AN UNEASY PEACE; VALLEY'S PORN INDUSTRY THRIVES - QUIETLY.

Byline: Reed Johnson 

Russell Hampshire makes a good living from movies like ``New Wave Hookers 4'' and ``Biggest One I Ever Saw'' but he sees himself as ``just an average guy,'' an unassuming Valley businessman quietly tending his piece of the American Dream.

He reads the Wall Street Journal religiously. Fusses over his prized rose bushes. Cheers like a lunatic at his teen-age son's soccer games. Plays a bit of golf on weekends or goes bowling with his wife, Betsy.

Few of his neighbors suspect that Hampshire, 51, maintains this cozy, conventional San Fernando Valley lifestyle courtesy of VCA Labs Inc., his state-of-the-art adult video production company. In the late 1970s, Hampshire operated out of a cramped Hollywood storefront, perpetually on the lookout for aggressive vice squad detectives.

Today, he presides over a smoothly efficient enterprise with annual sales of $15 million, making VCA one of the world's top purveyors of glossy, boutique erotica.

That Hampshire and scores of other X-rated entrepreneurs can operate freely and openly, without fear of crusading evangelists or marauding FBI agents, is a sign of how an uneasy peace has evolved between mainstream society and the $4.2 billion U.S. adult film and video industry - its heaving epicenter in the San Fernando Valley.

A decade after Attorney General Edwin Meese III's Commission on Pornography issued its controversial report and a federal crackdown sent several leading porn producers and manufacturers (including Hampshire) to jail, the Valley has reluctantly learned to live with an undesirable industry that employs thousands and brings in millions in profits.

With the Clinton administration focusing on child rather than adult porn, and makers of adult films knowing exactly how far they can push the limits of public tolerance, pornography has left the back alleys of American popular culture and permeated its mainstream.

That's been an economic boon for the Valley, home to an estimated 60 percent of L.A. County's 152 hard-core adult film and video producers, manufacturers and distributors. Today, even some of the industry's fiercest opponents concede that pornographers no longer skulk in the shadows, as they once did.

Instead, prosperous suburban conformity is fast becoming business-as-usual for many of those who profit from L.A.'s ``other'' film industry - the one stretching 30 miles from Calabasas to La Canada Flintridge.

``The pornographers are getting bigger, and they act like they don't have a problem,'' says Patrick Trueman, former chief of the U.S. Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity section under President Bush and now director of government affairs for the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association.

``I've driven through the Valley. If you go out there today, they run their business just like any other business.''

Worst-kept secret

Surely the Valley's all-time worst-kept secret, the adult film and video industry has been part of the cultural landscape since the early 1970s, when adult-film makers and magazine publishers began moving out of New York City in search of lower rents, balmier climes and a ready-made pool of performers.

Last year, according to the Van Nuys-based trade journal Adult Video News, an estimated 7,970 hard-core adult video titles were released in the United States, up from 7,852 in 1996. (Hollywood's major studios, by comparison, released 231 feature films last year.) Of that total, about 80 percent were written, cast, shot, edited, soundtracked, duplicated and boxed in the Valley.

``If you want to be in the business, the Valley's the place to be,'' says Paul Little, a k a Max Hardcore, 40, an actor/filmmaker formerly based in Burbank and now operating out of a leased stucco mansion above the Foothill Freeway.

To many Valley residents, the adult industry still exists in a kind of '70s alternative reality of cocaine parties, hot tub orgies and Cosa Nostra thugs.

To those who argue that pornography promotes rape, prostitution and domestic violence, those perceptions are more than just cultural cliches.

Yet today's industry is far less isolated and shunned than it was in the ``Boogie Nights'' era, when movies like ``Deep Throat'' and ``Behind the Green Door'' were stomping on taboos and shattering free-speech limits. After 30 years of police raids, picket lines and political skirmishes, the Valley and its strange alter-ego have entered a phase of uneasy coexistence, based on mutual profitability and a sort of ``don't ask, don't tell'' philosophy.

``This is not a business that I hold in high regard in terms of its contribution to society or lack thereof, but it's a legal, legitimate business according to our existing laws,'' says Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick of Reseda.

``These businesses are unobtrusive, you don't know that they're there, and they're producing a product that's seen in the privacy of people's homes, and people view these videos voluntarily. There are no negative impacts on surrounding communities.''

