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I had lunch at the Continental on Wilshire Blvd in Beverly Hills October 30, 2002, with producer Eric Mittleman. We each order 12-inch pizzas that we consume in their entirety (minus some crusts). I drink four lemonades and Eric has a couple of Cokes. I've known Eric for five years, since his days producing Nightcalls and other shows for Playboy, through his tenure at Danni's Harddrive to his present position at Creative Light Entertainment. Eric: "Creative Light started out as a distribution company and expanded into production. They acquired the rights to distribute the animated movie AirTroopers that needed a full audio redo. If any of my relatives anywhere in the world ask what I'm working on, I don't have to candycoat, spin, or do any of the things I did while working at Playboy. Then I couldn't tell my four-year old niece about female ejaculation. It's not socially acceptable. "That helps you ease into a more normal life, as normal as Hollywood can be. It's a lot cooler being stopped on the street because you are walking down the street with Mark Hamill than Jenna Jameson. If it's a picture with Jenna Jameson, I'm ducking out of the frame. There's so much of life that comes back to you when [you work in mainstream as opposed to adult entertainment]." Luke: "It's like a burden off your shoulders." Eric: "Yeah. You don't realize..." Luke: "The strain that you were under..." Eric: "The stuff you would do to compensate... Even just sitting here like this in a restaurant talking about Hollywood entertainment. It's not like looking up to see someone's shocked expression because you said 'anal.'" Luke: "How does your girlfriend [of five years] feel about your switch?" Eric: "She likes it. I met her while we both worked at Playboy. She worked in post-production. Even then there was a certain amount of 'ohmigod, look at what he does for a living.' "There are friends from that business that I would keep in touch with but I don't know if it's the flake factor, or if they feel out of their element around non-adult stuff, but they don't keep in touch. Once in a while I'll talk with Gary Gray at Playboy. There's some overlapping crew that I know. I keep in touch with some of the executives at Playboy. "I know the principle partner at Creative Light, Scott Zakarin, from high school. Scott brought me into Playboy in 1991 because he was running the on-air promo department. Scott left in 1993 to join an advertising company. He created The Spot in 1993, the first online soap opera. It was just text and pictures. He left The Spot and started Lightspeed Media, which also does online entertainment. He then formed a partnership with Brandon Tartikoff called Entertainment Asylum. It was bought by AOL in 1995. Brandon passed away. Six months later, they laid everyone off and bought out their contracts. "With some of his AOL money, Scott and Rich Tackenberg started Creative Light Media in 1998. Peter Jayson (former producer of Dateline and TV documentaries) came in as a partner. They pursued production and distribution deals, making the kids video The Adventures of Cinderella's Daughter. "In October of 2000, as my contract with Danni's Harddrive was coming to an end, I talked with Scott. They had a movie called Magenta, an erotic drama, which sold well for them. With my Playboy background, it made sense for me to produce a movie in that genre (became Forbidden) - something for late night cable TV, softcore, Showtime, Cinemax, HBO. HD24P technology was just coming on the seen. It's high definition digital video that George Lucas used for Star Wars episode two and Robert Rodriguez used for Spy Kids. Almost all the CBS primetime shows are shot in high def. It looked as good as 16mm and approached the quality of 35mm. "We then pulled the trigger on another movie in that genre - Voyeur Beach. I wrote and produced both erotic flicks. Then the bottom fell out of that marketplace in 2001 because of competition from hardcore. Playboy bought the hardcore cable channels. Our profits halved. "While making these movies, we made some straight-to-video reality programs. We produced a 90-minute interview show with Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner called Mind Meld. It's Nimoy and Shatner sitting down and talking about Star Trek and how it influenced their lives. It's a nice warm show. If you like Star Trek, you'll love the show. An interviewer could not do an interview with either of these men as well as they interview each other. The success of the video opened up many distribution avenues for the company." JLS writes on imdb.com: "Shatner and Nimoy couldn't be more different. Yes, they were born four days apart -- as we find out at the beginning of the film -- and their careers following similar arcs, but their professional concerns and personal problems diverged radically. Nimoy, the actor's actor, and Shater, the comedian, approached