lovin this so far

Nice Monty!!! The interviewer gets interviewed!

Another great set of interview questions. Kudos :)

Interesting read

I worked in an adult bookstore in college. It was easy, the pay was good, I liked watching porn. Got a nice discount as well.
Most of the time it wasn't too busy so I'd watch porn, do schoolwork or read.

What was always busy though, were the boothes in the back. For the uninitiated, guys sit in these little boothes with a curtain and choose from several porn tapes to watch. And then you, uh... watch them. You can thank Ruben Sturman for the jerk-off booth.

No, I didn't have to clean the boothes. That's always the first question everyone asks. My dealings with the boothes consisted of powering them up in the morning or off at night.

The bad thing is, the boothes took tokens rather than quarters. Some people, in lieu of using the change machine in back, would constantly come up to the counter to get tokens. I grew a distaste for seeing the same people over and over, but they are the same people that are buying your products today. So as long as you don't have to look at them, I guess it's all good.

Oddly enough, as I was working here, I ran into a friend who told me he used to have the same job. I asked him why he quit and he told me one time a guy came running out of a booth up to the counter for tokens. When he got there and held out his hand, there was jizz dripping from it. My friend called the manager and told her she had 15 minutes to get to the store before he left.

My strangest experience was with this big awkward dude who always used to just hang out in the back. I thought he was gay, but wasn't sure. He was awfully stupid though, that's for sure. He'd kind of just mill around waiting for guys to come out of the boothes. I never saw him say anything to anyone, which I found strange. So I'd go stroll into the back to see what the hell he was doing and he'd scurry into an empty booth. A little while later, I'd see him milling around again. Eventually, he'd just leave. Creepy.

Another fun story about the porn shop is the amount of married men rolling in to check out gay porn. There were a lot of them, and this was in a town of only 60,000 people. Makes you wonder how many married guys have fantasies about hitting another dude. A lot, I suspect.

That's a strong word.

In college, me and a couple friends organized Wednesday Night Porn Night. At first, it was just 5-10 dudes hanging out checking out the latest adult title. After a while there were people coming from all over my hall, including quite a few women. We were packing 30 or so people into a small-ass dorm room to watch a little adult, maybe cracking a few beers, maybe ordering up some chicken (for what later would come to be referred to as Wednesday Night Chicken and Porn Night). It was interesting to say the least.

Then, of course, came the bookstore. While I was familiar with AVN, I had never really picked up a copy before I worked at the bookstore, so I became fairly well acquainted with it.

This all added up and since I was a journalism major, one of the co-founders of Wednesday Night Porn Night always chided me with "someday you're gonna work for AVN."

After a couple years in L.A. I found myself in need of a new job. I was working for a mainstream producer and missed writing. I went to my go-to site for all jobs journalism-related, JournalismJobs.com, and what do I see? AVN - Adult industry publication seeks managing editor...

And so it goes...

My friend is now a professor and track coach at Mankato State in Minnesota. I'm working for AVN. He's jealous.

Until tomorrow...

Great read so far! Monty's a great guy!

Great interview, great guy ....go MJ!

This is too much fun, thanks Sleazy and Monty!

Monty, missed catching up with you in Phoenix. Was great to say hi but I hope we get more time soon! :winkwink:

Nice interview

Hellloooo porn, and hellooooo CURIOUS (toyboy?)... The nature of this industry is both disgusting and fascinating at the same time. And profitable. Good one.

:1orglaugh

not going to debate. i'm just going to agree. i love heart!! singing baracuda as we speak!

johnny cash, tribe called quest - love it. :thumbsup

Bottle service with hot chics accompanying always makes for a good night. :thumbsup

LOL - I hate it when there is going to be an Ambush interview that I might actually follow. Takes so much time.

Good choice Sleazy.

Maybe, someday -- I'll be cool enough to be paid to write like MJ.

A boy can wish...no?

FYI - there is NO MORE BOTTLE SERVICE IN LA now.