Capt. Robert Ruchhoft, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's Organized Crime and Vice Unit, says the adult industry learned a valuable lesson from the federal sting operations of the early 1990s. So long as they steer clear of child pornography, bestiality, sadomasochism and other extreme predilections, pornographers know they can make millions - peacefully and legally.

``It's pretty obvious to anybody in the industry what's legal and what isn't. They read court decisions just like anybody else, and they have legal advisers,'' Ruchhoft says.

``It seems as though we've reached a point where society has decided we have to live with a certain amount of that stuff. It's there if you want it and if you don't want it you don't have to have it; nobody's shoving it down your throat. I think that's kind of the best of both worlds, given all of the things that play into this. We can't just go out and summarily decide what's pornographic.''

Economic clout

As the Valley's legal scrutiny of porn has diminished, its economic co-dependency has soared. Pornographers help support dozens of small and mid-sized Valley businesses, from editing labs and video box designers to toy manufacturers who make vibrators and blow-up dolls.

``There are thousands and thousands of people employed by these companies,'' says Paul Fishbein, publisher of Adult Video News. ``They pay rent, they use banks, they use UPS, they use printers, duplicators. They use the same tape services that (Hollywood) uses.''

Some law enforcement officials and entertainment analysts challenge the adult industry's figures, saying it's difficult to prove numbers like AVN's reported total of 697 million adult video rentals last year. But no one questions that the sums involved are enormous, and the Valley is pocketing the lion's share.

Filmmaker Paul Little estimates he spends about $225,000 a year, mostly in the Valley, on tape stock, cameras, darkrooms, editing labs and other tools of the trade. Taking his cue from Madison Avenue and Hollywood, Little publishes his own newsletter (``The Max Report''), regularly attends the Cannes Film Festival, talks knowingly about overseas marketing rights, and plans to reissue his brutally explicit, cinema verite-style videos every five years - ``just like Disney.''

Throughout its flamboyant, cocaine-snorting adolescence, the adult industry was constantly reeling from scandal. The infamous 1981 Laurel Canyon murders, in which the late porn king John C. Holmes was tried but not convicted, left a permanent black eye. Then in 1986 the industry was rocked by revelations that sex star Traci Lords launched her prolific career as a minor.

These days pornographers seldom make the crime blotter, so long as they stay out of eyesight and earshot. In February 1996, the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office brought misdemeanor charges against eight actors and a director for allegedly shooting an adult video in a backyard swimming pool within view of an Encino day-care center. But the charges ultimately were dropped, and such incidents have grown rare as pornographers have adopted lower profiles.

``Usually, the responsible producers, they try and keep it very low-key. They don't want to offend the neighbors,'' says Michael Bobenko, senior vice president of operations for the Entertainment Industry Development Corp./Los Angeles Film Office, a private, nonprofit corporation under contract with the city and county to issue filmmaking permits.

Contrary to Hefneresque legend, today's porn executives lead relatively unglamorous lives. Hampshire owns no bunny-strewn mansion, no underground Jacuzzi. His interests include collecting autographed sports jerseys and presidential signatures, which he uses to decorate his Chatsworth offices.

Making the rounds in his usual attire of Hawaiian shirt, shorts and running shoes, Hampshire stops to banter with some of his 120 full-time employees. Most earn ``anywhere from six bucks an hour to 100 grand a year,'' he boasts, plus full medical and dental benefits. Hampshire also donates thousands of dollars' worth of free video equipment to Valley charities and schools.

``People's conception out there is that we're running around and fornicating on the floor. Look around you,'' Hampshire says, indicating the plush office furniture and Apple computers plastered with snapshots of secretaries' grandchildren. Beyond the pastel walls, in another part of the 40,000-square-foot warehouse, two bored-looking male technicians monitor half a dozen video duplicators, while a falsetto chorus of moans rises above the clattering conveyor belts.

``We try to keep to ourselves, pay our employees, make a living,'' Hampshire says.

In recent years, law enforcement officials say, organized crime has loosened its grip on the adult industry, opening the field to venture capitalists like Hampshire, a former registered Republican. Politically speaking, pornographers today are more likely to be libertarians than liberals: They distrust government, hate regulation and firmly believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of wealth.

