A “SKINTIMATE” LOOK AT ‘A HISTORY OF NUDITY IN MOVIES’ WITH JIM McBRIDE & MIKE McPADDEN

 

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SKIN: A HISTORY OF NUDITY IN MOVIES is a new documentary that chronicles the history of birthday suits in cinema, from the days of Thomas Edison up to HBO Max. The film has garnered rave reviews from Variety, CNN, and Roger Ebert Voices.

 

We caught up with producer and Mr. Skin himself Jim McBride, as well as associate producer, “skintributor,” and Teen Movie Hell author Mike McPadden to find out the effect the Me Too movement had on the picture, the Mr. Skin style, and importance of cinematic nudity.

 

 

 

Daily Grindhouse: Jim, you’ve been doing this since 1999 and for those who were not in the know, how did the Mr. Skin bit start and how do you feel the internet has changed the website over the past 20 years?

 

Jim McBride: The whole Mr. Skin thing started just because I was a fan of nudity in movies as a kid. For me one of the “skinfining” moments in my life came in the fall of 1980. I was living in a suburb of Chicago — River Forest — and my dad bought me a Betamax and got cable television at the same time. As a kid that grew up watching only ABC, NBC and CBS, to all of a sudden have Showtime and HBO, this was big.

 

Daily Grindhouse: How old were you at this “skinfining” moment?

 

Jim McBride: I was a senior in high school in the fall of 1980.

 

Mike McPadden: You should say you did watch PBS when they showed I, Claudius.

 

Jim McBride: To give you an idea of the kind of person I was, in 1976 when PBS played I Claudius there were twelve episodes airing for an hour a week — I would go down in the basement and literally watch every second of it for the minimal nude scenes. It was very rare to see nudity, but it was PBS. That was the only place you could possibly see nudity because it was not regulated obviously by the FCC.

 

Mike McPadden: I didn’t have some grand artistic justification. My mother wanted to watch I, Claudius and we only had one living room TV at that time. To get me to watch it, she said there are orgies in it. She knew who I was. And I loved it.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Who shows up nude in I, Claudius?

 

Jim McBride: Sheila White is probably the big one, in the eleventh episode. I had to watch a lot episodes to get to that and you got to keep in mind too, we didn’t have a way to record it. So while it was happening, you had to take it in in such a way that you could look back and remember it.

 

Mike McPadden: You had to just photographically drink it in.

 

 

Jim McBride: I want to stress there wasn’t a ton of nudity in the twelve episodes, but there was enough to make guys like me and McP sit in our house and watch it. So fast forward to 1980, no pun intended, I get this Betamax, I get cable television, and all of a sudden now I have access to Italian sex comedy comedies, drive-in movies, blaxploitation films, and British sex farces all loaded with nudity. With the convergence of technologies, I started recording as many movies as I can that had nude scenes and then I would save the nude scenes on to separate videotapes. I became a savant on the subject; someone who was passionate about it and very organized about it. As I kept doing it, my friends noticed, if you ask this guy any actress, he could tell you off the top of his head if they had been nude and how far into the movie and all that.

 

Daily Grindhouse: You say you were, or you were organized and this is pre-computers in the home; did you just have a notebook?

 

Jim McBride: Yeah, I had notebooks. I separated the nude scenes by TV stars to movie stars, by decades, by years, you know, whatever I could do to organize it. It was my little card catalog if you will. That was another reason I was able to learn it so well. Throughout the eighties and nineties, I was a fun party trick. My friends would always quiz me. I worked at the Chicago mercantile exchange in the pit, which really ramped my work because there are so many boring moments down at the merc where brokers would just come over and, and send runners with little cards that would ask me questions about actresses. One day I was in a bar, Charlie’s Alehouse in Lincoln Park. I lived across the street and I had to get to work at like at seven in the morning. but it was like a Tuesday and here I am with my friends at 11 at night drinking, single and going nowhere in life.

The guys were quizzing me and it just so happened that Harry Teinowitz, who had a show radio show on AM 1000 in Chicago, overheard the conversation and said, “I can’t believe you know this off the top of your head; would you come in and do this on my radio show?” We came up with the name Mr. Skin because I didn’t want to use my real name for some reason, I don’t know why.

 

Daily Grindhouse: So you and Harry brainstormed the Mr. Skin moniker?

