TheGoldenChild

Manufacturing Reality
Paris Hilton and the American Cannibal
by Keith Hollihan
In our continuing series, a profile of the pornographer who put Paris Hilton in your living room, and a fascinating look at ?pseudo-events? in our culture and the media that can?t get enough of them.
If you have a problem with reality TV, chances are it?s the word ?reality? that puts the bug up your ass. For many good citizens of the global media matrix, the use of that word is a bit like George W. Bush?s calling himself a ?uniter, not a divider.? You know it?s not exactly true, perhaps even deliberately false, but the label creates its own pseudo-reality that must be dealt with on annoyingly elusive terms.

There?s nothing real about reality TV. The events are predetermined, the participants are carefully selected to create particular dynamics, the narrative is often story-boarded in advance, and the drama that makes it to your television has been manipulated and shaped for your viewing pleasure. Yet, there?s nothing absolutely unreal about reality TV, either. The people who appear on the shows are not celebrities or actors but come from all walks of life, their personalities are genuine, and they really do contort themselves through the social, physical, and mental tests we cheer or jeer at home. If the tension, conflict, and story are contrived, an argument could be made that the nightly news uses many of the same techniques, applying music, narrative, stock footage, and editing onto unscripted events in order to entertain us with otherwise raw and perhaps even boring information.

Exactly why reality is blurred in this way, and for whose benefit, was a mystery to me until I talked to Kevin Blatt, the pornographer best known for launching Paris Hilton?s sex video into millions of living rooms. Blatt, also known by the moniker KB, recently got into the reality TV business as a producer, having made a cross-genre jump he sees as little more than a sidestep over an invisible line. ?Both industries have their share of pussies, assholes, and dicks,? he deadpans. Talking to him about his lengthy experience in porn and his more recent taste of reality TV, you can quickly see the parallels. There?s always been a whiff of pornography to reality TV?voyeuristic in nature, arguably exploitative, occasionally lurid. You wonder how the people on screen can do what they?re doing. You can?t help but watch. You lose patience with the complexities of normal sitcoms or the heaviness of the evening news, seeking the easy release found in cheap thrills of human degradation.

But it was when Blatt described the machinations and motivations behind celebrity sex tapes, and in particular his behind-the-scenes story of Paris Hilton?s foray into reality TV porn, that the nature and purpose of reality TV became more explicit to me. The story began when he described what he?d been doing with Paris Hilton?s box.


The Accidental Pornographer

On Feb. 2, 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that the contents of a storage locker containing some of Paris Hilton?s personal belongings, including revealing photographs and diary accounts of intimate thoughts, wild parties, celebrity encounters, and sexual escapades, had become the property of David Hans Schmidt. Described as the ?sultan of sleaze? for his dealings in celebrity porn, Schmidt once peddled nude photos of Amber Frey, the girlfriend of Scott Peterson (sentenced to death for murdering his pregnant wife, Lacy). Schmidt bought the contents of Paris Hilton?s box for $2,775 at an auction, after Hilton apparently failed to keep up with her storage fees. Recognizing the gold mine he?d come across, Schmidt said he planned to sell the contents to interested parties, and was expecting the bidding to reach $20 million. According to those reports, Paris Hilton considered the items illegally seized and felt distraught and victimized by the exploitation of her privacy.

Kevin Blatt began negotiations with Schmidt on behalf of a group of European investors in January of this year. According to Blatt, his clients were less interested in the contents of Paris Hilton?s box than in securing her attention, hoping to work out a deal to attach her name to a casino they wanted to build. (Within three months those clients had dropped their plans, and Blatt was representing new investors.) To me, it seemed like a strange way to go about proposing a business deal with a potential partner, but Blatt was indifferent as to whether their goals made sense or would ever provide him with a payoff. His own involvement in the deal was in part a ploy to keep his name attached to Paris Hilton and garner media attention for himself and his various business projects. I realized that I was beginning my initiation into an upside-down world where publicity and news, not to mention reality, are never what they appear.

