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David After Dentist: The Inevitable Spin-off

For some reason, it’s taken as an article of faith that predicting the habits of Internet users is akin to mapping the human genome. It’s not; there are a few basic rules of thumb. Animals are golden on the Net—particularly when acting like humans or falling asleep. And children are Cyberspace superstars no matter what they’re doing, though especially so when they’re trying to unravel a problem. Thrust an adorable kid into a situation still alien to his child brain, and you can comfortably sit back and watch the hits roll in.

Which is why David After Dentist was destined for greatness from the get-go. The video, in which a young child copes with the disorienting effects of anesthesia after having a tooth removed, has ricocheted around the world at warp speed, amassing 8 million hits. In fact, the most surprising thing about the video’s success was the outrage it provoked, as critics charged David’s father with exploiting his son’s obvious discomfort by sharing it with the world. YouTube viewers seethed; media-types parsed the inherent ethical dilemmas with Kantian nuance. The tempest subsided when eight-year-old David, reached at his Florida home by a Wall Street Journal reporter, said that becoming an Internet celebrity was “exciting.”

David’s declaration hasn’t deterred mashup artists and satirists from piggybacking the clip’s runaway success. The latest entrant in this category is “Chad After Dentist,” a parody that shows Chad Vader, the star of a popular fan film series, playing the part of David. For some reason Chad sounds a little like the Governor of California, but his suit is pretty neat. We’re approaching backlash threshold — another Internet inevitability — on the David After Dentist meme, but this spin-off snuck in under the wire.

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Darwin’s Bicentennial: A New Evolution Fight at the Site of the Scopes Monkey Trial

Darwins Bicentennial: A New Evolution Fight at the Site of the Scopes Monkey Trial

For more than 80 years, Dayton, Tennessee has had a monkey on its back. That monkey is the English naturalist Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday will be celebrated on Thursday in hundreds of cities around the world. Darwin’s treatise On The Origin of Species was instrumental to the town’s famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which pitted noted trial lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan against each other in a fight to determine whether evolution should be taught in Tennessee public schools.

Though Bryan and the creationists initially won this fight, the law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools was eventually overturned in the 1960s. And while most in this town of 7,000 have been content to move past history, a Wisconsin-based atheist group called the Freedom From Religion Foundation rubbed it in by purchasing a 12-foot-by-25-foot billboard on the Southern side of town to remind them of Darwin’s legacy — and his milestone birthday. “Praise Darwin,” the billboard reads. “Evolve Beyond Belief.”

That stirred up some of the old feelings. The group’s co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor says it was not allowed to purchase a billboard in the city limits of Dayton once the head of the local advertising company found out what would be on the sign. “Once we sent one advertising group our artwork for the sign, [the firm] cut off all communications with us,” Gaylor says, adding that a company representative told the Chattanooga Times Free Press that he was a Christian and would not take money for any sign that supported Darwin or his birthday. Ultimately the FFRF purchased a billboard on the outskirts of town from a company that was not Dayton-based.

This is not the FFRF’s first foray into Dayton. In 2002, they were a plaintiff in a court case that ultimately banned Bible classes in Dayton’s public schools. “For us, this billboard was really symbolic,” Gaylor admits. “We didn’t really expect Dayton to be a fertile recruiting ground for us. It’s just our statement that they should not suppress knowledge by teaching religion in schools. Their belief is holding them back.”

Locals, however, say the whole billboard contretemps is more amusing than controversial. “The billboard right next to it says ‘My friend’s got mental illness,'” jokes Tom Davis, the public information director at Bryan College, who has lived in Dayton for 17 years.

An overwhelmingly Christian and conservative small town located less than an hour’s drive north of Chattanooga, Dayton landed the Scopes trial in 1925 after the American Civil Liberties Union announced a search for a teacher willing to challenge a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Town leaders, eager to boost the local economy with the media attention a trial would bring, came up with a 24-year-old science teacher named John Thomas Scopes, who was willing to teach Darwinist theory instead of creationism.

