Kirk Douglas, LET'S FACE IT, THE RAGMAN'S SON author, actor: Mr. Media Interview

Image via WikipediaActor Kirk Douglas will be 92 in December. 92! I’m roughly half his age and from everything I’ve heard about him of late, he’s got twice the energy and drive that I do.

Every generation of the last 60 years can easily point to a favorite Kirk Douglas movie, whether it’s Champion, Paths of Glory, Lust for Life, Spartacus, or Tough Guys. As for me, I’ve always had a fondness for the cartoon silliness of The Villain.

His latest autobiographical book, Let's Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning was just released in paperback. It joins an already crowded bookshelf of memories, including The Ragman’s Son, Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning, and My Stroke of Luck.

You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with actor KIRK DOUGLAS by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

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Marlise Kast, TABLOID PRODIGY author: Mr. Media Interview

There are people who read supermarket tabloids and – aw, wait a minute. We all know everybody reads the tabs, why lie?

And if there are that many readers, there have to be some pretty good writers and editors. Writers such as Marlise Elizabeth Kast of Globe magazine.

Marlise spent three years at Globe, covering the likes of Morgan Freeman and Mary Bono, Bobby Brown and Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire.

She lived through it and wrote a book, Tabloid Prodigy: Dishing the Dirt, Getting the Gossip, and Selling My Soul in the Cutthroat World of Hollywood Reporting.

You can LISTEN to this Mr. Media interview with MARLISE KAST by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player below!

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Copyright 2008 Bob Andelman. Click here for copyright permissions!

Jim McBride, "Mr. Skin" adult web site pioneer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

Guys, Mr. Skin watches movies so you don’t have to.

Forget the days of wading through plot and dialogue just to get to the moment where Phoebe Cates pops open her bikini top in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Or when Sherilyn Fenn gets randy in Two Moon Junction.

Mr. Skin, via his website at www.mrskin.com and his just released second book Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide, The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex and Nudity on DVD, can tell you alphabetically exactly how far to fast-forward just to get to the good parts. Skin time, what body parts are exposed, size, skin color, hair color, you get the idea. Mr. Skin is nothing if not thorough.

And for those who think there must be a finite supply of these moments, let me just say that today alone Mr. Skin added seventy new pictures and twenty-one video clips to his archive. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Mr. Skin, also known as Jim McBride, welcome to Mr. Media.

Mr. SKIN: Hi Mr. Media. It’s always a pleasure to meet a famous mister. You’re right up there with a Mister Clean, a Mister Peanut. This is a big thrill for me to rub elbows with another mister.

ANDELMAN: I must say I feel the exact same. Thanks for joining us today.

Mr. SKIN: Thanks for having me.

ANDELMAN: Jim, you were a guest on Howard Stern’s morning show recently on Sirius, and he called you a “grandmaster of porn.” Your parents must’ve been so proud.

Mr. SKIN: Oh yeah. As you can imagine, my parents are very proud of me. I’m very lucky. I have parents that are very cool. They are the kind of parents that, as long as I’m happy, they’re cool with what I do for a living. And it’s neat. I even have my mom works as a “skintern” for mrskin.com. My parents are retired, and she gets paid to help with data entry for the website.

ANDELMAN: Now I understand -- data entry! She’s not watching the movies with you noting the…


Mr. SKIN: No. I have a team of 10 people in our content department that go through screeners of DVDs that movie companies provide us or stuff that we tape off of satellite or things we rent at Netflix. It’s a hard job. They have to go through movies, fast-forward through movies to find the nude scenes and chronicle them, grab the pics and clips, associate the actresses to the movies. It’s tough work, but somebody has to do it.

ANDELMAN: Now, how do you interview someone for a job like that? And are they all men?

Mr. SKIN: We have, I think of our 45 employees, I’d say about 40 are guys and five are female. But I think it’s more because there’s so much tech involved with running a website that you get a lot of males. We have writers; some of our writers are female so we do have females, but it’s definitely a guys club over here at mrskin.com.

ANDELMAN: Tell us a little about how mild-mannered Jim McBride became the internet legend known as Mr. Skin.

Mr. SKIN: Well, as a kid, I had a fascination with celebrity nudity in film. In fact, I remember when I used to look at my dad’s old Playboys in the early seventies. I would immediately go to the “Sex in Cinema” section. That was my favorite part of Playboy. I, of course, loved the Playmates, but the “Sex in Cinema” feature fascinated me, that famous people, people I knew, had been naked in film.

And fast-forward, a habit of mine, to the early ‘80s, and I was a senior in high school and all of a sudden, we got cable television and a Betamax at the same time. And it was a meeting of two great technologies. And you gotta remember, as a kid, growing up, we had ABC, NBC, and CBS, and that was it. All of a sudden, now I had HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime, and to fill all that programming, they had to show Italian sex comedies, drive-in movies. So I was a kid in a candy store taping as many films as I could every night with my new Betamax and the next day, editing the nude scenes onto other tapes I was collecting. I had hours and hours and hours of nude scenes on tape, and I’d categorize them as TV stars or categorize them for movies from the ‘70s, however I chose. And I became kind of an expert on it just as a fan, and it was something I collected.

During the ‘80s and ‘90s as I continued to do it on my own, I was a fun guy at parties or wherever. The guys would always come up to me and say, “Has such and such been naked?” and I said, “Oh yeah, 42 minutes into this movie.” And they were blown away that I knew this stuff.

One day in the mid to late ‘90s, I was in a bar in my hometown of Chicago, and I just happened to be standing next to a guy who had a radio show here. The topic of female celebrity nudity came up, and some guys were asking me questions. I was nonchalant, answering the questions, and he thought, “My God, this would make for a great radio guest!” And he invited me onto his show. We agreed not to use my real name. We came up with “Mr. Skin,” and next thing you knew, I was on more shows in Chicago. Finally, it started to spread across the country. I never dreamed it would become a popular radio segment where people would call in, ask me actresses, I would tell them off the top of my head if they had been naked, but it did. And then I was thinking, “Wow.” I had nothing to promote. I didn’t have a website or anything. I just went on radio shows talking about this stuff, and, finally, someone heard me on the air in Chicago and said, “I’ll help you build a website if you want to do it.” And I said to him, “What’s a website?” In 1998, I didn’t know what a website was.


I started with me and one tech guy, and I launched mrskin.com on August 10, 1999. And then it’s grown to today we have over 40-some employees, and we get about 6 million visitors a month to mrskin.com. And it’s really one of those things where it wasn’t like, as a kid I thought, “Boy, I want to grow up and have a website and be an expert on female celebrity nudity in film.” It’s one of those things that just kind of happened, but I couldn’t be luckier. The fact that I get to do this for a living and am obviously well-paid to do it, it’s a dream come true.

ANDELMAN: Now, did you meet your wife before or after all this happened?

Mr. SKIN: Right when it was starting, I was going on a show in Chicago as a regular guest to talk about nudity in films coming up on DVD and whatnot. And he had his one-year anniversary show at a bar, and he had me there as a guest as part of the live broadcast. And I actually met a girl at my health club, and I said, “Why don’t you come to this thing, it’ll be fun.” And she brought a friend who turned out to be my future wife. The night she met me I was Mr. Skin. So she knew what she was getting into, in other words.

ANDELMAN: So you never had to resort to any subterfuge or anything…

Mr. SKIN: No, but I, prior to meeting her, I sure did, because there were times where I would go out with someone, and the topic of, “What do you do?” would come up. And I remember “computer consultant” came up a lot in the early days, until I could feel someone out, no pun intended, I really wasn’t about to just throw the Mr. Skin out there and ruin my chances until I felt a little more comfortable.

