Michael Gross

"Starting a porn site today is almost like starting a grunge band 20 years ago."
                      
                    - Michael Gross







Chief Magazine: How are you?

Michael Gross: Pretty good. Are you a Pratt guy?

Yeah, I went to Pratt and graduated a few years ago. Actually so did a lot of people on our staff. Most of the kids that went to Pratt and stayed in Brooklyn, we’re all sort of evolved with the same ideas. A couple of our partners have an online literary journal. Actually we have an intern who is going to Pratt at the moment.

Did any of you have Sean Kelly as an instructor?

I didn’t. Oh yeah, he’s a comedy writer. My friend Julie did. I never had him in a class but I met him a couple times. Is he a friend of yours?

He’s one of my best friends. He’s one of the original Lampoon editors. He was the head writer for Saturday Night Live and lots of other things. But basically there were 10 people responsible for National Lampoon, and Sean makes the list. He wasn’t one of the originators but he came in and was a major editor. He’s a brilliant, brilliant man. Whenever I would get criticized for the bathroom humor or the boy’s club, prep school humor, I would say "yeah, we’re the people who published the parody of James Joyce." I can’t read James Joyce, let alone parody him, and Sean Kelly actually wrote a parody. We published it like once a year because we couldn’t believe that we could do it. Do you know what kind of mind that takes? But Sean’s a dear, dear friend. And a wonderful man, just a great human being. Funniest man you’ll ever sit in a room with.

Well that’s great. When was the last time you were living in New York? How long have you been on the West Coast?

I’m living at the beach. So you guys have an online magazine? And a paper?

We’re going to print the end of July. The first issue we’re going to print like an 80 page book, perfect bound.

It’s none of my business, but where did you get the money?

We’re raising it now, to be honest. Right now we’re planning all these benefit events. We’ve been doing parties, which kind of came out of the idea of issuing release parties. They were so successful that we started booking more and more bands and DJs, doing more and more events. We have a loft space here in Greenpoint. We were doing parties here like every two weeks and we outgrew the space. We took May off in terms of events to get lined up to do parties at other venues. We certainly weren’t charging people to come to the loft, for basically a big house party, but since then we’ve been starting to throw benefit parties at other venues and giving venues their fair share of the door and starting to raise some of the capital from the door to help supplement the magazine. I mean our main thing will be advertising, certainly.

Where does the magazine get circulated? Brooklyn?

Yeah. It will be a free magazine, available in coffee shops, bars, boutiques—those sort of places.

How much is an ad?

We're reasonable...

What do you envision your circulation being? How many are you going to print?

We’re going to start with 9,000. Tentatively the release is late August. We’re planning on having a Thursday event, a Friday event, and a Saturday event, and we hope to distribute a fair number of copies then. And then we’re going to also send small amounts to people we have in the rest of the country. Couple hundred to Seattle, couple hundred to L.A., to Chicago, and Austin.

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Cool. Would you run an ad for an adult site?

Absolutely.

Have you looked at my site?

Yes, and I enjoyed your site and appreciated the link.

Do you know that image with the monkey and the girl?

Don’t recall that one, but sounds like I should.

We’ll take an ad. It’s a cartoon image of a monkey and a girl. It’s clothed, there’s no nudity.

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Yeah, that sounds great. One thing we were struggling with when we first launched the website almost a year ago was trying to find a webserver that wouldn’t have a problem with us putting nudity on the site or linking to sites that have adult content.

That’s one of the problems in our business. We’ve had this thing almost four years now. We went into this as complete novices, literally did a phonebook search for adult sites, and picked one that seemed to have experience with this to put it up. And it got hacked and crashed twice. Then I finally got gurus in who got me a better server and more firewalls in to protect my back. I mean, it’s not easy. I wrote a column on that on an adult site. And I get people who ask me all the time where I go for a server. I just recommend my company. They’re San Diego-based and inexperienced. There you go, you’re an adult site. Regular folks don’t want to do it.

No, they definitely don’t.   

It’s really interesting to see on Blogger. When it was Blogger they were very cautious about what you could put up. You could put up some nudity but you had to be really careful about getting too dirty. And Google took it over, and for a minute it looked like it would get more restrictive, but instead they opened the floodgates and they’ve got hardcore porn blogs. Google doesn’t seem to care. Which I think is interesting. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know if we want to go into a whole conversation, but for me—someone your age, my son’s 35, and you’re in your 20s?

Yeah. 25.   

It’s just a form of pop culture. A low form of pop culture. Starting a porn site today is almost like starting a grunge band 20 years ago. What the fuck’s the difference? Once you know what it is…I’ve been in restaurants, I’ve been at parties, my friends, my son’s friends, you know, all literate and professionals in their 20s and 30s… everybody talks about porn. I mean at my age I remember literally sneaking into stores to buy something, and if it showed pubic hair it was illegal and you could get arrested for selling. You compare that to here it becomes ho-hum. So that’s why I ask, from your standpoint, you can recognize it, then control the taste level of the imagery. We can do this, but we don’t want to look like that. But no one seems to mind.