Once Scopes was indicted and the July trial began, hundreds of newspaper reporters descended on the town to cover the circus-like event, which featured fully-clothed chimpanzees performing on the courthouse lawn and a fair bit of ridicule from newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken, who declared that local residents were little more than backwards “yokels.”

“I think some outsiders still view us as a bunch of anti-intellectual monkeys,” says Ann Bates, a lifelong resident whose grandfather owned the drugstore where locals dreamed up the plan to bring the trial to town.

Meanwhile Davis, who has been the director of the town’s annual Scopes Trial Week, says the festival will not take place this year. While some locals have wondered whether it’s because of pressure from outside groups during this 200th anniversary year, Davis says no, it was more of a staffing issue. “Simply put, the people who played Darrow and Bryan decided to retire this year and they were kind of the driving forces behind all this,” Davis explains.

Instead, at the end of the month the local Bryan College will be holding a symposium called “War and Peace: 150 Years of Christian Encounters with Darwin.” The symposium will explore how Darwin’s Origin of Species challenged creationist views. Retired professor Dr. Dick Cornelius says the town is committed to hearing all sides of an argument, “even if it doesn’t favor our position.” The motto of Bryan College is “Christ Above All.”

While Gaylor insists that Dayton locals have gotten more and more backward over the years, Davis swears that’s not so. “We have a public school system that’s accredited by the state,” he says with a smirk. “Our kids seem to score appropriately on state tests. We even have some people with college degrees. So the H. L. Mencken attitude is tiresome. It’s as ignorant as we’re proposed to be.”

In the end, Cornelius says, there is nothing wrong with a little bit of belief. “Evolve beyond belief There is always belief,” Cornelius says. “After all, every time you sit down in a chair you have to have the belief that it will hold you up.”

Being Green May Help Business in Bad Times

It hardly bears pointing out that during these days of 7.6% unemployment, when the business pages of the local newspaper look more like the obituaries, no industry is doing well — and that includes green business. Wind and solar manufacturers, starved for credit, are cutting back on projects and laying off workers. Whole Foods, the organic food superstore, has seen its stock price drop more than 70% over the past year, and has cut back on planned expansions. Companies — including Time Inc., which publishes TIME and Time.com — have eliminated their sustainability officers, and the business press seems more concerned with plotting financial panic than with covering the latest green enterprise.

So if all that is true, why is Joel Makower feeling optimistic Because despite the current downturn, Makower, editor of the website GreenBiz.com and one of the best-known names in the field, has watched sustainability rise from a niche concern to something about which every executive must at least pretend to care. Green businesses may not be flourishing, but business is still going greener. Of course, the recession has restrained sustainability practices and as Makower writes in his just released State of Green Business report, whatever progress is currently being made may not be “addressing planetary problems at sufficient scale and speed.” Regardless, he says, the green momentum is still growing, not so much because businesses such as solar power or recycling have become financial titans , but because green values — efficiency, reducing waste, managing carbon — have increasingly become standard practice for any smart business. “It’s really becoming business as usual,” says Makower. “These are practices that don’t go away during a recession.”

Quite the opposite. Wasteful processes that might have mattered little in a booming economy could doom a company when the economic pie starts shrinking. Take the auto industry. Toyota is weathering the recession far better than its American counterparts not just because it has been making the fuel-efficient automobile customers wanted — though that helped a great deal — but because the Japanese giant makes a fetish out of efficiency. Even Wal-Mart, once environmental Enemy Number One, has made its Byzantine supply chain greener and more efficient — and spreading those values to its network of suppliers. The message is sinking in: a 2008 survey by Johnson Controls found that 72% of building managers are now paying attention to energy efficiency, up 10% from the year before. “We’re finally coming to grips with the financial and environmental cost of waste,” says Makower. “It’s exciting the amount of innovation that’s coming out of this.”