ANDELMAN: Well, as part of the challenge for me in getting ready to interview you, I had to force myself to think back to the first time I saw a woman’s breasts in a movie. And I’ve come up with, I think it was Serpico, and the reason I remember it mostly, I don’t remember whose breasts they are, and I’m sorry, sorry for the women listening…

Mr. SKIN: You don’t have to, because I do. Her name’s Cornelia Sharpe.

ANDELMAN: There we go. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. Skin! That was it! I remember it because I had read the book; I loved the book. My dad took me to see the movie. I must’ve been 12, 13, maybe 14. I can’t remember what year that was.

Mr. SKIN: It came out in ’73.

ANDELMAN: There we go. I was 13. Thank you, thank you. Take a bow. So I remembered being in the movie theater, and then suddenly there they are. And just as suddenly, my dad puts his hand over my face, and I’m like, “Knock it off!” Do you remember your first pair, so to speak?

Mr. SKIN: Actually, there’s different moments in my life. I remember the situation you just talked about. In 1977, I was 15 years old, and my parents took me to an R-rated movie called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. And it was a critically-acclaimed movie, and they took me and, 52 minutes in, Kathleen Quinlan’s top loosened. I remember that awkward moment where you see breasts, and you’re sitting next to your parents and then the next day going and telling all your buddies you saw breasts in a movie. So that was one of my early memories.

Remember on PBS, you used to watch the Public Broadcasting cause they would occasionally flip in some nudity. I remember I watched “I, Claudius” in 1976, all of 13 episodes, just for the nineteen seconds of nudity. I became an expert on the Roman Empire just because I was just riveted waiting for Sheila White’s topless scene in that. Another thing, I remember when “Steambath” with Bill Bixby and Valerie Perrine was aired on public television. She had some nice nude scenes in that, and I remember catching that on public television. So those are my earliest memories of nudity, but I remember looking in Playboys I saw a ton more prior to ever seeing it on a movie screen or TV screen.

ANDELMAN: That’s funny. I’m thinking about PBS, and I think probably around the same year that I saw Serpico, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was being broadcast in the United States for the first time. And I remember all the guys talking about how funny it was, but also oh my God, could you believe that you can see those breasts?

Mr. SKIN: Yes, exactly. And they would have Carol Cleveland would be on.

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

Mr. SKIN: She’d show her breasts. And you’re right. Well, that was the great thing about public television especially. To a kid now, it probably wouldn’t be a big deal when you have the Internet, you have all these different ways to see girls naked. But boy, when we were kids, it was tough. We could only look at National Geographic so much for your nude scenes.

ANDELMAN: Now, from a sociological point of view, and we won’t spend a lot of time on this, but as much time as you’ve spent in pursuit of seeing naked actresses in movies, any idea why we’re so attracted to that? Is it the whole forbidden fruit?

Mr. SKIN: Well, I think the biggest thing is I compare it this way. It’s just for people personally. Who are the people you most want to see naked in your life? It’s always people you know. You work at an office, you see a girl works at your office, you see her all the time. She’s beautiful. Most guys are thinking, “God, I’d love to see her naked.” It’s because she’s familiar to them. They know her, they see her all the time. You see a girl that you get coffee every morning. She works back there, and she has great breasts, let’s say, and you think, “Boy, I’d love to see her nude.” Well, think about celebrities. With the way media is and, Mr. Media, you would know this, the way things are. Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, they almost are a part of people’s lives. They’re on every television show. You see them in the magazines. You hear about them from other people. You feel like you know these celebrities like you know people in your real life. I’m not saying it’s the same, but it’s the same type of feeling -- you feel like you know Jennifer Aniston. You feel like you know Angelina Jolie because you just are inundated with information on them. And I think because of that, it adds another level of excitement to want to see them naked just like you do someone in your personal life. I really believe that. I think that because of the familiarity. I always say that what would you rather see, Angelina Jolie naked or someone as hot as her that you don’t know and never heard of? Everyone would take Angelina Jolie.


ANDELMAN: Yeah, I guess we’ll have to wait for someone to do that off this website, thegirlsinyourofficewhoyoualwayswantedtoseenaked.com.

Mr. SKIN: Well, that would be a pretty expensive database, I can tell ya that.

ANDELMAN: Is there a difference to being, say, addicted to porn and just wanting to see celebrity women without their clothes? I was thinking about this, and I remember years ago, at least from my experience, this would be before mrskin.com started, picking up a magazine called Celebrity Sleuth.

Mr. SKIN: Oh yeah. I’m a big fan of Celebrity Sleuth magazine.

ANDELMAN: Yeah. It collected still photos and images much the way you do. But, in that situation, it was something that even my wife had to admit that she was a little curious to see who they got each month.

Mr. SKIN: Well, yeah. I’ve kind of based mrskin.com on, in a sense, the Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin magazines, magazines I grew up loving to read in the eighties. And it’s the same thing. Here’s a guy, Celebrity Sleuth, who has an incredible collection of pictures and paraphernalia and trinkets or whatever of celebrities. And he, on almost a monthly basis, would put out a magazine in which he’d talk about different topics and different celebrities, and it gets you interested. If you paint the picture, if you make the people you’re talking about sound interesting and give some background on them and some history, it makes it that much more exciting to see them nude. And Celebrity Sleuth is a master at it. I’ve always been a big fan, always given him a lot of credit as a “skinspiration” for what I do, and I learn lessons from that exact thing. It’s more than just throwing pictures up. It’s about the information that accompanies it, and we’re real big on that at mrskin.com. That’s why we have so many reviews, ratings, articles, interviews, information where you can find what’s coming up, all that kind of stuff. When it’s combined with the pictures, that’s how you have a successful venture, no question about it.

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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Jim McBride, "Mr. Skin" adult web site pioneer: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: In talk shows, they talk about a big “get,” like, at one time Donald Trump would’ve been a great get for a certain talk show or something, and there’s people who just won’t do those things. What has been a great get at mrskin.com? Someone that people really wanted to see that you found.

Mr. SKIN: Oh, well, like we’re always looking for rare, out-of-print stuff where we know you can’t just walk into a Netflix or a Blockbuster and find. Like some examples, Stockard Channing. Stockard Channing, not the hottest girl in the world, but she’s pretty famous. People know her from “The West Wing” and a number of other shows. She did a movie in 1977 called Sweet Revenge, and no one every heard of this movie. It’s out-of-print. It only came out for a short time on video. But she has a nude scene 17 minutes in. And I remember when I had the website I was trying to track this down in the early days of the site and, a few years later, tracked it down. And things like that are really fun for me.

Another example would be Melanie Griffith did an Israeli movie called Ha Gan, which translates into The Garden, and she’s pretty much naked throughout the whole movie, full frontal. And that’s another one out-of-print, impossible to find. We tracked that down.

Victoria Principal did a movie called The Naked Ape that was produced by Playboy, one of the few times they went into the movie production business. And the movie was made and never released or released very limited at theaters, and I was able to obtain a copy and have that.

Stuff like that’s really fun, and I could probably name some others. But to give you an idea of one of the fun things for me and for the website is we’re not only chronicling the actresses we all know, the Angelina Jolies and Pam Andersons and Jennifer Anistons, but it’s all the female celebrity nudity in the history of film. And there’s some real obscure stuff out there, and it’s fun to find it. The pursuit of it is almost as fun as actually seeing the pics.


ANDELMAN: There’s a new movie in release called Good Luck Chuck with Jessica Alba, who’s had an interesting career avoiding being caught naked. She got very upset with Playboy when they put her on the cover in a bikini. And, for this movie, the story where I had read, I guess, she was talking to someone from Newsday and said did you think I was naked in that movie? And she insisted that she was always covered up. How big a get would it be to find her?