the roles from different perspectives. Their Trek journeys, although documented in more detail elsewhere, are discussed with benefit of age-weary hindsight." Eric: "Scott is friends with Stan Lee [created Marvel comics in the 1960s]. Spiderman was coming out and getting a huge marketing push. We decided to do an interview show with Stan Lee and Kevin Smith [director of Dogma, Chasing Amy, Clerks] and then we enhanced it with Marvel images. Sony bought the show from us and it is going to be part of the Spiderman gift pack coming out. "After that, we started production on a low budget horror film [Inhuman] which I co-wrote and co-produced. Actress Chase Masterson, who has a huge following among the sci-fi audience, signed on so we decided to make it as a SAG film. We shot over the summer and we're in post-production now. It's heavily inspired by classic horror movies like Creature From The Black Lagoon. "William Shatner was doing a charity event in Jolliet, Illinois, to benefit the Hollywood Horse Show, a charity for kids. He sponsored a 1500-person paintball tournament in a $5 million paintball park. He went to Paramount and got permission to use the team names Federation Klingon and Borg and use jerseys that look like uniforms. He plays a Captain Kirk-like character in charge of the Federation in this battle. It was too good of an opportunity not to bring out a whole bunch of cameras and shoot. We brought 12 cameras and created William Shatner's Spplat Attack. It's Star Trek meets Survivor with a paintball twist. That will show on pay per view December 10 and in stores December 12. "We have a longstanding relationship with Sid Caesar. We remastered all his Show of Shows. We interviewed many of his old writers like Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon... We've released these as DVD sets, websites and merchandise. "We're looking for other icons to develop relations with. I'm connected with Mark Hammil through mutual friends. He has a huge passion for collecting comic books. We've developed a project called "Comic Book: The Movie." It's an unscripted movie shot on digital video over four days during Comic-con in San Diego in August. We shot over 80 hours of material that we're now trying to edit down to a 90-minute movie." Luke: "Why do you think Playboy.com hasn't made money?" Eric: "It's too big. It's an old company. Try explaining the internet to your parents or grandparents. They'll get it eventually but they won't be surfing like a 15-year old in an hour. When I was at Danni's, which is hugely profitable, they tried many times to get meetings over at Playboy to pitch some managerial consulting deal. Playboy didn't know how to manage that business, especially with the huge amount of free content available to the web site from other aspects of the business. "As Playboy sinks more into hardcore, it becomes just another hardcore company with a good reputation. Hef did a cameo in Comic Book: The Movie. We did a 50-minute interview with him about comic books. I've never seen Hef more alert, alive, witty and fun than during this interview, just because he was talking about something other than Playboy. I realized that for eight-and-a-half years, I'd been watching the man regurgitate poorly written press releases. Here he's finally talking about something he has real expertise in. He's not just trying to put a dollar in his pocket. "The company has strayed so far away from what the magazine was... I think the company will coast until Hef passes away and then AOL/Time Warner will buy them." Luke: "What was behind your move to Dannis?" Eric: "I was really unhappy at Playboy during my last two years there. Just the bad management decisions they made and being forced to work with some incompetent people. I met Danni when we did a show called "Playboy's Hard Drive," which was a show we did looking at sexy websites. We stayed in touch. "I didn't get into entertainment to do erotic material. My work for Playboy had a false prestige for it. I used to say to myself, 'If I'm going to do this kind of material, at least I'm doing it for Playboy. I'm not doing it for Vivid or Wicked.' "Eventually, Danni and her husband came up with such a good offer. Did I want to make less money working for people I can't stand or make more money working for people I liked? It was no choice. "It was November 1999. We were shooting in Jamaica. Somehow Playboy had developed a policy that significant others weren't supposed to go on field trips. My girlfriend wants to go to Jamaica. My life is going to be a lot more difficult if I don't take her to Jamaica. "I decided we would go down a week early. She stayed the entire time. My executive producer [Tamara Wells], who tried to fire me a number of times and was basically the reason I quit, was on the phone to LA from Jamaica complaining that I'd brought my girlfriend down. I get off the plane in LA, go to the office and quit. Cut to a year