Energy efficiency and waste reduction should be no-brainers — both factors contribute directly to the bottom line. But an even more encouraging trend from 2008 is the inclusion of a company’s carbon footprint in the calculation of its financial targets. Businesses now increasingly measure and work to minimize their carbon footprint, even reporting their efforts in publications like the Carbon Disclosure Project. In part, that’s because CEOs are simply greener today than they’ve ever been, but also because, with a new President in the White House promising carbon cap-and-trade legislation and the world working to negotiate a broader successor to the Kyoto Protocol, smart companies know that managing carbon will soon become a fiduciary responsibility. “[Executives] who don’t will soon go way,” says Makower. “This is now the price of doing business.”

So if green isn’t crashing, as many believe, why does Makower insist the “glass is half full” Just as it is in the political sphere, the pace of change in business isn’t anywhere near fast enough to meet the challenge posed by climate change, dwindling resources and myriad other environmental problems. Makower notes that carbon intensity — the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of GDP — decreased by 0.6% in 2008, the smallest decrease since 2002. The failure of green business so far to produce a Google-like success story — a company that crushes in the stock market — hasn’t helped either. “We’re not moving the needle fast enough when it comes to climate, toxicity, energy use,” says Makower.

In 2009, Makower says, the chief impediment to green business will be a lack of cash — just as it is for the rest of us. And like the rest of us, green businesses will be looking to Washington for a savior, hoping that President Barack Obama’s promises to use stimulus spending to make the U.S. economy greener, leaner and cleaner was more than idle campaign talk. “If there’s one thing I’d like to see from the Administration, it’s a vision for what the green economy will look like,” Makower says. “But right now, we’re in uncharted territory.”

See TIME’s pictures of the week here.

Geithner’s Challenge: Selling a Plan Without the Details

Geithners Challenge: Selling a Plan Without the Details

When three top aides to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were sent to brief members of the Senate Banking Committee staff on Monday at 6:30 p.m. E.T., they walked into a hostile environment. The GOP was in the middle of losing a hard-fought battle over the near $800 billion economic stimulus bill, while Democrats were being bombarded by complaints about the party’s support for it. The last thing any of the staffers wanted to hear were details of a new multibillion-dollar program to try and stabilize the housing, credit and financial markets.

As it turned out, they didn’t hear much. The Treasury aides unveiled a broad outline of the six-part plan, but there were few hard numbers or details mentioned. There would be up to $80 billion to stimulate new lending to households and businesses and as much as $100 billion for foreclosure prevention, the aides said. But when it came to the business of bolstering banks, they provided no ballpark figures. As for the still notional public-private fund that Treasury hopes will buy up the toxic mortgage-backed assets that have crippled the financial and credit markets, it was unclear how much would be needed to leverage up to $1 trillion of proposed buying power. And the idea of subjecting the nation’s biggest banks to a “stress test” to determine their solvency raised more questions than it answered.

The Hill staffers say this is all eerily familiar. Last fall, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson convinced Congress to give him $700 billion in two installments to tackle the financial crisis, but he ended up altering dramatically his initial vague plans to purchase the bad assets as the crisis unfolded. “Everyone walked out of the room with the impression that Geithner hadn’t learned anything from the experience with Paulson,” says one senior GOP aide who was in the meeting.

After a surprisingly vague speech laying out the basics of the plan at Treasury earlier in the day, Geithner was humble but blunt in front of the Banking Committee on Tuesday afternoon. He gave the Senators their due, beginning almost every answer with deference to the questioner. He said that while he wasn’t asking for anything yet, he could be — and soon. “I’m not standing here before you today to ask you to authorize more resources,” he told Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. “I want to be candid, though, that I think this is going to be an expensive problem

for the nation, and it’s going to require substantial resources.” Shelby
chastised Geithner for having a half-baked plan, and the ever-combative Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky attacked him for lack of specificity.

Treasury aides were equally at pains to be deferential. A senior Treasury official, speaking after Geithner unveiled the plan, said, “Both President Obama and Secretary Geithner understand very, very well and have got the message very, very clearly from the United States Congress they have to show that this is going to be managed better [than Paulson’s program], that it’s going to have more transparency, stronger conditions, and that a better case is going to have to be made to the American public that the money is having an impact on lending.”