Mr. SKIN: Let’s put this way: in this day and age, if Jessica Alba did a movie where she was naked, everyone would know about it. There’s no way that this would be an unknown movie cause, in this day and age, it just wouldn’t happen. I think finding out that Jessica Alba is gonna do a nude scene from someone on a set and before it came out, that would be huge. But it would be too difficult for her to do a nude scene. It would be sitting there, and no one noticed it. Nowadays, it’s just impossible. Yeah, that Good Luck Chuck should’ve been renamed “Good Luck Seeing Jessica in the Buff” because it just doesn’t happen, and it’s unfortunate. There’s about, I’d say, six or seven girls naked in Good Luck Chuck. There’s a ton. Nothing from Jessica Alba.

ANDELMAN: Okay. And what about this? You’re a dad. As a matter of fact, just a couple weeks ago, your wife had a baby. My daughter whispered to my wife the other day that someone had told her that there were nude pictures of Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical on the internet.

Mr. SKIN: Yes.

ANDELMAN: How do you feel about the inadvertent release of stuff like that? Those pictures were not from a movie. And then after you think about that for a second, how will you explain to your own kids one day what you do?

Mr. SKIN: Well, first of all, as far as Vanessa Hudgens, I always say. “If you don’t want pictures of yourself naked out on the Internet, don’t take pictures of yourself naked.” That’s number one. My personal business philosophy is we only are chronicling nudity from films or television or video. I don’t sit in a tree and take pictures of actresses and post them at mrskin.com. We really stay true to the movie database aspect of it. So the Vanessa Hudgens stuff is not something you would find at mrskin.com.

To get to the question of how would I explain what I do to my children, to be honest, I’m not ashamed of what I do for a living. It’s not only a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work. And I treat it very seriously. I have a great team of people working with me. It’s a great place to work. I would have no problem explaining it to my children when the time is right. And if I was doing something that I felt I’m ashamed of or couldn’t tell my children, then I probably shouldn’t be doing it. So that’s really my philosophy. I really wouldn’t have a problem telling my kids.

ANDELMAN: Has any actress ever asked you to remove her image or video?

Mr. SKIN: Yes. We get letters occasionally, not as many as you’d think, but occasionally, we’ll get letters from actresses. I could tell you that 99.9% of the time, they’re from no-name -- I shouldn’t use no-name -- obscure actresses which maybe search Google and find out that mrskin.com has pics and clips and a review of their nude scenes at our website. And we’ll get contacted by them, but we always point out to them that we’re a database and that our attorney gets to them right away to make sure they know what the website’s all about. And we’ve never had any -- in over eight years of running this website -- legal trouble as far as movie studios or actresses are concerned. And I think it goes back to because of how we promote the data. We’re celebrating the nudity. We’re having fun with it, and we’re sticking to stuff that actresses willingly appeared in. It’s not like the Vanessa Hudgens thing or the paparazzi pics that you would see all over the internet.


ANDELMAN: Have you ever had a Traci Lords moment where you found out that someone was underage?

Mr. SKIN: Occasionally, especially these European movies and stuff, you’ll find out that maybe an actress was 15 or 16 when she was in the movie, but it’s hard to tell right away. And we always remove that stuff. So we try to keep it so that, as best we can, that an actress is at least 18 years old when she does stuff. It’s just the smart thing to do in the political and business environment today.

ANDELMAN: You’ve had a relationship with the “Howard Stern Show” for a while, and you do the “Mr. Skin Minute.” But you made a real crossover to the mainstream this past summer with a part, not you personally, but the Mr. Skin site with a part in the movie Knocked Up. How did that come about?

Mr. SKIN: Well, I received a letter from the attorneys at Universal saying that they’re putting a movie out in a year. It was gonna be done by the guy that did 40 Year Old Virgin and would I give permission for my website to be used in the movie. And my answer was, “How quick can I get this back to you, signed?” I didn’t know how they were gonna use it originally, but they said that it was gonna be real positive. “You’ll like it.” And I said, “You know what, I don’t even care if it’s negative, let’s do it.”

Then the movie was made. I heard from people that saw it at a film festival, you’re not gonna believe the promotion for mrskin.com in this movie. And then I was able to see a screening in Chicago. I invited a bunch of friends, and there was a screening in Chicago before it came out. And I was just floored, blown away, by how just to be associated with the movie this successful and more important, the actual product placement of mrskin.com. You couldn’t ask for a better product placement in a movie.

ANDELMAN: Oh, it was amazing. And all the while, I don’t want to give away too much for people who haven’t seen the movie yet, but all the time that they’re building up to where Mr. Skin will be mentioned, anyone who has heard of or seen the site has got to be thinking they’re doing Mr. Skin.

Mr. SKIN: Right. I’ve had that from a lot of people where they didn’t know that the Mr. Skin thing was coming up, and they’re watching it thinking, “My God, they totally ripped you off! I was so angry!” and then they’re like, “Oh, my God, was that great!”

But I was able to talk to Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen. I was lucky enough to go to the L.A. movie premier of Knocked Up and then the after-party to meet those guys. And they both told me that when they based Seth Rogen’s job for the movie on what I do for a living thinking it would be a funny…Number one, it’s a funny job to have to tell people that’s what you do, but number two, they wanted a website that already existed so that the guys could be trying to duplicate it and later find out that it existed. So my site kind of fit. They wanted a funny business and something that already existed, and it kind of hit it well for them.

And I’m so lucky because now on September 25, yesterday, the DVD is in stores and pretty soon, it’s gonna be airing on cable television everyday. And as great as the bump was for us when the movie hit theaters, I truly believe that the DVD and the airings on cable and satellite television are gonna be just even better because you’re already at home watching it, and you just walk over to your computer and check out mrskin.com

ANDELMAN: That’s just an amazing thing. Any movie producers that would like to mention Mr. Media, just give us a call, okay. We’ll talk. How do the movie studios treat you? And tell me if there’s any difference between pre-Knocked Up and post. Do they discourage you, or do they actually send you the videos at this point?

Mr. SKIN: No, actually the movie companies really embrace mrskin.com. And we keep records. I have over 75 different studios send us screeners of movies before they’re out. In fact, I had Knocked Up in here on September 10, I believe it came in. It’s in stores September 25th. Its very common for a great majority of the movie studios to send us stuff. Think about it: I get to go on Howard Stern, Mr. Media, many different radio shows, to talk about their movies. We don’t talk about Disney movies or Gone With the Wind or things that have no skin. But if a movie has female nudity – like Good Luck Chuck - that’s on the front page of our site today. We get 6 million visitors a month to our site! We’re telling you there’s six different girls naked in that movie! Unfortunately, not Jessica Alba, but I’m promoting their movie. And in this day and age, of all the competition, what a great thing to get mentioned by mrskin.com for free on the radio and for free at the website. It’s a great promotion for the studios. We used TLA Video, if you’re at our web site and you want to buy Knocked Up, let’s say. You can follow a link direct from mrskin.com to TLA Video. We’re their biggest seller of movies. We move movies. We get people excited about them. And let’s face it: a lot of the movies are crummy movies. But we point out that “Alyssa Milano is nude in this movie” or “Demi Moore is nude in this movie” and it makes guys want to own the movies to check ‘em out. It’s a great vehicle for the movie studios to be able to promote their product.

ANDELMAN: You’ve said that, in deference to your mother’s preference, you don’t list the nudity in Schindler’s List.

Mr. SKIN: Well, what I meant by that is we don’t have the pics and clips from Schindler’s List. From the database standpoint, we do have Schindler’s List in our database, but we don’t have the pics and clips. I remember a few years back my mom sent me an email. She saw it at the website, and she said, “Please tell me you won’t put up pics and clips from Schindler’s List.” And I said I will not. I promise you it will not happen. And that’s the only example of one where we pulled, but I think that was the right move.