 

Jim McBride: Yeah. He said, “What about Mr. Nude?” And I go, ehhh. Then he goes, “What about Mr. Skin?” And I go, okay, we got a winner. So I went on the show thinking, it’d be my fifteen minutes of fame. I left the merc at lunch. The show aired middays. I took a cab to the Hancock building and did the show. I thought I’d do it for fifteen minutes, go back to work, and that would be the end of it, but it was such a popular segment that they wanted me to come back. I started doing it more and more and became a bit of a local radio celebrity in Chicago and then started to go on shows around the country. Around that time, someone came up to me that heard me on the radio in Chicago in late ’97 and he said, “You’ve got to put what’s in your head into a website.” I didn’t even know what a website was, but we ended up raising a little money and started Mr. Skin.com. The site launched on August 10th, 1999. It’s something I never planned out and it’s been a hell of a fun time.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Younger people who grew up with the internet, they don’t know what it was like in the early days. It was like the Wild West when you started, it hadn’t gotten too normal yet.

 

Jim McBride: When I started, I went on the Stern Show about six months into it, and that’s when it really blew up.

 

Mike McPadden: That’s where I first heard him.

 

Jim McBride: I got somewhere around a thousand joins that day when normally I would have had ten-thousand joins, but the website completely shut down. In the early days of the internet, we had affiliates pushing Mr. Skin that would charge $39.95 a month for access to the website, and nobody flinched. You’re right about the Wild West; it was a different time. We’ve had to be a lot more strategic and there’s obviously a lot more competition 21 years later, but that’s one of the great things about the website and the team is that we’ve always stayed kind of on the cutting edge of what’s happening out there and when you come to our website it doesn’t seem like you’re at something that’s behind the times. Even at this late date, it seems like, “Okay, these guys are doing things that you don’t see too often.”

I’m not technically savvy. I am not even a great businessman. But I’m smart enough to know what I don’t know, which is a lot and I’ve been able to hire great people, especially on the content side. We’ve had very passionate people who love this as much as I do and have that ability to put this into certain words that make it fun. That’s really the the big thing about Mr. Skin.com. It’s not just about the nude scenes, it’s also the editorial comment and having fun with it and we’ve been really lucky with some of the great writers we’ve had.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Speaking of which, we have Mike McPadden right here. Mike, how did you get sucked into Mr. Skin?

 

Mike McPadden: I heard him on Howard Stern, went to work, checked out the site, and couldn’t believe my eyes. I swear to you, I got weepy.

 

Jim McBride: And remember, what he saw was like crappy VHS content in a total navigational nightmare. But no one had ever done that.

 

Mike McPadden: It was the breadth of the content And the breasts, but also the breadth. The first actress I saw was Rainbeaux Smith. They had almost every Rainbeaux Smith movie and you could put the cursor on a photograph and it would give me this weird little animated series of photographs to show what the video was and I swear, I said, “The future is here.”

At that point, I was working for Celebrity Skin magazine and I had been doing some editorial freelance — like copywriting – for Shockorama, which was a B-movie company in New Jersey. They also did Seduction Cinema. Jim met those guys at a trade show, they read the copy and said, “This is really funny. What is this?” They gave him my number, he called me and said, “I’m going to be in New York. You want to get lunch?” Now, when people picture Mr. Skin, they picture me. So what shows up at my door is this Adonis; this golden Hollywood idol and that was hilarious in itself. We had been just swiping all the images of the Mr. Skin website to use in the Celebrity Skin magazine and our art director, this big tall surfer dude whose nickname was Magic Marker was scared shitless. He was like, “Skin’s coming here? Is he coming to kick my ass?”

 

Jim McBride: I was coming to steal your writing team.

 

Mike McPadden: Exactly. We went to dinner and Jim got drunk and he offered me a job. I’d been dying to get out of New York since forever, so I moved to Chicago three weeks later.

 

Daily Grindhouse: The documentary, SKIN: A HISTORY OF NUDITY IN THE MOVIES is wonderful; how long has this been in production?

 

Jim McBride: Almost exactly two years. I had known the whole time I’ve been doing Mr. Skin.com that no one had ever done a definitive history of nudity in movies. and I gotta be honest, I never considered doing it as a documentary. But my friend Paul Fishbein, who used to own AVN, he had done a lot of television production and we got to talking a couple of years ago and I told him that no one had ever done this. He said we should do a documentary on it, so Paul and I as the executive producers, put up the money to fund this, but importantly, he had access to it to a great director, Danny Wolf, and I had access to people I trusted that could help me a writing team that could help formulate the story and, and what were the important things that we should be talking about in this definitive documentary, on the history of nudity in film. So I had the the writers — McPadden — he had the director – Danny — and the four of us really put our heads together to organize this thing. I didn’t expect it to be as good as it turned out and more importantly, as someone who had never done a movie before, I didn’t realize the review side of things. I didn’t realize we’d get over a hundred reviews of this movie and the reviews have been so positive overall.

