Wednesday, March 2, 2005
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Steve Sailer Interview Via Email
Luke: * Is race such a big deal in America that we can't talk about it publicly?
Steve: Well, we talk about race all the time, but in private. You're also allowed to joke about race in public if you are a comedian. You're just not supposed to write seriously and honestly about it in public.
For example, take the connection between race, crime, and real estate. Try this experiment: Go tell your most politically correct friends that you've found the perfect house to buy. It has a very cheap price and it's in a conveniently located neighborhood . right on Martin Luther King Blvd. (The nice thing about this experiment is that it hardly matters what city you live in.). Your friends will make very clear to you that you would be a fool to move to Martin Luther King Blvd.
Stand-up comics are socially allowed to talk about race in public. For example, Chris Rock famously advised: "If a friend calls you on the telephone and says they're lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to know what they should do, the best response is 'Run!'"
But, you aren't supposed to write seriously about race in public, other than to repeat the usual cant. For example, a fine reporter named Jonathan Tilove wrote a book in 2003 called "Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street," but practically nobody besides me would review it, apparently because of discomfort over the "stereotypes" associated with MLK Blvds.
Of course, serious public debate in print or on-line is far better than private talk to figure out how to ameliorate our country's problems. So, public understanding of race remains crude because writing frankly about race just isn't done in polite society.
Much of the censorship stems from the following logic (if you can call it logic): "If different racial groups tend to behave somewhat differently, then -- oh my God -- Hitler Was Right! Therefore, we must never allow this fact to be mentioned in print, or the public will learn the horrible truth and they'll all vote Nazi."
Well, that's just nuts on so many levels.
It's one big non-sequiter: Of course, there are different racial groups. And of course their members tend to inherit certain different genes, on average, than the members of other racial groups. And that means racial groups will differ, on average, in various innate capabilities. But that also means that no group can be supreme at all jobs. To be excellent at one skill frequently implies being worse at something else. So, there can't be a Master Race.
Sports fans can cite countless examples. Men of West African descent monopolize the Olympic 100m dash, but their explosive musculature, which is so helpful in sprinting, weighs them down in distance running, where they are also-rans. Similarly, there are far more Samoans in the National Football League than Chinese, simply because Samoans tend to be much, much bigger. But precisely because Samoans are so huge, they'll never do as well as the Chinese in gymnastics, on average.
* What have been the repercussions to your life from your writings on race?
I guess it's made me a cult figure, which is bizarre because I'm just about the most boringly conventional guy I know: a middle-aged, golf-playing, Republican family man with an MBA.
Years ago when I was working on a deal alongside a wise investment banker of the old school, he told me, "Always tell the truth. It's much easier to remember." At my age now, my memory isn't getting any better. Besides, I figure that the truth is better for the human race than lies, ignorance, and wishful thinking. At minimum, it's more interesting.
* Can a society ever have too much diversity?
Personally, I like ethnic diversity a lot. I lived for many years in the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago, where something like 100 different languages are spoken. I enjoy observing different kinds of people, and because I'm rather shy, the fact that I couldn't converse with most of my neighbors due to the language barriers wasn't much of a problem to me. And I didn't worry too much about crime because I'm a big galoot and muggers don't mess with me much.
But, just because I like diversity doesn't mean everyone else necessarily should. When you get right down to it, most intellectuals' prescriptions for how to improve the world is for the human race to Be Like Me. Well, I try not to be that dogmatic about imposing my tastes on others. For example, among all the professional film critics in this country, I probably spend the least time in my reviews explaining my opinion of the movie and the most time analyzing the issues it raises. I like understanding how the world works more than I like.
For example, precisely what I liked about Uptown was what made it a lousy place to raise a family due to it lack of neighborliness, crime, and public schools completely overwhelmed by the challenge of educating children speaking 100 different languages.
Ethnic diversity isn't of much interest or value to little kids. They need to learn to deal first with all the human diversity that is found in even the most mono-ethnic communities: young and old, boy and girl, and all the different personality types that you see even in one extended family. Further, kids need some homogeneity and safety so they can learn independence. Before the great crime wave began in the 1960s, kids used to walk or ride their bikes everywhere. Now, moms chauffeur their kids everywhere, which is bad for kids and bad for women.
Overall, like everything else in life, increased ethnic diversity comes with tradeoffs. The funny thing is that a lot of its side effects are precisely the ones that liberals say they oppose: for instance, diversity makes free speech less popular; it lessens community solidarity and support for welfare programs, and it vulgarizes the arts. That probably why so many liberals have moved to Howard Dean's and Bernie Sanders' Vermont, which is the whitest state in the country.
* What do you think about the flood of illegal immigrants into the US? Is that good for our country?
It's good for some people, bad for others. The problem is that most of the Americans it's good are already among the most privileged people in America -- factory owners looking for cheap, nonunionized labor; corporate farmers wanting to bust the UFW with scabs from south of the border; movie stars looking for cheap servants; Democratic politicians, ethnic activists, people who eat out at sit-down restaurants a lot (such as journalists), and so forth. In contrast, illegal immigration tends to be bad for the poor and working class of America -- it cuts their wages, messes up their public schools, increases the cost of health care because so few illegals have insurance that the cost of their care gets passed on by hospitals to the rest of us, and increases crime in their neighborhoods.
But while the victims of illegal immigration outnumber the beneficiaries, they don't have much influence compared to the privileged. If you look at poll results, the divergence between elite opinion and mass opinion is greatest on immigration. The privileged maintain their privileges by demonizing anyone who calls for the enforcement of the laws against illegal immigration as a "racist," "xenophobe," "nativist," etc.
