anderswolleck

Some people might imagine that Hustler magazine was slapped together by a staff of illegal aliens in a dirty basement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but Allan MacDonell is certifiable proof that the magazine is the real deal. He shows off some of his skills in his excellent new book, Prisoner of X. Flanked by a cover illustrated by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, the book chronicles MacDonells rise from a lowly entry-level job in the editorial department to the magazines editor, and then finally his fall 20 years later when he gives a scathing roast to publisher Larry Flynt.

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Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Allan MacDonell: Im going to be doing some writing with my partner. I have a writing partner and were trying to sell scripts. So the first step is to write a good one. So were slaving away at that.

DRE: Can you do The Hustler movie for VH1 or something like that?

AM: Im hoping that someone will. Weve had some people talk to us about that. Its mostly people from Nickelodeon oddly enough.

DRE: Wouldnt Larry make a good grumpy animated character?

AM: He would make a terrific animated character. As a matter of fact, that was the way you would get through work sometimes. You pretend he was an animated character. Some people called him Humpty, short for Humpty Dumpty. So you were trying to act like, Hes not really a guy. Hes not really going to get me.

DRE: Were you portrayed in The People vs. Larry Flynt?

AM: No. The time frame in the movie ended just about when I got to become prominent there.

DRE: So you werent Crispin Glover.

AM: I wasnt Crispin Glover. But you know how Crispin Glover does that thing with the eye. Theres a guy who has a dead eye and he felt that it was making fun of him and he was pretty upset about it for a moment. He was overheard calling his lawyers to see what could be done about Crispin Glover making fun of his dead eye.

DRE: I dont think that you could sue somebody for that.

AM: No, you cant. It was a ridiculous call. It gave a lot of pleasure to everyone else in the office.

DRE: I heard some scary stories about Larry over the years. One of them was about him torturing people to find out who shot him.

AM: Let me tell you something. The guy that shot Vernon Jordan is in jail. That guy at one time took credit for having shot Larry. Larrys line on it is that hes not really concerned with it. The guys in jail and its all in the past. But I read this interview with him in Loaded magazine and they asked him a question I have never asked him. They said, What would you do if you could get hold of the guy who shot you? He gave this very detailed description of point by point of torture ending in death. When I read that, I thought, Hes not just saying this. This is not extemporaneous. I had this flash like this could have already happened. So maybe Loaded magazine is where the rumor came from.

DRE: Does it make you nervous at all?

AM: A little bit here and there. At one point before it came out when I was driving to see some friends, I thought, What the hell have I done? Why do I have to pick on some guy whos so much bigger than me? Then the Ted Turner stuff is in the book too. Im thinking, Why do I have to go and antagonize the biggest guys? Why cant I just go pick on some little guy? Like why cant I just push my wife around? Why cant I just kick the dog? Why do I have to go and go after guys like this? But Larrys not embarrassed by himself and I wasnt really after him. Its not like I was trying to paint him in a particularly bad light. I feel that since I didnt go after him in a vindictive way, I feel that its not going to incite any reprisal on his part. Hes so much bigger than me. What could he care?

DRE: Right, but reprisal could come in the form of you not selling your next book because Larry knew that guy or that the bank foreclosed on your house because you missed one payment.

AM: Yeah, I dont think its going to happen. Larry loves attention. He loves to to get his name in the paper. Larry is painted in a somewhat realistic light. But hes not being slammed and hes getting his name in the news again. The one I would worry about more would be the Ted Turner. I dont see him foreclosing on my house but Time Warner reaches pretty far.

DRE: Yeah, it does.

AM: The thing is, I already had so much trouble getting the book published that it is like, What more can they do? Its like these guys that come back from Vietnam and they start robbing banks and they catch them and they say, What are you going to do? Send me back to Vietnam? Its a similar thing. Theres not that much he could do to me and I dont think hed kill me.

DRE: All of a sudden your cable will short out one day.

AM: Yeah. I dont get CNN anymore. I cant get on Larry King.

DRE: I really like the structure of the book, talking about the magazine, applying it to your situation and then telling the stories. Howd you come up with that?

AM: That was a necessity. I had to do something with the book to make it for my attention span and for the attention span of the reader. Initially it wasnt as strictly chronological. From those chapter headings, I would get some thematic thing going and then I would just fill in. Then after we got a second draft, I was able to move things around so it was a bit more chronological. Luckily they still fit within those headings. I knew that it couldnt just be one long narrative. Part of the inspiration was from Jerry Stahls Permanent Midnight. He goes into the past, then hell have a section either from the present or from a different perspective. It helps you focus as youre reading. Also I wanted it to be for a much wider audience than just Hustler readers. People have a general impression about what Hustler is like but they dont know the particular departments. So I wanted to give them the experience of what the magazine is.

DRE: Its funny that you mentioned Jerry Stahl because he used to write the letters for Hustler. Were you in charge of getting writers to do things for Hustler?

AM: Oh yeah, basically I was a creative director. So I was hiring all the writers and getting a lot of freelance writers.

