04/21/04

LC040421

This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City
of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

The former porn star who's out to protect workers who have no
union, no residuals and no healthcare.

Sharon Mitchell>> Service is service. You help people out
where you can, when you can. You apply what you've learned and
give back in life because I'm a former porn star that wants to
go to heaven too.

Val>> And then, he's called The Greatest and we'll meet the man
who's his best friend and who's captured is triumphs over the
years.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Whether you hate it or accept it, pornography is big
business and it's centered in the San Fernando Valley, so when
news came that two adult film stars had tested positive for HIV,
that sent shudders through this multi-billion dollar industry.
Healthcare in the porn industry has always been a concern, but
we met one woman, a former adult film star, who has made it her
mission to make sure that her colleagues are safe from AIDS.

>> "Now go on. Go find your Romeo (laughter)."

Saul Gonzalez>> It's a Monday afternoon on a soundstage in the
San Fernando Valley and cast and crew are working to complete a
pornographic movie. When finished, it will be just one of over
ten thousand such adult films released in the United States
every year. While the cameras roll on set, performers backstage
are getting safe sex counseling from Sharon Mitchell, a leading
lady of adult films turned public health crusader on behalf of
sex workers.

Sharon Mitchell>> And these are the crown condoms that you
can't see on video. I understand that this may not look like
the stellar place to be of service, but you know what? Service
is service. You help people out where you can, when you can.
You apply what you've learned and give back in life, because I'm
a former porn star that wants to go to heaven too.

Saul Gonzalez>> The unabashedly flamboyant Mitchell is the
founder of one of America's most unusual healthcare clinics,
Sherman Oaks-based Adult Industry Medical, or AIM. It's a
clinic whose clientele is made up exclusively of Los Angeles's
growing population of sex workers.

Sharon Mitchell>> You got nice good blood flow today.

>> Oh, don't mind me. I'm just going to look away.

Sharon Mitchell>> Oh, I don't blame you. It's okay. We do the
HIV testing, STD testing, GYN services, counseling, we do drug
and alcohol counseling, we do psychiatric assessment. We can't
motivate people to get in or get out of the business, but what
we can do is provide enough education and enough background of
those that have been there to help people make healthy choices.

Saul Gonzalez>> In an industry where compassion can be as thin
as the plot lines of its movies, Sharon Mitchell is seen by
performers as their guardian angel and her clinic a sanctuary.

McKayla>> It's not like going to a regular medical doctor,
because you walk in and you're fine because everybody else is
just like you. Nobody's looking down on you. Nobody is looking
at you like, oh, yeah, she's the so-so, you know?

Saul Gonzalez>> Mitchell, who's appeared in over two thousand
adult films since the mid-1970's, started AIM after experiencing
a kind of porn mid-life crisis.

Sharon Mitchell>> At some point, it hit me that I'd been known
for spreading my legs for almost a quarter of a century and I
didn't know how to amass any skills to ensure the rest of my
life. It was really sad. It was really sad.

Saul Gonzalez>> So Mitchell went back to school and got a
degree in AIDS and drug counseling. With funding from adult
filmmakers, she opened her clinic's doors in 1998.

Sharon Mitchell>> It became real clear. All of my pain, I can
apply here and give back to others. It's redemption for me.

Saul Gonzalez>> AIDS testing and education are at the center of
AIM's work. Under voluntary industry standards, over four
hundred performers are tested here once a month. Results are
received back in less than twenty-four hours. Individuals that
test negative receive documentation proving that they are virus-
free. It's paperwork that's increasingly required by major
adult film companies before filming of sex scenes begins.

These precautions were put into place after five adult film
performers were infected by AIDS in 1997. Despite such
incidents, Mitchell says far too many sex workers are unwilling
to admit that HIV is an on-the-job risk.

Sharon Mitchell>> Denial is rampant about HIV. No one wants to
believe it's going to happen to them and no one wants to take a
look at what's going on. No one wants to say, "I'm in a real
high-risk category here." No one wants to think about it.

Saul Gonzalez>> If a performer does test positive for the virus
through AIM, the clinic will put out an industry-wide alert and
place the individual on a sexual quarantine list, effectively
ending that person's on-camera career.

Dr. Steven York>> Most consents for HIV in California state
that there will be extreme secrecy with the results. Our
consent says right up front that if you are positive, we are
going to tell every relevant member of the industry who needs to
know.

Saul Gonzalez>> Physician, Steven York, is AIM's medical
director. He says if the adult entertainment industry were to
let down its guard, the AIDS virus could spread like a prairie
fire through the community of performers.

Dr. Steven York>> This group is notable because, obviously,
their number of sexual partners is much greater than the average
individuals. You might find people having three or four sexual
partners a month. You might find people having as many as two
hundred or three hundred in a single day. That kind of thing
does go on.