ANDELMAN: Well, I was gonna ask you if there are any other lines that you won’t cross, and I had one in mind. I was thinking of the Jodi Foster, the rape scene in The Accused.

Mr. SKIN: You think of The Accused, but if you think of these B movies and flasher movies, there’s so much more rough stuff in those. And if I have to start screening things based on what I think is wrong or right, that gets into a weird area. So what we do is, if it’s a movie that has nudity, we’ll review it, show the pics and clips, rate it, and that’s the policy. And hey, there’s stuff I have on my website I can’t even watch it because the scenes are so rough. Some of the stuff you saw in Hostel is pretty tough, but I didn’t want to get into censoring other artists’ work. And it just gets too goofy. If you don’t want to watch it, don’t go to that page to check it out is how I feel about it.


ANDELMAN: I asked you the question, but I actually saw that The Accused was on the site. But I thought it was interesting someone had a concern because it does say, “Turn down the sound.”

Mr. SKIN: Oh yeah, well yeah. We definitely have comments about it because it’s a rough scene, but that doesn’t mean that, because it’s a rough scene, I want to leave it out of the website. And, like I said, The Accused is just in the mainstream of people know about it. We have hundreds and hundreds of movies. I Spit On Your Grave, it for one, is a drive-in movie from the seventies that makes The Accused look like a Disney movie. So there’s movies out there that are very rough, but we, if it has nudity in it, that’s what we deal with, and yeah, sometimes it’s rough, but most of the time it’s enjoyable.

ANDELMAN: You’ve indicated in other interviews that you have no interest in doing a male nudity site, but the issue seems to come up more and more often. I’m kind of surprised that you haven’t considered a spin-off.

Mr. SKIN: It sounds stupid, but I don’t really do this for the money. I do it because, when I was a kid, I was so into collecting this stuff. When I was collecting it for 15 or 20 years, I didn’t make any money doing it. But I continued to collect it and chronicle it and learn about it and read about it. I didn’t do it for the money. If I have to wake up at two in the morning to tape and go through a movie because Ernest Borgnine’s gonna be in his underwear, it won’t be fun.

ANDELMAN: But you can hire people to do that.

Mr. SKIN: If anyone wants to do a guy nude site, go ahead. I won’t stop you. I won’t compete with you.



ANDELMAN: So where do you go from here? Hugh Hefner bought Jenna Jameson’s Club Jenna site awhile back. I suspect you’ve had offers. And with the publicity and the attention you’re going to get as Knocked Up goes into DVD, I’m sure that the value of the site only goes up.

Mr. SKIN: I think so. I’ve had some inquiries lately about what I would sell this website for and until someone knocks my socks off, I’m very happy doing this for a living. I don’t really have any plans to sell it.

I can say, as far as the next frontier -- or front and rear, if you will -- for us is the…I feel like, as far as radio goes, I’ve done everything I can to get the Mr. Skin brand and word out on radio. The Internet, obviously, we’ve got that covered. I have books. I have a book out in stores this month called Mr. Skin’s Skintastic Video Guide, The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex and Nudity on DVD. It’s our second book. I think we’re off to a good start in the book world.

I think the next logical step would be the television side of things, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be television in the network or cable sense. It could be television as far as maybe putting content out there that can be downloaded to your phone or downloaded to whatever device you have. I really think that’s going to be the next area that we have to get the Mr. Skin brand into. And I’ve had tons of offers I’m sifting through right now how to make that happen. It’s pretty amazing what’s out there, and it’s a learning process for me. I really think you’ll be able to download content from us, pretty cool stuff, in the coming years, and I think that’ll be a real neat thing for the future. And, hey, it may lead to a TV show, it might not, but I don’t even know if TV’s the way to go anymore. I think if you could do something that millions of people want to download via the Internet or via their phone, who’s to say that’s not better than television in the next couple years, anyway.

ANDELMAN: That’s where it all seems to be going.

Mr. SKIN: It seems, yeah, it seems. So we’ll see.

ANDELMAN: Well, Mr. Skin, Jim McBride, thank you so much for joining us today on Mr. Media.

Mr. SKIN: Well, thank you. I really appreciate you doing this interview and like I said, we’re in the “mister” club. Any time I could meet a mister, it’s a big thrill for me.

ANDELMAN: Appreciate that. And if you’re reading this or listening to this and you’re over 18 -- and if you’re not over 18, just don’t come back to me about it, you can check out Mr. Skin’s website at www.mrskin.com.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

A.J. Jacobs, "The Year of Living Biblically" author: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

A.J. Jacobs must have the best magazine job in America. As editor-at-large for Esquire, here are a few examples of recent stories appearing under his byline:

• “My Outsourced Life,” detailing his effort to send his writing assignments to India,

• “Googling A.J. Jacobs’s Brain,” about his proposed effort to catalogue his thoughts, dreams, and desires

“The Sexiest Woman Alive 2005” and “2006,” in which he spent five months teasing readers as to the identities of Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johansson. And, yes, he was required by law to spend time with each of them, passing off flirtation as research.

And then there was his equally painful interview with Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives” in which he described each of her body parts in languorous detail.

Oh, I could go on and on about the women in his professional life. They also include Mary Louise Parker and Rosario Dawson. But then we’d never get to the reason for this interview, which is to celebrate his hysterical, yet thought-provoking new book, The Year of Living Biblically.

You can LISTEN to this interview with A.J. JACOBS, author of THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY and THE KNOW-IT-ALL, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player above!


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: I have to start by saying I think you’re a friggin’ genius. Not only do you have an inventive new book and a magazine publisher prompting it and promoting it online and in print, but you’ve also found ways within its own text to subtly plug your last book, The Know-It-All. At least -- I counted -- 13 times directly.

A.J. JACOBS: Really? Oh, wow, I didn’t realize I was that good.

ANDELMAN: Well, it’s easy. Anyone can figure it out. You actually have an index. There’s an index, and you can go through, and you can count. So directly or indirectly, thirteen plugs, and that, to me, as a guy who’s written a few books, I have to say, I think it’s as brilliant as Nick Tosches thanking himself in the acknowledgements to one of his books because, without him, his books wouldn’t have been possible.

JACOBS: That’s true. That’s absolutely true. Yeah, well, that’s nice. Maybe I should have a coupon for the first book in The Year of Living Biblically.

ANDELMAN: I think that’s the only thing that’s missing. I think it’s great. I think it’s brilliant. How did The Year of Living Biblically come about?

JACOBS: It came about because I grew up in an incredibly secular home. As I say in the book, I am Jewish but in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. So not very Jewish at all. And I actually thought that religion was gonna wither away, and we’d all live in this sort of scientific world. But, of course, that didn’t happen, and so I became fascinated with was I missing something by not having a spiritual life? But was I missing something essential to being human like someone who’s never heard Beethoven? Or was half the world deluded? So I decided to dive in head first cause that’s what I like to do. So I dive in head first to try to understand the Bible, this most influential book in the world. And I thought the best way to do it would be try to actually get inside the minds of the ancient people and get in the sandals of my forefathers.




ANDELMAN: And you did this how?

JACOBS: Well, I read the Bible, and I compiled a list of every suggestion, every rule, every commandment in the Bible. And by the end, my list was 72 pages, over 700 rules. Everything from the Ten Commandments we all know, all the famous ones, no lying, no coveting, but it also had dozens, hundreds of obscure rules like don’t wear clothes with mixed fibers and don’t, well, stone adulterers, for instance. So I wanted to try to follow every single one of those. So just commit myself completely to this project. So that’s what I did.

ANDELMAN: Now, I’m definitely, I’m about as close to agnostic as you are, as you were at least. Moses had 613 rules that he brought down, didn’t he?

