Hey folks. Capone in Chicago here. It goes without saying that the man known as Mr. Skin (real name Jim McBride) is hero to millions, perhaps even billions, thanks to his tireless efforts to bring us the most complete collection of movie sex and nude scenes on the face of the earth at his MrSkin.com site. If you're reading this, and you say you don't know who I'm talking about, you're a dirty liar. Before this year, I might have believed you, but this past summer, Mr. Skin was thrust into the mainstream and forever immortalized in KNOCKED UP as Seth Rogen and his roommates realize the painful truth that their idea to being an online encyclopedia of filmed nudity has already been taken.
One thing you may not realize about the Mr. Skin organization is that it's based right here in Chicago, and for years I've been looking for a decent excuse to visit Skin Central (yes, I actually felt I needed an excuse). A few years back, Mr. Skin published a “Skincyclopedia” to movie nude scenes, but by the time I got the idea to interview him, too much time had passed since the book's publication. I don't remember the first time I, ahem, came across the Mr. Skin site, but until this past month, I'd never actually paid to skim through the zillions of photos and clips it holds (I still haven't technically, since I was given a password by Mr. Skin to scan the site). I'd used the site as a, um, research tool for many years (you can look up for free what films or TV shows an actress has been nude in, but you have to pay to see any actual nudity). I remember hearing McBride countless times on Howard Stern's pre-Sirius radio show giving Top 10 lists of the best nude scenes of all time, or of a given year. He was a great guest, and Howard was clearly taken with the man's knowledge and conviction.
Visiting Skin Central (there's no big sign outside the offices, just a name on a mailbox) is like getting a preview of walking through the Pearly Gates. The walls are covered with movie posters of classic T&A films, signed photos of starlets, and photos of McBride with nearly every member of the KNOCKED UP cast and crew, and every staffer on the Howard Stern show. Strangely enough, there are also photos from the premiere of the Jeff Garlin comedy I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH (a film McBride had a hand in financing). But it isn't until the end of our time together on this Sunday afternoon when Mr. Skin took me into the “vault” (okay, it's really just a big-ass room), the room containing the mother of all movie catalogs, thousands upon thousands of DVDs and VHS tapes. Just imagine the greatest video store off all time times three million. And you don't ever have to look at the packaging to wonder if any of these movies has nudity in it.
Skin Central is a well-oiled production line with rooms for people who only watch films for even the faintest nip slip or ass check exposure. And Mr. Skin doesn't just detail nudity. The site features tens of thousands of images and clips of actresses who have yet to show us their most intimate of areas, but have opted for sexy undergarments, short skirts, or bikinis. There are stations in the Mr. Skin offices for designers, writers, publicity people, and management. There's even a little soundbooth where McBride records his weekly “Mr. Skin Minute,” an update of what's nude in theaters and DVD for the week. Like it or not, Mr. Skin has become as much a part of our online movie landscape as imdb.com or any fan site. McBride comes across as a man who is living his dream, who turned his obsession into a career, and has created a site that will never die because people will always want to fast forward to the good parts.
I got a call from the Mr. Skin people a couple of weeks ago asking if I wanted a review copy of his latest book “Mr. Skin's Skintastic Video Guide: The 501 Greatest Movies for Sex & Nudity on DVD.” It's a crowning achievement in McBride's kingdom. But I wanted to meet the man face to face to get my book signed personally (“To Capone, ain't this book cool??? Breast wishes!!! Mr. Skin”) and to interview the man behind the smiley avatar about his origins, his organization, and maybe one or two references to nudity. We sat in his office, and often he'd flips his computer monitor around to show me examples of site features or clips. The otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon may have been the greatest day of my life. Enjoy…
Capone: I have to ask, why are there photos from the I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH premiere in your office?
Mr. Skin: What happened was, I knew the executive producer for Jeff Garlin's movie, Rob Kolson, who is the CFO of my company. And because of that, he recommended--and I'm happy I did it--that my company and myself invested in that movie. And when Jeff Garlin and the CHEESE people were filming the Chicago segments of the movie, they used the Mr. Skin offices as their headquarters, they used our conference room and set up their phone banks and computers. Then they did their planning, went out and shot. Obviously when they were shooting around Chicago, Jeff let me hang out and watch. It was a really neat thing. I don't invest in movies for a living; it was just a freak thing. But I'm very happy to see how the movie is doing in the limited theaters it's been in; it's been doing great. It's supposed to be kicking ass on the Video On-Demand. It's just a cool thing, and neat to be a part of the making of a film.