 

Mike McPadden: Variety gave it a rave, from Owen Glieberman — a major critic — gave it an unqualified rave. This thing was on the AARP website.

 

Jim McBride: My parents were so excited that AARP recommended this to all their members, no pun intended. I did not anticipate that side of it and to get critical acclaim for something that you were hoping maybe to get a review or two in a small little newspaper, it really blew my mind.

 

Mike McPadden: Paul and Danny, produced and directed the really tremendously great three-part documentary series, TIME WARP: THE GREATEST CULT FILMS OF ALL TIME, which came out shortly before this.

 

Jim McBride: When I saw what they had accomplished with that, I felt pretty comfortable that this would be good.

The big thing were we going to be able to get enough talking heads that were that people would be interested in and we have a beautiful combination of people like Mariel Hemingway, Malcolm McDowell, and Peter Bogdanovich, but to also feature cult favorites like Camille Keaton, Diane Franklin, Pam Grier, and Linda Blair. That really helps the documentary because you don’t know who’s going to show up. Even Ken Davitian, the guy from that crazy nude scene in BORAT.

 

Daily Grindhouse: How did the end result differ from your vision of the documentary?

 

Mike McPadden: We worked really hard on this all along. We came up with a narrative and the documentary serves that narrative. It was astounding. We always wanted to do this definitive narrative thread from the invention of the movie camera up to the streaming services today that incorporated male and female nudity because it’s about all naked bodies in a cinema.

 

Jim McBride: The hard part was narrowing it down really to two hours and six minutes because when we first started, we were at five and a half hours. Some of the nitpicky reviews state “Well, they left this out” or “They didn’t include this,” or “What about this genre?” What is really hard when you do a documentary, that’s the history from Thomas Edison to the Me Too movement, is how do you narrow it down to two hours?

Even though it’s informative and educational, it’s also extremely entertaining and you got over a hundred nude scenes in two hours. I don’t know how we did it, but we did it.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Will this film be listed on the Mr. Skin website?

 

Jim McBride: We had a master debate on whether we should list all the movies, but this is just overwhelming. And almost every one of these nude scenes — except for the stuff from Thomas Edison — are on our website already, so we just chose to do a clip or two.

 

Daily Grindhouse: The opening and closing of the documentary are built around the Me Too movement. The film has been in development for over two years, how important was it that you fit that into the narrative.

 

Jim McBride: We were very conscious of this because when we started, it was right when all the Weinstein stuff was hitting, and a lot has happened in the last two years. My biggest concern with everything that’s going on is that people would think it’s completely tone-deaf and exploitative. And you know, even if you’re you’re, you have the best intentions — which we did — we’re not stupid. And even with your best intentions, it’s easy to fall into exploitation. What I’ve liked in the reviews is that people have said, “I learned stuff, they gave voice to women, it was entertaining, and I got all my nude scenes. How the hell did they do it? That to me was the biggest challenge and I think we hit a home run in that regard.

 

Mike McPadden: I always say the Me Too movement has made everything better and it certainly made this a much better movie than it might have been before that. It gave us a guideline, a guiding factor to make sure that we were serving the narrative, which in this world that the movie is coming out into, Me Too, is the defining aspect of this type of discussion. So to use that as the molds that we could pour everything into really, I think made for a powerful story. David gave a very strong point of view that we could follow, not just narratively, but in a sense of getting it right, which was really important. And I of course had gone through this with my book Teen Movie Hell, on which we were set to start final edits in the fall of 2017, which is right when the Weinstein scandal broke.

 

I just said, “Oh fuck. Here I am, a white man turning fifty, married to a woman. I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t say, “Here I am, guys, ain’t PORKY’S cool?!” So I had someone from on high who inspired me to say, “Look, you schmuck, you know all these incredible women who write about movies, invite them to contribute chapters to the book.” And that’s what I did. One of them was the magnificent Katie Rife, who was a Mr. Skin employee for a couple of years. She wrote a great chapter in my book on modern female-directed coming-of-age films. So I always had that in mind when we started this project.

 

Daily Grindhouse: I really do think that this documentary will be used in a film class sometime in the future.