Saul Gonzalez>> Two hundred or three hundred?

Dr. Steven York>> Yes. Two hundred or three hundred in a
single day.

Saul Gonzalez>> Many adult film companies now require condom
use in their productions, yet these policies are voluntary and
rely on self-policing. Outside of preventing sexually
transmitted diseases, Mitchell also uses AIM as a platform to
warn new performers about a host of other dangers in the
industry.

Sharon Mitchell>> Number one, the economic exploitation is
horrible. I can't tell you what it feels like to walk down the
street and have someone recognize you for a movie that you've
done twenty years ago that's now re-released as a classic and
they saw it in Europe somewhere. I'm thinking, "Wow, that's
great. I got paid maybe $1500 for that." No residuals, there's
no union, we are not millionaires. So you really have to
concentrate on making money.

Saul Gonzalez>> Along with AIDS, economic exploitation and job
burnout, the performers in the adult entertainment industry say
they also face another hazard of the trade: society's contempt.
Even as America's appetite for pornography continues to grow,
the actors and actresses on screen say the public doesn't even
want to acknowledge their existence.

>> I haven't come out to everybody yet about me being in this
business. It's only because I'm afraid of their reaction that,
"Oh, you do that?" and they don't want to talk to me anymore.
I'm afraid of that because a lot of people look down upon it.
But if you look in how many closets in how many homes, porn is
there. You know, they're the ones watching the videos and
they're the ones buying it, but yet they can look down upon it.

Saul Gonzalez>> As adult entertainment enters a new century,
its demand for fresh talent remains insatiable. For the safety
of these performers, Sharon Mitchell will continue to fight to
make the world of dirty pictures as clean as possible.

>> The show must go on and it does.

Val>> The news that two adult film stars tested positive for
HIV caused some companies to cease production for sixty days,
but others say that's an over-reaction.

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Val>> It's been six decades since the horrors of the Holocaust
after World War II were revealed to the world and since then
there's been a huge chasm between Germans and Jews, but there's
one organization in Los Angeles that is trying to bridge that
gap by bringing together the children of Nazis with the children
of Holocaust survivors. The program is called German-Jewish
Dialogue. Among its founders are Morrie Kagan and Cornelius
Schnauber. Morrie's parents are Holocaust survivors.
Cornelius's father was a Nazi. The two men are close friends.
I met them at the Max Kada Institute for German, Austrian and
Swiss Studies at USC where they told me about their lives.

Cornelius Schnauber>> I was born near Dresden, the East German
city, the beautiful city of Dresden, and my father was an early
member of the Nazi party.

Morrie Kagan>> In many cases, as in my parents' case, they met
at a concentration camp. So you could always say that, if it
wasn't for Adolf Hitler, I would not be here today. A rather
sad statement, but in fact.

Cornelius Schnauber>> He was not ambitious as though he didn't
want to become one of the leaders, but when the Nazis took over,
he had a good job first in the Nazi unions and then later on
during the war in the Nazi Red Cross.

Morrie Kagan>> Eventually, though, they were separated and sent
to different camps. After the war, my father actually traveled
throughout Germany trying to locate my mother and eventually, of
course, did in the displaced persons camp outside of Munich.

Cornelius Schnauber>> My grandparents brought up the issue of
where did the Jews go? Where did they take them? Then my
father said they were deported to a foreign country, so he never
accepted the fact that Jews were intentionally killed.

Val>> Cornelius Schnauber was six years old when the war ended.
He became a noted intellectual and professor. He met his wife,
an American from Stanford, and they settled in Los Angeles.

Cornelius Schnauber>> And there was a drawing --

Morrie Kagan>> -- this is a pen and ink.

Val>> Morrie's parents also settled in Los Angeles. His father
was a jeweler and an artist. His work captures some of the
horrors of the concentration camps.

Morrie Kagan>> They were carrying a number of bodies to a
funeral pyre where they were going to be burned. Cornelius
Schnauber, who I also call my brother in history, came into my
life in late 1986.

Val>> That was when the German-Jewish Dialogue began. About
three hundred Germans and Jews have participated in these
intense conversations guided by specific rules. How do you talk
to each other with that kind of history?

Morrie Kagan>> Well, you know, it could be very easy to sit
there and point fingers at people, but we learn and we realize
that the people we're talking to are not the perpetrators.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Nobody who participated in the German-
Jewish Dialogue made me responsible for what happened during the
Nazi period, but I always have guilt feelings because I come
from the nation which put Hitler into power.

Morrie Kagan>> One of the key elements was how do we Jews and
Germans define the term Nazi? We as Jews discovered that we had
a far broader definition of the term Nazi, as did Germans. In
the Jewish world, almost all Germans were Nazis and this comes
from the heart and the gut. It's a very visceral response.
Germans looked at it a bit more clinically. Nazis were
individuals who were members of the Nazi party.