C: So this is a good year for you in terms of exposure in KNOCKED UP. What was interesting about that was we actually saw a longer cut of that film back in December of last year…
MS: I remember reading about that.
C: I figured everybody at the particular event where I saw it would know about your site, but the fact that Mr. Skin is actually mentioned in the movie is in some ways a validation that the world at large knows about it. It's part of the mainstream.
MS: That's exactly how I've seen it. In fact, since June 1, when the movie hit theaters--we'd always had great traffic--but it went up like 30 percent, and not just traffic but the name “Mr. Skin” has been up at Google like 30 percent. But most important level, like you mentioned, MrSkin.com was seen for a long time as this porn site or this thing that you'd know about only if you listened to Howard Stern. But KNOCKED UP made it be something…a 50-year-old couple in Kansas no knows about us. That jump to the mainstream was the best part of being in KNOCKED UP. But for me, I couldn't be happier. As for as product placements go, I can't imagine a better…Reeses Pieces in E.T. is right up there. But could you ask for better product placement, where not only is the lead character trying to start this business--and I talked to Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen, and they said they based what Seth's character does for a living specifically on what I do for a living--but the actual showing of the web site in the movie and talking about it, it was so near. And the fact that it's such a critically acclaimed movie. And now it's on DVD and when it airs on cable television, like THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN does every single day, that two-year bonanza is going to help us so much. It has a lot to do with how great the movie is. Try going to Blockbuster right now and renting KNOCKED UP; you can't, they're all off the shelf, everyone wants to see that.
C: Maybe the best thing about the product placement is that you didn't have to pay for it. Some companies pay millions to have characters drink their soda.
MS: That's always been my whole thing about running MrSkin.com. I don't get paid to go on Howard Stern and I don't get paid to do 300 interviews a year on different radio shows. The whole success of MrSkin.com is that I'm able to figure out a way to promote my web site via the media and not have to pay for it, and KNOCKED UP was the final straw in great free publicity. It's a funny thing, when I was a kid, I didn't think, I want to grow up and be an expert on nudity in film. It's just one of those things where the internet came along.
C: Did Apatow contact you to let you know ahead of time they'd be doing this? I've read interviews with Rogen where he said the original concept was to have these guys create this site in a universe where Mr. Skin didn't exist, but then it seemed funnier to them to have these guys develop a site oblivious to the fact that your site existed.
MS: Universal contact me in the summer of 2006 to say, we'd like you to sign something to give us permission to use your web site in the movie, and two things happened. First, I said How fast can I sign? I knew it was the next movie from the guy who did THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, so I had a feeling it would do okay. And second, the smart thing that we did is, instead of using of using the front page of our actual web site, we said Fuck it, let's dumb it down and we created a fake thing that says “MrSkin.com” in giant type. That was something that someone here suggested to me; I wouldn't have been smart enough to know that. What you see in the movie isn't truly our front page, but the “MrSkin.com” is enormous. Our actual front page is too busy for the actual three seconds it would be up on the screen, and you wouldn't know where to look. I'd never dreamed when I signed that, that it would be that great a product promotion. I was like, “It can't hurt.”
C: Walk me through the process of getting a clip or photo onto the site. I just saw a movie on Thursday called WE OWN THE NIGHT, in which Eva Mendes shows her right breast, which he hasn't done for a while. When you first out about a new nude scene in an upcoming movie, what is the process from reporting that to getting the clip on your site?
MS: With something you're describing, that's something that's in theaters, so that is something I need to know for my reporting on the radio (the weekly “Mr. Skin Minute” premieres on Stern's Sirius radio show). In about 20 markets, I do a weekly thing where I say, “Here's what's new in theaters this week. Tomorrow in the theaters is WE OWN THE NIGHT. Eva Mendes shows breast. Then I'll talk about the new DVDs, the new CALIGULA disc, whatever is hot that week. That's just me talking, but it's great free promotion for the movies. As far as the web site goes, we enter the data into the site, meaning that we'll say not only has Eva Mendes been naked in TRAINING DAY but also in WE OWN THE NIGHT. But we don't have pics and clips until it's actually on DVD.