* Which public figures talk about race honestly?
Minority comedians, mostly.
As the film critic for The American Conservative magazine, I've noted that you can show an honest view about race, but for talking about it, well, you might have to go back to Ron Shelton's comedy with Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, "White Men Can't Jump." Writers? Not too many . Heather MacDonald, the boys at GNXP.com, Randall Parker, the amazing prose stylist who calls himself the War Nerd, John Derbyshire . You can find a lot of the best free thinkers on my iSteve.com website under "Links".
* Is it good to be proud of being black? Is it bad to be proud of being white?
I don't have too much of a problem with either, but I think it's healthier for our country to inculcate non-racial loyalties, such as being proud of being an American citizen, which is a legal concept, not a racial one. I'm a "citizenist." I try to think about: "What is in the best overall interests of the current citizens of the United States?" In contrast, so many others think in terms of: "What is in the best interest of my: identity group / race / ethnicity / religion / bank account / class / ideology / clique / gender / sexual orientation / party / and/or personal feelings of moral superiority?" Precisely because basing loyalties upon a legal category defined by our elected representatives -- citizenship -- is so unnatural, it's the least destructive and most uplifting form of allegiance humanly possible on an effective scale. I believe in looking out for my fellow citizens, especially the ones who didn't get lucky in the genetic lottery for IQ, even if it means I have to pay a little more to have my strawberries picked. And that's one reason why I'm against illegal immigration -- the elites have trashed the concept of solidarity with our fellow American citizens in order import more cheap labor.
* Is race a concept that has a basis in reality? In genetics?
First, the human race is clearly one single, interbreeding species.
Second, there's a huge amount of confusion on this subject since the standard scientific model of race we've had since Linnaeus -- race as subspecies -- doesn't work very well in theory, although it turns out to be surprisingly close to adequate in practice, as the findings of population geneticists L.L. Cavali-Sforza and Neil Risch show. Risch, who is with the UC San Francisco Medical School, compared the racial self-identification of medical patients to what their genes said their background was and found over 99% agreement.
Third, the logical problems with the Linnaean taxonomic model of race, however, allow many people to advance the trendy Race Does Not Exist dogma by throwing difficult questions at supporters of the race as subspecies model, such as "So, how many races are there?" "What race is Tiger Woods?" "How can you belong to more than one race?" and "Can races change over time?"
But this conceptual fuzziness inherent in race is common in the natural world. The best example of the fuzziness of natural categories is the "extended family." All the criticisms made about the fuzziness of racial groups apply in spades to extended families. How many extended families do you belong to? Well, at least two: your mom's and your dad's. But they each belonged to their parents' two extended families, so maybe you belong to four. And your grandparents each belonged to two .
And what are the boundaries of your various extended families? If the question at hand is who you'd give a spare kidney to, you'd probably draw the limits rather narrowly. But, when making up your Christmas card list, you probably toss in the occasional third cousin, twice removed. And exactly what's the appropriate name for all these extended families anyway?
In fact, extended families are even less clear-cut than racial groups. Yet, nobody goes around smugly claiming that extended families don't exist. I dislike the Linnaean model, with its implicit assumption of "A race for everyone and everyone in his race." All the Linnaean categories both below and above "species," such as "subspecies" or "genus," tend to be highly arbitrary. So I've been exploring an older definition of race, which has the advantages of both being almost undeniable to the point of tautology, and fitting closer with what people around the globe think of as race: lineage. By far the most useful definition of a racial group is "a partly inbred extended family."
Why is extended family such a perfect analogy for race? Because it's not an analogy. They are the same thing: kin, individuals united by common descent. There's no natural law defining where extended families end. A racial group is merely an extended family (often an extremely extended family) that inbreeds to some extent. It's this tendency to marry within the group that makes racial groups somewhat more coherent, cohesive, and longer lasting than smaller-scale extended families.
For example, oceans slow down intermarriage. The same is true for the Sahara and the Himalayas. Social barriers of language, religion, caste, class, etc. get in the way of the whole world turning into beige Tiger Woods-look-alikes.
* What do you think of the famous chapter on race and IQ in the book The Bell Curve?
Something that always kills me is how liberals denounce IQ as utterly meaningless, except when they claim IQ scores prove that they are smarter than conservatives. Right after the election, millions upon millions of liberals visited web pages reassuring them that the blue states had much higher average IQs the than red states (such as Connecticut 113 and Utah 87). But, as I pointed out, it was a complete hoax, an utter fabrication.
As for The Bell Curve, even though it is one of the biggest selling social science books since Kinsey, it is now out of print, which says a lot about the intellectual climate these days. As for the backlash against the book, well, as my friend Greg Cochran says, "Nobody ever gets that mad at somebody unless they are telling the truth."
In many ways, though, what interests me more in The Bell Curve is its analysis of trends that transcend race, such as the stratification of American society by IQ, a process that allows the clever to wage a clandestine class war against the clueless. Nobody on the higher IQ right half of the bell curve is very interested in the welfare of the left half of the bell curve, per se. I wrote a long series on how to help our fellow citizens on the left half of the Bell Curve, but I've never seen anybody else interested in the subject.
* Can a racial or ethnic or religious group only have good characteristics? Is ascribing only good to a group patronizing?