Blatt, 37 years old, calls himself an accidental pornographer. Raised in a comfortable upper-middle class family in Cleveland, Ohio, he attended public school and played a lot of golf at the local country club. He worked a number of part-time jobs?repping aluminum siding, selling broadcast ads for the Howard Stern radio show, and even DJ?ing at a strip club, which gave him insight, he said, into the mindset of the ?crazy females? he?d later meet in porn. Along the way, he developed the hunger of an industrious hustler. When his brother Darren, aka D-Money, moved out to California, Kevin Blatt followed him. D-Money?s job entailed cold-calling businesses to sell alarm systems, and he discovered that a number of ISP companies in his accounts were growing like crazy. Their CEOs were teenagers making money hand over fist, and their business was internet porn.

Carnie Wilson, the singer in Wilson Phillips, had just had her stomach stapled live on the internet. Why not, Blatt wondered, broadcast Houston?s labia surgery, too?It had to be illegal, Blatt figured, but it wasn?t. Soon, the two brothers were working for those teenagers, selling advertising and making deals in the interstices between adult websites, spam, spyware, and adult-related product companies. It was the late 1990s, the height of the internet boom. Although Blatt didn?t believe the party would last, as a marketer and PR hound, he found he had a knack for providing an articulate and disarming mainstream voice to an inherently scummy industry, as he put it. In 1999, a friend who?d made a mint in the porn industry rented a cruise ship to host a fin-de-siècle Bacchanalian revelry on the high seas. With sex shows on every deck, it was a ?different kind of Love Boat,? Blatt says. Early one morning after another debauched all-nighter, Blatt found himself hanging over the rails next to the porn star Houston, famous for the Houston 500?a mass gang-bang she organized for self-promotion. Hung over, seasick, and exhausted, they chatted about business. Like all the porn stars Blatt knew, Houston was talkative, needy, and self-obsessed. Soon she was telling him about her imminent labioplasty. Blatt asked what a labioplasty was, and Houston explained she was going to have surgery to, as Blatt phrased it, make her ?pussy lips smaller.?

Carnie Wilson, the singer in Wilson Phillips, had just had her stomach stapled live on the internet. Why not, Blatt wondered, broadcast Houston?s labia surgery, too? Radio and talk shows wouldn?t be able to resist. As he put it to me, ?You know how the media is?the media loves shit like this.? It was then, standing at the rail of the cruise ship, that Blatt had an epiphany into his own life: ?I realized I could become the P.T. Barnum of pussy.?


1 Night in Paris

It turned out fewer customers were willing to watch a labioplasty than Blatt, Houston, or the backers at fetishhotel.com expected. Blatt was undaunted by the event?s lack of success?his name was now out there, he?d made it onto the Howard Stern show, and people began to see him as a player. Blatt was soon approached by Ian Eisenberg, whose father was a pioneer in the phone-sex industry, and Roger Vadocz, president of the Seattle-based porn company Marvad. They told Blatt they had a new tape of a party girl named Paris Hilton, heiress to the Hilton fortune?ever heard of her? Blatt realized he?d run into her before. ?I met this bitch the other night,? he told them. ?She fell out of this car with Erica, a Penthouse Pet I know.? Paris Hilton was known around the clubs as a super-wealthy party girl. At the time, Blatt had no idea she would become the next ?it? girl.

Eisenberg and Vadocz wanted Blatt to be their publicity frontman. Vadocz owned a website named sexbrat.com that was plugging a short clip of the video which showed, in green-tinted night vision, blurry sex acts between Paris Hilton and her former boyfriend Rick Salomon, then-husband of Shannen Doherty of Beverly Hills 90210 fame. Blatt knew he could pick up the phone, call Howard Stern?s producer and get on the show, so he worked out a quick deal with sexbrat.com where every time he said the web site?s name on the air, he got a thousand dollars; and every time Howard Stern said the name, Blatt got two thousand. Blatt sent me a clip of the tape [WMA clip here]. ?You?ll laugh your fucking ass off: I said it 28 times.? He worked the name sexbrat.com into nearly every answer on the air.

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