So the whole process once the movie eventually hits DVD, we have a person here who deals with all the movie studios and P.R. Films. Over 75 different studios or P.R. firms send us screeners of DVDs. For example, Universal sent us the 2-disc KNOCKED UP set 10 days before it hits the street. Depending on who it is, we'll get it a week to 10 days before, sometimes only three days before, we've got a team of guys in the back, it's like an assembly line. New releases take priority. We go through it, we promote it on the front page of our site. [he turns his monitor around and calls up the home page] Let's see, today we've got a feature on “Student-Teacher sex on film.” Here we go, new clips from SPECIES: THE AWAKENING from the new DVD. So we're promoting that because Marlene Favela and Helena Mattsson are naked in that movies, and we'd do the same thing for WE OWN THE NIGHT. Boom, Eva Mendes naked in the new release, we'll have a review of the film, we'll have the pics and clips, we'll rate the nudity, and it's shown to our six-and-a-half million visitors a month. So it's the combination of the huge radio exposure, the Howard Stern thing, plus all the shows I do on a weekly basis, plus the people who come to the web site. When I say that we give great promotion to a movie, it really is. I go on the radio show, say Eva Mendes is topless, now a guy says, “I gotta go see this movie.” And we'll let the people know when that movie is out on DVD, so they can go rent it or buy it. That's a simplified version of the process.
C: From a publicity standpoint, it makes sense that the studios would play along and cooperate because it means ticket or DVD sales for them. In the beginning, back in 1999 when you started, were they coming after you for copyright infringement? Was there ever a problem?
MS: I've never had any issues. When I first started the website, like anything new, it took people a while to realize you're around. But one thing I had from the day I started the site was I has the radio thing happening, so I was already going on radio shows, not as many as I do now. But I would go on and say, “Oh my god, there's a new nude in scene in…” We're talking about '99, so I was saying CRUEL INTENTIONS [laughs]. And you have to realize the way we do the web site, we don't just post the pics and clips. It's a site with interviews, features, thousands of reviews, and we're only showing a tiny fraction of the movie, albeit in our case, we care about the nudity. So from the start, even when I launched the site, I talked to attorneys and said, “I want to do it the right way. Show me how to do it.” And they did. When I started it, before I had all the studios helping out, it was just the way we presented it. But now the studios make us part of their distribution network, if you have nudity. If you don't have nudity, you don't need us. I'm not going to talk about Disney films at MrSkin.com or on the radio.
C: You stay away from porn movie, but when you get into that softcore netherworld, how do you keep from getting bogged down in all the clips and the sheer volume of titles?
MR: You mean if there's a movie with tons and tons of nudity? We have internal rules here, like no more than eight clips from a movie, we don't go over a minute usually. Sometimes a film has five seconds of nudity, so when I say I have a clip of a nude scene, it's a five-second clip. I showed you this SPECIES movies, that obviously has a ton of nudity and that will have a lot more clips [looks at the listing]. It looks like we have seven clips from this movie. It depends on the movie, but I never have a half hour of the movie. I'll either have four seconds or two minutes of the movie when it all adds up.
C: How do you deal with celebrity sex tapes? I know you don't deal with paparazzi photos or anything like that, but I remember you featured clips from the Paris Hilton tape for a while.
MR: We used to, yeah. In the last couple of years, we've really tried to move from being more mainstream, and we made the decision…it was never a porn site, but we used to have clips from DEBBIE DOES DALLAS or DEEP THROAT because they were such a part of the mainstream. The Pam Anderson-Tommy Lee tape, of course. Paris Hilton, Tonya Harding, because they were celebrities. But then in the last couple of years, if we're going to go after the type of mainstream advertisers, it would be smart to stick with the R rated, NC-17 stuff. I'm happy with the decision we made, because it's such a tiny percentage of what we do anyway. It was literally out of 20,000 movies, there were probably 15 that had that kind of content; now there are zero.
C: And for each individual movie, you have links to buy them too. I'm sure that goes a long way toward getting acceptance from studios.