If you want that shit...you better head to Vegas...the new chief of police outlawed it with a city ordinance.

Pretty whacked, eh?

I have 1 word for you...

SLAYER!!!

One of the best Ambush Interviews thus far. Guess this is what happens when you have a writer telling his stories. Nice one Monty!

Jeremy

great read so far...

Monty Monty, he's our man .. If he can't do it .. No one can!!!


Monty is an awesome writer and journalist ... An indusrty person that I consider a Friend !

MJ Rocks!

I am waiting for more insight... :thumbsup

I will be commenting on the adidas jacket next time I see you :upsidedow

Well, what can I say to that other than absolutely!
Any time with Julie is a good time.

And by the way, I'm back. Changed out computers this morning. I am now happy to say I'm on an iMac rather than that POS PC.

More soon.

You know, growing up in a small midwestern town, there were a lot of metal heads. Lots of Slayer fans, Pantera, Metallica, etc.
I was never down with Slayer, however, I've recently been turned on to the greatness that is Iron Maiden, and I know you're down with that!

Yo, if it's good enough for Rod Laver and Run DMC, it's good enough for me. My A-didas walked through concert halls and they walked all over coliseum floors!

hahahahah I love ya Monty!

OK, so back to it until something pulls me away again...

It will be 2 years in September. Seems like longer.

I am technically Senior Editor/Associate Publisher. What those titles mean, I'm not really sure. They sound nifty though, eh?

I write news and features. I have a hand in putting the AVN Online magazine together. I promote the company and our events through various means. I go to tradeshows. I try to help people accomplish their goals. In general, I try to make things happen.

Hopefully I have been successful in some of these endeavors.

yup definitely good enough for the Run DMC's and their concert venues... way back when. heh.

what was that you said earlier in the Ambush? .... oh, this...

"maybe I'm stuck in the past or something too... " :upsidedow

sorry hon, couldn't resist :)

but we'll thumbs up for your creative Tshirts :thumbsup :thumbsup

I just like the classics, you know? :1orglaugh

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.

When I graduated from college I knew all I wanted to do was move west where it was warm. I hate the cold weather. It literally depresses me, so Wisconsin and I didn't go well together.

I was in Phoenix visiting my grandparents my last year of college and got hooked up with this publishing company doing some freelance stuff. I was basically just compiling columns, editing press releases and the like. When I graduated they had a full-time opening. They produced 6 computer engineering magazines. I knew nothing about the subject except what I had picked up freelancing. I cared even less then I knew, but I saw it as the exit I was looking for and packed up and got the hell out of the cold.

They brought me on because I knew how to write and edit and didn't care about my lack of knowledge of the subject. All of our stuff was submitted by industry insiders, so I just edited it and put one of the magazines together. Needless to say, not having any interest in what I was doing made for a pretty shitty job. On top of it, in the beginning I shared an office with this chick who was from Kentucky but lived in Texas most of her life - talk about the worst possible fucking accent to listen to. It was like nails on a chalkboard to me. On top of that, she was 37 and single and in desperate need of a man, so all she'd talk about was how she was going out with this guy or why this other guy didn't like her. She had the mentality of a high school girl and everything came out half Kentucky/half Texas.

So anyway, I was out of the cold, but had a job I really wasn't in to. After a couple years, it really started to show and I eventually let it get the best of me and I got canned. At the time I was pissed, but in hindsight, a better thing couldn't have happened. I picked up and moved to L.A. and everything has been going pretty well since then.

Great read ! ...

sometimes in life you just gotta say Mastorakis and see where it takes ya :)

Ain't that the truth!

