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Defamer would like to take just a moment to salute a true American hero — a local filmmaker whose vision, dedication and utter depravity have resulted in some of the bravest and most honest films of our time. His name is Ira Isaacs; you may know him as the maker of such "shock art" (i.e. fetish porn) masterworks as Laurie's Toilet Show, Gang Bang Horse (Pony Sex Game) and Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7, and soon you may also know him as the man sent up the river in what Radar today describes as perhaps "the most extreme obscenity trial in U.S. history."

Correspondent Susannah Breslin has Isaacs' noble and only mildly revolting story via Q&A, hopefully in a disinfected room or on a phone with a condom pulled over it:


ISAACS: I was one of the first to do this. Getting actresses to participate in this art venture is not the easiest thing in the world. Picasso had problems as well. And [Marcel] Duchamp with the toilet [Urinal, a signed urinal exhibited in an art gallery]. [James Joyce's] Ulysses was up for obscenity. I felt like I'm never going to be a great musician, I'm never going to be a great oil painter. Here, I had a chance to shock a lot of people. My movies that I make, there's a lot contrast, there's a lot of social commentary. How people deal with taboos. How people see something so mundane. The contrast between feces and a beautiful girl. Good and evil. ...

RADAR: Were you worried about getting busted?

ISAACS: January 17 [2007], I'm going to my office in Koreatown, and there's 20 to 25 FBI agents. They're in my office. They're in my hallway. There's these two big guys. "Are you Mr. Isaacs?" they say. "Come with me." They walk me down the hallway, into my office. There's FBI all over the place. But I'll tell you, they were very, very pleasant people. They were really nice. Those guys would rather be fighting terrorism than being the sex police. The FBI guy was as curious as you are. He asked me, "Off the record," he asked me, "How do you convince girls to do this kind of stuff?" I said, "I do it very well."

Transfixed as we are by the concept of "good and evil" as represented by a dump on someone's face, we're afraid we must sit this trial out at risk of our own standards-and-practices violation and/or years of nightmares. You are in luck, though, dear reader, as indefatigable Huffington Post legal correspondent Allison Hope Weiner will be moving on to this shitty case upon the end of jury deliberations in the Anthony Pellicano trial. Good luck to Mr. Isaacs; may we never know first-hand what a true master he is.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]