MR: We use TLA Video, and we're one of the their biggest movie sellers. Again, if you get six-and-a-half million movie fans to a web site, and we're saying “This movie has great nudity, go buy it” it works. TLA is happy to have us, because we move movies.
C: We really do live in a Mr. Skin universe, because in addition to your validation in KNOCKED UP, when I see any nude scene these days…For example, Elizabeth Perkins in “Weeds” recently, I didn't know if she'd done nudity before, so I went right to the site to find out. And you immediately think when an actress does nudity, “That'll be up on Mr. Skin tomorrow or next week.”
MR: We promoted the heck out of that “Weeds” episode. But isn't that fun, to think that way? That was my goal when I originally started MrSkin.com, to have people think exactly like you're telling me you do. That always makes me feel good to hear that, for guys out there to watch a television show, like Michelle Ryan on “The Bionic Woman.” Now the first thing I want them to think is, “Wow, is she hot. I wonder if she's ever been naked.” And the next thing I want them to think is, “Let's go to MrSkin.com to find out.” I can't imagine there are other or better places for people to find that information. I mean, I still want more and more people to know about it, but as for the guy who wants to know if she's ever been naked, I want the next logic thought to be our site. We're doing pretty well in that regard, and that was my goal originally.
C: When did you decide that an actress in her underwear or a bikini or a sexy dress needed to be a part of your site?
MR: That's a great question. And it before I launched the web site, and it was the smartest thing I ever did. Originally, when I was in the planning stages of this web site, originally it was me and one tech guy. This is when I was putting actresses into the database, linking the movies to the actresses, linking the TV shows, writing the bios, writing the reviews, rating the scenes, all that stuff. I thought I'd only do that only if they were naked will they be on the site. But then I started thinking about scenes like Jacqueline Bisset in THE DEEP in that t-shirt thing. That wouldn't have made it in the site because it's technically not nudity because her breasts aren't exposed but you can see them through the wet t-shirt. Or a great bikini scene from a movie or someone in their underwear. I remember in FATAL ATTRACTION, when Anne Archer in her underwear at the beginning of the movie. That's sexy great stuff. So right in the time before I launched the site, I said, you know what, I'm going to include underwear, bikini, even “sexy,” that being if an actress has a great cleavage shot or is wearing shorts that ride up. And I'm so glad I did it, because you look right now on the front page of my site, and one of the most popular girls searched is Jessica Alba. She had never been naked, but boy, do guys want to see her in IDLE HANDS in her underwear. Another great examples is Jessica Biel, who is in I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY in an underwear scene. That wouldn't have been on the web site, but some of those pages are the most popular. So I'm glad I did that. Luckily I made that decision early on. I probably would have come along at some point and said, I gotta do this. But I made the decision before I started, and it definitely was a smart one.
C: It seems like a lot of your favorite nude scenes are from the '80s and early '90s.
MR: I think any movie guy who likes nudity in film is going to say that the drive in movies from the '70s, the teen sex comedies from like 1980-85 was the glory days for nudity in film. That doesn't mean we haven't had great movies since then, but my coming of age--I graduated high school in 1981--so boom in the fall of 1980, I get HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. And this new device called the Betamax, all at the exact same time. It was the merging of two technologies, and it really changed my life. As a kid, I got ABC, NBC, CBS. I remember staying up to watch every episode of “I, Claudius” in 1976 because Sheila White had a topless scene. There was a minute of nudity in 13 Sundays of “I, Claudius” and I had to watch every one. And there was no way to tape, and it was just a huge thrill. Now can you imagine that same guy getting HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. And in those early days, they ran those Italian sex comedies, the CONFESSION OF… movies from the UK. I learned about Laura Antonelli. I just had to tape everything I could. Those were the years when natural breasts and bush, and all the things I still long for--I'm not a big fan of fake breasts and shaved--but for the book I was very careful to look at the beset from each era. Even from the stuff you'd see on Cinemax late night, I still went with the ones with Shannon Whirry and Shannon Tweed and some of the bigger names that did some pretty quality stuff, not to mention your MONSTER'S BALL are in the book and DREAMERS with Eva Green and great things that have happened in the last couple of years. So I think it's pretty balanced. But if I had to live in an era of nudity, the mid-70s to the mid-80s was the best.