later, a new producer they hired is now living with Juli Ashton, and Flower, host of Nightcalls 411 is pregnant with the director's child. So much for the policy against fraternization. "In late 1999, Danni had just built a huge production facility and they didn't know how to work with." Luke: "You had a dream of doing a lot of special things at Dannis?" Eric: "Some of those became impractical because of the way the internet went. While I was there, I started 24/7tv.com. It was going to be short-form programming for the internet. This was the time of companies like DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) were collapsing. I realized I could do better by myself, with a $1000 camcorder, and a Mac and my rolodex. "I called celebrity friends like [rapper] Ice T, [actor] Billy Dee Williams, and Steve Schirripa, then the entertainment director at the Riviera in Las Vegas and now an actor on Sopranos. I just knew that someone one day would point a camera at Steve and make a lot of money. We shot a lot of short web interstitials and the plan was to pursue sponsorship. As the web fell apart, things like that totally fell apart. "We found at Dannis that the stuff that got the biggest response wasn't bigger productions but it was more intimate home movies. People would rather see home movies from Cancun than a more expensive elaborate parody production." Luke: "Like Bra Wars." Eric: "That was made by Dean Guilotis who has been with Dannis a
long time. He worked for me. He did all the work. When my contract was
coming up at Dannis, I had nothing against anyone there. It's just that
they were paying me a lot of money to do very little. It was time to move
on. A lot of people like me were derailed by the internet. I was happy
to get back to mainstream big productions on a big screen. I couldn't
be happier than what I'm doing now. I'm working with friends. We're doing
shows that I would actually watch." Luke: "You're like Elie Samaha. You've found a niche forming good relationships with celebrities and finding projects they really want to make and making it happen. You're like John Travolta with Battlefield Earth. You need to start making some Scientology films." Eric: "It's not an immediate plan but if Travolta knocks on our door... The difference between us and Elie Samaha's company (we do have a lot of similarities) aside from that he knows bigger stars because he was in the nightclub business, is that we're a distribution company. A lot of what we do is greenlit based on marketing costs. We knew before we greenlit Inhuman that Japan was looking for monsters that were big and scary." Luke: "Are there any star vehicles for [porn star] Juli Ashton planned?" Eric: "If I was going to pull anyone from that world for something, it's probably be Juli. We had a scene in Comic Book: The Movie where we needed some girls, not nude, for a party scene. I invited Juli at the last minute through a mutual friend but I have a feeling that the invitation did not get to her in the way it was intended. The response was, 'No, she just turned down American Pie 3.'" Luke: "If you had to cast a porn star, aside from Juli, in an acting role, who would you choose?" Eric: "The adult business is so different. I've never seen an adult actor, aside from Steven St. Croix, analyze a character. I just think of the research real actors do for a part. I just read an interview with Selma Hayak who did the movie Frida. She spent months painting reproductions of the paintings Friday painted so she could get into Frida's head space. Could you imagine a porn star who has to play a pizza delivery guy working as a pizza delivery guy for a week? 'Oh, I play the sexy pool woman, so I am going to go dredge pools for a month.' Getting into character in the adult world means something entirely different. "If you need a hot sexy actress to play a porn star, it's a lot hotter to see Jennifer Love Hewett try to do it than a real porn star. What have been the big porn star crossover roles? Jenna Jameson in the Howard Stern movie playing herself. Kobe Tai in Very Bad Things playing a hooker who gets killed. Ginger Lynn in Young Guns. The only one who has come close to crossing over is Traci Lords and she went through a stage where noone would hire her. After she put in the work to become an actress, she got good and booked bigger roles. In Blade 2, I didn't even realize I was watching Traci Lords." Luke: "How's Greg Dark?" Eric: "He's making 12-15 big budget music videos a year. He's promised features but nothing's been finalized. I've always wanted to do something mainstream with Greg, something action-oriented. I asked Greg two years ago what he would do if he had money and didn't have to work. He said he'd be a martial arts instructor. Greg is holding out for a feature with a guaranteed theatrical release. That's difficult. Seagal can barely get a guaranteed theatrical."
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