One audience that immediately voiced its disapproval of the plan was Wall Street, which ended the day down close to 5%. To many traders, the announcement was too vague; some felt it didn’t go far enough, that by refusing to effectively nationalize the worst banks, Treasury was only going to prolong the pain. The details were so sketchy, in fact, that some observers wondered why the Administration made the announcement now. Treasury officials contend they need to move the plan ahead fast. “The markets wouldn’t wait, and we felt it was important to give them an idea of where we are headed,” explained one senior Treasury official. “Today, it wasn’t that they didn’t get details, it was they didn’t hear what they thought they’d hear, which was a huge taxpayer subsidy to buy up their bad assets. That’s not going to happen, so we wanted to get it out now.”

But for all the grousing on the Hill and Wall Street, and all the deference paid by Administration officials, Geithner and Treasury have reason to feel confident about the politics of this new bailout. For one thing, Geithner can start his program using the remaining money from the second installment of the Paulson plan — as he said, he doesn’t need to ask for new funds yet. More important, the President has soaring approval ratings despite growing public disaffection with Washington’s response to the crisis.

Geithner is not taking that asset for granted, and he included public-confidence-building measures in his bailout. Part of the plan as unveiled is dedicated to public reassurance, trumpeting a “new era of transparency, accountability, monitoring and conditions.” Treasury says it will require new conditions from firms that receive government assistance, including showing how they are expanding lending; mitigating foreclosures and restricting dividends, stock repurchases and acquisitions; limiting top executives’ compensation to $500,000 unless stockholders vote otherwise; prohibiting political interference by lobbyists; and posting contracts and investment information on the Web.

Ultimately, though, not even increased transparency and accountability or Obama’s political capital will deliver new money for Geithner’s bailout unless the initial program pays some dividends. “It’s gonna depend entirely on the specificity of the plan such that he can sell it,” says the senior GOP staffer who attended the Monday briefing. “And for the Dems, it’s going to matter a lot if it’s working.”

See pictures of the global financial crisis.

Content, Once King, Becomes A Pauper

Up until very recently, perhaps as recently as six months ago, the prevailing wisdom among analysts who covered the media industry was that “content is king.” It is an inexact way of looking at what editors, photographers, actors, producers, and reporters create.

Movies, TV shows, magazines, radio programming and high-quality internet content were viewed as having a significant intrinsic value. The best content can be moved from one medium to another, increasing its value even further. TV shows can be played on TVs, PCs, and handsets. Newspaper content can run on a printed page or on the internet. Radio can be broadcast from satellites or radio towers.

The value of content has never been ethereal. It has always been directly tied to what owners could “get” for it, either through advertisers or subscribers. For content to have a value, it could never be free. Its position as royalty depended on that.

Content is rapidly being devalued. The first people to press that case are accountants. They have insisted that companies from News Corporation to The New York Times to Time Warner to CBS write-down tens of billions of dollars in assets. Cablevision bought the large daily newspaper Newsday less than a year ago. Its accountants reduced the value of that property by 70%. That was not simply the value of the Newsday building. What they were saying is that the income from the property has been impaired, probably permanently.

Yahoo! and Time Warner were downgraded by a Wall St. analyst yesterday. His reason for cutting Time Warner is that, once its cable systems have been spun-out to shareholders, its crown jewels which include Time Inc, AOL, and networks such as CNN were not worth the multiple at which the company trades. The essence of his argument is that content, even the best content, is losing its value.

Part of the problem with content value is tied directly to the recession. Accountants should take it easy when they lean on that too hard. The best assets bounce back when the economy recovers. But, by forcing companies to write-down their content assets so extremely they are saying that the firms can never go home again. Their TV shows, movies, magazines, and newspapers will never recover all of their value.

Making the case that newspapers cannot recoup their value is fairly easy. The argument has moved beyond that part of the media industry. The value of feature films is under attack. DVD sales used to drive a lot of the profit from movies. Consumers are getting what they used to see on DVD from the internet. They now often pay less than they did for the physical copy of a film. In many cases, the internet can be used to get the film without paying at all. And, it is easier than sneaking into a movie theater undetected.