We consider, as you said, pornography and sites to be another pop culture subcategory. We’re not trying to run, necessarily, arousing material. But we certainly won’t shy away from it. We will interview the head of Tokyo Perv. And talk to her unabashedly about everything. We get a good photo essay of guys with morning wood, and you know, we’re going to run it.

That was a nice piece there.

Thanks, I enjoyed it too. With this upcoming issue we’ve got a photo essay of love dolls. It’s very well lit, very poised.

Is it that company that makes the three or four thousand dollars one?

I don’t know what company the photographer shot.

Are they the ones that look very real?

They look very, very real.

Yeah I have a whole feature on my site about them. They’re amazing.

It’s pretty remarkable.

They are $3000-$5000 each.

It’s a huge market.   

Yeah and we go to a lot of conventions, talk to the people that build sex machines. There’s a new company coming out with a new one, and I went to the photo shoot. I asked the guy. He said they sell for $1400 each and we had to change their production to China to keep up with the sales. Who are all these people? Who’s spending $1500 to get a moving dildo in their house? Anyways, what are you doing with me?

I’d love to talk about all that you’ve done, linearly. Starting with you growing up and teenage and formative years, your education in Brooklyn, your work for National Lampoon and Esquire and then the film industry.

You know I sat on the board at Pratt.

I read that on your site. When was that?

Mid 90's. I actually couldn’t afford it. It was really expensive. You have to pay a lot of money to stay on the board.

Yeah?  

I was out of my league, I’m sitting there with bankers, and they didn’t think anything about paying 200,000 bucks a year just to sit there. And they had expectations, I knew what they were looking for. Their expectations were that I would bring movie money. I couldn’t find anybody to give a shit. And they didn’t want to kick me off the board, and I got along really well with the president, he was doing a great job. When I was there-- literally one year-- we went through three presidents. The school was a complete mess. ‘94, ‘93, it was disastrous. He [Dr. Thomas Schutte] pulled it to-fucking-gether. He really did his job. He’s a great guy. I see him when he comes to California. I get letters from him. We talk.

The last time he was around, I think he wanted me to do something. I forget what it was. I said, "Look, get me a doctorate, will you?" I never graduated. He said, "we can’t do that." He goes, "Take out your checkbook. You can pay for a doctorate...Well we’re giving one to some movie star." But I don’t quite rate that. And truthfully now that I’m doing an adult site, and I’m not being hypocritical about it, I put my name on it, I’m becoming vaguely non persona to a lot of people at Pratt. They don’t say anything. I don’t hear about it, but I curate a museum as well. And there are some board members who are upset.

Fortunately there are people who give directions and say "it’s none of your business." But definitely you notice people don’t talk to you anymore. Well fuck it, we’re adults now. I’ll be 62 in October. You think I worry about what anyone fucking thinks about what I do? Oh god, I’m so concerned. The old lady who puts 200000 into the museum, what do I do?

So... where do you want to start?

The beginning.  Did you grow up in California?

I grew up in Newburgh, New York. Very colorful environment, actually. It was a 35000 person town at the southwest point. And my mom left Seattle when I was born and took me as a baby to Newburgh. And the man who married her and raised me is John Dix Gross. An Italian family. His father actually grew to power from being an Italian immigrant running charcoal plants and the like, to the point where the governor of New York baptized my father. They all had a lot of money and they all blew it in the 20's. And they were all small town gangsters. Gangster is a big word, but they were loan sharks and bookmakers, and my father had a bar of questionable repute. We owned a rooming house, and I saw anything and everything that way. There was a point where my uncle used to take book every day in the house and I wasn’t allowed to use my encyclopedias because he’d file his scratch sheets alphabetically in them. They’d give me two bucks a day to bet the horses. He taught me how to take book.

One day I came home from school, I was about seven years old, and the kid next door said, “Boy, you should have been here! The cops came. They took your mother, your father, your uncle, everybody.” Forty state troopers came to the house, cleaned it out. They decided to clean up the act for the kid. It wasn’t good for me to have everybody arrested. And my mother got on probation and my uncle got off in two years and said my father didn’t know anything about it so he wouldn’t lose his liquor license [laughs].

Wow.

I grew up in a very colorful working class environment, and I’m so grateful for it because the experiences and color that was in my life—I had very good parents, very supportive of my artistic talent. And they were working class. They never went to college, they knew nothing about art, all they knew is, "gee I wish he’d be a doctor and go to Westpoint, but he can draw and he loves it so we’re going to support it. He’s going to grow up to be a starving artist," because that’s the way they saw art. But if it makes him happy, let him do it. They gave me private art lessons at 12, opened an account at an art supply store, encouraged me, were proud of my paintings, and then I got into Pratt. And I was the first college-educated kid in my entire family.

No kidding.

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I dropped out after three years, because I just got fed up with school, but I had incredibly supportive parents. I really credit everything to that support. You know, I had friends whose fathers, when they said they wanted to make movies, said, "Fine. Get an engineering degree first and then you can make movies, or be a writer or whatever you want, but you need something to fall back on." And they went to the whole college, got this degree they didn’t want, got out and walked away from it, and became writers anyway. But they made their parents happy. I was lucky because my parents just said "Man, you’ve got this talent... God gave it to you. Go for it." I had a wonderful upbringing. Very colorful, very typical small-town upbringing. You know, bicycle, the woods, catching snakes, fishing with my mom, small town, gangster uncle, like everybody’s got. It was very, very good.