 

Jim McBride: Again, credit to Danny Wolf. You do all these interviews and you have all this content and then you have to select what works to move this thing along. That was genius of him: even if you get good information, to thread it in such a way that it works from start to finish is very difficult.

 

Daily Grindhouse: How do you feel the internet has changed nudity in movies? Is it still as titillating? Is it still provocative? It’s still as exciting? Do we still even get nudity in movies? Is it a big deal to see a big star naked in a movie anymore?

 

Mike McPadden: The answer to all those questions is no, and that’s why there is no nudity in the movies anymore. Nudity was put in movies to sell movie tickets. Nudity, which is available now every night on television and every minute of the day on the internet, is no longer a draw to paying customers.

 

Jim McBride: But on the other hand, I say to you, we’re in the golden age of celebrity nudity because when I started Mr. Skin in ’99, we had 19 television shows that we could grab stuff for the website. In 2009, it was 29 shows and by 2019 it was 144 across 36 platforms. With Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and all that original programming, there’s never been more places for celebrities to do nude scenes. And I’ll say to you, if you watch an hour of Game Of Thrones, you feel like you just watched a movie and these are huge stars doing nude scenes on television now. There’s more nudity than ever before; it’s just not in movies as much. It’s shifted to television.

 

Daily Grindhouse: We talked about Howard Stern earlier and Jim, you’re still a regular on the show. Have you ever had the pleasure of hanging out with my favorite Wack Packer, Beetlejuice. Have you seen him nude, and where would you put his genitals?

 

Jim McBride: No, I never have. I did get to hang out with Hank The Angry Drunken Dwarf, which was one of the highlights of appearing on the show before he passed away. I had just started my website and I was able to hang out with him in Las Vegas at an AVN show. But my son, who’s fourteen years old, I was looking at his phone or his iPad and he had pictures of Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice has become very popular with kids because of Tik Tok. It’s the weirdest thing. He is so fascinated that I was on a show that Beetlejuice was on. Lots of kids love Beetlejuice.

 

Daily Grindhouse: “Goo for him.”

 

Jim McBride: Back when they were a little more daring they asked me — and this was one of the coolest things I ever got to do — for Howard TV, they produced a six-part Pay Per View special of the craziest moments on the Stern Show. It was stuff they couldn’t show on TV like the best breasts of guests… and I hosted it. I went out to New York and filmed it and that was the first time I’d ever done anything like that. It was so much fun. Got to meet a lot of porn stars at that.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Everyone has a theory on when adult cinema went to pot, but I think it’s around the time porn parodies stopped coming up with clever titles. What are the most clever adult film parody titles?

 

Mike McPadden: HANNAH DOES HER SISTERS hands down, glands up.

 

Jim McBride: SHAVING RYAN’S PRIVATES. This isn’t a parody, but my favorite gay porn movie is one that played at Chicago’s Bijou Theater in the ’90s called BULGING JOCKSTRAPS.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Mike, in the documentary, you wag your ding-dong around quite a bit during the segments on the ’70s and the ’80s….

 

Mike McPadden: Add “not literally,” please.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Why is that era important to naked film history and why is it important to you?

 

Mike McPadden: I was a teenager in the ‘eighties. I was turning twelve at the end of the ‘seventies. It was the last time that nudity was de rigueur for both Hollywood and exploitation movies and a major selling point. I think even by the ‘nineties, even though you have SHOWGIRLS and BASIC INSTINCT, for a lot of people for them that is a home video experience. As I say in my Teen Movie Hell book, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH opened in New York and I saw it the Friday I started my freshman year of high school and FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF opened, uh, the Friday after I graduated. So those teen movies were my teen years. That’s why it matters to me.

 

 

Jim McBride: For me, that golden era for teen sex comedies from 1980 to 1985, they’ve never made teen sex movies like that again. AMERICAN PIE in ’99 kicked off a little run there for a while, but with a few movies like FAST TIMES, PORKY’S, LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN, MY TUTOR, SCREWBALLS…, um, God, that was just the sweet spot, being at that age when you’re always horny.

 

Mike McPadden: When does that stop?

 

Daily Grindhouse: I did some freelance work for Mr. Skin and Mr. Man, and people always ask me what it’s like and I always tell them, you know, it’s a lot harder… so much harder… than you’d think to come up with terms for “dirty pillows” and “ding-dongs.” How did you approach writing blurbs for the site, and how did that evolve over the years?