These days we're supposed to celebrate diversity - but not notice it! The reality is that life is about trade-offs. For example, in the last six Olympics, all 48 finalists in the men's 100-meter dash to determine the World's Fastest Man have been of West African descent. On the other hand, the kind of massive muscularity and minimal body fat percentage that allows people of West African descent to dominate sprinting makes them very bad at, say, English Channel swimming. Sprint champions tend to sink like stones.
Nobody can be best at everything. There's no such thing as racial supremacy. Nobody can be above average at everything either. We don't live in Lake Wobegon.
An Open Letter To Keiko The Killer Whale From Gram Ponante
The following is a letter that perhaps the most influential porn commentator in adult, Gram Ponante, editor and co-chair (with Iphigenia Squirtz) of GramPonante.com, sent to one of the most recognized killer whales, Keiko. (Ponante did not send the letter to Keiko, who can't and won't read it, but published it on one of his family of websites, where Keiko's handlers might accidentally Google it. - Ed.)
Congratulations on the tremendous amount of water displacement your whalish girth inspires. Sometimes I wish I were a whale. It must be fun to not have to chew. Is it? Is it???!??? Good water displacement and edible food should allow you to maintain your lifestyle as a whale. I've always admired your work as a cetacean and have applauded your fictionalized struggle to live in a habitat native to killer whales in the Free Willy movies.
Now that I have buttered you up, Keiko, let's just see how your whaley sense handles the following full frontal assault, beeyotch! (Ponante mistakenly typed this as he said it aloud, consuming three cups of coffee laced with Bailey's, Kahlua, and Grand Marnier. I think it's called a B-52 shot. - Ed.)
Therefore - and I say "therefore" not as someone who has just written something that would provide a logical antecedent for what I'm about to say, but because I'm walking around the house with a souvenir gavel Belladonna gave me - I confess to being a bit confused and curious about your decision to wash ashore and eat all those children.
My Open Letter To Brian Grazer
Lukeisback.com is accepting contributions from those people who want to follow in the footsteps of Steve Hirsch and write open letters to uber-producer Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment.
We should all write open letters and comment on them within the porn community for the next two years. Then I will meet Brian Grazer at Koo Koo Roo or something in 2007 and ask him if he has read any of our open letters, to which he will reply, "open who now?"
Has the Mafia tried to muscle in on GramPonante.com?
No, but I was telling Adella to keep her goddamn contract superstars off my lawn, batting their eyelashes and having pillowfights at all hours.
I walk into Burt's office. He's glued to coverage of another female teacher who had sex with her underage male student story.
We have lunch Tuesday in Culver City. I ordered a vegeburger with fries and Burt (producer of Showtime's My First Time series) got a chicken salad.
Luke: "What is it like to come back to A Current Affair (tabloid TV show relaunching March 21) after you burned a lot of bridges with your book Tabloid Baby?"
Burt: "I did burn a lot of bridges with my book with a lot of people. At the same time, when my book came out, I found out who my friends were."
Burt's cell phone rings with the tune from ACDC's Back in Black. He ignores it.
Burt: "When Peter Brennan met with me and invited me to come back to A Current Affair, I was surprised and humbled."
Rupert Murdoch has little patience. First, he wanted to create a TV newsmagazine that resembled the tabloid energy of News Corp. newspapers. Then he wanted to debut it in four weeks. To make that happen, he tapped Peter Brennan, one of his favorite producers. The Sydney native had started a hit morning show for News Corp.
Burt: "I didn't think I'd ever be doing that again. That book was my farewell to tabloid TV. Although in the ensuing years, I became a standardbearer [at www.tabloidbaby.com] for doing good tabloid. I got a lot of response from the website. People from around the country contributed stories from papers around the world that, if there was a real tabloid TV show out there still, and these would be the stories we'd cover. Again, the stories we got were not coming out of the Globe or The Enquirer or the Weekly World News, but the Guardian, the Independent and The New York Times.
"Coming back to A Current Affair, as we look for stories, we are finding them in small town papers again. We are not getting them from the E! news daily website.
"Peter invited me to come back to New York to work on the show. I have a family now [one wife and two kids]. I have a production company. I'm tied to LA. When I told Peter that, he said I could do whatever I wanted on the West Coast. I'm running the West Coast operation."
Luke: "How did you like doing My First Time?"
Burt: "That was a lot of fun. That was one way to put it. My First Time was a hybrid. It was erotica meets reality meets documentary. It was based on an anonymous website called My First Time.com. People write to that website their erotic stories. Some of them you can tell are not true. Our orders were to just use women.
"We did a pilot where a man and a woman each told his story. The men are a lot more graphic and less sentimental. For women it's the overall experience. For men, it's, yeah, I turned her over and I banged her.
"I did the interviews on video. I interviewed 84 women. My dog died one day and I was off to put the dog to sleep and somebody filled in and got to interview the midget.
"We shot everything in a studio and on location on 16mm. The director worked himself into a coma. I took over directing one day. The scene I shot was a lesbian scene in a swimming pool -- two gorgeous women, a blonde and a brunette. I directed. I stood next to the camera and said action. I said put your hand there, and she did. I said, ok, now do that. And she did. Now kiss, and she did. Then I said, keep going, and they did.
"I stood there and I forgot to yell cut. I was three feet away and watching them do all this stuff and eventually the film ran out and we wound up with a 20-minute uncut scene that we later tried to sell on the internet."
Luke: "What were the porn talent [from Jim South and Robert Lombard] like to work with?"
Burt: "They were all cooperative. We didn't have any trouble with people's egos. There was a variance in talent. Some could act. Some were young and others were older and had experience in that latenight softcore stuff you see on Cinemax and Showtime. Some were famous. Aurora Snow. Lexington Steele."