There’s a kind of schizophrenia in me, if you will. I mean, it makes no sense. To me it makes sense. It’s taken all these years to get comfortable with it. And that is why I’m very liberal and very conservative. My liberal friends can’t talk to my conservative friends and vice versa, and they can’t figure me out at all. I vote Republican and have a porn site. I’m a series of contradictions all the time. I think there are good people everywhere and good qualities in people. And I’m not a knee-jerk anything. That’s kind of how I am in my work, too. I’m very much a chameleon. I have no problems working for Mobil Oil Corporation after working for National Lampoon. I was happier working at National Lampoon, it suited me better, but I see beauty in everything and I love learning, and I love doing everything. Doing just that, doing it all at the same time, isn’t contradictory to me.

You started off studying painting, though.

One of my best friends in high school was named Don Shay. And Don Shay went off to publish a magazine that’s published right now called Cinefex. Which is the leading, most beautiful magazine on movie special effects. They have a great website. He lives in California now; we’re still good friends. In high school we made movies and published magazines. We published a little fan zine, a movie fan zine, and did all this stuff. So I said what I want to do is I want to get out, I want to go to school, and I want to make movies. But I was an artist. And I also wanted to be an illustrator. And I also loved magazines. So I went to art school. I made the determination to learn the business end of this... in other words learning about advertising or about publishing a magazine, I could learn on the job or from my peers. What I needed to do was train my hand and train my eyes as a painter. So I went to fine art school as a painter.

But my roommate was in graphic arts. I would just suck off his projects by watching him doing them. I would learn from what he was learning. I had an architecture student and I learned from what he was doing. So when the time came and I left school, I had no portfolio that would take me into the painting world and decided to be in the magazine business, I took three months and made a mock portfolio as if I had taken all of the design courses. And got a job, as if I had. But meanwhile, the actual day-to-day schooling was learning how to paint, and I never applied that typically, except now I’m painting. I just thought I could get the whole education by majoring in one thing and sucking of my roommates in another way. So I just took my portfolio and got my first job. And it was a miracle being published. And I thought "I can do this," and got my first job at Cosmopolitan.

So once you left Pratt did you go right to Cosmo?

Yeah I went directly to my first job at Cosmo. I was bringing home $82 a week. I was married with a baby, living in Brooklyn. We had a $100 a month walk-up apartment. We bought one six pack of beer every Friday, and drank down at… what’s that bar down around the corner, Al’s? And mooched off my friends. Drank from their pitchers. And I just went to work at the magazine and kind of moved up rapidly through that. Got a nice portfolio together and got the break of my life. Because everybody else was being drafted, avoiding the draft, and taking teaching jobs. I didn’t have to because I was married with a kid. I was draft exempt because I had a baby at age 18. I was able to go to Mexico for the Olympics in ’68, and it jumped my portfolio, put my professional career ahead five years, because I came back with an incredible portfolio. And then I went into the magazine business with Eye Magazine, which was a very hip magazine at the time. They went out of business. I floundered around at three other magazines, and finally wound up at National Lampoon. With the timing and everything else it was just right for me to be there.

Now how did that come about? Did you just send them your portfolio?

I was looking for a job. I was working at something called Family Health magazine. But it was my own magazine, and in those days the best thing you could do was get your own magazine. You didn’t want to be designing for another art director. You wanted to go up the hierarchy until it was your magazine. So, you could have any magazine you wanted. But the good ones were taken. So you were constantly trying to jockey yourself into a better and better position, changing jobs every year, but moving up with a better portfolio, more responsibility. And I was at Family Health looking for a job.

My assistant went to Lampoon and came back, I didn’t even know it was available, and he said, “I just went for a job but I think it’s better for you.” And I had seen the first issue of it; I remember seeing the parodies they had done of Time. They were brilliant. And I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, reading from it out loud, it seemed brilliant. I said to her, "I could fix this thing." And she looked at it and said, “Why would you do that? You’re trying to work your way up in these beautiful magazines and this is a rag!” And I said, “No, no I get it. I know what I could do with this thing.” So I walked in and talked to them, and the rest of it is kind of reported in every book that you read. Josh Karp has a wonderful book about Lampoon. It tells my story pretty well, you know, got the interview, who didn’t like me and who did, and how it all worked, and the magic that took off because karmically we just clicked. We were like kids in a candy store. We had our own magazine. We could do anything we wanted. And did. What a joy it was.

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Well it’s sort of hard to imagine climbing any higher than National Lampoon in that time.