DRE: How difficult was it to get writers to write under their real name for Hustler?

AM: It didnt have to be their real name, but if they worked there full time, Larry was insistent that they used their real name in the masthead. No one ever wrote their real name for the Sex Letters anyway because youre pretending to be someone else anyway. But as for the feature articles it wasnt that easy. Its not just because of the real name thing. It was because the pay for a feature article is still the same as it was in the 1970s. Youd have to find someone who had access to some odd subculture or some an event and they would write for that price. When you found someone who would do it, you got very happy, especially if they had like three or four ideas. But I got the employees from zines. I would find these zines and I would recruit these kids who didnt have the notion that there was such a thing as a career path. They thought just to be able to write for Hustler would be a great thing. Theyd be very enthusiastic and theyd be into counter culture stuff or underground stuff or just things that would interest someone which we thought would make Hustler interesting. You know that magazine from England called Bizarre?

DRE: Yeah, I love that magazine.

AM: We were trying to get aspects of that going too. We were trying to get counter culture things. We covered Burning Man very early on and even different aspects of sex that a lot of other people werent covering. At one point we had this woman who discovered this family living up in central California who were three generations of swingers. The grandparents had been swingers. The parents are swingers. The kids like being swingers too. She went up and stayed with them for a little while and that was a really fascinating story. That was a story I would read that anywhere. That could work in Harpers. It was just really fascinating. So once in awhile we pulled something that came out pretty well.

DRE: You couldnt have worked there for all those years for the prestige.

AM: I had some weird compulsion to make it the best magazine I possibly could. Sometimes you hire a freelance writer and you can tell they thought, This is just for Hustler. Ill just throw this in because its just for Hustler. Or theyll make it really vile because its for Hustler. But if I felt they were being somewhat careless or whatever, I would make them care. Theyve got to try and make it the best they can. The one line I used to always use was, David Mamet used to write girl copy for a magazine called Oui. Then they would go, Really? I would say, Do you think David Mamet would turn this in? That would sometimes help. It would make them feel like what they were doing might actually lead to something. The thing is with writing youve got to practice. When people realize that, I would get really good stuff out of them. Theres a magazine called Barely Legal that we did. I can think of five to seven people who really poured their hearts into that shit and really made it fun it a fun reading experience. They would instill all kinds of different emotions. One of those women who wrote that is teaching English at a community college. Another one is in the South pursuing other writing.

DRE: What kept you at Hustler?

AM: I knew I couldnt turn it into a great magazine but I did like the fact that I was paid to write. I enjoyed collaborating on the humor stuff and working with the art director and the artists. I pretty much had creative freedom. I enjoyed the fact that as I kept rising there and getting more responsibility, I learned more about publishing and more about putting magazines together. I wouldnt have had the opportunity somewhere else probably. Also after a certain point I started making decent money and I liked that.

DRE: Whats your fondest memory from working there?

AM: I guess the high point was when [House Speaker-elect Robert L.] Livingston did his preemptive confession. Someone called us and they gave us the phone number of the speaker elect of the House of Representatives girlfriend. So we called her and she told us to fuck off and hung up and would not speak to us again. Then maybe a day or so after we called her, this newspaper called Roll Call, they call themselves the paper of record of Capitol Hill, called me at my desk and said, We hear youve got something on Bob Livingston. I said, I cant tell you anything right now because we have confidentiality agreements in place until financial matters are settled. So the guy at Roll Call says, Im going with it. I turned to this friend of mine, one of the editors and I said, Wouldnt it be great if Livingston did a preemptive confession? He goes, Thatll never happen. Within two hours, Livingstons got this press conference saying hed been Larry Flynted. That was the biggest rush. A couple days later he resigned so getting him to drop out of the whole impeachment process without having a shred of evidence on him, just by a little bit of guile and luck, was a great feeling.

DRE: Besides getting fired, what was the worst thing?

AM: Well, getting fired wasnt the worst thing. I had a great run there. But by the time I got fired, I was really disenchanted with a lot of it. People write these books where theyve descended into these depths and then they have this big redemption. I dont feel like I need to be redeemed. There are lures and compromises. You have to decide which ones youre going to take. Youve got to balance this integrity within you. I wasnt quite balanced inside and that roast of Larry that I did before I got fired was a reaction to that. It was me trying to restore some inner balance. That roast was basically was a resignation. So the firing wasnt really that bad a memory.

DRE: Whats your opinion of SuicideGirls?

AM: I love SuicideGirls. Do you know Richard Kern?

DRE: Sure, I interviewed him for the site.

AM: I met him because I interviewed him for a magazine called Chic back when he did the video The Right Side of My Brain with Henry Rollins and Lydia Lunch. We became friends. Then when we started Barely Legal, hed been doing all these shots with all these girls. I said, Why dont you do a layout for us? So then he started shooting for Barely Legal and a lot of different magazines. But it seems like theres an evolution from what Richard was doing to what the SuicideGirls are doing.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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