A Hollywood Film Based on the Life of Reuben Sturman??

HOLLYWOOD, Calif.—An article in the Hollywood Reporter Wednesday noted the upcoming writing projects for Hollywood screenwriter Adam Mazer, who just won an Emmy for the Al Pacino vehicle You Don't KNow Jack, about Dr, Jack Kevorkian. Following a project on car-maker John DeLorean, Mazer, a Philadelphia native, is set to pen a biopic about Reuben Sturman, the legendary porn king who built an empire from the 1960s to the late 1980s, when he was finally jailed by the feds on tax charges.

The picture is currently titled Rube, and according to HR, will be "based on the late Reuben Sturman, who in the 1950s began selling 'girlie magazines' in Ohio, imported porn from Europe and brought peep shows to America. Despite legal challenges, he became a billionaire in the 1970s but got into business with the Gotti mob in New York, ended up in jail and died penniless."

Sturman died in a federal prison in Kentucky on Oct. 27, 1997, while serving a 10-year sentence for tax evasion. His status as a First Amendment hero in the adult industry is so great that AVN named its free speech award after him.

According to many accounts of the government's persecution of Sturman starting in 1964, when the FBI made its first raid on one of his warehouses in Cleveland, federal prosecutor Bruce Taylor is the man most responsible for targeting and finally getting Sturman.

But in a 2004 article in AVN on Taylor, legendary defense attorney H. Louis Sirkin said the truth lies elsewhere.

"I don't believe he was directly involved in the convictions on Reuben Sturman," Sirkin said. "The one who was responsible for convicting Reuben was Craig Morford, who was an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Ohio. Bruce was not one of the prosecutors on the case."

Morford, the article states, was the prosecutor on Sturman's tax evasion case; the first time the government had managed to convict Sturman of anything. Sturman and attorney J. Michael Murray faced Taylor in a federal obscenity case in 1991, which Murray remembers well.

"What happened was, the case went to trial for almost three months, and the jury came back with a not-guilty verdict on one count, and it was a hung jury on all the other counts," Murray stated. "As I recall, the split on the jury was, there were more for acquittal than conviction, so Bruce Taylor tried that case on the other side of me and he got nothing out of it. What happened was, later on, rather than go through a retrial—and I think I negotiated this with Mary Speering, but Taylor might have been involved—at that juncture, Reuben had lost his tax case, and so we entered a plea in the obscenity case and got a concurrent sentence, which meant that he basically didn't do any punishment for that case."

Sirkin, of course, was a part of the legal team—along with Paul Cambria and Allan Gelbard—that just won an important victory against the government in Washington, D.C., in the John Stagliano/Evil Angel obscenity trial, which ended in an acquittal. And Murray is also still very much in the saddle, currently working on an appeal in the Free Speech Coalition challenge to the government's 2257 regulations.

As Mazer, who recently referred to Sturman as "a nice Jewish businessman" from Cleveland, dives into the project, apparently using Eric Schlosser's book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, as one piece of source material, it will be interesting to see whether this biopic reflects the reality of Sturman's life, and not just the most sensational headlines.

Considering Mazer's love of biography—he refers to himself as a "biography kind of guy"—it may have a better than even shot.