In retrospect, yes. But if you looked at it at the time it was just a small rag, it looked like an underground comic. And I had a lot to do with it coming out. But it wasn’t just me, we came together after I was there. The New York Times wrote something in the 70's about Lampoon. And they said if the original editors, Doug Kenney and Henry Beard, are the parents of National Lampoon, then Michael Gross is the doctor who delivers the baby. And that’s how I see it. That’s exactly how I see it. I just made it work. But I never wrote a word. I never created anything. I just made it work. I was blessed to have the opportunity. The rest is history. It just took off—I think they expected it to last a year. Eventually all the talent went elsewhere too. Well, times change. All that’s left is this legacy that’s 30 years old. What happened with that is when it went under, I started a design firm called Pellegrini, Kaestle and Gross. And Lampoon was still a client with special publications and special projects. And we did lots of other things. Running our own design studio in midtown Manhattan was really awful. I mean, you found after six months all you were doing was worrying about telephone systems and paying the secretary. It was tough and I didn’t like it so I quit doing it. So I went to Esquire and fell back into the comfort zone of a magazine. And of course, it was then one of the best five magazines in the country. So I was a really happy camper. They sold us to another publisher who didn’t like what I was doing, didn’t like the editing, and then it was over. Didn’t know what to do with myself. It was like 1978. I went back to National Lampoon and got an office over there, did

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freelance and did stuff for Heavy Metal.

Heavy Metal is their sister publication. So I did books, I did some illustrations, I did special projects for them, and it almost paid the bills. I freelanced a little, and I was floundering. At that point Animal House had already been made, and I knew Matty Simmons, who produced it. I knew him a little bit because we just touched base in that circle and I knew all the rest of the people so well. And you have to remember that when we ran Lampoon, we had a stage show. We had a record company, so John Belushi and Bill Murray, these people were good friends of mine. And John Belushi’s wife was an assistant of mine in the art department. We hired her so that John would stay in New York and not go to Chicago. And we did all this, and they all then left to go to Hollywood. When that all happened, Doug Kenney was out in California making a movie, getting ready to do Caddyshack and whatever. And they were all saying, “Come on out, the weather’s fine. We’ll find a way to use you.” So I took an advertising job so I could take care of my family, but in the meantime, when I was at Lampoon, freelancing, because Leonard Mogel and Heavy Metal was trying to gel with Matty Simmons, who was his partner doing Animal House, he wanted his own movie. So we got together with Sean Kelly and said, "What can we do with Heavy Metal?" And he said well we can make an animated feature. An adult animated feature. And I was involved a little because I said I knew a lot about animation and art. And Leonard Mogel said, "Good, we’ll make you Associate Producer," and we got a little bit of money together and actually almost made a deal with 20th Century Fox.

We met with animators... and I thought it was so cool that I was going to make movies, my first love when I was 15 years old. Back to the first wish from high school, I just got delayed for 15 years. But then it all fell through. I told my family that we were going to move to California, and that I was going to take this advertising job, make movie posters, and somehow I’m going to worm my way into the movie business. I was going to learn how to do it, and got on a plane. While I was on the plane flying to California, Leonard Mogel made a last desperate call trying to get this thing sold to Universal. And Ivan said, “That’s a fucking great idea. I can probably get this produced in Canada.” And with a phone call, he got it started. When I landed in California, a week before showing up at my new job, Leonard calls me up and goes, “I went to Universal and talked to Ivan Reitman, and since you’re in California, he’s going to do this movie, and I told him you were attached, and he said, ‘Oh yeah I remember Michael.’ So you’ve got to go sell yourself.” So I went “Okay Ivan, how are you doing,” and he says, “So why should you be part of this?” And I said, “Well you know you have a problem here, you’re going to do this movie, animated, and it’s going to be based on all this art in the magazine. Animators don’t know how to translate this kind of art into animation and stay true to the kind of art it is, because your animators are all going to be Disney-trained, or from commercials. They’re going to be doing bunny rabbits. Someone has to get these guys to make the film look like the product it’s coming from.” And he thought it was a good idea. "Why don’t you art direct and I’ll make you associate producer." I said that was fine. So, I didn’t take my advertising job and the story is much to the chagrin today of anyone who wants to get into the movie business. I got my first producing job within three weeks in Hollywood. It happened on the plane while I was flying out there. Totally karmically, cosmically, stars in the right place kind of thing… Well, if I wasn’t in California it wouldn’t have happened. Literally I walked in, started my first movie knowing absolutely fucking nothing about movies or animation. Way over my head. And Ivan was doing Stripes at the same time, producing/directing one movie and then producing this one, and he completely put me in charge of the movie after awhile. I was the only one really doing the job. So they upped my participation, upped my rates, upped my credits, and that became a fifteen-year relationship with Ivan Reitman. My next movie was Ghostbusters.

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Wow.

Go figure, huh?

Yeah. So after Heavy Metal, Ivan asked if you wanted to be an associate producer on Ghostbusters? Or what happened?

No. Well, what happened is we had a little office, and everybody hangs around, and they work different scripts seeing what they could get together, but there wasn’t really a place for me. And Ivan let me go, and I was kind of desperate.

