Howard Stern: Howard Does Hollywood

"So what do you do," I wonder, "touch yourself or..."

"No, here's my trick. I figured this out once when I had to go to a doctor. And I don't care if they're doctors, when you pull your pants down in front of another guy, they judge you. So now, before I do that, I sit there and I try to think sexy thoughts and I rub my legs together..."

I hope I can do this justice: Stern is sitting with his legs crossed, rocking slowly back and forth, squeezing his legs really tight. He's trying to give himself a mini hard-on. His eyes are half-closed. My face is beet red.

"Inevitably," says Stern, coming back to life, "when you get nervous, it's still small, there's nothing you can do about it. When it's flaccid, it's small. You gotta just grin and bear it."

He's grinning; I'm speechless. "Where were we?" I ask, trying to get my bearings. "If this movie works, are you going to want to be a movie star?"

"Fuck, yes, I would like to do another movie. I was shocked by how much I loved acting. I'm not sure if people will accept me playing something other than myself, but I hope they will. I think I pulled off what I wanted to pull off. I had three goals in this. First, I didn't want people to laugh at my acting; I wanted to prove that I could act. Number two, I wanted to do the kind of movie that wasn't a Saturday Night Live movie, like Coneheads or something. I'm embarrassed by those kind of movies. And lastly, I wanted to accurately portray my story, but not in a goofy way, not over the top. And that's why it took so long to develop a script."

"People were bringing me scripts every two weeks that had Richard Simmons prancing through my house, and none of that reflected reality. I really wanted to do a movie of substance. I would love for everyone to walk away feeling like it was a great movie. And I'm really after attracting people who have never heard the radio show. As big as the anticipation is in New York and California and all these places that I'm on the radio, there's Kansas--what is their reaction gonna be? I think that the movie is [going to be] appealing to people who have never heard me before. They'll like the movie more, I think, because they're getting to see a lot of these radio bits for the first time. For my fans it will be like, hey, I remember when he did that.

"I wanted to make a movie," he adds, "not about the Howard Stern today; I already know that guy. I want to meet the guy from college. I wanna see how the fuck he got to where he got, and what he was like on the radio back then. What the fuck did Alison see in him? If anything. And what kind of woman would have traveled the country with him? And that's what the movie addresses. You'll see the Howard Stern that gets embarrassed, the nerd, the guy who can't function in the real world. He can function when he's on the radio, when he's 'King of All Media' and all that shit. But man, get me in real situations and I fall apart. I'm a fucking mess."

Fine, I think, but I also want to hear about other movies, sexy Hollywood movies. This is Movieline's "sex" issue, after all. "Because you always have these porno stars on your show, Howard, I was wondering if there's anything out there in the sane world that could turn you on. I figured you liked Showgirls or Striptease, right?"

"No way," Stern yells. "Showgirls was the biggest piece of shit. The only thing good about it was that it was so bad you could laugh the whole way through. And Striptease I really didn't get. I fast-forwarded so I could see her crawling around naked. I would do her in a minute..."

"What did you think about Demi's kid being in the movie?" I ask, since I found it particularly reprehensible.

"Why would somebody famous with money want their kid to be famous? That's why I don't get Kathie Lee [Gilford]. She spends half her mornings talking about her kids, when really she should be protecting them from that. What, I want a child star in my house? They're the most fucked-up human beings on the planet. What sick ego would you have to want your kid to be in a movie? Especially one where the camera is up your wazoo? What were [Bruce Willis and Demi Moore] thinking? Enjoy your children. When they're adults, let them be actors. You want to know something? I realize that being an actor, especially an actress, is the most fucked-up business in the world. These actresses all think they're ugly, they all think they're fat. They could weigh 12 pounds and they think they're fat. And I gotta tell you, you've got to admire women who do this. I don't know how the fuck they stand up to it. Because every actress that you meet is this tiny." He holds his hands about a foot apart. "And they all think that at 23 they're washed up, and they're not gonna get any young roles anymore. It's sad. So why would you put a child through this rejection when you have all the money in the world? Demi is sexy, that's for sure. Yeah, I'd do Demi, if only my wife would let me."