``When I got in the business in the '70s, it was run by the mob. I don't think that's a big secret. And I'm glad they were involved,'' says ``Miss'' Sharon Mitchell, star of some 2,000 hard-core films and videos since 1973.

``Now they (the mob) aren't involved, nobody cares, and we all pay taxes,'' says the 40-year-old Encino resident, one of a small but growing number of female porn stars who've recently begun directing adult videos. She also counsels adult actors about drug addiction and AIDS prevention, having recently kicked her own 16-year heroin habit.

A shaky passport

For those working on the other side of the camera, the adult industry remains a shaky passport at best to the middle class. As in Hollywood, the genuine superstars are few and the struggling bit players many. Many adult actors tend to be refugees from the margins of the new ``service economy.''

``It was either (nude) dancing or welfare, and I was working full time for a living and still couldn't make ends meet,'' says Ericka, explaining how she made the transition from Michigan waitress to adult film performer. A single mother of two, she now earns twice as much doing porn shoots as she formerly made waiting tables.

Yet those who are lucky, smart, or ruthless enough to survive the industry's Darwinian rigors have begun to blend in with their Valley neighbors.

``We have become so legitimate that it's unbelievable,'' declares Jim South, a laconic Texan whose 21-year-old World Modeling Agency in Sherman Oaks serves as a kind of X-rated Ellis Island for the hundreds of women and men lured West by dreams of fast bucks and full-frontal celebrity.

``John Q. Public thinks we're all such dirt bags, that we beat our wives and have sex with our children. We're just like you,'' South says.

He has a point. South makes his home with his wife and two sons in the staunchly unrisque community of Thousand Oaks, in a Spanish-style house with a pool, and commutes to work in a '91 GMC van.

No scarlet letters

As pop culture gradually raises the threshold of what public opinion deems morally acceptable, hard-core porn has begun to merge with the raunchy cacophony of gangsta rap, ``Married . . . With Children,'' Howard Stern monologues, Hooters restaurants, Victoria's Secret catalogs, ``presidential kneepad'' jokes and whatever else passes for cultural normalcy in the smog-filtered sunset of the late 20th century.

In Los Angeles, where identity may be only airbrush-deep, it's not always easy to tell the ``legitimate'' actor/model from the aspiring triple-X stud or starlet. Who's that guy with the electronic pager and the million-dollar tan standing next to you in the Ralphs checkout line: a BMW-driving studio hotshot, or a jeep-driving ``gonzo'' porn maker?

``They're not making these porn movies in the middle of a public street, and there are a lot of very good-looking guys and women in Los Angeles,'' observes Robert W. Peters, president of the Manhattan-based anti-porn group Morality in Media. ``So unless the porn stars and starlets are hanging a scarlet letter around their necks, I don't know how the average person would know.''

While porn's enemies pray for a religious revival or a renewed legal crackdown, some believe the industry has become its own worst enemy.

``There's way too much supply,'' grumbles Hampshire. ``When I first got in there were 200 films released a year. Last year there were seven or eight thousand. So you figure it out.''

Others contend that the industry's creeping ``normalization'' only proves what its critics have argued all along: That pornographers are far less motivated by radical free speech and erotic self-expression than by plain old greed.

William Margold, 54, a former adult performer and now the industry's oft-quoted unofficial historian, thinks the industry may be doomed to collapse from its own excesses.

``I've suggested that the San Fernando Valley is the La Brea Tar Pits of the industry, and we've gone there to die,'' he says. ``We're dinosaurs, and maybe out of that death will come the birth of a new industry.''

For now, the Valley is putting up with porn - though a few dissenting voices can be heard above the steady ka-ching! of cash registers.

``Slavery was normalized at one time. Women not being able to vote was absolutely normal. That didn't make it right,'' says the Rev. John Houghton, a pastor at Church on the Way in Van Nuys.

``We're basically saying we don't know how to change this (pornography), so let's just take away the feeling that this is bad. Let's just call it good. But that doesn't make it good for you, anymore than saying, Now you can have all the cocaine you want.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1) Jim South examines photographs of adult film actress Nikki Neals.

(2) Sex star Sharon Mitchell has appeared in approximately 2,000 hard-core films since 1973. The 40-year-old Encino resident recently started directing.

(3) Porn veteran Jim South heads Van Nuys' World Modeling Agency.

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News