Now, I was stranded in Hollywood, I didn’t take the advertising job, I had a few bucks in my pocket, but what could I do? It wasn’t like there was another animated feature I could go to. It wasn’t like I really knew how to art direct movies, and we were floundering a bit, and what happened is Ivan decided there would be a sequel. So he called me back in and said that he though we could get a sequel going, and that I could direct it. Now this was making me very happy. And we did a little development which kept me working for him for a living, but not much money. And along the way, while we were looking for different ways we could do a sequel, I fell in love with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So I talked Ivan into buying the rights. And we went around and around and around and Douglas Adams said he could do it. Ivan Reitman said, "What the hell is he going to do with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?" And Douglas didn’t want it to be animated. In the middle of this there were a couple of scripts going. And Ivan came in one day and said, "Take a look at this." And it was Bill Murray, and Danny Aykroyd. They had agreed they were going to do this thing called Ghostbusters, which was described at the time amongst ourselves as Poltergeist, but the guys that show up are Danny Aykroyd and Bill Murray. And of course it had this relationship with Harold Ramis, who really knew how to write for Bill, and did Stripes. He was producing his own movies and whatever. And again, he turned to me, and said the problem is that this was a special effects movie, and that we’re only going to get this movie made if we put it out a year and a half from then. That would mean it was being done in half the time of any special effects movie ever made, and there are no special effects companies in existence that have room to take it on. Which was true, they were all booked. He was just like, "I don’t know what to do about this." And I said, "Well I know a lot about special effects." [laughs] Lying again though my teeth. But I do know a little bit, because we used some of that in Heavy Metal in complicated ways. I knew someone named John Bruno who went on to work with Camaron and get Oscars for special effects work and John was on the animation team and he wanted to get into life special effects. And I knew his circle, so there was my friend Don Shay doing Cinefex magazine. Anyway, I got put on board as associate producer.

Because you said you could make special effects.

Yeah. And because the other partner who knew zero about it and I had already had this experience with Heavy Metal, we work together well. And he said, "Okay, you’re associate producer, you do the special effects work."  All the visualizations of the ghosts and the monsters and all that stuff. So I called Don and finally what we did was we knew someone at ILM who was getting ready to leave and setup his own shop. So we made a deal with him. And Columbia made a deal with him and MGM too, and the two studios financed his special effects shop. We built a special effects shop to do these two movies and I had to manage him. At that time there were fewer and fewer who could visualize original imagery for creatures. It all fell into one category or another. I had to get original visualizations, so I drew on my background and went to the illustrators and people I knew from Lampoon and my science fiction hobbies. All these comic artists and all that, to do original visualizations. And I pulled it together. Right in the middle of that, I managed to sell Douglas Adams on the idea that we could do Hitchhikers as a live film given the expectation you have when you’re doing Ghostbusters. And he said fine. So as a producer I closed a deal and we took on Hitchhiker’s Guide. We worked on it for six years, never got a script together, and finally let it go. It’s hard to make a movie. But that was it, I was now part of the team that made all of Ivan’s movies. And we moved into other kinds of films, like Twins and all that, which did not involve special effects, did not involve animation. But I had already earned my stripes as a producer, and I knew how to manage crews, so we just divided up our responsibilities. It’s a weird path, but in the movie business there are more weird paths.

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So how did the visuals and the whole Ghostbusters logo and green slimer fit into the process?

It was just part of the job. You know that chameleon thing I was talking about? One thing David and I both prided ourselves on, is we got it out of Pratt. I’d like to teach right now because I have real theories about this, one of the things that was at its peak in the ‘60s and is dead today is conceptual art direction. When asked why I did conceptual covers, because I had completely conceptual covers, it was because they were ideas. It wasn’t just the newest school of graphics, or sticking a photo up there. Design and even advertising, where it originated, had a function, which was to communicate through the visual. As a consequence, I learned that, and was able to adapt that into any problem that needed solving visually. And film became one more of those venues for me. I’m equally comfortable with photography, illustration, painting, magazines, corporate graphics and movies. To me it’s all one thing, all problem solving. It’s all fun. Movies are better because you get to blow things up and make a lot of money. And you know they live forever and you’re proud of what you did, but in the end, a lot of those strange skills I had developed, drawing from Lampoon, drawing from parody, drawing from doing different kinds of things, my eyes worked like I just saw a problem and said it should be like this, it should not look like this.

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It’s a talent I have that turns out to be not very describable and difficult to apply, because what you want from me is different from the last job, and I’m not going to make it look like the last job. I’m going to make it for you, and that makes sense, but they can’t pigeon-hole you.

It’s like an actor playing lots of roles or an actor known for his persona. You’re going to hire the actor known for his persona because you know what you’re getting. If you look at the variety of my work you say, "Gee he has everything. What does he like to do most?" And I’ll tell you what I like to do most. I like taking pictures of naked women and elephants. I like being a photographer with no one to tell me what to do, I like publishing a website where I do whatever I fucking want to do and I photograph naked women around the world and I’ve been wanting to do that since I was ten as well. I used to draw dirty pictures and hide them when I was ten years old. And I paint. I don’t illustrate anymore because I don’t want to answer to any art directors, answer to any clients, answer to anybody. I just want to do what I want to do. I sell my paintings. I’m not big, I don’t have a gallery, but it actually pays the rent. I’m a pretty happy camper.

So talk about what you’re doing these days. How did the new photography and subsequently the website come about?