Luke: "Who were the best actors?"
Burt: "Aurora Snow and Marty Romano. Marty was great. He was very funny off the set. We had the first [simulated] sex scenes done by Dick Smothers Jr. We had him playing a college football hero from 1958. He had his spiked hair combed down. He looked exactly like his father. He was a young charismatic guy.
"A month later, he appeared on the cover of The National Enquirer because he had done his first hardcore.
"All the people we used as actors considered themselves to be actors, professionals, and they were doing a job. There was hanky panky going on on the set. These were young people having fun, waiting around all day to do their scenes... We didn't have any trouble."
When I didn't have my tape recorder rolling, Burt told me that the male actors were often swaggering tough guys until it came time for the scene when they were gentle, unthreatening and easy to direct.
I understand that as a subliminal way of saying that putatively heterosexual male talent are really bisexual.
Luke: "Any of the girls hit on you?"
Burt: "No. None of the talent hit on me or the crew. One of the crew shooting behind the scenes stuff asked Lexington Steele to take it out so she could get a picture, which he did."
Luke: "How did your book affect your life?"
Burt took notes all through his tabloid days and began writing the book in 1996. It was published in 1999.
Burt: "I still have cocktail napkins from 1989 that I had written notes on.
"I had tremendous interest from publishers in New York. I had a hot agent, David Vigliano. My dear late friend Neal Travis [who invented Page Six in the New York Post] helped me get the agent. I started writing it on deadline. I wanted the last chapter to be the birth of my [first] son. I finished writing it in 1996. Vigliano got it out to a bunch of publishers in New York. There was some snobbishness. New York publishers didn't think anybody would be interested in tabloid television. A Current Affair had just been canceled.
"Then, Anthea Disney, who replaced me as managing editor of A Current Affair after Rupert Murdoch took her from newspapers in Britain, became the head of Harper Collins [book publisher owned by Murdoch]. Word went out from New York that this was not a book to publish. Everything went cold. Over the next couple of years, I worked with editor Ed Breslin. We went out and got another agent, Jimmy Vines.
My attorney, Paul Sherman, an old school New York business attorney who secured the book deal for Xaviera Hollander when she did The Happy Hooker, and for Joan Rivers, told me he had a publisher in Nashville, Tennessee -- APG Books. We made a deal. They did religious books and children books and had just started a pop imprint called Celebrity Books. They did a book by Georgia Durante who was married to a mobster in New York. She was his getaway driver. She came to Hollywood and became a stunt driver. The Company She Keeps. My book was the second under that imprint. My book was going to be the one that would blow everything open to tremendous publicity.
"We published it in October 1999. It started hitting the bookstores in December. We did a book launch party at the Bel Age on the Sunset Strip, where a lot of the action took place. The following week, we did a launch party at Elaine's in Manhattan.
"I was booked by my publicist on Good Morning America, NBC Dateline, MSNBC, CNN... The week I got to New York, every booking I had was canceled. The bookers, the young kids who saw the book, thought I'd be a great guest, but when their bosses saw it, they said, we're not putting this guy on television. Look at what he says about Tom Brokaw, Bryant Gumbel.
"I let everything hang out in that book. I wrote it as a screed at first then I rewrote it over three years. At a time when Howard Stern's books were big sellers... I used common language, tabloid language. I didn't pull any punches on my own misdeeds or other people's.
"I wasn't out to get anyone. I just told it like it was.
"I found out that the people who were most offended by it were people who I worked with... People who spent a better part of ten years making other people's lives miserable were so offended that I would write about them.
"I had several purposes for the book. One was my memoir. I was also telling the story of tabloid television, how it changed television and how it fell."
Our food comes but our interview rolls on.
"I was telling the story not through corporate shifts or audience tastes, but like Saving Private Ryan, through one platoon. How the day-to-day story decisions made the genre successful and ultimately made it tawdry and killed it.
"I expected that one of two things would happen: I'd be massively successful and launched into a new life as an author, or no one would notice the book and I'd be known as that little c--- who wrote that book about his friends and would never work again. I never expected the middle, which was that everybody would read the book. It was the most Xeroxed book in the history of television when the galleys came out. Everybody would know about it. But it would sell in New York and LA and a few copies in Chicago because of the media blackout on the book."
Luke: "Didn't you have to sell your Porsche?"
Bert: "I had to sell it in 2000 because work stopped. There were threats made... Paramount tried to stop the book. They put out a cease-and-desist letter that my deal at Hard Copy included a confidentiality clause. I was not allowed to relay my experience. We fought that and won quickly but it cost $10,000 in attorney fees.
"Some people I'd worked with stuck up for me."
Luke: "How much money did the book cost you?"
Bert: "About half a million dollars.
"The book did launch me in a different direction. I worked quietly under the table. I met Brett Hudson and we started a company [Frozen Television] together.
"Henry Schleiff, the president of Court TV, is mentioned [unflatteringly] in my book.
"At my book party at Elaine's in New York, Henry had two producers waiting at the door. They said, Henry has read the part you wrote about him in the book and wants to apologize to you. On an unrelated matter, he would like to hire your wife as the host of this show on Hollywood and Crime.
"I met Henry. He embraced me. We had awkward funny moments. He said, this part was right. This part wasn't. Henry gave my company four hours of documentary work.
"You start feeling humbled. You start realizing you hurt people's feelings.