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But you actually got over 700.

JACOBS: Well, I included sections of the Bible including the Proverbs, which have a lot to say about, for instance, laziness. So I couldn’t be lazy anymore. The Proverbs don’t like naps very much so it was unfortunate I couldn’t take naps all year. So I included other sections of the Bible in addition to the five books of Moses.

ANDELMAN: The thing that struck me reading was that this research must have affected a lot more people than just you. Particularly, your wife comes to mind.

JACOBS: My wife is a saint. That is true. I won’t deny it. Yeah, it was the most extreme makeover of my life. It affected every single part so the way I ate, the way I talked, the way I dressed, and the way I touched my wife. So she was very patient. I’m glad that we’re still married.

ANDELMAN: And you literally did change the way that you touched your wife. There were times where she was considered impure by the Bible.

JACOBS: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: Which meant not just not touching her, you couldn’t sit where she sat.

JACOBS: Right. There’s a section of the Bible, if you take it literally, that says you cannot sit where an impure woman has sat, which ruled out pretty much every chair, and in New York, you’ve got the subways, the buses. And my wife, as revenge, she didn’t like that rule so she sat on every chair in our apartment so I was reduced to doing a lot of standing.

ANDELMAN: And then you actually found a portable chair, right?

JACOBS: I did. I carried around a chair, a little pure chair for the subways.




ANDELMAN: Now, who else was affected by this project? People you work with, perhaps? Your son?

JACOBS: Yeah, people I work with. You mentioned Rosario Dawson. There was a little conflict between my work life where I work for Esquire, a men’s magazine. I like to think it’s a high-brow men’s magazine, but it’s still a men’s magazine. So interviewing Rosario Dawson while trying to obey the Bible’s rules about lusting, that was not an easy one. I had to do the interview without looking at her.

ANDELMAN: You were in the same room, though.

JACOBS: Oh, yeah. I just avoided eye contact.

ANDELMAN: Uh-huh. And how did Rosario feel about this?

JACOBS: Rosario was actually very understanding. I had a huge beard like this hedgehog on my face, and she actually said that, she was one of the few people who said she actually liked the beard.

ANDELMAN: Well, of course, at that point, wasn’t she just coming off working with Kevin Smith?

JACOBS: That’s right. Yeah. So she was used to it.

ANDELMAN: Were there other assignments that were affected by the beard and the whole practice?

JACOBS: Well, I did an assignment on the Bible for Esquire so that was one. But, yeah, it was the clash between the way we live now in the 21st century and the way they lived then. It’s all I see now. I was walking around Manhattan in a white robe and sandals carrying a staff. I didn’t have sheep with me most of the time.

ANDELMAN: Most of the time.

JACOBS: Most of the time. Well, I did go on a number of adventures because I wanted to immerse myself with people who live biblically or took the Bible literally in some way. So I did go to Israel, and I did spend the day shepherding sheep, which was one of the most, the greatest experiences of my book.

ANDELMAN: Now, there was also Uncle Gil.

JACOBS: Right. My family has an interesting religious background because most of us are very secular, but my ex-uncle, a man formerly married to my aunt, is probably the most religious person in the world. He’s been through every major religion. He was a born-again Christian. He was a Buddhist. He was a Hindu cult leader. And now he’s an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem.

ANDELMAN: In any of that time, I kept wondering, did he do Amway?

JACOBS: I didn’t see that in his autobiography, but he’d be good.




ANDELMAN: It’s a really interesting book to read, partly because it’s funny, but it’s also very thought provoking, as I said earlier. Myself, I’ve always been much less of a religious person and more of a Ten Commandments guy. I always thought, if you needed guiding principles in life, the Ten Commandments seemed to boil down pretty well to the basics of being a good person.

JACOBS: Right.

ANDELMAN: But, I wondered, now that you’ve finished the book, what elements of your year continue with you?

JACOBS: Well, it’s interesting because the book did change me in a hundred different ways, big and small. There is humor in the book, I hope, but that’s only part of it. I really was fascinated with religion, and I wanted to see what, if anything, I was missing. So there are things that I found about religion that I’ve kept even after my year. I don’t stone adulterers anymore, but I…

ANDELMAN: Thank God.

JACOBS: Yeah, thank God. I definitely, the Bible gave me a sense of gratefulness because there’s a lot of talk about thanking in the Bible, which I think it’s really important to remember the hundred things that go right in a day instead of focusing on the three or four things that go wrong. So it really helped me in that. And one of the other lessons I learned is that by acting with almost a “fake it till you make it” approach because I was acting like a moral person. I was not coveting. I was not lying. I was trying not to gossip. And, if you do that, you slowly become a slightly better person. I’m not Angelina Jolie or Gandhi, but I feel that by committing yourself to acting, pretending that you’re a good person, you actually become a better person.

ANDELMAN: Now, have you had that confirmed by other people?

JACOBS: That I’m a better person?

ANDELMAN: Yeah.

JACOBS: Well, my wife thinks I’m a better person now that I shaved my beard.


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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Billy Bob Thornton, "Beautiful Door"/"Bad Santa" musician/actor: Mr. Media Interview, pt. 1

You just can’t pigeonhole Billy Bob Thornton.

Think about the movie roles he’s most famous for and see what, if any, connection there is: Carl in Sling Blade; Hank Grotowski in Monster’s Ball; Morris Buttermaker in Bad News Bears; Coach Gaines in Friday Night Lights, and my favorite, Willy in Bad Santa.

Who would figure that the guy who portrayed so many varied and somewhat disturbed characters had a musical soul too? But, this month, Billy Bob Thornton’s fourth CD, Beautiful Door, will be released. It’s a collection of original, contemporary songs with a touch of country, all written and sung by Thornton. He also is the drummer on the album’s tracks.

And just like his choices as an actor, no two songs on the album are easily matched and categorized. You’ll recognize his deep voice instantly on the somber opening ballad, “It’s Just Me,” but be surprised that it’s also him on the rockin’ “Hope for Glory.”

You can LISTEN to this interview with actor and musician BILLY BOB THORNTON, star of BAD SANTA, SLING BLADE and MONSTER'S BALL and leader of THE BOXMASTERS, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player above!

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Billy Bob, this was my first exposure to your music, and I’ve got to admit, I was a little surprised at how gentle and calm most of it is.

BILLY BOB THORNTON: Yeah, it’s kind of a vibey record. When we play live, we’re a little bit more of a big rock show. On the records, we tend to do kind of somewhere in between J.J. Cale and Johnny Cash kind of stuff. But I’ve always been into real moody records, and that’s what we try to do. Like you said, we’ve got a couple of tunes that are a little more raucous, but for the most part, it’s a real vibey record.

ANDELMAN: It was a little against type from what I was expecting, I guess, or what I thought the type was. Obviously, I was wrong. Is this album very different from the three that preceded it?

THORNTON: Well, it’s pretty similar to the first one, Private Radio, as well as the third one, which was called Hobo. But the second record we did was called The Edge of the World and it was kind of all over the map, that record, our second one. It had everything from rock songs to country songs on it, and you can’t do that anymore. These days people want records that kind of sonically and lyrically all fit the same vibe like it used to be in 1968 or 1970. You could have a record with all types of songs on it, but I’m not sure if it’s the people or record labels, but they want to put it into a category. I suppose a lot of that is because of the radio. When I was a kid, you would hear James Taylor and Black Sabbath on the same station. There’s the contemporary country station, and then there’s the pop station, and everybody has to be in a category.