Well, I missed the boat a little bit by coming a little late to it. Late to it for a couple reasons. I resisted computers all my life. Remember, I’m a different age than you. You were born with one. When they were putting them on our desks at Universal, you could get lessons on using it. And I refused to learn it. Why should I have to learn a fucking computer? It’s not what I do, it’s too left-brained for me, I just couldn’t take it and I didn’t need it. Then time caught up with me. My son is a helicopter cinematographer, a mathematical and computer guru. He can take them apart, put them together, write software, the rest. He just told me, "Dad, get an apple, it’s fun, I promise." And finally the design business is turning to computers and I’m frustrated because as a designer I have to stand over someone’s shoulder and say I want it to look like this, I want it moved over there. I realized I’m going to have to learn this software someday. So only five years ago I got myself an iMac and I just fell in love with it. Digital photography for me... I’m in my eighth digital camera. Every new upgrade it gets better and better. It’s instant and I can do things with them and there’s no darkroom, and it’s free! And I went in as an illustrator and I can take my drawings and I can do this and, whoa! This is great! I use InDesign, I run four websites, I’m a digital photographer so I have Photoshop and big Mac power and a 30 inch monitor and I’m sitting on the beach connected to the world. And I just fell in love with the whole thing.

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You have to remember that porn, the real burst of this shit, didn’t happen until about ‘98. So I was sitting around the year 2000, 2001, getting involved in this, and being an old porn-meister and loving dirty pictures. I’m going to all the porn sites and collecting pictures and going back a few years, my wife and I were big collectors of porn. I knew all the big porn stars in the ‘70s and ‘80s and I went back and decided I would photograph these women. I was able to find Annie Sprinkle and her friends and I went and photographed them and never knew what I was going to do with it.

At a certain point in my life I met Roberta Morgan, a great woman, a dear friend of mine, my business partner now, and she had written a bestseller on wrestling called The Main Event. She had been a journalist, went to NYU journalism school, and she had a radio show in Miami and she lived in L.A. We were chatting and I said, "Let’s do a book." We’d call it True Love, and she would interview and write about all the porn stars. And we are very judgmental on all sides. Most liberals I know, who are very liberal are more judgmental than the most conservative people I know. They’re angry judgmental. Everything is okay except "those people." In Thailand, there’s no such things as "those people." Everyone’s alright. I read a book about Thailand, an interesting study about this big whorehouse built for soldiers in the Vietnam War, and it’s got 40 brothels. They’re really nightclubs, but you go in and you pay and you take a girl out, but he was writing about that and he was talking about an American who was there who had lost his legs and one arm in the war, and he was in a wheelchair. And he was there and there were two Thai girls giggling with him and playing with his stump. Gleefully. He was thinking of the irony that he had to travel all the way to Thailand to be treated normally. That is Thailand. It’s cheap. If you ever have the opportunity, don’t pass it up.

Yeah, definitely won’t. I’ve yet to see any of Asia.

It’s a good one to see. They’re wonderful, wonderful people.

I was thinking of something you were saying earlier. These days, especially in the Brooklyn indie rock scene, there’s this all capital letters, boldfaced, underlined, italicized idea of the "DIY," Do-It-Yourself.

You can’t do that anymore. It’s just no good. The publishers are no good. It wasn’t working. But porn was growing in spite of that. I said to Roberta, "There’s no porn site for you and me." A smart person, with general interests, who really likes this stuff at it’s best, will research and find the best stuff, and create the best stuff. Write it and do it, and not be a hypocrite about it. It’s not some erotica lesbian poetry site, not some slicker-than-thou photos, afraid to use the word porn and call it erotica. No, this is porn, ok? Porn. “I’ll read this book” porn or erotic porn, some of it’s better because it’s amateur, done with a flashlight and a Polaroid, and some of it’s better because it’s the slickest and best photography you’ve ever seen. That’s the point. I’ll edit it, I’ll use all of my photo-editing skills, she’ll edit it, and we’ll pull off our own site, and call it Mike and Mandy’s Most Original Porn Emporium. How did we do this? “I don’t know,” and I don’t know either. We literally did it from scratch. We lost money. We fired people. We spent thousands and thousands on inventions. We built the site and I’m really proud of it. It is truthfully the best and only porn site I’ve tried to build. I have seen maybe 40000 sites. I am connected with the business. I search the world.

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I run a blog called Intelligent Erection, which leads you to the smarter stuff. The critics didn’t get it at first, eventually they came around and said, “This is really special, it’s just kind of a collection of these people’s porn I guess.”  It’s eclectic, it’s for porn connoisseurs, it’s got humor, these people are smart, and they still can’t pigeonhole us, because we’re not dumbfuck amateur dotcom whatever. We’re gently, slowly growing and placing ourselves, and that’s admirable I think. I refuse to have it as anything but a porn site. Our name’s on it, it’s porn, and if you don’t like it, don’t look at it. And in the ego of self-publishing, we worked very hard at this, four hours a day, and made something I’m really proud of. And meanwhile I run around and take photographs and go to conventions. I photograph girls and we go to parties and we feel young again. We’re both in our sixties and it’s fun. I like doing it, and it makes a little money. It thrives. It pays the rent. We’re three and a half years old, mine’s about five years old. We’re making just six figures, but eventually we’ll do better than that. Eventually we’ll retire.

