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Originally Posted by SleazyDream
9. Talk about being an assistant for an out of controll greek producer and the parties he threw.
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Before my tenure at AVN, I worked for a film and television producer named Niko Mastorakis. He was a real douchebag. A total megalomaniac. We called him The Mastorakis, like it was some sort of deragatory term. We also used it in sentences such as, "give 'em the old Mastorakis," which simply meant tell them to go fuck themselves because that's what The Mastorakis did.
He was the guy that the second something wasn't exactly to his liking, he'd tell someone to go fuck themselves. If he felt a contractor was trying to screw him - tell them to go fuck themselves! If something cost more than he thought it should - tell them to go fuck themselves! If a deal didn't work out to his liking - tell them to go fuck themselves! If someone didn't return his call - tell them to go fuck themselves!
Naturally, as his assistant, I got to deliver all these messages. I learned two things - what you can get away with when you don't allow yourself to be pushed around, and that I didn't want everyone thinking I was a twat, which is pretty much what everyone thought of The Mastorakis. This guy, after dropping millions of dollars over the years as a guest, actually got banned for life a couple of years ago from the Beverly Hills Hotel because of his assinine behavior and abuse of the staff.
Funny thing is, he's a little weasal in person.
So this guy's MO was that he would make some really shitty movies with Hollywood B-list talent and then resell them over a period of years in various European markets. It made him rich. Of the fine films he produced and directed is stuff like Blind Date, which stars the chick that Phil Spector killed; .com for Murder, a psychological thriller starring a pre-Desperate Housewives Nicollete Sheridan and a post-Species Nastassja Kinski, who later sued The Mastorakis (around the office the rumor was that she refused to sleep with him and everything fell apart from there); and perhaps the ultimate in disgusting cult entertainment - Island of Death. He also co-wrote the Anthony Quinn film The Greek Tycoon, which is probably the only halfway decent thing he's done in his life.
The beauty of this job was that The Mastorakis spent most of the year in his home in Athens while I ran the L.A. office. I actually only met him twice, if I recall. We communicated mostly via email, which made it easy for him to be a fuck. In person, he kissed my ass. However, as he was never around and we had this beautiful house just up off the Sunset Strip as an office, I took full advantage of the house. Downstairs were desks and such, but upstairs was all bedrooms, a TV room, etc. Well, other than practically living up there, I also threw some fairly nice parties in that house. Get a keg and some bottles, a little food, hook up a laptop to his Bose speakers, have 50 of my friends over, and blow it out. Around midnight we'd roll down to Red Rock for some dancing and carousing and them come back for afterhours. The house would be trashed, but that was OK because The Mastorakis had a maid, who he paid peanuts and I believe was an illegal, come in every week. She hated him as much as everyone else, so she never said anything. These were good times.