"John Parsons gave me my first job in television at Channel 5 News in New York in 1980. John became my competitor when I went to A Current Affair and he started up Hard Copy.
"John helped me out.
"I started doing documentaries. We started working with Albert S. Ruddy, who is old friends with my partner Brett Hudson. We interviewed Al for the [Legs McNeil] porn documentary we did for Court TV. Al had dealings with the Perainos and was open and funny about it. Al produced the movie Coonskin (1975) and couldn't get it distributed. Barry Diller refused to distribute it so he went to Butchie Peraino."
One of Burt's assistants stops by the table: "We're going to head out. We weren't able to make contact with the girl. She lives in Orange County. Steve is going to try to talk her into it."
Burt: "Is she in school or what?"
Assistant: "No."
Burt: "Have fun."
The guy leaves. Burt turns to me. "We're doing a story on a student at San Diego State University, Steve York, who directed his own porn film and showed it on television. We went with him yesterday when he went on a job interview to Hustler. Hustler apparently offered him a job."
This is a partial transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor."
Burt: "We wrote a treatment with Al for a Hallmark movie based on Jimmy Carter's childhood memoirs. We wrote and produced the movie Cloud Nine with him."
Luke: "What killed tabloid TV?"
Burt: "When tabloid television first raised its head with A Current Affair, it had an entire part of America to itself. The networks covered events on the East Coast and Europe. They came out to LA if a movie star died or there was an earthquake. The rest of America was known as fly-over country.
"Whenever they covered America, what they know refer to as the red states, they show a picture of a thresher going through a field or hot iron ore being poured in a factory, and call it the America story.
"A Current Affair was going out to the middle of the country and taking small town dramas that gave you a picture of what was really going on. You could see America's alternative morality. People were buying homevideo cameras and making sexy movies. People were hiring hitmen. The minister was having an affair with the organist.
"It was showing what was really going on in America. It was covering America in a new way. It was breaking down these barriers of reporters in trenchcoats reporting and having ordinary-seeming people cover stories. It democratized newsgathering. It was a real threat to the networks, who slowly began to coopt it.
"As tabloids became more successful, A Current Affair spawned Hard Copy, Inside Edition, American Journal, Extra and Day & Date. The people who worked on the original show became spread out. Former network people came in such as John Terenzio (formerly of NBC) took over A Current Affair. Tabloid newspaper reporters started running the shows. The story selection got more sleazy. They were going for ratings. One of the stories that killed tabloid was one of the greatest -- Joey Buttafucco [and his mistress] Amy Fisher. It was a miracle story where the girl shot the wife and the wife not only survived but came up swinging and said, I defend my husband. You couldn't feel sorry for the wife was so combative in the face of all facts that her husband had had this affair. There was no one that you could root for.
"Then came O.J. Simpson. That changed everything. When the murder happened, nobody really covered it. Mr. Simpson had not been charged. For a week, we had a latenight show Premiere Story that was going to go up against Nightline. When Nightline covered Bosnia, we'd be covering Madonna.
"We had the O.J. story to ourselves for an entire week. When Ted Koppel first covered it, he apologized. He said some things are not important but there's interest and we have to cover it.
"After that low speed chase, and he was arrested, all the networks jumped on the story. There was live court room coverage during the day. Jay Leno making jokes at night. The tabloid shows were pre-recorded. All they could do was buy witnesses that would spoil the case and do the same stories with alliteration and music. There was no reason for these shows to exist. That killed it. The networks became tabloid covering Columbine, John John Kennedy's death, Princess Diana... The networks weren't covering these stories in the right way. They were still doing it with the network distance and loftiness.
"You watch NBC Dateline and they make fun of people.
"Just recently, there was a story in San Francisco. A bunch of workers for the gorilla foundation, a bunch of women who worked for Coco the Talking Gorilla, have sued because they claim they were forced to show their breasts to the gorilla.
"A Current Affair is back. We got in touch with the lawyer for the women and said, we want to do your story. The lawyer said no. I'm only dealing with mainstream news organizations. I'm not going to deal with something like A Current Affair.
"He appeared on CNN. Jenny Mouze (Making The Mouze of it) did a segment called Monkey Business at the Zoo. It lasted 125 seconds. It was all jokes. They made fun of the lawyer and they made fun of the women.
"I wrote the lawyer an email: If you want to see what mainstream legitimate news does to you, watch the piece. They made fun of you. They made you look like an idiot, like a sharpie trying to make some money.
"He wrote back and said he is re-evaluating everything. We're in a deal now to get the four women who are suing. Another woman every week comes forward...
"The networks will cover the material but they still look down their noses at it. These are people who look at my salad and know the names of the various leaves. They go to their little markets and that's the life they live.
"That's what killed tabloid and that's what's left a great opportunity to bring it back.
"If Entertainment Tonight does a three-minute story, it's a special feature. They're all doing Hollywood. They can't write the long-form stories. A Current Affair is going to do stories that are twelve minutes. That's an eternity in television."
Burt tells me the story behind his site SaintMychal.com. "I'm doing TabloidBaby.com and every year for publicity I put out a press release. Remember Andrea Thompson from NYPD Blue who became a CNN newscaster? I named her newscaster of the year.
"I'm looking for something to publicize. At the end of 2001, there's a little item in Parade magazine (Walter Scott Personality Parade): There is a prayer going around called Michal's prayer.
"Mychal Judge was the fire department chaplain who officially was the first casualty at the World Trade Center. He heard the call and went in with the other firemen. When the second plane hit, Mychal was hit by some debris and died. There's a famous photo of him being carried out on a chair and laid his body to rest in a church next door that was miraculously untouched.