It builds, and it’s big, and it has come out of a great love of all things porn, and it’s honest. We treat our members well, if you quit we don’t cheat you on the price. We don’t do anything bad. We play in the right sandbox. There are people in the porn business who are honest and reasonable and share a love of these things. We can go anywhere. It doesn’t matter how the winds of change are in the porn business, we can change with it, and go there. And when we started it was a dead art. There was no class, photography-wise. The best photographers in the world generally make their photographs dirtier and dirtier and European photographers have girls spreading their legs now.  But they’re beautiful, and the whole thing progresses, and becomes saturated. We go over and say, “Remember the days when it just looked like this?” It's almost nostalgic to look at little home-made photos, but we can do it all.

With MikeyAndMandy, our biggest problem selling it was that we’re not a genre, we’re an audience. In the last two years, more people like us are turning out blogs. And more people with the blogs are focusing on this stuff for two years. We’ll have our own convention, an indie site convention. It’s kind of like the Sundance of the industry. Most of the people that have independent sites, they don’t sit down and say, “I want to make a million dollars,” but what they do learn is that they can do what they want - true independence and self-publishing. It’s a fun game to run, to ride out and I love learning. I’ve learned so much about traffic and changing Internet terms and watching the shift when blogs came up. It’s a fascinating game to play, like playing in Vegas, thinking you are going to beat the house, and you can’t, but you keep learning to count cards better, and as soon as you do, someone else out-smarts you, because as soon as you make progress here, they pull the rug out from under you. There were no blogs, and it’s blogs that drive traffic to our site, and of course blogs swamped it. Blogs gave everybody all this free stuff. But they don’t join, and the people who do join are of a different mentality, and you have to find them. So you do this incredible, self-learning marketing which I don’t know if I’m a complete fool at, or learning and getting pretty good at.

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You look at so many sites, and so many of them are so similar.

But you can watch how it shifts. It’s not unlike what’s happening in the music business, it’s not unlike what’s happening in publishing. There is a parallel to everything in entertainment and in mass media. It’s a hard parallel to focus, but at length we have conversations about what’s happened to music between the 60’s and now. There’s more available, nobody can get rich anymore, but everybody can be heard. Is that better? There’s no predominant force, is that better or worse? In some ways it’s worse, it’s producing mediocrity and on the other hand it’s better, with more opportunity. If you take these things and you weigh them across the board, the Internet’s closing a lot of print publications, but it’s opening a lot of venues. People who publish on the Internet are self-published, so they’re undisciplined. So where do you get real quality?

What happens is, it’s more in the hands of the individual to decide where he wants to go spend his time and money. It’s like going to a supermarket the size of a city. This is fine. You have everything available to you right now, so now what do you do? Mostly, you can’t shop there because it will drive you nuts. It’s very interesting to be part of that. Our belief is that when we do well, we win a little bit and have some fun. I’ve always believed in one over-simplified rule in life: Do what you love, do it well, be good at it, and if you have any talent, and if you’re any good, bang! It will happen. Maybe not the way you saw, and maybe not overnight.

I’ve lived two spectacular lives, in publishing and in motion pictures. Jesus, who would want more than that? And I’m not dead yet. Some would look at what I’m doing now, and think how far I’ve fallen, like, "Wow, this guy used to be a major movie producer, he worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger and now he does porn." And, "Ah, he had such potential and he’s making dirty pictures." Yeah, you got it. That’s my decision. I do it well, I don’t work too hard and I don’t want to work with those assholes in Hollywood. And I don’t mean the Schwarzeneggers or any of those in the older generation. I know all my old partners in the movie business. They said, “I gotta get out of here.” It’s a whole new generation, they’re all lawyers, they’re all marketing people, it’s all crap, there’s no original ideas, and Hollywood’s been complaining about that for 70 years. It’s somebody else’s time in that business, not mine. My time is to do what I’m doing. We’re a little late to it. We’re actually late, and ahead of the curve. We’re late, in that we would of made a fortune if we were in the business earlier. We’re also ahead of the curve in that, what we’re doing now, there’s going to be more of, but we will be the model.

What you were taking about before, with wearing both hats, both liberal and conservative - it seems almost as if there is this widening gap, and that gap is also widening within Internet websites.

I have a theory about that, and I don’t think it’s widening as much as people are saying it is. What’s happening is that the voices at both ends are the loudest and the pundits love to carry on about that on television because it gives them something to talk about. You always get a pundit on each side of the extremes, but in truth, most of us live in the middle. Most of us just get up every day and feed our children, and go out, and go camping, have a barbeque and get a new car and do what makes us happy and worry about staying alive. Most of us do. And the problem is, that if you have liberal social beliefs, like I have, I’m incredibly liberal socially. I’m a pornographer, of course I am. On the other hand, I want a non-intrusive government. I don’t want the government to do anything for me. The government doesn’t work. I’m a libertarian almost. For me it’s not a conflict, and where does it put me? Right in the middle. I get up and do what’s right every day. I do as little as I can. I don’t listen to those voices over there that are screaming hysterical liberals and I don’t listen to the fucking religious right, they’re both wrong, but I believe truly in the end, they’re both the minority. They scream the loudest, the liberals are more intelligent in terms of the voice they can put on the Internet or on television, but in truth, if we didn’t have that hysteria – when you get up everyday, I’m talking about you, not hypothetically, when you go out and actually do, not conversations not what’s on television, like, “I heard, gee the world’s coming to an end because they’re kidnapping babies.” I’m talking about what goes on in your neighborhood, in your life, your girlfriend, if you’re married or single or whatever. What actually affects you everyday. Do either of these two extremes actually affect you?