Cornelius Schnauber>> You can say in one sentence that six
million Jews were killed between 1933 and 1945 and that's one
sentence, but each of those six million Jews was a person like
you and me and that I wanted to tell the future generation.
Don't take it just as descendants of home history books.

Morrie Kagan>> The Dialogue is not an intellectual
conversation. You are not there to be an academic. You are
there, you're speaking from the heart, you're speaking from the
soul.

Cornelius Schnauber>> You are at home, have a nice home
probably, and then suddenly in the nighttime, there is a knock
at the door. Pulls you out, puts you in a train where they
usually transport animals and then a concentration camp. Either
you were killed or you had to do slave labor.

Morrie Kagan>> Anger remains a very dominant factor within the
Jewish community to this day. Many, many Jews will not buy
German products.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Fortunately, during this Dialogue, many
of these angry people became I will not say soft, but they now
have second thoughts.

Morrie Kagan>> It's important to know that the Germany of 1933
to 1945 is no more, that Germany today has transformed itself.

Cornelius Schnauber>> Let's say, if you're in Germany now and
you are attacked as a Jew, you can always get help from the
government. But at that time, and that makes you even more
frustrated, it was the government itself which killed and
discriminated against the Jews.

Val>> What was one of the things you learned that was kind of
revelatory for you in the course?

Morrie Kagan>> Of course, we had much more in common than not.
Also, the fact that pain is relative. That is, I could feel my
parents' pain and I feel the pain of loss and I feel the pain
that I never knew my grandparents, that they died in those
years. That is my pain and I own that pain, but I also learned
that the Germans -- and we also have Austrians in the group as
well -- suffered from pain as well. The pain of shame is a
different kind of pain, but nevertheless a pain. So we had to
learn to value that as well.

Cornelius Schnauber>> I cannot put guilt feeling into the third
generation and not my goal either, but responsibility. I always
tell them that, if you are proud that you come from a nation of
Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Einstein, who had to escape
from Germany, then you also should take the responsibility of
what happened between 1933 and 1945 and work hard that something
like that should never happen again.

Morrie Kagan>> I'm afraid that anti-Semitism in the world is an
ongoing thing. It's been here for millennia and I don't think
that the German-Jewish Dialogue will end it. I'm not that
naïve. Although we learn from history, it tends to repeat
itself, so I can only speak for my generation and perhaps hope
that my son's generation, our children's generations, can learn
a bit more from it and teach that to their children.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
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contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val>> He's taken more than a million photographs of his best
friend. A little excessive, you say? Well, consider that the
friend is Muhammad Ali and the photographer is the legendary
Howard Bingham. These two have been pals for over forty years.
Now they're joining forces again in what may be the biggest
coffee table book ever published. As Philip Bruce reports, it's
a major milestone for Bingham after decades of training his lens
on the greatest of all time.

Philip Bruce>> When Howard Bingham took up photography, he
thought he was leaving heavy lifting behind, but then came
"GOAT", short for the Greatest of All Time, a heavyweight book
about the heavyweight champ of boxing. We thought Howard was
kidding when he hauled the book in on a cart, but soon enough we
discovered he wasn't.

Howard Bingham>> Easy now, because it's heavy.

Philip Bruce>> Yeah, thanks for telling me (laughter). At
seventy-five pounds, it's more of a coffee table than a coffee
table book and, as we struggled to get it out of the box, it's
clear that Howard is just a little anxious to see the finished
product for the first time. It's big, all right, but is it
good? We'll find out in a moment. But first, a little side
trip down memory lane when Howard Bingham met a young fighter
forty-two years ago.

Howard Bingham>> I was with a black weekly paper called the Los
Angeles Sentinel and my assignment was to cover this big loud-
mouth coming to town. I never heard of him before because I
wasn't interested in boxing then and I wasn't interested in the
Olympics. So I was in the news conference and introduced myself
and took a photograph and left.

Later on that afternoon, I was driving down Broadway in Los
Angeles and I saw him and his brother on the corner of Fifth and
Broadway just standing at the bus stop. I thought they were
waiting on a bus, so I hollered out and said, hey, you need a
ride? They said no, they were just hanging out. I said I have
some errands to run and, if you want to see Los Angeles and meet
some people, I'll take you around. So they said, okay, fine.

Philip Bruce>> That's how the friendship began and, from that
unlikely start, Howard Bingham has had a ringside seat to
history watching as a young Cassius Clay transformed into
Muhammad Ali. He's captured most every moment of it on film.
Reporters and photographers don't normally become best friends
with people they cover.