Billy Bob Thornton Sings
Video #1: "Starlight Lounge"
Video #2: "Angelina"
Video #3: "Your Blue Shadow"
Video #4: "Walk of Shame"

ANDELMAN: Plus, with the downloading of music, people can just pick the songs that they want, so if it’s not all of a type, they may pick one particular song that they like, but if the next one doesn’t sound like it, they’re only going to take that one song.

THORNTON: Right. Exactly.

ANDELMAN: I guess the Billy Bob I was expecting was the one in the song “I Can Tell You,” the guy who says, “I can tell you some crazy stories, I bet they’d make you run away.” Not so many of those kinds of stories in there.

THORNTON: It’s funny when people say something seems to be “a personal record” or “Is it autobiographical?” It’s always a little of both. Most things you write about, they’re stories that either you’ve observed or been involved in or are yourself. I think the best way to write is from personal experience. Like, for instance, I wouldn’t make a very good science fiction writer. I pretty much have to write about stuff that I’ve either observed or been involved in myself.

ANDELMAN: You haven’t been in outer space?

THORNTON: Well, in some ways I have.

ANDELMAN: Okay.

THORNTON: No question about it.





ANDELMAN: Thank you for clarifying that. You’ve been playing music an awful long time. You’ve got your chops, but what drives you to keep making music now? Certainly, you’re not in it for the income.

THORNTON: Well, I’m not in movies for the income, either. If I didn’t love it and want to do it, I wouldn’t. If I wasn’t having fun at it and didn’t get fulfillment from it – there are a lot of jobs you can make money at. I could have gone into the oil business or something else maybe, but I doubt they would’ve had me. It’s kind of funny. I end up answering a lot of questions about that. I guess the answer to that would be, my answer would be the same answer as Tom Petty or Fall Out Boy or Jack White or Ozzy Osbourne. I’m not sure what they would answer if you asked them that question. I would imagine it would be, “Well, what else would I do?”

ANDELMAN: Are you more likely to hang out with musicians or actors?

THORNTON: I hang out mostly with musicians. I have a few actor friends, not many, and most of the ones that I have are not very famous ones. They’re guys that I came up in the theater with mostly. Frankly, I don’t hang out with many famous people at all. I’ve got all these kids, so I kind of just stay home and don’t do much of anything. Play with kids and record music and then when I go away, it’s usually to make a movie or to go on tour with the band.

ANDELMAN: I suspect, without getting into it, that you’ve had enough exposure to being very famous and very visible, and you could certainly choose one or the other - to be famous and visible, or not to be.

THORNTON: Oh yeah. That part of it is not my favorite part, the old going out in public part. I’m still embarrassed by it, frankly.

ANDELMAN: Really.

THORNTON: Oh, yeah.

ANDELMAN: Does the musician in you make different choices than the actor?

THORNTON: No, it’s pretty much the same thing. I guess there have been choices as an actor that have been slightly different than doing music. If I were playing music to sell 5 million records, I would certainly write different kinds of music than I do. I don’t exactly write commercial music. I have, however, as an actor a couple of times, done bigger movies, Armageddon, for instance, stuff like that. I doubt you’ll ever see me making some kind of pop or hip-hop record or a contemporary country record, either.

ANDELMAN: You haven’t made the musical equivalent of Bad News Bears yet, either.

THORNTON: No, although we’ve got a few coming out pretty soon on another record that could be a little bit Bad Santa-like.

ANDELMAN: Really? Got to pause there and tell us more about that.

THORNTON: My band is called The Boxmasters, and we are making a record under just the band name, which will have my name on it, but it’s the same exact people. The record’s gonna have an explicit lyrics sticker on it, but it’s kind of a hillbilly/punk record which is something we do live a lot.





ANDELMAN: That should be very interesting.

THORNTON: In fact, we’re opening for ourselves on tour.

ANDELMAN: Is that right?

THORNTON: Oh yeah.

ANDELMAN: Do you get paid double when you do that? How does that work?

THORNTON: The Boxmasters only get like $200 bucks a night for the whole band, and they have to ride another bus. Even though it’s the same band, we still treat ourselves really bad when we’re The Boxmasters.

ANDELMAN: I was gonna say…

THORNTON: We treat ourselves as an opening act.

ANDELMAN: My old days of covering music years ago, I think the attitude was you always had an opening band that was never as good as the headliner?

THORNTON: Right. Exactly. We try to be just as good, but we still treat ourselves like crap when we’re the headliner.

CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING!!!

©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Billy Bob Thornton, "Beautiful Door"/"Bad Santa" musician/actor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2

(Return to Part 1)

BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Have your music and film careers ever met? Has any of your music accompanied a film, for example?

BILLY BOB THORNTON: Well, actually, I’ve cut a couple of songs for TV shows that are not out yet that are coming out. I was asked to do a Hank Williams cover for a Canadian television show that’s gonna be on this coming year, and then there’s another show on Showtime that we did an opening credit song for. So I’ve done that, but I haven’t done anything for my own movies. I tend to be more willing to do music for a movie that I don’t have anything to do with really. I try to keep the two as separate as possible.

ANDELMAN: I understand. Let me ask you this: could you pick out a song or two from Beautiful Door and maybe tell us a little about them?




THORNTON: Well, the song “Beautiful Door,” the title song, is an anti-war song, really. Normally, I haven’t put real political songs on my records. This whole record, really, the theme of it, is life and death and how important life is and how we need to treat it and about having to face death. It’s both on a personal level and a global level. There is a song on there that’s about not judging a book by its cover. There’s three sort of anti-war songs as well as a couple of songs about suicide and how that affects the people you leave behind because of your choice. So it’s really a record about life and death. The song “Beautiful Door” is about religion being mixed with war and politics so much and how it seems that the people that die are the people who don’t really care. It’s like the people who aren’t involved in it are the people that usually get it, and the big chiefs are the ones that live except for in a couple instances recently. It doesn’t point fingers at any particular group. It points a finger at everybody, the East as well as the West and everything. So the song is as much about our system as it is anybody else’s. It’s just saying, “If you think there’s some magical answer on the other side of some door into the heavens or whatever, and if you kill to get there, that’s okay. Well, you can believe that if you want, but don’t take any of the rest of us with you.” That’s not what everybody believes.





ANDELMAN: Do you feel as you get a little older -- you’ve got kids, early teens and a young daughter -- are you more prone to speak out about politics and things like that at this point because of your kids or your maturity?

THORNTON: Well, they definitely affect the way I think and what I do, but I don’t really speak out that much sort of publicly about politics. I’m not that educated about it. I tend to more do it as a character in a movie or in a song or something. I don’t go to many rallies because I don’t know what I would say. I’m not really a politician. Now, there are some actors and musicians and a lot of people who are real educated on politics and can speak about it way better than I can. I just kind of say what I feel personally in these songs, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to go before Congress or anything like that because I’m not educated enough.

ANDELMAN: Sounds like you might actually be a little shy about doing that even if…

THORNTON: Probably.

ANDELMAN: Now, on the lighter side of things, I see that Graham Nash sings background vocals on a couple of tracks. I was wondering how that came about?

THORNTON: Graham and I had a lot of mutual friends over the years, and we always tried to hook up and do something together. We were asked by a company to do a Surround Sound mix of one of his songs, one of my songs, and then do one together for this thing up in Vegas that they had, this sort of a techie conference to demonstrate this equipment. And so, during the process, we fell in love with each other’s songs that we’d just written, and he really loved the song “Beautiful Door” as well as “Hope for Glory,” and I can tell you, on those three songs he does the background vocal part. So it was pretty nice to be able to harmonize with a Graham Nash, let me tell you.

ANDELMAN: I would say that would probably be a career highlight.

THORNTON: Oh, it was really great. He’s such a terrific guy, and I’ve always been a huge fan of his. He’s really the only guest star on the record.

ANDELMAN: Good one to have.