Personally, I was very involved in the 2004 presidential election, and campaigned very hard, not necessarily for the democratic candidate, but just to educate people and drive vanloads of kids to Ohio. I registered voters, and then when the election came and went, I was like, “Alright, I’m going to move to Italy.”

That sounds just like something I did. I did it because of a combination of politics and the OJ Simpson trial. “I’m outta here.” I went to the mountains of Italy to become a painter. We sold everything we owned, got on a plane with forty bags, one-way tickets, moved to Italy, went up to the mountains in Spoleto, lived on a farm, and painted. What I learned, and it’s so quintessentially American, is it’s very hard to be an ex-patriot. And I also couldn’t learn the language. America is just this place in my blood, where I can do what I want to do, more than I can elsewhere, except escape. And then you find yourself with ex-patriots who are all kind of missing a piece of the brain. Some of them get away because they can’t take it, but all of them are running from something. It’s not a comfortable place to be. It ended a marriage, and I became a drunk – I’m sober eight and a half years now – but I knew I went into the gutter. I wound up in New York, jobless and homeless, no family, in a hospital, them telling me I should be dead. I got help, and recovered, and now I live a beautiful life with grandchildren - my wife died six months ago unfortunately - and I kind of just rebuilt a quieter personal life, where I don’t get influenced by turning on the television every day and upset with an asshole president, because you know, this too shall pass.

I’m old enough to have seen it all. I saw JFK. I saw the 60’s, I lived the fucking thing, I saw the 70’s, I saw everybody fucking, I saw Disco, I saw everybody dream I saw everything fail. I can’t even name half the presidential candidates that ran. In the end, when I get up every day, does it affect me? No, not at all. So I might as well just do what I do, and be a responsible good person. I help people, I do what I do, I do no harm, and I try and stay happy because David Kaestle is dead now, he died a couple of years ago – my best friend. My wife’s dead. My mother’s dead. And they all died within a year and a half. I just sat here and said, “What am I gonna do for the rest of my fucking life?” What if I live another twenty years? What am I going to do? And I’m comfortable. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put one foot ahead of the other, and just keep doing this stuff that feels good and it’s nice to do and it’s something I’m proud of, and if it’s not something the rest of the world is proud of, I don’t care. In the end will I be vindicated? What do I give a fuck? There’s a legacy.

I’m taking care of my legacy, I’ve got six or eight books in my name, and I’ve got ten movies that come on television that I can be like, “Oh look at it, I did that movie.” And what does that get you everyday? It doesn’t get you anything. I’m proud to have done it, I’m also disappointed in a lot of the things that I’ve done. I’ve also wreaked a lot of havoc and let a lot of people down. Go to Thailand and you’ll learn a lot about life. If you ever have a chance, go to Thailand. You understand everything in Thailand. These people are non-judgmental. They understand every capacity and phase of life as being what it is, they live with pain, poverty, joy, working, religion and sex all on the same level, none of it more important than then other, with a smile, because that’s really what’s important.

In Brooklyn, there’s a whole DIY attitude in magazines and in publishing. Do you have any advise for people?

There’s a price you pay for it, and the price is you don’t get any mentors. I worked with John Lennon. You’ve got to focus driving a product with talented intelligent people. You’re on your own, all talking to each other, you’re all amateurs. The problem with being amateurs is that you can only rise to a certain level. You don’t have Gordy form MoTown. You don’t have people who may take all of your money, but may also turn you into a legitimate star. I don’t know what’s better. I think we are in the middle of a very changing environment in which the change is what it’s all about. I think the whole definition of art is going to change, but I can’t tell you where or how. It’s going to be something that involves no particular media and it’s going to be an all inclusive experience. It’s not going to be for my generation to do. It’s going to have to wring itself out. A talented, self promoted and self produced musician will be able to make a living, but he’ll never be rich. The day of dominating the charts, of dominating the scene won’t happen, but that’s a very recent phenomena anyway.  Most musicians didn’t get rich, most writers didn’t get rich. There was even a time in the movie business when the people didn’t get rich. Everybody says the good old days, the good old days. Fuck the good old days, people have been saying the good old days for a thousand years. No, I’m sorry, you will not be Elvis Presley. You probably don’t have enough talent to be anyway. Even if you were Elvis Presley, he couldn’t be Elvis Presley again. I don’t think art leads, I think art reacts. You have to have a lot of something going on for a while before some creative force – some genius – can rise to the top. And so, I would set the definition of success  – the expectation – low. There are plenty of famous people who are unhappy with how they got there. Success is an internal thing.

Websites

www.mikeyandmandy.com
www.intelligenterection.com
www.michaelcgross.com

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