Mr. Skin, MrSKIN.com adult website entrepreneur: Mr. Media Radio Interview

Image via CrunchBase

By BOB ANDELMAN

Here’s a statement of fact I think we can all agree upon: Heterosexual men  like to look at naked women.

We also like to see fully and partially clothed women and imagine them naked.

That, in truth, is often more satisfying, in a strange but true fashion.

And let’s not forget that we also enjoy doodling pictures of naked women and sharing these doodles wih our equally compelled brethren.

Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione figured this out. Howard Stern did, too.

And then there was Jim McBride, the cheerful young dude who makes a living cataloguing and capturing the moments when our favorite film and TV actresses—and many more women we’ve never heard of—slip a nip or more out of their clothes for all to see.

AUDIO EXCERPT: "Over 2,000 new nude scenes have happened since January 2005. So I said, 'It's time for a second edition.' That's kind of the reason this book is 688 pages. It's like half the size of the health care bill." 

Mr. Skin, as McBride is best known, is an empire-builder himself, with his website, MrSkin.com, radio appearances on the Howard Stern Show on Sirius Satellite Radio, and now the second edition of his valuable library reference,  Mr. Skin’s Skincylopedia—now in its second edition.

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You can LISTEN to this interview with JIM McBRIDE, web entrepreneur behind MrSKIN.com, by clicking the BlogTalkRadio.com audio player above!

Copyright 2009 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.