Great questions and answers

When I lived in Wisconsin I worked for two dailies - first, the Oshkosh Northwestern, where I worked for a year covering various things, getting my feet wet, meeting people, etc., etc. The big deal in Oshkosh every summer is the EAA Airventure, which is the biggest airshow in the world next to the Paris air show. For a week every summer a town of 60,000 turns into a town of 200,000. The tiny-ass airport in Oshkosh is the busiest in the world after I think O'Hare and George Bush. Planes fly in from all over the world and they park them in acres and acres of fields. Quite a spectacle. Covering EAA that summer was a hell of a lot of work, but it was also an experience I'll never forget. Among other things, including a WWII fighter bursting into flames moments after takeoff and crashing, the owner of SC Johnson built an exact replica of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose and flew it into Oshkosh that summer. I interviewed him. Pretty cool shit.

So then I worked for the Appleton Post Crescent. Unlike Oshkosh, Appleton is a pretty cool town. Heart of the Fox River Valley and all. This is actually one of the bigger and more respected papers in Wisconsin, at least until Gannett took it over. Anyway, this was 2000. I was an avid political buff back then (six years of Bush has made me a jaded prick) and that summer, of course, was the height of the Bush/Gore race for the presidency. Somehow I kissed the right ass and got myself assigned to covering much of the campaign. Wisconsin was a swing state, so one or both of those fools was stopping in every other week. I covered most of their stops and slyly inserted my liberal bias in most of the stories I wrote. :1orglaugh Just kidding. it was pretty cool, I got access I really never dreamed of and my byline on the front page quite a bit. And despite the amount of post-work celebrating I did that summer, it's one I'll never forget.

Finally, in college I was the managing editor of our school newspaper, the real go-getter that I was. Well, my senior year after working my way up through the ranks I figured it was my turn to make some changes. I started with our logo. Wanting to make a splash and catch a lot of eyeballs I decided to abandon the standby black, block font and use my Photoshop skills to make the color scheme a rainbow and turn the block letters into something akin to a marquee scroll. I succeeded in making an eye-catching logo. Everyone noticed. Of course, they all thought we were a LGBT pub. In hindsight, I should have stayed with black.

I have to get to a dinner. So I guess I'll really get on this tomorrow. At this rate I should be done sometime around May.

This is a beauty...

After I graduated from college I had my real job lined up, but it didn't start until August, so in the meantime I decided to find a job with as little actual responsibility as possible and party my ass off in my remaining months in Wisconsin.
I took a job in the custodial services department at the University. In other words, I was pretty much a janitor. If I recall, I made about $6.50 an hour.

Well, employing a bunch of university kids every summer, the custodial services department didn't expect much. You didn't show up for work - not really a big deal.
Anyway, that's not the way I work, so I always showed up for work and they loved me for it. Other people would go missing for 3 or 4 days at a stretch. Thing is, we didn't really do anything when we were there. The students were assigned to a full-time custodial employee everyday, who gave them tasks to do and this one dude kept choosing me.

I was majorly hungover most days and he could usually tell, but I still did whatever job he gave me. We took a lot of cigarette breaks. Sometimes, he'd just let me take a nap on the clock. Other times we'd drive around in one of the University trucks. After a while when he figured out I was competant and not going to make him look bad, he'd assign something to me and just leave for pretty much the entire day. Before he would take off, he'd always leave me with the reminder - "Remember, take your time." In other words, if you work hard it's going to make us all look bad.

I was all for that, but just had to laugh everytime he said it to me. I remember one particular morning where I had tied a beast on the night before. Pretty sure I was still drunk when I came in to work. This dude sets me up to mop the handball courts, of which there were four. Before he rolls out he imparts the department motto on me - "Remember, take your time." He left, my buddy's house was across the street, I went over and slept off my drunk for two hours, came back and mopped and all was good.

On a side note, this one morning, I saw this janitor that somehow looked familiar to me. He said hi, I said hi, and that was pretty much it. I couldn't figure out where I had seen him before. Then it dawned on me - two years earlier when I worked at the bookstore, he was the dude who came in on Saturdays to clean the jizz boothes. :1orglaugh
He was a really great guy, but obviously did too many hits of acid in his day. I don't think the other janitors new what he did on the weekends, so it was never mentioned.