THORNTON: This record is made by just me and Brad Davis, who’s my co-writer and guitar player and Teddy Andreadis who plays organ and piano for us. They’re both in my touring band, too. And then on bass is Lee Sklar who, if you’re gonna have a bass player, that’s the guy to have. He plays predominately these days with Phil Collins, but Lee and I are old friends.

Billy Bob Thornton at the Movies
Clip #1: Sling Blade
Clip #2: Bad Santa 1
Clip #3: Bad Santa 2
Clip #4: School for Scoundrels
(Karl meets Napoleon Dynamite)
Clip #5: The Last Real Cowboys

ANDELMAN: Let’s talk about movies for a moment or two before we wrap up. I’m very curious about this. If you were getting together with your own buddies and were gonna share a favorite story from the making of a movie, what would it be?

THORNTON: I guess I would have to say, actually, there are probably more stories from Bad Santa than anything else. I made a movie in San Quentin years ago and so for about two months, we were shooting in San Quentin. That alone was a pretty big deal. Every day was kind of a, well, you can imagine, you’re shooting in one of the heaviest prisons in the country. It was pretty odd. The thing is, to tell anecdotes about what happened on the set, like sometimes you’ll be asked, “You got any funny stories about what happened on the set one day or whatever?” There’s so many of them you can never think of one. It’s like when somebody comes to visit, and you’re supposed to take them out to a restaurant in your own town, you can’t think of one. So, yeah, mostly it’s just like a general vibe on a movie, and yeah, crazy things happen every day. I don’t know.





Probably the funniest story that ever happened on any movie was on a movie called Pushing Tin that I did with John Cusack up in Canada. The story is way too long to tell here, but let’s just put it this way: we played a pretty decent practical joke on John, who has a weak stomach, and we got him good. It was a very elaborate plan, and about two weeks later, he got me back. We’ll just say it involved a sheep, a real live sheep, and some lingerie.

ANDELMAN: All right. I think for those who are listening to this as audio, that will give them something to think about. What is it that you might see in a script that would get your attention as an actor? And are there any roles you’d like to be able to erase from your IMDB listing?

THORNTON: Well, maybe some stuff early on. Since I was a well-known actor, I don’t think so. I’ve been pretty satisfied with everything. Some I like better than others but certainly nothing I’m ashamed of. Early on in my career, there are a few, but that’s back when you can’t say no. And the thing that attracts me is really the story and the characters. I’m not that big on tricky stuff. I usually don’t look for a movie that has the surprise, it was the butler kind of ending or whatever. Like really tricky stories don’t interest me. I like simple stories with complex characters.

ANDELMAN: I think that my favorite Christmas movies of all time would have to be National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase, and Bad Santa. It just never fails to entertain and make you fall down laughing. But I wondered, what movies would a guest see at your house during the holidays?

THORNTON: The usuals, Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life, and then it’s not easy for me to sit and watch my own movie, but I have to say I actually can watch Bad Santa. It gives me a kick, so I don’t mind watching Bad Santa.

ANDELMAN: And do you watch Bad Santa or Badder Santa?

THORNTON: We usually watch Badder Santa.

ANDELMAN: Finally, what’s coming up next? I see you’ve completed something called Mr. Woodcock, but I don’t know anything about that.

THORNTON: Mr. Woodcock is a New Line movie starring myself and Susan Sarandon and Seann William Scott. It’s a comedy, a pretty dark comedy about a gym teacher, sort of the gym teacher from hell.

ANDELMAN: That wouldn’t be you, would it?

THORNTON: Actually, it is: Bad Santa in gym shorts. It’s coming out in September. I think it’s September 21st. I’m not positive on that date, but that’s from New Line Cinema, and it’s definitely out in September. And then I’m attached to seven movies over the next two years.

ANDELMAN: Wow.

THORNTON: There’s no start dates on them all. They’re trying to figure this out after my tour. We’re touring August 1st through the first week of September, mostly hitting the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, the West Coast, and then down South.

ANDELMAN: Okay. Well, it’s good to know that you won’t be bored in the months to come.

THORNTON: No. With all these kids and tours and movies, I’m pretty busy.

© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Chris Napolitano, "Playboy Magazine" editor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1

When I was a student at the University of Florida, studying film during the day and writing freelance stories at night, I landed two choice assignments. Choice, that is, for a horny, unrequited, socially awkward twenty-year-old.

First, I got to spend an afternoon hanging out with Russ Myers, a notorious film director and king of loopy seventies porn, the man who gave movie critic Roger Ebert his notorious film credit on Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. That was a wild day.

The other unforgettable assignment was interviewing Playboy magazine photographer David Chan, who came to Gainesville to uncover the most delectable Gator coeds for “Girls of the Southeastern Conference” pictorial. Chan was a delightful guy with an enviable job. Hundreds of beautiful women were lined up outside his headquarters at the University Holiday Inn to bare their, uh, natural assets.

But Playboy and I go back about a decade or so earlier to the time when I discovered my dad’s prized stack of 1960s Playboy s in a cardboard box in the attic on top of an old cedar wardrobe. And by the time I was thirteen, I ordered a subscription of my own. And once a month ever since, I’ve looked forward to the arrival of the next issue.

A female friend jokingly asked if I read Playboy for the articles. Articles? I answered. Are there articles in Playboy ?

Apparently, there are because my guest today is Chris Napolitano, the magazine’s editorial director. If you look at the masthead, the only name listed higher is the magazine’s founder, Hugh Hefner.

Napolitano began his career with Playboy in 1988 as an editorial assistant in the fiction department and now, in his 20th year with the magazine, is responsible for the day-to-day editorial policy and operations of Playboy magazine. He reports to Hef and is based in the company’s New York publishing headquarters.


ANDELMAN: So, when did you guys start slipping articles in between the photos?

NAPOLITANO: When did that happen? Ever since the first issue in 1954. In fact, we started slipping more nude photographs in the book over the next ensuing years and decades. It was pretty article-heavy right from the very beginning.

ANDELMAN: That’s true. I do know that because I have read an awful lot of articles in there. I’m a huge fan of the Playboy interviews in particular, which are a wonderful part of the magazine, and I think there’s probably a lot of women out there who only read the magazine for things like the interview.

NAPOLITANO: It’s the one that gets attention. We have a great tradition going back more than 40 years with the Playboy interview.



ANDELMAN: How do you decide who’s appropriate for the interview?

NAPOLITANO: Well, the rule of thumb is household name. We usually don’t introduce personalities or thinkers no matter how interesting we might feel the things that they have to say are. They need to reach a certain point of critical mass where people are going to seek out the magazine based on who we’re talking to.

ANDELMAN: It seems like in recent years the folks interviewed in there, it’s broadened a bit, it’s gotten a bit younger at times. It seems like there’ve been some rap stars in there, maybe some film stars that maybe 20 years ago might not have quite qualified.

NAPOLITANO: That’s right. One of the things we used to talk about was that we don’t get Al Pacino and Godfather I, we get Al Pacino and Godfather II. In other words, somebody who’s clearly established themselves as having a strong track record. But in terms of actors, the movie industry has very much changed since then and with films being in theaters for about two weeks and then going to DVD, everything moves a little bit faster. The actors are a little younger and perhaps not quite as iconic. We had a great interview with Bruce Willis that we just ran in the July issue. And we all agree that Bruce Willis is somebody that was pretty high up on the list of guys that our readers liked. And then we scratched our heads a little bit and realized that this was the third interview with Bruce Willis, which was pretty extraordinary. It was quite an unusual thing to go back to him. And I think that’s because they don’t make stars like they used to. So we’ve adapted.

