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No one will go to jail or be fined for staging this past weekend's erotic film festival, but the city plans to discuss guidelines with the owners of the Guild Cinema that could determine whether there is a second annual "Pornotopia" in Nob Hill.

Albuquerque City Attorney Bob White said the independent movie theater, which hosted the three-day event, will be given a notice of violation but with no penalties attached. He said a meeting will be convened in the coming weeks to "sit and talk and figure out a way to not do this again."

Penalties up to $500 per screening could have been assessed, Guild co-owner Peter Conheim said. Thirteen screenings were scheduled.

The festival, which was billed as an alternative to traditional, exploitative pornography, was nearly shut down before it began on Friday. But with the American Civil Liberties Union stepping in, the show went on.

And the organizers said the lineup of explicit films was a hit.

Molly Adler, co-owner of Self Serve, which markets itself as an upscale sex shop, said attendance was high all weekend, perhaps stoked a bit by the publicity from Friday evening's showdown. She said the show of support drowned out the handful of complaints from Nob Hill neighbors.

Adler also said the city unfairly lumped the festival and the Guild in with full-time purveyors of adult entertainment.

"The point of the film festival was show people that there are alternatives to the sleaze," she said.

"I think we definitely accomplished that. People have come out and said, `We want this.' "

White agreed that the content of the festival is protected speech, but he said the festival clearly violated the neighborhood's zoning ordinance that prohibits "adult amusement" where the "primary emphasis was nudity."

White said the festival's theme set it apart from a typical feature film with sex scenes woven into the narrative. The determining factor, he said, was that "if it starts with sex and has sex all the way through and ends with sex" it's a violation, at least in Nob Hill.

Conheim said he is open to reaching common ground with the city.

"My hope is that when we have this meeting . . . we will be able to be granted a variance to do this kind of program, without a hassle, on an extremely rare basis," Conheim said.

"I hope it would mean we could work on the language of the zoning code so it takes more accurately into account art; so it wouldn't include the lay person's definition of sleazy porn."

While the three-day film festival was promoted as a healthy celebration of sex targeted at mainstream audiences, the clear hit of the weekend was a classic X-rated film from the 1970s. Conheim and Adler said that the line Saturday night for "Disco Dolls in Hot Skin" was so long that the Guild added one more late screening Sunday night to accommodate the overflow.

The kitsch and curiosity factor - the film was screened in 3-D - makes such screenings popular around the country, Conheim said.

Peter Simonson, executive director of the New Mexico ACLU, said his group will continue to defend the theater.

"It continues to be our contention that the Guild is not and should not be characterized as an adult entertainment establishment," Simonson said. "And we believe that the material that was presented during the film festival this last weekend was protected under the First Amendment regardless of what the city's laws say, and we anticipate and expect that it will be protected into the future, as well."

Adler said she wants to continue the festival next year, but it remains to be seen whether it could be held at the Guild.

Conheim says he's willing to pursue this as a free-speech cause but he wants to first give the talks with the city a chance. He wants to keep it in perspective, too.

"There are so many more things that are more important than a city having a porn festival," he said.

Because the festival coincided with Saturday's World AIDS Day, Self Serve included a fund-raiser that brought in $600 that will be donated to Faith Alive, which provides free HIV services in Nigeria.

Conheim offered an additional benchmark for success.

"I did not clean up one disgusting thing in that theater this weekend," he said. "There was no evidence of any hanky panky."