C: In this decade, say, are filmmakers not paying enough attention to nudity as an art form? Are you perhaps jaded by the sheer number of naked actresses you see in a given day? Are there any recent examples of scenes that harken back to your glory days?
MS: Yeah, crazy stuff like AMERICAN PIE PRESENTS: THE NAKED MILE. It's probably a movie a lot of people haven't heard about; it came out in 2006. But my crack staff added up 53 butts in that movie, and that's the kind of stuff that if I'd seen it in the '70s or '80s, it would have blown me away. The girls are gorgeous. I think a movies like HOSTEL, the girls are beautiful there. There's still good nudity in film. The difference, I think, is the full nudity you saw and of actresses playing high school students. That doesn't happen today. These girls were 19 or older when they did the film, but they were playing 17-18-year-old students getting completely naked. It was just a different era. And for a kid who was 17 or 18, that was a big thrill. How many times now would you see a movie about a high school where there was full-frontal nudity, like PORKY'S. It doesn't exist. It's just different now.
C: What are some of your favorite nude scenes from this year so far?
MS: Did you see that movie CASHBACK?
C: I not only saw that movie, but when it began life as a short film, I was on a jury for the Chicago Film Festival that gave the CASHBACK short the top prize for best overall short film. The feature is great too, really funny.
[He begins to play the nude scene from CASHBACK on his computer.]
MS: If I had seen that when I was in high school, I would have never left my basement. One cool things about the site is that you can search it by plugging in the year. So here is 2007, there are 80 movies that came out with “Hall of Fame” nudity. HOSTEL, PART 2; even GOOD LUCK CHUCK; and then you get your BREASTFORD WIVES. If you go to 2006, you've got 159. But with THE NAKED MILE, we promoted the shit out of that movie with my Anatomy Awards and on the radio; I had to have driven some men to see this movie. This is based on what they used to do at the University of Michigan, where a group of students would get drunk, strip down, and run a mile through campus.
C: Now this is interesting. We're half way through this clip, and there isn't any nudity yet. How do you decided how much of the scene to show leading up to the nudity?
MS: It all depends on the scene. The sexy talk and the teasing, it makes this much more sexy, so we left it in. But if they were showing a waterfall that had nothing to do with this, we'd cut it out. Look at these girls! This is an examples of a modern-day teen sex comedy that's right up there with the great of the '70s and '80s. They aren't showing their muffs, I notice, but they probably don't have them to be honest. Even GOOD LUCK CHUCK, you have to remember, you guys look at movies for how great the movie are as a whole; I look for movies for their nudity.
C: I have to admit, a nice nude scene rarely hurts a movie I'm reviewing. What did I just see? Oh, it was FEAST OF LOVE, which has nudity I wasn't even expecting, and it kept me awake.
MS: I read a review where the guy said, “This movie will be loved by the Mr. Skin crowd.” We already have it with three stars, no pics or clips yet because it's a new release in the theaters.
C: The nudity helped.
MS: Who would watch the [HBO series ] “Tell Me You Love Me” without the nudity? When you say the nudity helps…the nudity has to be there.
C: You guys actually cover film festival now.
MS: We have a site that's part of us, yeah. These guys already go to fests on their own. I pay their flights, rooms, and expenses, even thought they're working for other people because it's such a cheap industry. And as they review movies for their different web sites and what not, they know that they have to give me a detailed thing about who gets naked at what time. We had someone at Toronto this year, and they reviewed BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOUR DEAD with Marisa Tomei. It's a handful of guys. I just realized, they're already accredited; they're already in. They just have to pay for what they see, but I pay for the information. It's a team of guys who have been doing it for me for a few years, and they know what I want and they know to be accurate and they know what I need to know. They aren't my official guys from my office. Though occasionally that will happen, but I need the guys here to do other stuff. We have a lot of work to get done here. I just need the information; it doesn't matter who gets it for me.
C: Do you ever get tips from readers on rare nude scenes or on upcoming releases?