ANDELMAN: I read that that was the third time for Willis. Some people would probably scratch their heads and say, “You’ve interviewed Bruce Willis at length three times?” What’s interesting, it seems, about a guy like Willis is he’s always got something to say. This time I think the big takeaway was that he has changed political parties. And you got into that, and that was quite shocking thinking about how adamantly Republican he had been in recent years.

NAPOLITANO: We see a lot of the information that we publish in that long-form interview informs a lot of the coverage that Bruce Willis will get now for the next year or two. Any lengthy profile, everyone will use our interviews as a source and a sourcebook for various personalities. And that’s another thing that we are very proud of with the interview.



ANDELMAN: And I imagine that’s something that you look for, too, in terms of deciding who the interview will be. It’s someone who the public or the rest of the press will have to refer back to Playboy .

NAPOLITANO: That’s right. They’re gonna be able to speak on a number of different subjects in depth, coherently and in an interesting way. These are all things that we think about when we assign the interview. A taciturn guy is not necessarily the best thing for us.

ANDELMAN: It’s got to be someone who has something to say and is willing to say it.

NAPOLITANO: Right. Exactly, exactly.

ANDELMAN: Who are the big guests out there right now that you haven’t been able to get or, for whatever reason, have not been able to bring into the Playboy interview?

NAPOLITANO: Well, very often the hardest guests for us would be on the political side. I think that Hollywood responds very well to the kind of things that we do with the interviews. So, the guests usually come in Hollywood, it’s just a matter of time, when they feel that their project is right and that they’re willing to step out or that they want to finally let loose a little bit. So on the Hollywood side, I would love to hear from Angelina Jolie. On the political side, we’ve got a whole roster of political candidates for President out there. And I’m gonna cross my fingers and not really go into it too much, but we have had some good success with interesting some people in doing the interview for us, and as we roll out through the end of the year, you’ll see who they are.

ANDELMAN: I’m gonna take a guess, and I don’t expect you to confirm these, but I’m gonna guess that running for President, the three most interesting for your purposes would probably be Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and maybe Bloomberg if he runs. I’m guessing that Hillary Clinton just probably will not do it at all. Has she been asked and approached?

NAPOLITANO: We’ve been in conversation with Hillary and Bill, so we know where they stand with us.

ANDELMAN: That would be a no?

NAPOLITANO: Pretty much, yeah. At this point. The idea is to kind of come around and make them have to say yes because everybody else is talking to us.

ANDELMAN: And what about in the literary area, the cultural area? One of the things that used to be fascinating to read is there were a lot of literary figures who would be interviewed in there, whether it be Norman Mailer, people like that. There doesn’t seem to be as many of those these days.

NAPOLITANO: I’ve kind of put on the slate that we should have our eye on John Updike for an interview. He’s a regular contributor to the magazine, but I think that he’s a shy guy and a shy public speaker. But he’s a very engaging guy, and I think that our readers would be interested, and it’s kind of funny that we haven’t quite covered him. Philip Roth is another guy that I want to bring in and land. Thomas Pynchon would be another person that I think would make headlines, perhaps a little bit off-beat for the bulk of our readers, but that would be another kind of literary find for us. But in general, the reason why you don’t see as many writers these days is when we look at the total package of the magazine, we’ve had extraordinarily good fortune in landing writers to write for us. So if we have them contributing pieces, we’re less inclined to try to find a way to get them in the magazine using the interview as a platform.



ANDELMAN: That makes sense. Of course, besides the interview, the other thing that Playboy tends to be known for is getting celebrity women to pose for the magazine. I’m thinking that’s the other big part of the equation in terms of if Playboy wants to make a big splash this month, it would love to have a big celebrity interview and a big celebrity photo spread.

NAPOLITANO: That’s right.

ANDELMAN: Is that a fair…?

NAPOLITANO: Uh huh, yep, yep, although we don’t tie the interview and photos together.

ANDELMAN: No, it’s just nice to have two big ones in the same issue.

NAPOLITANO: Absolutely, absolutely.

ANDELMAN: Two big features, pardon me. I don’t want to suggest I meant anything other than that. Again, there was talk in the last couple years that celebrities, women, were not as inclined to pose for Playboy as maybe they had been in the past, that they didn’t see it as the same path. Do you see that as true these days?

NAPOLITANO: Yes. I mean, I think that it’s a more complicated environment than it has been in the past. I think that, personally, a lot of celebrities would be more than happy to pose for us, but there are a number of people who have a lot at stake in their individual decisions. It’s not the same as when Sharon Stone and Philip Dixon decided to take some photographs. There’s a whole bunch of ramifications. They have endorsements, commercial endorsements, they have appearances at stake, and a bunch of advisors, and so it’s a really complicated process these days. And what we try to do is just reduce it to the idea that never mind the money, naturally the PR and establishing yourself and showing another side of yourself to the public is a major factor, and they should definitely consider that as a plus. But, also, it’s about taking a great photograph, a kind of photograph that will be seared in the memory of the national consciousness, and I think that’s something that doesn’t come up as often as it should in our conversations with them.

ANDELMAN: If the phone rings when we’re done, and it’s Angelina Jolie’s people and they’re calling to say, “Listen, Angelina would love to do the magazine, your choice, she’ll either do the interview, or she’ll do the photo spread,” which do you choose?

NAPOLITANO: Well, I certainly would choose the photo spread first. Absolutely.

ANDELMAN: Okay. So this is good. This is consistent with what I expected. I’m afraid I’d be disappointed if you said anything else, Chris. Who else would you like to have do a photo spread in the coming months to year?

NAPOLITANO: Oh, well, there are plenty of people. Anybody that is attractive and willing to embrace the sort of Playboy spirit and the Playboy lifestyle is on that list. It’s a great platform for reinvention and rejuvenation, so there’s a handful of young celebrities out there right now who are struggling a little bit or having personal struggles, and I’d see us as a great venue for them to kind of break out of that.



ANDELMAN: Let me guess. Lindsay Lohan?

NAPOLITANO: That would be one name.

ANDELMAN: Alright. Were you surprised at how upset Jessica Alba was when you ran a photo of her clothed on the cover of the magazine?

NAPOLITANO: Well, that’s a tricky area. That’s a tricky subject for us. Again, I think that it’s a group decision for when people embrace us or decide to cooperate with us. And it’s probably a group decision when there are upset feelings, maybe because other arrangements have been made for exposure for the personality or the celebrity that’s disruptive, or maybe it’s seen as a loss of control by the people who would like to be making these decisions for her. So, that’s about as far as I’ll go with that. I think this was more of a reaction by….This was not the way that people in Hollywood like to see things get done, and I think that the ultimate reaction to that was Jessica stepping out and saying that she did not want to be on the cover at the time that we put her on there.

ANDELMAN: Was that a political lesson for the editors of Playboy for going forward?

NAPOLITANO: I don’t think it’s anything that we didn’t necessarily anticipate. You’ve got the celebrity tabloids that are gonna run any pictures and any stories about the stars that they think will drive newsstand sales and entice their readers. Then you’ve got the glossies with Vanity Fair and others who have full cooperation from celebrities undoing things that are photo-driven essays with kind of bland stories attached to them. Playboy is somewhere in the middle between those two things. The interview is something where the only negotiation is, “Are you gonna do it or not?” And we’re gonna ask the questions and you can trust us to publish what you say and nothing but. That course has been really helpful to us because they are never surprised by what the story is about because they know what came out of their mouth. So the flip side of that is that when they choose Vanity Fair’s venue they know what they’re getting. They have no control over or some of the time when Us or In Style or In Touch or any of those books go forward with or let alone Star or any of those kind of things do it. And we see ourselves kind of in the middle. We’ll do what we want because, as mainstream as we are and as widely sold as we are, we have a little bit of an edge. There’s a little renegade quality to what we do.

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© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.