The internet has already proved to be an imperfect place for the film and TV industries to make money. YouTube, Google’s video-sharing site, has always had the lion’s share of the online video audience. Virtually all of the content there is free. Visitors do not watch advertising or pay a fee. NBC has tried to set up a large video site that does capture revenue. Hulu.com only has high-end TV and films. There are commercials that run on every program. But, a number of the advertisements running at Hulu now are free public service spots. The yield for the content owners is, in some cases, next to nothing.

No one knows to what extent content will be “re-valued” as the economy improves. The newspaper industry may not be able to get any of its value back. Magazines may face the same problem. To the surprise of many, some of the more valuable content, like expensive feature films, may only make a great deal of money in theaters. The yield from VOD on the internet sales and syndication on the Apple iPod may turn out to be extremely modest.

The largest media companies are making the case that the only reason their asset values have dropped is the economy. That case may not hold up.

— Douglas A. McIntyre

See the best and worst Super Bowl ads of 2009.
For constant business updates, go to 24/7wallst.com.

‘Money from heaven’ leaves retiree empty

At first, the investment sounded too good to be true to Emiko, a 74-year-old retired elementary school principal. But she ached to grow her retirement fund so she could take any burden or worry away from her two children. So Emiko invested conservatively, only the equivalent of a few hundred dollars at a time.

But then the returns started coming in. It was exactly as Kazutsugi Nami had promised, a 36-percent return on the money Emiko had invested with his firm, L&G. “I want to create a world where your money never disappears,” Nami told investors on an L&G promotional video from 2007. Emiko says Nami issued “enten” money, a quasi-currency Nami called “money from heaven.” She began to invest hundreds of thousands, watching her enten account grow. But then the returns stopped. Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested 75-year-old Nami and 21 other executives of the now-bankrupt L&G on charges of organized fraud last week. Nami, chatting up reporters over a beer moments before his arrest, denied any wrongdoing. “Time will tell if I’m a swindler,” he said. “Time will tell.” Investigators say at least 10,000 people have alleged that they were swindled by Nami, a number that plaintiffs’ attorneys expect will at least triple. Plaintiffs’ attorneys say Nami wined and dined investors at giant parties in the ballrooms of expensive Tokyo hotels. The investors also used the enten money to purchase household items, clothes and jewelry at L&G markets. But the bigger scheme allegedly took place in a separate investment fund, into which Emiko poured thousands upon thousands. Emiko, who asked to withhold her last name, showed CNN her bank statement, showing a loss the equivalent of U.S. $400,000. “I’m ashamed of my stupidity. I’m so embarrassed,” she said. She’s also filled with anger when she thinks of the charismatic man she trusted with her retirement. “I despise him, to the point I wish I could kill him. He didn’t just do it to me. I involved three of my friends in this, too.” Although there are differences between the allegations of fraud against Wall Street’s Bernie Madoff and Japan’s Kazutsugi Nami, there are also parallels as well, said Temple University professor Jeffrey Kingston. “They were both smooth operators,” Kingston said. “They were moving in high-echelon circles and they wiped out the savings of a lot of people. I think the biggest parallel is the consequence for the investor. They’re left holding the bag and they have nothing left.” Emiko is not hopeful she’ll ever see any of the money she invested with Nami. Most of the money, according to her attorney, has gone to pay off early investors. Emiko says she’s working on staying healthy in her elder years, so she won’t burden her children — something she might now not be able to avoid.

Clinton could name N. Korea envoy before Asia trip

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could appoint a special envoy for North Korea before leaving for Asia next week, senior administration officials told CNN.

