How Did a Porn Flick Get Filmed in a Taxpayer-Owned Stadium?

Did you know that along with being the home of the USC Trojans, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum field, which was built as a memorial to World War I veterans, has hosted two Summer Olympics, Pope John Paul II, and was the place where John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic presidential nomination?

Pretty impressive, right?

Well, what if we told you that this taxpayer-owned field also boasts of being the shooting location for a 2001 porno?

Wait -- what?

“The filming at the taxpayer-owned stadium was done at night, with the Coliseum's towering lights blazing and its rows of distinctive red and white seats framing many of the scenes,” the Los Angeles Times’ Paul Pringle and Rong-Gong Lin II writes.

“The video also shows the stadium's signature tunnel, which the Trojan team charges through at the start of games, as well as a sliver of the iconic peristyle, the arched entrance to the Coliseum,” the Times adds.

The football-themed porno was filmed in one night, according to one cast member. Scenes were filmed on the field and in the locker room (although, apparently, the latter didn’t make it into the final cut).

What's odd is that, according to one of the “actors” involved, while the porno was being shot, a Sheriff's Department helicopter circled a few times, hovered there for a moment, and then left.

The “actor” says he remembers looking up and thinking: "There's going to be, like, this intercom saying, 'Hey, this is the … Sheriff's Department, you guys must cease.'

"But none of that came. They just circled, like they were trying to see what was going on," the “actor” said.

The Sheriff's Department and Los Angeles Police Department, which has jurisdiction over the Coliseum, say they don’t remember anything about a porno shoot.

“How the crew got permission to use the national historic landmark…is unclear,” the Times reports.

Yeah, wait a minute! If it’s a taxpayer-owned stadium, who gave the crew permission to film there? That is, what would be the standard operating procedure to get access to a place like that?

“The Coliseum is jointly run by the city, county and state, which owns the land. A spokesman for the California attorney general's office said Tuesday that he did not know if it is illegal to film pornography on state property,” the Times reports.

But that goes against state agencies like the California Department of Parks and Recreation which explicitly bans the filming of pornos on properties they control.

The Times has more:

Gaining access to the locked stadium and firing up the field lights typically requires the approval of a high-ranking manager…An attorney for the top Coliseum executive at the time the video was made said his client knew nothing about the production.

The Coliseum executive in charge at the time of the shooting was Patrick Lynch; he resigned last year and was indicted this year in a massive corruption case.

"That's disgusting," Lynch's attorney, Tony Capozzola, said of the porn shoot. "He would never allow that."

Really? Why was Lynch indicted?

“Lynch has pleaded guilty to conflict of interest in a deal that required him to return $385,000 in alleged kickbacks he received from a Coliseum contractor,” the Times reports.

“Ex-events manager Todd DeStefano has pleaded not guilty to charges that include bribery, embezzlement and conspiracy. Four other men also have been indicted in the case.”

Oh. Well, that might explain some of this.

Pope John Paul II visited L.A. in 1987 and said Mass for a crowd of 100,000

at the Memorial Coliseum (image courtesy Daily News).

“The indictments followed more than a year of Times reports on Coliseum financial irregularities and lax oversight by its nine-member governing commission, which includes four elected officials. Managers were engaged in side deals with concert promoters and others who did business at the Coliseum,” the report adds.

“Executives spent tens of thousands of dollars in public funds on massages, golf tournaments, luxury cars and other perks.”

Corruption, kickbacks, embezzlement, bribery… Yeah, we’d say that's the type of environment that would overlook the shooting of a porno in a taxpayer-owned stadium.

Final fun fact: the commission has been so overrun with corruption that it's near insolvency. The commission voted in May to turn control of the field over to USC.