August 19, 2003

Mr Skin: The last word on film strips

BY MIKE THOMAS
Staff Reporter Advertisement


Talent comes in all forms. Some folks excel at singing, others at gambling or crocheting or flatulating on command.

And then there's Mr. Skin.

Since his youth, Skin, known to friends and family as Jim McBride, has steeped himself in Hollywood nudity. Specifically, female Hollywood nudity. Name an actress, any actress, and this Chicago savant will tell you if, how, when, where and why she's doffed duds or paraded about in skimpy attire.

From the most gratuitous strutting to blink-and-you'll-miss-it glimpses, he has committed every moment, even the tiniest ones, to memory, and can recall them at will. In fact, extended exhibitions of this special gift, more Rain Man-esque than Mozartian in its prodigiousness, are somewhat unsettling. Is he man or cyborg? Was there an accidental overdose of gamma radiation?

Four years ago, McBride's nogginful of nakedness, in the form of a Web site called mrskin.com (slogan: "Fast-forward to the good parts"), debuted on the Internet, bastion of all things prurient. Its first charter member joined five minutes after launch. Thousands more would follow.

Today McBride, 40, newly minted husband (he wed in February) and former Chicago Mercantile Exchange trader, is arguably America's foremost expert on celebrity flesh, and his dot-com baby, now a toddler, is thriving. The sprawling, searchable, retro-designed cyberwarehouse, which catalogs the "work" of 6,000 alphabetized stars in more than 20,000 films using bios, stills and video clips, is said to titillate in excess of 3 million unique (i.e. non-repeat) visitors each month--a number of whom gladly shell out anywhere from $4.95 to $29.95 for unrestricted access--and "multimillions" in annual revenue. McBride declines to specify exactly how many multimillions, but he claims that his investors, the guys (including a brother-in-law) who put up $70,000 in initial seed money, are "very happy." Perhaps more telling, he's looking to move operations into bigger offices downtown.

It all began over drinks one weeknight in 1996, when a television producer pal, impressed by McBride's capacity for recounting celluloid full monties in vivid detail, introduced him to radio host Harry Teinowitz, who at the time did a show with Spike Manton on WMVP-AM (1000). Teinowitz, similarly floored, invited McBride to come on the air and flex his chops. He did, and listeners went nuts. Not long afterward, WCKG-FM's Steve Dahl got wind of McBride's superpowers and showcased him before a greatly expanded audience. "That," McBride says, "took it to a whole other level."

Movie buffs--not to mention buff buffs--throughout the area were dazzled. Local quasi-fame ensued. In late 1998, someone proposed the Web site. McBride's reply: "What the f---'s a Web site?"

Ultimately he leapt at the chance, quitting his Merc job and spending the next eight months creating a database from detailed notes and boxloads of videotape compilations, some dating to puberty. The great ones, they say, always start early.

"Since I was a kid, I'd been taping R-rated movies, and the next day I'd edit the nude scenes onto videotape," he recalls while conducting a tour of Skin Central, narrow second-story digs above a roofing shop in Oak Park. All around him a mostly male staff--skinions if you will (McBride is big on skin puns: skinformation, skinterns, etc.)--tend quietly and earnestly to the business of gleaning, logging, tweaking, writing, charting. "I'd make like five-hour videotapes of just the nude scenes. I'd do different tapes that were, like, 'TV Moms,' 'Stars of the '80s,' 'Stars of the '60s.' "

Now, thanks to Messrs. Jobs and Gates, McBride has loads of totally gnarly technology with which to extract high-quality content from all manner of sources, including digital satellite feeds (recorded onto TiVo) and, of course, DVDs. In an assembly-linelike process, key segments are logged, "ripped," touched up with high-end software on Mac G4s and, eventually, made available to surfers from here to Bora Bora via "a s---load of servers." Henry Ford would be proud.

"I could literally have the best video store in the country," McBride boasts, pointing out the scads of films, new and old, rare and common, that line hallway shelves. Indeed, your average Blockbuster pales in comparison. There's a constant stream of freebies from major movie studios (McBride: "What better way to promote a movie?"), but the most exotic stuff--out-of-print, foreign--is purchased through a variety of channels. According to chief content officer Mike Liuzza, one of Mr. Skin's most hallowed holdings, a '70s Italian flick starring Barbara Bach (Mrs. Ringo Starr) in her full glory, has sold on eBay for upward of $500.

From Angela Aames to Elsa Zylberstein, mrskin.com has them all. If, however, it's nude dudes you seek, keep looking. Nothing to see here, save for incidental, unavoidable sneak peeks.

"We have so much work to do with the female stuff," McBride explains. "That's what we do best. We don't want to go through movies looking for guy nudity. Just don't want to do it. This is fun. ... We all crowd around the screen when a new great DVD comes in and check it out. It'd be work if we had to get Abe Vigoda showing butt crack, you know?"

We know.

Despite its unabashedly male-oriented bent, McBride contends, the site also caters to a limited number of women.

"I can't say we have a ton of women members--probably 95 to 5--but when I'm on the radio [promoting], women are fascinated by the fact that we chronicle this stuff. They like to know what other women look like naked. It's pretty amazing."

And what of Ma and Pa Skin? Are they deeply ashamed? Apparently not. Native Chicagoans who now live in Arizona, they are, McBride says, "totally cool" with their boy's career shift. Not only that, but along with his sister and another brother-in-law (both of whom work in-house), they're on the Skin payroll. His wife, an attorney, also is "totally cool with what I do." Just recently, he notes, she sat through an appearance of his on Playboy TV "with six naked girls pressing their breasts against my face."

But lest you get the wrong impression, McBride is no Hefner, no Guccione, no Flynt. He simply repackages images that already exist and are meant to be seen. "We walk a beautiful line," he says. "Mainstream over here, porn over here. We're not mainstream, but we're not porn.

"Some people have different feelings about it, but the fact of the matter is, in a country like ours, there's nudity and sex in movies for a reason, and it's not artistic. In France it is," McBride says with a laugh, "but not in the United States."

With a book (Mr. Skin's Skincyclopedia: An A to Z Guide to Celebrity Nudity in Film), and a cable television show in the offing, McBride hopes to build the Skin fan base, which, thanks to his constant appearances on widely syndicated radio programs such as Howard Stern's, already is sizable.

"That's why we work so hard," he says, "because we know this is just the beginning. We're gonna build a skinpire right out of Chicago."

And the Reasons Why They Hate Us list keeps on growing.


Mr. Skin's Top 10 Cinematic Nude Scenes of All Time

1. Phoebe Cates, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982)

2. Mimi Rogers, "Full Body Massage" (1995)

3. Sharon Stone, "Basic Instinct" (1992)

4. Jennifer Connelly, "The Hot Spot" (1990)

5. Denise Richards, "Wild Things" (1998)

6. Kelly Preston, "Mischief" (1985)

7. Sophie Marceau, "Beyond the Clouds" (1995)

8. Alyssa Milano, "Embrace of the Vampire" (1994)

9. Jayne Mansfield, "Promises! Promises!" (1963)

10. Meredith Baxter, "My Breast" (1994)