Howard Bingham>> Yeah, but Ali was a special individual. You
know, it was a great fortune for him to meet me (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> The images show that Bingham has the eye of an
artist and he could have hardly asked for a better subject. To
look at these photos is to peer inside the soul of Ali. His
triumphs and his tragedies went far beyond the boxing ring and,
every step of the way, Howard Bingham was there with his camera
with the kind of access that only a friend would have. What's
it been like being near him through this incredible life? I
mean, he has had a life that not only will go into the history
books, I mean the history is still being written.

Howard Bingham>> Oh, man, it's unbelievable. I think that I'm
the luckiest man alive, you know. What I do, how I do, you
know, I have to really thank him for meeting me and thank him
for giving me the opportunity to be your friend, and I was his
friend too. Just to have seen the world with him and to just
meet people, you know, kings and queens. You know, just
everybody all over the world.

Philip Bruce>> The fight pictures are what made Howard famous.
When Ali was King of the Ring, major magazines like Sports
Illustrated and Life couldn't get enough.

Howard Bingham>> All of the Ali fights were events. You know,
they weren't just fights, they were events. It was a place for
people to be even if they weren't at the fights. Just to be
around the hotels because they were all big shows. People would
come in dressed and to show off just to be seen. It's
wonderful.

Philip Bruce>> But the adulation of boxing was nothing compared
to the huge crowds that turned out when they went to Africa.
That's where Ali met Malcolm X. The trip changed the lives of
both men.

[Film Clip]

Howard Bingham>> That was when we saw Malcolm on the way over
to Mecca. We met and talked.

Philip Bruce>> We've seen that portrayed in the movie.

Howard Bingham>> In the movie, yeah.

Philip Bruce>> How accurate was that?

Howard Bingham>> Pretty accurate. Very accurate.

Philip Bruce>> That was a real milestone in his life. I mean,
that changed Muhammad forever.

Howard Bingham>> Malcolm too, yeah. Malcolm went over there
and said he saw Muslims in all colors, you know, so it was a big
experience for him. That's what changed him.

Philip Bruce>> How did he react to how he connected with not
just black kids, but white kids? In the late sixties, he stood
for so much for so many. I mean, what did that mean to him?

Howard Bingham>> Well, I don't think that even now he
recognizes how much influence that he's had on people all over
since he's been involved, you know, since he's been
controversial with the Muslims and with the draft and just with
everything.

Philip Bruce>> It's no wonder then that Howard is a little
nervous about the new book as the wrapping comes off for the
first time.

Howard Bingham>> Boy, you can get a hernia picking this up.

Philip Bruce>> You sure do. That is beautiful, gorgeous.

Howard Bingham>> This here is the 1967 fight with Ali after
knocking down the big cat, Cleveland Williams. Here we go.
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

Philip Bruce>> This is it.

Howard Bingham>> This is it, Jack. I mean, Phil (laughter).

Philip Bruce>> The publisher has spared no expense. The book
is bound in Louie Baton leather by the same people who do work
for the Vatican. They'll only produce ten thousand copies.
Some will sell for $7,500 each and each one carries Ali's
personal autograph. But to Howard, the pictures are what
counts. He's one of two principal photographers. Will he be
disappointed at how it all turned out? Hardly.

Howard Bingham>> To see this and to know that this is going to
be here forever, you know, this is amazing.

Philip Bruce>> Even for the great Howard Bingham who has been
everywhere and seen everything, the experience is unique. His
photographs have been reproduced on these pages in flawless
detail and each one has its own story.

Howard Bingham>> And this is Ali's favorite photograph because
these are his idols. This was taken in 1962 in Los Angeles
here. Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Lewis, the dancer and the
puncher.

Philip Bruce>> Ali may be the star, but Howard Bingham is
clearly a featured player with some time in front of the camera
as well as behind it. There are many personal photographs of
the two friends sharing enough adventures for ten normal
lifetimes. To leaf through this book is to experience their
walk through history.

Howard Bingham>> Who else could you imagine that could warrant
a book like this to ever sell at this price?

Philip Bruce>> And it's been an amazing journey for Howard
Bingham, almost unimaginable for a struggling kid from South Los
Angeles who flunked out of Compton Junior College and wondered
if he would ever land a real job. You've not done bad for a guy
who flunked photography class.

Howard Bingham>> (Laughter) No, knock on wood. As I said,
I've been a blessed human being. I'll be sixty-five in May and
I'm still going, and will go.

Val>> Howard Bingham has traveled the world with his camera,
but he remains a Los Angeles resident and his photographs are
often on display at community centers and art galleries around
the city. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For
everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you
next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

This program was made possible in part by a grant from the City
of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, the Boys of Crenshaw,
veterans of a championship team who once thought baseball would
be their ticket out of South Los Angeles.

>> Everybody's not going to make it. Sometimes it's a hard
reality for everybody to come to the realization of that.
You're not going to make it. That means you got to choose
another form of life.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.