" amount of years, somebody has to stand up and fight for something, and I think this time around, it is I, and I really don't think there could have been a better person to fight this war, because anybody else would have already copped a plea three fucking months ago and done away with it ... Lou has said to me that this business is divided right now ... I've gotten calls from very big distributors who have donated stuff and other company owners who've been very supportive, to the other side of people that are blind to the whole subject and they honestly, in their own world think, "Well, they're only going to go after Zicari, and after that, everything's going to be good." And this business is divided of people who say, "Because we don't do those types of movies...we're not going to be touched," and what they seem to forget is we're dealing with an administration, that I've said it before, they do not like adult material. They don't sit down and [differentiate between hard-edged material and more couples-oriented fare].

    AVN: I don't know if that's the case. I read a lot about this and the U.S. Attorney has said, "We're just going after the most egregious kind of material."
    Black: Okay, let me ask you a question. Where does it stop? Where does it stop and can you honestly sit there as a reviewer of AVN and say my stuff is the most egregious?

    AVN: Oh, absolutely [laughs].
    Black: You can say my stuff is the most egregious?

    AVN: I love your stuff. You know that.
    Black: But the most egregious? We're talking about ... one fucking movie, we're talking about Forced Entry... and people like to go, "Oh, it's a rape movie." And let me tell you something ... Forced Entry has a beginning, a middle and an end. A movie that is based around a copycat serial killer of the Night Stalker ... Nobody can catch him and he eventually gets caught by a group of citizens who beat him and murder him in a fit. If you're telling me that's not a plot, as opposed to other companies ... There are other companies that have movies where it's just a five-scene vignette, not even a vignette. Guys are where ... they'll just fuck, in the bedroom where five guys cum in a girl's asshole. She squeezes it out into another girl's mouth. She drinks it. If that is not fucking egregious and disgusting and fucking revolting, I don't know what is ... I don't have harder like that. I have a couple of movies that are on the edge ... that are thought provoking.

    AVN: You go to virtually any mainstream movie, you've got rape scenes much more intense, you've got murder, right?
    Black: Horrible, horrible.

    AVN: Let me ask you, were you indicating a few minutes ago, that in your defense, you're not going to present a comparative type of argument?
    Black:Oh no, what our defense is that they're movies, comparative. I don't want to be compared to the other porn in the business. The comparative is let's be a comparative of what's at your local Tower Records [such as] I Spit on Your Grave, which is a cult, cult classic. Some people are educated enough, some people are overly educated, some people never heard or have heard of the Marquis de Sade. You can go into any store and grab the Days of Sodom and you go to Borders as a 15 year old kid and purchase this book, and this book is about dignitaries that basically kidnap a bunch of underage kids, boys and girls, hold them hostage in a house and perform unthinkable sex acts with them, make them eat feces, drink urine and at the end they have sex with them while they're cutting off their body parts. That is a book that is a classic, okay? That is a book; they made that into a fucking movie. [Acclaimed Italian director Pier Paolo] Passolini made that into a movie, which is somewhat simulated, but I'll tell you, there's nothing more, I find, disgusting - I'm not going to say obscene - disgusting that makes my head turn, when, as the banquet scene unfolds, in this movie, where these butlers wheel out a giant, seeping, buffet of shit and everybody eats this shit, that, that is, now that's a fucking comparable, that is a movie that people will say, "Oh you gotta see it." ... I tell you something, if you're going to go after me, and really the basis is, it's a content issue, that's all it is. It's on content and if you really go after that, then why don't you go after, there's a movie called L.I.E, it's a little independent movie that won at the Sundance Film Festival. The actor in it is a mainstream actor. Basically what it's about is the guy is a pedophile and he befriends young boys who don't have families and stuff and fucks them and this is a movie I bought at Best Buy. And it's basically about this guy who befriends this kid and whose parents are bad and he has the kid and he watches the kid, he nurtures the kid. The fabric of the movie is that he never has sex with the kid, even though he wants to. And a young hustler kid that had slept with the old guy eventually kills him at the end.

    AVN: The point being of course that ...
    Black: Point being there's a movie about fucking homosexuality, pedophilia and now if you sit back and go, "It's a horrible subject matter, that's a horrible fucking subject matter, why did mainstream society make a movie about that?"

    AVN: Basically your defense is going to be the community standards argument is ...
    Black:What is a community? The question is, what is a community?...The Internet community involves the entire world, okay, that is what that issue is. But let's dip back to the community of just the basic tapes. Other people have decided back when these rules were made in the 70's, they didn't have DVDs, they didn't have ...VCRs, what they had was these adult book stores, the kind that my dad [Dominic Zicari] started around the corner in Rochester [New York]... and that's why the law was established. This law was established to keep these things away from your neighborhood. That was the community. They didn't envision video tapes, they didn't envision DVDs, the didn't envision you going and purchasing by the mail, watching it in the privacy of your home and not one of your neighbors ever finds out about it. And that rule - it's going to be challenged now - this is going to be the big "put up or shut up" because when we beat this, there will be no more of these standards. We are gonna change it and I think it's slowly been changed from the sodomy law that the Supreme Court [overturned], a lot of these things, but the community, you've got to define what the community is and you have to define the material and how you purchased it in the community and not one of these tapes were purchased in the God damn store in someone's community...

    AVN: Let me ask you, why do you think they indicted you as opposed to someone else?
    Black:Well, it depends which story you listen to. If you listen to certain stories, because of the PBS Frontline [broadcast], if you read one of the government search warrants ... it says in there "Robert Zicari went on PBS Frontline and challenged General Ashcroft and said there was nothing they could do about his movies." I read the transcripts. I did not challenge them. I said I would defend our product and I would welcome, if they came in, I would welcome them ... but I didn't sit there and look at the camera and say "I'm going to get you Ashcroft, come on."

    AVN: I saw at least one statement on your Website, basically daring him ...
    Black: But that was after ... they're saying PBS, but after the PBS thing started rolling and all the controversy, that's when I came out and said, "Well, fuck it, if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, you know?"

    AVN: Any regrets you made those statements?
    Black: No, because again it goes into the whole state aspect of, and do I really think that if I didn't say those things, would they have not come?... And it is so easy to go after anybody in this business, so to say that they wouldn't have come down if it wasn't for me, is just cop out bullshit and the people that believe that are fucking delusional ... And the flip of that is that people honestly think that if I get convicted, then there's going to be no more prosecutions in our business? It's all gone, it's all done, me? Once they get the big, bad Rob Zicari, then it's all done, nope nobody else is ... I mean come on, do people honestly fucking believe that? If they believe that, they've got to be the stupidest fucking people on the face of the earth."

    AVN: You do realize that there are some people in the industry who wouldn't exactly shed any tears if you were convicted, right?
    Black: Of course not, of course not and some of it I've brought on myself for being an asshole to people and quite frankly some of it, not being an asshole to people, just people being jealous.

- Mike Ramone

    Next month: the conclusion. Black discusses the impact of his case on Extreme, the re-birth of his company, his porn-viewing habits, what he would really like to do in life and much more.