"Then I saw another article on the front page of The Los Angeles Times who have been talking about him. I looked into it. I saw that the gay activists said he was gay. And he was an alcoholic.
"I put together a release saying the Catholic church is going to find itself in a quandary. They're going to be faced with canonizing a gay alcoholic priest. Neal Travis picked it up in his column. People started emailing me.
"My old friend Wayne Darwin said, 'Mate, you ought to make this into a website and sell t-shirts to the gays.'"
Burt's wife Alison Holloway walks up. Burt introduces me as someone with "heavy religious issues."
From this web site:
Alison Holloway, co-presenter of HTV News in Bristol during the 1980's. Alison was chosen to co-present ITV's Olympic 1988 coverage with Nick Owen. Alison was quickly snapped up by Sky at the launch of Sky News in 1989. She then helped launch the South East edition of Meridian Tonight in 1993.
We talk about Benny Hill getting taken off the tele for making Paki (Pakhistani) jokes and pinching women on the bum.
Allison: "In our house it was all Benny all the time because I had an older brother."
Burt: "My friend Jimmy Sheehan put together this website. We put his story and articles about him. Within two weeks, we started getting emails from around the world. 'I knew Mychal Judge. He cured my baby of cancer.' 'I knew Mychal Judge. He...' 'I have a child with severe deformities. I've named him Mychal. I pray to Mychal every day.'
"From Perth to Germany, from around the world, people started emailing me. 'G-d bless you for doing this.' It's become this responsibility, this movement around the world.
"We get a few articles done.
"I'm on the set of My First Time. Some house in Van Nuys. Shooting the porn. I get a call on my cell from a reporter from The New York Times. He wants to do a story on SaintMychal.com. I start telling him the story. He says, what movement? You're making this up, aren't you?
"I say, I'll get back to you. I went home and got every email and put together this big memo for the guy from The New York Times. A week later, a front page story in The New York Times interviewing all the people I had sent him to.
"People were emailing that we were trying to bring down the church, that we were gay activists. His order, the Franciscans, unfortunately, is known as the gayest order in the Church. They washed their hands of it.
"We've kept the thing going as an ongoing research project. Great Britain did a documentary. Michael Daly at the New York Daily News is writing a book about Mychal Judge.
"It's been a weird sidetrack. My wife doesn't know what the hell is going on. She thinks I have some strange Catholic issues.
"When I was first interviewed, they asked me for my religion. I said I was a lapsed Catholic. I don't go to church. Then I was given advice to never say that. Say that you're a fine Catholic. You don't want people to think that you are someone from the outside trying to tear down the Church."
Interview with Holly Moss of HMoss Consulting
Holly: It is imperative for adult sites to look for additional revenue streams, as the rules set by Visa/MC are getting difficult for us to have a profitable business. Also, we need to get out of the notion that all users have a credit card. Not all online consumers are credit worthy!
However, majority of USA customer have a checking account, so for example accepting online checks, as alternative is important revenue stream for merchants. Also less then 50% of consumers own a credit card in Europe so if you are targeting international countries to expand your market, you must offer than an alternative payment option.
Vivid's Hirsch: Delusions of grandeur?
Somebody tell this guy that he makes videos of girls sucking dick. Please.
In a display of hubris unmatched since Paul Fishbein's condescending "attaboy" of a few weeks ago, Vivid "Co-Chairman and Co-CEO" Steven Hirsch has sent an "open letter" to mainstream producer Brian Grazer, saying "Dear Brian... I confess to being a bit confused and curious about some of your comments last Tuesday on 'Good Morning America.' If I heard you correctly, you called your movie a 'cautionary tale' and said that adult films are not good for people in front of or behind the camera."
Even though the avn.com article fawningly describes Hirsch as "perhaps the most powerful producer in adult" (The way I see it, Larry Flynt could buy and sell Steve Hirsch) the fact remains that Hirsch is a big fish in a pond - a puddle - that is mostly populated by small-time operators. (Those few times I've met Hirsch, he has been nice to me. There is no personal animus here.)
Hirsch is out of his league, big-time. Grazer produced one film that has a momentary shot of cocksucking. Hirsch has produced hundreds of films and videos with hours of cocksucking. This does not entitle Hirsch to get into the Vanity Fair Oscar® party and sit at Grazer's table.
Look for Grazer to continue to ignore these pathetic pleas for attention from these deluded executive types.
As a wise man once said, porn is the sideshow, not the main attraction.
I love this. Hirsch also says to Brian Grazer: "I've always admired your work..." which tells me that he never saw Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho.
Rob Brydon plays the critic and impresario Kenneth Tynan in this funny and touching drama set in 1960s London. As well as being one of the most influential theatre critics of the time, Tynan worked with Laurence Olivier at the newly founded National Theatre and waged a battle against censorship that famously led to him being the first person to say f*** on television. We spoke to the writer and director Chris Durlacher about the drama.
Nina Hartley's 1989 Interview With Shmate: A Magazine of Progressive Jewish Thought
Posted on Nina.com.
What Really Happened To Rebecca Wild?
I spoke with Rebecca last night and got the story about what really happened to her in San Francisco...
Rebecca was dancing at the MSC (Market Street Cinema) and last Monday night she was stricken with extremely sever leg cramps. That may sound like a minor thing to some but if any of you have ever had a serious cramp, you know it will can easily make a grown man cry... the pain is intense and unrelenting. The cramp just wouldn't go away and after several hours in excrutiating pain it hadn't lessened in severity, so she went to the local hospital. I didn't ask and she didn't say what exactly they did for her, but eventaully the cramp subsided and she finally got some relief from the pain, although the leg remained tender and sore.