The officials said Stephen Bosworth, the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and a former State Department official, has been offered the job. Bosworth would replace Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill, who is expected to replace Ryan Crocker as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the appointment has not been made public. They stressed that the timing and the details of the job were still being worked out. The naming of an envoy would signal the Obama administration’s commitment to addressing North Korea’s nuclear program. On Tuesday, Clinton said the United States intended to continue the so-called Six Party Talks — along with China, South Korea, Japan, Russia and North Korea — aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear program. Tension between Pyongyang and South Korea has increased in recent weeks, with North Korea announcing it would scrap peace agreements with the South, warning of a war on the Korean peninsula and threatening to test a missile capable of hitting the western United States.

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Clinton warned Pyongyang about provocative action against its neighbors. “We are hopeful that some of the behavior that we have seen coming from North Korea in the last few weeks is … not a precursor of any action that would up the ante, or threaten the stability and peace and security of the neighbors in the region,” Clinton told reporters. Officials said Clinton hoped to name the North Korea envoy before she leaves Sunday on a tour of China, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia. She could make the announcement at a speech Friday to the Asia Society, where she will outline the Obama administration’s approach toward Asia and its increasing global importance, officials said.

Ex-presidents of Latin America urge legal marijuana

People march in support of legalized marijuana in late January in Belem, northern Brazil.
Former presidents of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil called Wednesday for the decriminalization of marijuana for personal use and a change in tactics on the war on drugs, a Spanish news agency said.

Ex-presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil made their announcement at a meeting in Brazil of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy, the EFE news agency said. “The problem is that current policies are based on prejudices and fears and not on results,” Gaviria said at a news conference in which the commission’s recommendations were presented. The 17-member panel worked on the report for a year and will forward it to all Latin American governments as well as the United States and the European Union, EFE said. Gaviria said the time is right to start a debate on the subject, particularly with the pragmatic openings provided by the election of President Barack Obama in the United States. “In many states in the United States, as is the case in California, they have begun to change federal policies with regard to tolerating marijuana for therapeutic purposes. And in Washington there’s some consensus that the current policy is failing,” EFE quotes Gaviria as saying. Decriminalization should be accompanied by treatment for addicts and public service campaigns on abuse prevention, the commission said.

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“If you don’t help those who are dependent, you are half way there because they are going to commit crime to get money and pay for the drug,” Gaviria said. Cardoso said the group called for only the decriminalization of marijuana and not other illicit drugs because “you have to start somewhere” and it would have been unrealistic to ask the same for all drugs, EFE said. Marijuana was chosen because it is grown in all countries in the region and because it is “less harmful.” The decades-old criminalization of personal consumption has failed to stop the plant’s cultivation and distribution, the group said. The commission urged that all current criminal prosecution be aimed at drug cartels and organized crime and not marijuana smokers, EFE said. Zedillo did not attend the news conference but worked on the report, Cardoso said. Wednesday’s recommendation was the second time in less than a week that a Latin American government official called for decriminalization. A mayor in Peru suggested Friday that the federal government legalize illicit drugs and administer them through the national health ministry. Gusto Sierra, the mayor of the Surquillo district in Lima, said a federal drug law is hypocritical because it allows maximum legally allowed quantities for some drugs and plants but doesn’t say where to acquire them, the Peru 21 newspaper reported in a front-page story headlined “Say yes to drugs” Sierra said he will take the matter up with the nation’s executive branch. Zedillo served as president of Mexico from 1994-2000. Gaviria was president of Colombia from 1990-94. And Cardoso led Brazil from 1995-2002.

Auto-Tune: Why Pop Music Sounds Perfect

If you haven’t been listening to pop radio in the past few months, you’ve missed the rise of two seemingly opposing trends. In a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound great. Better than great: note- and pitch-perfect, as if there’s been an unspoken tightening of standards at record labels or an evolutionary leap in the development of vocal cords. At the other extreme are a few hip-hop singers who also hit their notes but with a precision so exaggerated that on first listen, their songs sound comically artificial, like a chorus of ’50s robots singing Motown.

