Howard Stern: Howard Does Hollywood

"But I also had a stag film, an old eight-millimeter movie, and it was great," he continues, veering off the sexy Hollywood movies I'd intended to get him to talk about. "It was about this woman who's naked and her TV's on the fritz. She calls the repairman. He shows up, she throws a fur coat over her naked body, and he's sweating because there's no air conditioning, and she's sitting on the couch and her fur coat opens up and he fucks her wildly in this bedroom...now, that was a great movie, one of the best movies I ever saw. And believe me, I saw it hundreds of times.

"But trying to go see porno movies when I was in high school--before I was 18 years old--was a big challenge. The movie I wanted to see was Russ Meyers's Supervixens, and I went with my friends and all four of us had phony birth certificates with the same name on them. I was, of course, the last dufus to go into the theater. All three of my friends got in, and finally by the time I got to the door, the guy goes, 'Wait a second, you're the fourth guy tonight who's shown me a birth certificate with the same name on it! You're out.' And I never got to see the movie. It's very unfortunate."

"What movies do you find sexy now? I would think..."

"Listen, I am so jaded. My fans send us films that are illegal here, really weird shit."

"You mean with little kids or something?"

"No, no, I would never watch that shit. No, just sick porno movies, from Europe or Japan. They send me these movies with guys fucking farm animals, I swear, fucking chickens until they die. The chickens, that is. I'm fascinated by odd human behavior. We got one the other day that took place on a beach in Japan. These women come out of the water and these Japanese guys are asking these women to do something, they're offering them money. I can't speak the language so I don't understand what they're offering the money for, but it turns out they want to get the girls to take a shit on a surfboard! The whole movie is them trying to go to the bathroom on the surfboard. And in the background, real families are having picnics. So this was pretty perverted stuff."

"When you go out..." I begin.

"I don't go anywhere," Stern says. "I hate to leave the house. I do my show, then I go home and sit in the basement and watch videos and that's it. I can't go anywhere because my fans go crazy when they see me. It gets horrible. And because I'm so tall, I'm hard to miss. Really, I could be in a room with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, it wouldn't matter, because I tower over everyone and they can spot me a mile away. Everyone's watching everything I do. So I prefer to stay in my house. That's where I'm happiest."

"What happens when you go out with your friends?"

Dead silence.

"Howard, you have friends, don't you?"

"No, not really. When I first married Alison, my mother sat me down and said, 'Howard, now that you're married, you have to go out with other couples, because you have a wife and you have obligations to your family.' And I said, 'Alright.' So we used to go out with other married couples, her friends and their husbands, and the husbands would, inevitably, five minutes into the evening, start critiquing my show and telling me what they liked or didn't like. They'd say things like, 'I like your show, but really Howard, you've got to lay off the Jews.' And that was it--my eyes would glaze over and I wouldn't say another word all night. We did that a few times, and then I said, 'Alison, they seem like nice people, you should definitely have a nice social life with them, but I am never going out with them again. This is going to kill us--we'll wind up in divorce court.' And I didn't."

"But I'm not complaining. I like staying home. I hate when celebrities complain that they can't go out in public. Who would want to? You stay home, you don't have any problems. I have the kids to entertain me [Stern has three daughters]. So I can honestly say that I don't really have any friends. But I don't have a need for that."

Whew. This guy is maybe more of a nutcase than I'd imagined. "Let's talk about making Private Parts," Stern volunteers, steering us to the project he's here to promote. "It was the most grueling schedule ever. But maybe the most exhilarating thing I've ever done. I'd get off the air at 10 o'clock, which was the biggest challenge, because I'm used to going to 11 o'clock, sometimes 11:30, just talking. But I had to get to the set early [the film was shot all over the tristate area], because by seven or eight at night, I'm exhausted and ready for sleep. I really didn't believe I could do this movie--I thought the hours would be too much of a nightmare. I'd get to the set and have to go and sit in hair and makeup, and with this face, you need a lot of hair and makeup. The whole movie's about my hair. There's seven different hair changes, and it's wild, one's more geeky than the next. I never could figure out what to do with my hair."

"Did you take any acting lessons?"

"Hell, no. The only thing I did was, I got ahold of Michael Caine's acting tape. Have you ever seen that? It's the funniest fucking thing you ever saw. Michael Caine stands there, he's teaching a class, and he says something like, 'One of the things I like to do is, if it's a closeup shot, I don't blink, because if I blink it weakens me. So what you want to do is stare like this, stare at the other person's eye. Now watch what I do, now, watch this... did you see what I just did?' And I swear, there is absolutely nothing going on, the guy is doing exactly nothing. So that's the extent of my acting training."

"But you were working with real pros, right? Ivan Reitman produced it [Reitman directed and produced Dave, Twins and Ghostbusters, among others] and it was directed by Betty Thomas The Late Shift, The Brady Bunch Movie. Did they give you lots of advice?"

"Yeah, they said, 'Don't take any lessons, just go in and be yourself, we don't want to ruin whatever's you.' And the first day I was on the set, I was real tight. I didn't get it. It was so different than radio. Radio is so immediate. But by a week into the filming, I knew I had it, I just had to adjust my pacing, just slow the fuck down and enjoy it. I learned. Every part of it was fun. Auditioning actresses was great, even though they were all so short that they came up to my penis, which isn't necessarily a bad thing..."

"Your little penis?" I remind him. "You know, Howard, I don't really believe you have a small penis. You're 6'5" tall, with big feet, long fingers ... all the things that girls always tell each other point to a big penis, or at least a long one."

"Wait a minute, Martha... you think I made that up? I am not that contrived. If I'm contrived at all, it was about sitting down and making a conscious decision halfway through my career. When I was working in Washington, D.C., I was driving in the car with Alison, and I said, 'If I'm gonna make it, I have to go all the way. I have to tell the truth about everything. I can't hold back, even about the fact that my dick is little.' And I wasn't thinking that if I said I have a small penis, all small-penis guys would like me more. It was coming clean and saying, yeah, I've spent more time obsessing on the size of my penis and being embarrassed about the size of my penis than about anything else in my life. Because I cannot stand to even get undressed in front of another guy. That's why I was never active in sports, because I didn't want to go into that locker room and show the other guys that my thing was so small. I have a good trick for any guy with a small penis, though. He should always wait until he's sort of aroused before he pulls his pants down, and then you look big."

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