Apparently leg cramps can be a condition unto themselves or they can also be a symptom of several other more serious conditons, so the Drs. chose to keep her in the hospital to run some tests... I guess for things like phlebitis (blood clots) and such.
Long story short, the tests were negative, she left the hospital early Thursday... she was NOT still hospitalized on Friday regardless of what MSC claimed... in fact she has returned to the club to complete her appearance schedule. And no, her pussy wasn't paralyzed, and no, it wasn't a drug overdose, and no, she didn't break her leg... it was simply a mundane electrolyte problem or something similar that caused severe leg cramps, nothing more, nothing less.
Rebecca was surprised if not exactly amused about all the comments and misinformation that this thing has caused not only here on TER but in dozens of emails and phone calls she's gotten repeating all kinds of rumors and nonesense. For those who offered their concerns about her, she asked me to pass on her thanks, and for those who thought it was funny, well, she had a few choice words for them that I won't pass on.
Hungary Update
It seems like Hungarian girls are not anymore interested in a porn industry! No new girls. 2 girls showed up at the casting today! 1 Russian and 1 Hungarian. Maybe the fact that being on the set working today, and the very next month being on TV in every single Hungarian home can be a big turn off. There is today's in Hungary 2 TV channels showing porn all night long ( Private Gold, XXL ) It's not pay per view and anybody can access to the channel!
[Our correspondence] came to include, in scarcely more than a month, some 150 e-mail messages from Foer, many of them wickedly hilarious, others gravely literary, and running to thousands of words..
No. 627: I told you that I wished I could talk like a black person. It's more than that, really: I wish, in the give and take between us, that I could give myself to you as a strong black man. You could receive my thoughts as if I were making strong love to you on satin sheets with the music of Barry White or Marvin Gaye playing-making love to you with my large penis, which would not be an offensive racial stereotype yet would be a penis of unmistakable substance. Instead I feel as if I'm humping away in a rabbity fashion on a futon, after a dinner of takeout Italian, with Dido on the stereo, and I'm hoping to make up for my shortcomings with earnest cunnilingus in a little while. This is all just a figure of speech!
Peter Biskind Reflects On Premiere Magazine
Gossip, not in the sense of rumor -- true or false -- but people acting badly when they think no one's looking, was important, especially in reporting on the industry, where the players believed they had license to kill. I realized that it is impossible to draw a firm line between the public and the private because so much of the former is driven by ego, by pettines, by vanity and venality, a truth brought home again and again by the best books on the film business from the eighties and nineties -- David McClintick's Indecent Exposure, Steven Bach's Final Cut, William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, and Julia Philipps's You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, all of which are rich in personal detail.
Then came Entertainment Weekly, which changed the rules of the game. EW solved Premiere's problem by being more newsy and more gossipy. It didn't care about film art or inflate its subject with windy claims. As a weekly, instead of a monthly, EW's lead time was dramatically shorter than ours, while its stories were briefer and pithier. Whereas we had indulged ourselves with six-, seven-, occasionally eight- or even ten-thousand word articles, their's rarely exceeded six hundred words, and were often less. Under pressure from EW, our's were pared down dramatically, but we still couldn't break news, and thereby gave up our only asset -- in-depth reporting. It was the worst of both worlds. The magazine downsized as if it had been shrunk in the washer. Circulation flat-lined at around 500,000. No longer an exciting start-up, Premiere had become a dowdy senior in the blink of an eye.
Hooper In The News
Arlo Gilberg is better known in porn as Hooper, a frequent poster to JBM:
Paul Laudanski writes "Slashdot ran an article earlier on 'iDownload Tries to Silence Spyware Critics'. Since then, the spyware critics have responded to iDownload: CastleCops, NetRN, and Sunbelt Software. InternetWeek and BroadbandReports have picked up this story as well. Brian Livingston interviewed iDownload's CEO Arlo Gilbert, who claims the letters were a success: "The majority of sites we've contacted have taken down or properly classified iSearch" and "When asked to name some of the sites that had complied, Gilbert answered, "I'm not going to share that information. It would be shooting a gift horse in the mouth."" General overview by Kye-U and Zhen-Xjell."
Hypotheticals
Eugene Volokh uses names of friends in hypothetical problems for his law students to work out, and I'm going to be in this one from the second edition of his First Amendment textbook:
Problem: "Mafiosi in Love." An Ohio statute says "The distribution, purchase, and rental of any material that's obscene under the standards of Miller v. California is prohibited." Martin Scorsese's new movie, "Mafiosi in Love," has four extremely arousing sexual scenes that are more explicit than anything seen in Hollywood studio productions to date. When Cathy S. rents a video of "Mafiosi," both she and the video store owner (Mitch Gunzler) are prosecuted. Will their Free Speech Clause defenses succeed?
Beats me. But I think this situation raises some other issues:
1. If "Mafiosi In Love," like most Martin Scorsese films, runs about 20 minutes too long, can Cathy S. sue the distributor, or Scorsese, or the video store owner, for 20 minutes wasted of her extremely valuable time? If so, how should she figure her billable hours?
2. If Cathy S., like most reasonable movie fans, expects not "extremely arousing sexual scenes" from a Scorsese gangster film but instead scenes like Don Rickles beating a guy to death with a telephone, and "Mafiosi In Love" unfortunately does not include this, can she sue for disappointment? If so, for how much?