 

Mike McPadden: Before Mr. Skin, I was a huge fan of Celebrity Sleuth magazine and Celebrity Sleuth himself, Barry Kemelhor is one of the standout talking heads in the movie. Celebrity Sleuth was absolutely obsessive and celebratory of all the actresses that were in the magazine and the language was so fucking uproarious to me, cause it’s nothing but puns and double entendres. And I always say, my favorite was Shelly Long, and the Long was italicized.

 

Jim McBride: The man is a genius. A big inspiration for the sense of humor of Mr. Skin is from Celebrity Sleuth and to a certain extent, Celebrity Skin. I could sit and read that stuff all the time. I could not wait for his issues to come out. We’ve become friends and he’s such an interesting cat.

 

Mike McPadden: And as I said, and he will remind you, he is the origin of our species.

 

Jim McBride: And he’s appreciative of that.

 

 

Daily Grindhouse: For each of you, what was the most important bit of onscreen nudity for you personally?

 

Jim McBride: It wasn’t the very first nude scene I ever saw, but I can tell you that it influenced me hugely. Very early when I got set up with my cable television and my VCR, I taped the movie called BOBBIE JO AND THE OUTLAW. I knew Lynda Carter was in it, you know, Wonder Woman herself, but in my wildest dreams, I didn’t think she would get naked. She was this gorgeous woman I saw every Saturday morning on television. I remember taping that and she had four nude scenes in the first 33 minutes, capped off by a scene where she’s skinny dipping with the big Indian chief while doing mushrooms and I remember saying to myself if Lynda Carter — Wonder Woman — has been naked, who else is out there? And then soon after that, I found Marcia, Maureen McCormick from The Brady Bunch, in a movie called TEXAS LIGHTNING where she was topless. Then, I stumbled upon S.O.B. that had just come on cable television with Julie Andrews, Mary Poppins, and that was just off running with all those discoveries in the early ‘eighties that were really important to my fascination with who’s been nude, celebrity-wise.

 

Mike McPadden: The first nude scene that I ever saw was definitely life-changing. I grew up in Brooklyn and we had a neighbor who was a film collector. He collected rarities, a lot of silent movies and things like that. and he put together a night of bloopers and rare films at Brooklyn College. So we all went and they were really cool. They were old celebrity commercials from the fifties and stuff and then when he got to the blooper section, he ended with, to go out on the highest of notes, a baby powder commercial, and there are two women in a bathroom with towels on and they’re talking. And one of the actresses loses her towel and she’s just bare-breasted. The other one sees her and you just see her just freeze for a millisecond and then she throws her towel off too. And they just finished the commercial. So I’m sitting there, you know, I’ve just rocketed into the 69th dimension as an eight-year-old and never came back.

 

 

Other than that, my favorite nude scene is, uh, Joyce Hyser from JUST ONE OF THE GUYS because it literally knocked me out of my seat. I was watching it on video and leaning back in my chair in the basement and it’s so unexpected. The movie is great, first-off, and that was a really great surprise. Then you get to the big climax, where she reveals her true gender by opening her prom tux. And I was like Fred Flinstone, feet in the air and everything.

 

Daily Grindhouse: So what do you guys think is the most popular or well-known bit of onscreen nudity in the history of film?

 

 

Jim McBride: One of the most-watched scenes of all time would obviously be Kate Winslet in TITANIC based on how many families saw that together. It was a PG movie and she got naked in one of the biggest grossing movies of all time, everyone knows that, but I have a feeling that Sharon Stone in BASIC INSTINCT is the most well known nude scene of all time. It was just so shocking and it’s been parodied so many times. Those would be two of the biggest I would think.

 

Mike McPadden: I would say BASIC INSTINCT is it. I saw BASIC INSTINCT on 42nd Street, which is a real rough audience, and during that scene, it went berserk. It was the craziest thing ever. It was like nothing I had experienced except for at the end of JASON GOES TO HELL, the big reveal when they show Jason’s broken mask in the dirt and Freddy Kruger’s hand comes out of the grave and grabs it. And these are people who were screaming at the screen the entire time, but those were just eardrum-shattering, explosions of appreciation.

 

Daily Grindhouse: What do you guys think is the most gratuitous use of nudity in a Hollywood film, where even you guys had to say, “Now that’s unnecessary.”

 

Jim McBride: That’s never happened. It’s never happened in our life ever.