The force behind both trends is an ingenious plug-in called Auto-Tune, a downloadable studio trick that can take a vocal and instantly nudge it onto the proper note or move it to the correct pitch. It’s like Photoshop for the human voice. Auto-Tune doesn’t make it possible for just anyone to sing like a pro, but used as its creator intended, it can transform a wavering performance into something technically flawless. “Right now, if you listen to pop, everything is in perfect pitch, perfect time and perfect tune,” says producer Rick Rubin. “That’s how ubiquitous Auto-Tune is.”

Ron Jeremy: My Life as a Porn Star

If gold medals were handed out for making porn movies, Ron Jeremy would be the all-time champion. He has made close to 2,000 of them, including On the Loose: Viva Ron Vegas and San Fernando Jones and the Temple of Poon, as well as about 100 mainstream movies, such as The Boondock Saints with Willem Dafoe. He tells the story of his XXX-rated career in a steamy new book, The Hardest Man in Showbiz: Horny Women, Hollywood Nights & The Rise of the Hedgehog! . And yes, it’s illustrated. TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs spoke with Jeremy from his Hollywood home:

TIME: How did you get your start in the porn industry

Ron Jeremy: Like many Jewish boys, I was working up in the Catskills, as a waiter and the maitre d’ at the Paramount Hotel. I was doing theater, and it was a very difficult situation, especially in New York, where you couldn’t be an extra unless you were part of the Screen Actors Guild. I was making no money. We agreed — my girlfriend Alice and I — to take some pictures in the deluxe wing of the Paramount. We knew women could do Playboy and that might lead to a career in theater, film. I thought I would try it out and at least get some kind of exposure, pardon the pun. So my girlfriend took the photographs and sent them to Playgirl. I thought maybe they would agree to bring me to L.A. for a layout, and while I’m in L.A. I’ll try to get some work in Hollywood. Then Playgirl called and they said we have good news and bad news. The bad news is they weren’t going to fly me anywhere. The good news is that they were going to use the pictures we had taken.

How did the public respond to the photos

I had used my real name: Ron Hyatt, from Queens, New York; likes to go hang gliding and sailing when he gets the chance, and working on his master’s degree in special education. A lot of people looked up R. Hyatt in Queens, New York, but they were getting my grandmother, Rose Hyatt, who lived downstairs. My poor grandmother was being woken up night and day, mostly by guys. Playgirl likes to think that their audience is mostly women, but no, no, the majority is gay. My poor grandma had to move. Then my dad sat me down and said, “I don’t know what cockamamie business you are getting into. You want to do something, fine, you’re an adult, but don’t you ever use the family name again.” So I used my middle name, which is Jeremy.

What was your path to the porn industry

I quit teaching because I was making no money. After Playgirl I went to see a filmmaker I knew. Joe said he only did adult movies, so I said that’s kind of sleazy. Then I did theater for a few months and starved. So I went back to Joe and thought, it’s not so bad. I asked my family what they thought and they said, [we] aren’t crazy about the idea but if you really want to do this go ahead, if you think it may be a shortcut to the mainstream. So Joe put me in my first adult film, Tigresses and Other Man-eaters. I spent an hour in makeup and they never once saw my face.

Were you embarrassed during the filming

Yes, a little. There were some professionals there who had done it for a while. I wasn’t getting the liftoff as quickly as they did. It was embarrassing. It’s funny because now, years later when I am not taking Viagra and the other guy does, I am still slow to the punch. I am the slow man on the totem pole. It was embarrassing because I was not used to being nude and having sex in a room full of people.

Were your friends shocked that you were doing this

The funniest dialogue came from the Catskills, where I had been working as a waiter for so many years of my life. They had this thing called “Bungalow Bunnies,” where the women would stay up in the Catskills and their husbands would leave to work. They didn’t really care if their wives were messing around because they were doing the same thing with their secretaries back in Manhattan. We were up in the Catskills, and I had a very good sex life, to the point where when I was once late to dinner and told the maitre d’ I was with a girl. He said, and I remember his exact words, “Anybody else I would forgive but with you it’s like brushing your teeth. You’re late; you’re being docked pay.” So when they heard, Ron’s doing porn, they said, “That’s not a big shock, is it”
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