You may not recognize his name, but as the man who figured out how to make online adult entertainment pay, Chris Mallick has had a profound effect on our world. "Third-party billing" is not exactly a sexy phrase, but the concept Mallick masterminded revolutionized the way the invisible masses achieved satisfaction, and gave e-commerce its kick-start.
A rarity in the world of pornography, Mallick didn't focus his attention on making or marketing sexual images, it was a few lines of computer code that excited him more. This revolutionary source code allowed users to pay for stuff any kind of stuff remotely via the World Wide Web. Naturally, like many technological breakthroughs, its potential was first exploited by the triple-x rated business community. Mallicks company made its millions by taking a tiny cut of each credit card transaction he facilitated in an industry that would eventually generate fifty-seven billion dollars per year globally. Essentially Mallick and his fellow third-party billers were the ultimate middle men.
Having made more money than anyone ever imagined, Mallick got out of the business hed helped invent while he was ahead and now works in Hollywood as a producer. Initially hed hoped to turn his stranger than fiction experiences working in the backend of the adult entertainment industry into an HBO television series. After teaming up with screenwriter Andy Weiss (of Punkd), the project morphed into what is now a major motion picture released by Paramount Pictures.
Luke Wilson plays Jack Harris, a character closely based on Mallick in Middle Men, an action packed, smartly written comic caper Mallick claims is eighty-percent based in truth. Given that on screen his story involves the Russian mafia, accidental murder, an affair with a 23-year old porn star, FBI agents, terrorists, and the bribery of an elected official, its intriguing to speculate exactly which twenty percent is purely fictional.
SuicideGirls called up Mallick and got some surprising answers from the internet pioneer.
Nicole Powers: The film carries the caveat that it's "inspired by a true story" and that story is yours. How much of the film is fictionalized?
Chris Mallick: About eighty percent of the film is pretty accurate, and based on events that actually happened in my life during that period of time. Luke Wilson's character, Jack Harris, is the most closely based in reality in terms of things that actually happened. The other characters in the film, for the most part, are composites of other people, people I've had experiences with in business over the years. A good bit of the comedy and the entertaining things that you're seeing in the film are from the minds of George Gallo and Andy Weiss, the co-writers. So we say about eighty percent of the movie is true and we think it's more fun for the audiences to figure out what twenty percent they don't necessarily believe.
NP: Well my take on it, having watched the film, is that you can't make that shit up. Knowing that truth is often stranger than fiction, I'm prepared to believe that the more bizarre events are probably based in truth.
CM: I think your instincts are correct. I say that all the time, you can't make this shit up. Because life is more interesting than fiction, and people do things that are so off the wall and so over the top that many times those are the things that really are more true. So yes, I agree with that assessment and I thinks it's fair to say that with this film. A lot of this shit you just can't make up. Obviously names have been changed and there's composites of characters so it doesn't zero in on any specific individual.
NP: Given that a lot of the humor was injected for entertainment purposes, I can imagine that your real life experiences were a lot more stressful and a lot less fun than what was portrayed in the film.
CM: Yeah. I'm 51, and it was probably, for me, the most stressful six-year period of my life. I'd been in business all my life, and while this was a business at its core, and I operated it as a business from 9 to 5, it's the afterhours and the entertainment that you have to do to entertain clients of that nature, and the trade shows that you go to and the conventions where a lot of insanity ensues.
NP: Talk a little about the inception of your business, how you came across the people who wrote the code and how you saw its potential way beyond what they had ever thought of.
CM: Well my career at that time was of a spin doctor or a sort of fixer of companies that had potential. I guess the common thread though all of them was they had a basic good business but they weren't necessarily the guys to operate a business of that size. I would come into companies, particularly start-ups, and arrange proper accounting and tracking and compliance depending on what the industry was. This was no different, with the exception of there was a tremendous industry out there, I mean maybe the second oldest industry in the world, people interested in seeing images depicting sex and nudity and things. To me it was a no-brainer market place. It was like ice in the desert, people are just going to buy it. And people wanted to buy it, the problem was no one could actually figure out how to pay for it.