 

Mike McPadden: Nope. No, no. There’s no such thing as unnecessary. I will say I have always liked Jill Schoelen in THE STEPFATHER. She gets naked in the bedroom, she takes a shower, you watch her take a shower, and the movie starts again. She gets out and the movie starts again. To me, that is the most definitive gratuitous nude scene, but don’t tell me that wasn’t necessary.

 

Jim McBride: I get asked about that so much, because then that movie aired on a cable television all through the late ’80s and ’90s, and she’s not like a famous actress by any means, but boy, guys remember that she had one of the great butts of all time getting into the shower there.

 

Mike McPadden: We always try to point this out that what made Mr. Skin stand apart, also language-wise, is that we only ever celebrate the nude scenes. Every nude scene is the greatest nude scene of all time. Any movie that contains nudity is the greatest movie ever. When I got there, it was like the really heinous days of the internet, Maxim magazine culture, real gross stuff like “no fat chick”  jokes. I just thought that was repulsive, and it wasn’t all over Mr. Skin, but it was just all over everywhere else on the internet and when I got to Celebrity Skin, that’s the kind of writing that was there and as soon as I got there, I said, “That’s over” because I buy this magazine and I’m in love with Kathy Bates so don’t make fun of her and don’t make fun of me. It should be a party. It should be a good time. Everything, everything associated with any nude scene is to be celebrated and encouraged. That I think may have made all the difference in Mr. Skin and it’s why celebrities like Sarah Silverman, Alexandra Daddario, and Anna Paquin have reached out to us. Paquin has cited the language on the site as irresistible.

 

 

Jim McBride: That True Blood. I miss that show. That was so good for our website. They got Anna Paquin, Lizzy Caplan; they had a ton of legends get naked on that show.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Aside from boobs and butts, what are other visuals that you guys think is sexy in a film?

 

Jim McBride: Penis, for sure.

 

Mike McPadden: Balls.

 

Jim McBride: As much as I love new nude scenes, a perfect sexy non-nude scene is Jacqueline Bisset’s wet T-shirt scene in THE DEEP. It doesn’t have to be nude to be a Mr. Skin. We have plenty of non-nude, incredibly sexy scenes at the website. So it doesn’t have to be nude to be a great scene at our website.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Tell us a little bit about Mr. Skin’s brother site, Mr. Man.

 

Jim McBride: We launched Mr. Man in 2014. I had resisted it for a while because I was thinking about it from a promotional standpoint. I didn’t feel I could properly promote it because I just don’t know male nudity.

 

Mike McPadden: It’s not our area of expertise.

 

Jim McBride: But my guys pointed out to me that they were going through every episode of Game Of Thrones and True Blood anyway, so we might as well get the guy nude scenes while we’re going through it. I’m not trying to be funny here, but it’s been our fastest growing website every year since it’s launched. I’m just blown away by the numbers. I was very naive thinking that like 50% of the traffic would be gay men and 50% would be women. It turned out to be about 99% gay men, 1% women, with a margin of error of 1%.

 

Mike McPadden: What took so long with Mr. Man was that we had to find the right team, beyond the scope of our knowledge. Vera Napoleon, who took over when I left Mr. Skin in 2014 to just freelance and write books. is absolutely brilliant. She has taken both sites and run with it beyond what I would have been capable of.

 

Jim McBride: The fact that there are literally about 140 television shows now that do have male nudity, so Mr. Man is positioned to do well.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Who has the most impressive wrench in a Hollywood film? Sub-question: Biggest balls?

 

Mike McPadden: You’re asking the wrong guys.

 

Jim McBride: I know we have lists over at Mr. Man of all that stuff.

 

Mike McPadden: I do really like looking at penis and balls.

 

Jim McBride: I know some members of the hung jury like Liam Neeson…

 

Mike McPadden: Jimmy Woods. I always hear.

 

Daily Grindhouse: Do you think audiences and the – Americans in particular — are more liberated than ever when it comes to sex and nudity and movies? Or is it as puritanical as it ever was?

 

Mike McPadden: That’s a tough question. It’s as puritanical as it was in the ‘fifties, but for different reasons. Back then the fear and loathing of sex and nudity and culture came from the political right and now it comes primarily from the political left, and the right, but much more so from the political left. It’s just how things are. I’m not going to comment on that either way. And as I said, the Me Too movement, it’s only good. It’s only made the world better. So we’ll see where this takes us — sex and nudity-wise — culturally, as we continue to evolve and absorb the lessons of that moment and others that have come up since then.

 

 

—MIKE VANDERBILT

 

Mike Vanderbilt
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