Peter Landau Interviews Legs McNeil
LM: Linda was a liar. She lied to me. You know what, she wasn't that smart. I hate to say that. If you recount her story she's a victim of Chuck Traynor, then she's a victim of her second husband, then she's a victim of Women Against Pornography. She's always a victim. Once you find that, you say, "OK, something's wrong here."
PL: So you edited the book to allow Linda to speak her mind, but do you discredit her in a sense?
LM: I wasn't discrediting her; I was just asking other people about her. She's written Ordeal and that had become what everyone thought the porn industry was and I knew it was wrong.
PL: Reading the book I found that there were similarities between the porn stories and those of the punks in Please Kill Me.
LM: That's kind of why I did it. It was the '70s, so of course drugs and the sex were the same. I felt familiar with it. I felt like I was the only guy who could actually do this. And that makes me sound like I'm an egomaniac, but I'm not saying it in that way. I'm saying it in the way that I had the time and the money and I wanted to take it seriously. Plus, I'm not a real moral kind of guy. I don't really judge people. So I thought in that way I was prepared to do it.
One last word on the Oscars®
Yeah yeah, Russ Meyer, they mentioned two of his three major-studio films, BFD, if they really wanted to honor porn they would have mentioned Jim Holliday...
I was very impressed at how Academy President Frank Pierson managed to divide, with Solomonic wisdom, the Oscar® awards given to Million Dollar Baby and The Aviator, giving one film the acting, directing and Best Picture awards, and the other film the technical awards.
Reminds me of the year Vivid was getting shut out at the AVN awards and suddenly WHAMMO! there was a tie for Best Actress and both awards went to Vivid contract performers, again, a potential embarrassment avoided by judicious selection of winners.
Pierson, faced with two strong contenders produced by two major studios (Warner Bros. and Miramax), exercised similar judgment and divided the awards accordingly. You know, this would never happen at awards shows if the ballots were counted by an independent company, maybe an accounting firm, of untarnished reputation and unquestioned integrity. Maybe people who give awards for achievement should look into this.
Oblivious To The Obvious
Luke F-rd interviews Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie and tries to get the libertarian honcho to say something, anything, politically incorrect about race, while Nick ducks and weaves, trying to stay as smug and boring as possible...
What exactly is the point of being a libertarian if it means you don't feel free to speak the truth you see with your own two eyes?
Before Sunset With Lynn LeMay
What if you had a second chance with the one that got away?
It's nine years after Luke and Lynn first met; now, they encounter one another on the French leg of Luke's book tour.
They were in love nine years ago after they met at the FOXE Awards at the Mayan Theater on Hollywood Blvd. Now they're together again, this time at Barney's Beanery at 8500 Holloway. There's a lot to remember and to tell each other.
At first they behave just like friends, realize very soon what they really need from each other and later regret they couldn't get in touch all that time. In the end we're almost sure they'll make love at least...
If you want to believe they've really been dreaming of each other all these years, believe love's the strongest thing, you have the opportunity here. End it using your own discretion. This story has little humor but it gives good mood. You must read this. Even if you're not in love yet, you'll want to be. Highly recommended!
Austrian Model Crystal Klein On Howard Stern
"Austria is pretty boring," said Crystal Klein. "There's no hot guys, either."
"Hitler's from Austria - he was hot," said Artie Lange.
Stern asked Klein if she hated the Jews. "Of course not," she said.
"In Austria they hate the Jews," said Stern. "There's no Jews left. Austrians hate Jews. They're some of the top Jew haters in the world."
Stern suggested that they play Nazi and Jew, that she'd love that. "Hunt me down."
Howard told Crystal that if she did certain things, he would tell her where the rest of the Jews were hiding.
I email Klein:
Hi Crystal,
How did you like your time on Stern? How many lies did you tell him? You have a boyfriend... He got so many more things out of you than I did. I guess he's the king. I am on lithium, clonidine and clonazepam. You have too met a Jew -- me.
We In Ohio Knew About Jim Holliday
Dino writes:
Luke, I just found out about Jim Holliday's death yesterday. I am emailing you after reading your article about Jim Holliday that you posted on www.lukeisback.com.
I knew Jim in the 70's while he was living in Athens, Ohio. I was able to connect with Jim again over the past two years with Jill Kelly's help. She passed along over the telephone an email message that I sent her that had some cryptic information that only Jim would know just to let him know that he wasn't being pimped.
We were fraternity brothers at Ohio University in the 70's and fellow Yellow Snow. Yellow Snow was a name for our fraternity's sports teams that was created by Jim that we used to pimp on other fraternities and sororities. Actually, Yellow Snow lived on after Jim's departure from Ohio and became a big thing on campus for a few years.
I knew Jim when he was Bill Carlson (his real name) and when his current alias was Jack Nash. He was the proctor of the Delta Upsilon fraternity house and he generally oversaw the goings on of our fraternity. Your article with your descriptions of him reminds me of many memories of the times we had those years in Ohio.
Anyway, I thought I would email you to thank you for putting the information out there about Jim. There were about 6 people from Ohio that Jim kept in touch with. I was one of the lucky ones that he called every month or so over the past two years.
I actually received a call from him while I was in Las Vegas on December 9th. I was at a sports book and could not talk long, but could tell his ramblings were stranger than usual. I was shocked to hear that he passed away only a few days later.
Again, I appreciated and enjoyed the last article that you did about him. Thanks for bringing him back into memory for one last time.