MS: Oh yeah. We have a message board, and we have guys who say, “I'm working on this film. So-and-so is going to be naked,” or someone will see a test screening, and they'll say, “Hey, I saw this.” Or we just know it's an R-rated movie with some actress that's supposed to have strong sexual content, we're hoping for the best…hoping for the breast.
C: There are some really obscure shit on your site. Foreign films that aren't subtitled or clips of some fairly well-known actress who made a movie in Europe that never came out here.
MS: That stuff happens. I'm sure you saw the movie 300 with Lena Headey. Recently we discovered this little gem called FAIR GAME, which is a made-for-TV movie in the UK, probably aired once or twice, never issued on DVD, and it was before she was famous and she has full-frontal nudity in it. Now we're trying to track that down. We still discover it. As of a week ago, we had all these other movies she was naked in, but we're still finding that stuff out. Now, how do we find it? I have guys that I pay that live in France, Italy, Germany that tape TV shows and look through things. I look at foreign celebrity sites to see if I'm missing anything. I have a team of people that scour those sites to say, “Hey they have Lena Headey naked in eight movies, they have one more than that.” Let's check that out. We have guys that rent and buy movies from Europe for our site. The cool thing about the internet is that if Monica Bellucci did a rare thing on Italian television in 1988, someone, somewhere taped it or get a picture of it, and someone else will bring it to another community and boom, we'll find it. I have guys that work directly for me doing this, but then I know where to go look to find out if this stuff exists. I know what sites to find it. I want MrSkin.com to be the most up-to-date, accurate database of where to find actresses naked.
C: Your thoroughness has always been what impressed me the most.
MS: That's the other thing that's cool about the book business. Sure, I've got my 501 movies book, but since we went to print, there have been like 10 movies that have come out that I would like to put in it. Whereas, with the internet, something can happen on “Californication” on Monday; I could have it on the site by Tuesday.
C: You have new offices and your staff and list of contributors continues to grow. What have been some of the key changes in the organization over the years?
MS: My biggest leap was hiring Mike McPadden, who was running Celebrity Skin magazine. I'd always loved the writing in Celebrity Skin and Celebrity Sleuth magazines. I was really struggling with the writing. I'm not a writer like they are, and it sounds stupid, but making it funny and making it interesting makes the nudity better. If you can write something and give it history and background and tell why this is a cool nude scene, it makes the nude scene a better experience. On top of that, if you're a great writer with the humor angle going, now it's a fun time. I had tried different things; I'd hired some local writers, I tried hiring this guy in Vancouver, who was a nightmare. And I thought, I've got to track down these guys who write for Celebrity Skin. And they all use aliases, so I didn't know who the hell to contact, and Celebrity Skin wasn't exactly wanting me to stop by their offices. Somehow someone had a meeting with someone who ran Seduction Cinema, and I told them I was trying to track down someone from Celebrity Skin, and he goes, “Oh, I know a number.” I ended up contacting Mike McPadden, just by chance he had been saying, “God, I've got to get out of this. Wouldn't it be great to work for Mr. Skin?” It was the best thing. So when I got him, the writing level went from here to here, and he started organizing a team to where now the writing at the site is so much better; now we're putting out books. Anything we turn out--advertising, press releases--they're done in a professional way. To me that was a huge thing because it gave us the complete package, not just pics and clips but the whole experience in a fun and interesting way with a historical perspective. So that was a huge turning point. It's not like we weren't making money before, but it really took us over the top.
C: I haven't thought about those magazine in a long time, but that's really where your site comes out of, isn't it?
MS: Before that, what were you going to do? The Bare Facts Video Guide, Celebrity Skin, and Celebrity Sleuth. For a fan of nudity in film, which I was, those were my bibles. I would read those like other guys would read novels.
C: Are there particular filmmakers that you worshiped over the years for their handling of nudity and sex scenes? Russ Meyer comes to mind.
MS: God there are so many. They're probably all the ones you would think of. Let's say from BASIC INSTINCT. In the office, we love Paul Verhoeven. From “Red Shoe Diaries,” the Adrian Lynes of the world, Andy Sederis, anyone you would think. Even Eli Roth with the HOSTEL movies, putting great nudity in those films. Even Robert Altman, we love him. We call him Skin Visionaries. Harry Novak, the hicksploitation stuff.