He pronounces her name "Dummy," with the accent on the second syllable.

"But," he adds, "I don't understand why Bruce Willis is such a big deal."

"No argument from me on that point."

"I wonder how he got to be such a high-paid actor. Here's my whole bead on [the pay scale in] Hollywood. A guy like Jim Carrey, I love. I think what Jim Carrey did in the Ace Ventura movies is nothing short of brilliant. He took a shit movie and he elevated it to comic genius. Dumb & Dumber, I think the same exact thing. I think Jim Carrey's a tremendous talent. I understand why he gets $20 million a movie--the guy can put my ass in a seat. Bruce Willis, I have never seen a movie because he was in it. I know those Die Hard movies made a ton of money, so obviously they got someone's ass into that seat, but not mine. Then, I see a guy like Billy Baldwin getting, what, millions per film? I don't know one film a guy like that has done where anybody rushed out to a theater to see it. I know I can put asses in a seat. If I put out a movie, I could put some asses in the seats."

"Why would you put yourself in a situation like this in the first place?" I wonder. "You've got more money than God, you've got all these obsessed fans out there, you already can't walk out of the house. Why the hell would you want to be a movie star?"

Stern doesn't hesitate. "You know what? With my second book,_ Miss America_, Caldor [an East Coast retail store] and all these other places kept my name off The New York Times best-seller list they post in their stores. They just pretended it wasn't on the list. If the movie of Private Parts is huge, it will piss off every establishment type there is. I want to spit in the face of every Hollywood jerk-off that exists, because I see Hollywood the same way I saw radio when I got into it. I basically see an industry that rejects me, that does not want me to succeed, that in the worst way wants me to fail, because they don't understand me and they know I don't play by their rules. I got into Hollywood through the back door. I wrote a book, it was a tremendous success, it was bought for a movie. I'm playing my own game, in my own court, with my own rules. And surely, that is going to make a lot of people mad or envious of whatever they think I have that they don't. If it's a success, they'll all be pretending that they were wishing me luck from the beginning. But I'll remember. And fuck them."

I think I'll leave now.

A few days later, I arrange to call in to Stern's radio show to finish up our interview on the air. I'm hoping the King of All Media will have some fun with me in the comfort of his primary medium. Right away, after he takes my call, though, he's implying that I'm a star-fucker who just wants to be famous. But since I'm not (really, who the hell would want fame without money--then I'd just be like Stern regulars Jessica Hahn and John Wayne Bobbitt), I don't argue this point and he stops ranting.

"So, c'mon, Martha," he says, "what else did you want to talk about?"

I try again to get Stern to talk about sexy Hollywood films, mentioning both The Last Seduction and Body Heat, but Stern and his sidekick, Robin Quivers, just laugh. "Too intellectual," they both say. Pressed, Stern says he liked Jane Fonda's body in Klute, Daryl Hannah's in Splash, Raquel Welch's in One Million Years B.C., Jamie Lee Curtis's in both Perfect and Trading Places. Then he mentions two, more recent flicks, Bound and Carried Away. Bound, he says, he liked for the lesbian love scenes between Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon. Carried Away, though, brings up other bodies-- men's. In that film, he explains, Dennis Hopper makes like Harvey Keitel, showing off his manhood on screen. "Almost always when a guy shows his penis, it's a mistake," Stern informs me. "[Hopper's] got one the size of an elevator button. Same with Richard Gere. They shoulda called Breathless Penisless."

All of which makes for swell radio chatter, but personally I'm not buying the line that Stern's an idiot too shallow to quite grasp the "deeper" meaning of movies that aren't outright trash. Stern--radio personality, best-selling author, and perhaps our next big movie star-- didn't get where he is because he's a dummy. But keep it quiet. Howard Stern doesn't care if you know his penis is small, but he is not so sure he wants you to know that his brain is big.

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Martha Frankel interviewed Kevin Bacon for the November issue of Movieline. Check out more about Martha Frankel here!

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