C: Our readers like a lot of genre stuff, what are some of your favorite sci-fi or horror films for nudity. We talked about SPECIES earlier.
MS: LIFEFORCE and SPECIES are landmark sci-fi films. None of you guys would give a shit about EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE as a movie, but I give a big shit about it because Alyssa Milano is very naked in it. HOSTEL is one. DEVIL'S ADVOCATE is a great one for nudity. CAFE FLESH, BREEDERS, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH are all sci-fi films we loved because of the nudity. And understand, nudity always trumps quality of the movie.
C: Were the puns always part of the site?
MS: Yeah, I've always had a punny sense of humor. And McPadden picked right up where I left off and took it to a whole other level. When I do radio shows, instead of just saying Reece Witherspoon shows her breasts, I think it's much more entertaining to say Reece's Pieces. You're trying to entertain and make people laugh on top of giving them information. I know from the start that if you could make it funny and interesting and give the nudity, that's a magic combination.
C: Have you have met any of the more mainstream actresses that you feature on the site?
MS: No, I don't really have a desire to. It would probably ruin my fantasy somehow if I did meet them. And plus, I'm not one to seek out and stalk anyone like Phoebe Cates, who's in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, and that's my favorite nude scene of all time, she'll always have a special place in my heart, but that doesn't mean I want to I want to hang out in her neighborhood and wait for her to walk out the door. Plus, I live in Chicago and I don't go to film fests so much, or movie premieres that much; I've been to a few. I'm in Chicago and have a family [yes, McBride is married with kids], I don't really have time to do that.
C: Before this year, was there a particular moment in the history of the site where you realized you were more a part of the mainstream than maybe you'd thought?
MS: March of 2000, when we went on Howard Stern's show for the first time, because we were doing good to that point. I launched the site on August 10, 1999, and we were doing good but no killing them. I had bills to pay, and I was able to make enough money to live, but I wasn't anywhere near where we are today. But in March of 2000, I did a call in to Howard Stern, on the phone back when he was on regular radio, our numbers exploded. And I'll never forget, I was nervous to do the show, I did the show, it went great, and then our traffic went through the roof. In fact, it knocked our servers off by the next morning. I'll never forgot that afternoon while I was watched the sign ups crank up, Gary from Howard Stern's show called and said, “Hey listen. That went great. Howard really dug it. We're not going to do this every week, but we definitely want to have you on on a regular basis.” Since that day, I probably go on that show, in studio twice a year. And then I do the “Mr. Skin Minute,” every week.
C: Since Howard's switch to Sirius, you could obviously say more if you wanted to. But do you still keep the discussions in your lingo?
MS: Yeah, I don't go on there and just say cunt and stuff, just to say it. I'm so used to doing interview in the terrestrial radio world that it's hard for me to go beyond that, though I can definitely can open up on Howard. He is such a good interviewer that he'll set the tone and pace. Yeah, we cross into some really blue areas when I'm doing his show, but I'm R rated when I'm on his X-rated show. I tend to stick in my comfort zone from all my time doing regular radio.
C: My final question is, I think, the most important: How the hell do you spot an unintentional nip slip? Something from a PG-13 movie that, if anyone making the movie had been paying attention, might have gotten that film an R rating. The first time I really was amazed by this phenomenon was Nicole Kidman in MOULIN ROUGE or Jennifer Love Hewitt in THE TUXEDO. Who spots that?
MS: It depends. Sometimes it's me, like Tea Leoni in SPANGLISH [shows me the clip]. Here's a great example, now watch. There is no way in hell you saw that if you were watching that at regular speed. But we go through shit like this. Now I'm not saying I'm the one that discovers it every time, sometimes someone on the internet will. And we also have still pics, look how clear that is! Our guys here, they don't miss this stuff. They would know to go through that part just in case, and probably 99 times out of 100, nothing happens, but boom, you get a gem like that or Winona Ryder in AUTUMN IN NEW YORK. And it's cool.
C: You have made this not-so-young man's life a little bit more wonderful. Thanks for taking time out on a Sunday to come talk to me.
MS: Not a problem. This was fun. You know a lot more about the site than anyone who's never paid to use it ought to.
C: I'll take that as a compliment. Thank you.
Capone
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