When I got there, as you see in the film, the guys have come up with this, they've started a business, and they basically in their real life story just needed a little help organizing their business and getting things straightened out. A lot of problems are borne out of any business that starts up in a field where there's not an instruction manual. This business did not come with a set of instructions. There was no right, wrong or proper way to do things with this exact industry because it was brand new.
The idea from me was, people go to adult bookstores, they go to adult movies. When I was a kid in New York, you would see all these guys sneaking into the peep shows in Times Square. You know these people are going out of their home and doing it. Now imagine you can get anything you want in your home and avoid the embarrassment of running into a neighbor, or anyone on the street seeing you, or dealing with a sales clerk as you're buying a piece of content or an object or something of that nature. So the market was already there in my mind and this was a way to monetize that. But it was never in my mind limited to adult entertainment. Anything that anyone would sell eventually, in my mind, would be online, as we take for granted now. You buy your airline tickets, your books, your magazine subscriptions, clothing, anything you can imagine is now online, and the reason we're able to do that is because a group of people came up with a code that allows you to put your credit card number in a machine remotely. It was a no-brainer in terms of a business opportunity.
NP: So is that code patented and used by the likes of Amazon.com now?
CM: Everyone uses the base of that code. It was never patented.
NP: Ouch.
CM: Yes. Guys back then when the internet was brand new, these were academics and they all believed in the open source community. The code base was put out there for people to improve upon, and many people improved upon it. It became widely used and widely known under the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. If you have someone out there who is a would-be competitor and they come up with a better way to handle a certain portion of a transaction in the backend, you want to let them do that because it does bring about a greater robustness in the software. So that's what happened with this, and people have taken that base code and have improved upon it for years and years.
At the end of the day, like in many industries, the adult entertainment world provides the capital and the fuel for that sort of development. I mean you arguably would not have had video or VHS tapes. As you saw in the movie Boogie Nights, they went from film to video to DVD as a direct investment of time and technology by the adult entertainment community, and you see that in a lot of things. It provides a lot of capital. Although nobody wants to admit it, it spurs a lot of growth.
NP: So the Amazon.coms of this world directly benefited from the breakthroughs brought about by the porn industry.
CM: Yes, I think that's fair to say. Most e-commerce companies out there benefited from the development of that code.
NP: So since you didn't have the patent on the code, you developed a billing company so consumers could be billed by a company they trusted for content they paid for from some random website of a specialist nature in Croatia of questionable origins.
CM: Yes, correct. Because there were no borders we could market all over the world. The key was it's very analogous to the telephone industry. When the telephone industry was emerging, every town in the country, every village, every hamlet, had their own phone company. Then, eventually, it consolidated and consolidated to the point where 15 or 20 years ago there were two main carriers. It's the same thing that happened in internet billing for third-party billers. Everyone said, "Oh it's a gold rush." They loaded up their wagons with their shovels and they traveled out West. Many of them weren't able to find the gold, they weren't able to operate because they were just a bit behind the curve. At one time I think we had 50 competitors. When I left we had one. So it came full circle, as many industries do, where you don't need a lot of vendors fulfilling that role, you just need the ones that are incredibly sophisticated - especially in terms of fraud prevention and data encryption security, and things of that nature.
NP: In the movie, the company was called 24/7. What was your company called in real life?
CM: It was Paycom Billing Services.
NP: And I guess it was about having a brand people trusted in the same way that Amazon does billing for third party sites today.
CM: Yes, exactly. You build the brand based on success and based on competitive issues such as pricing, speed with which you take a transaction. You know when Amazon first started, when you first tried to buy books they would say congratulations you've bought a book. Then the next day or two days later you could get an email from them saying sorry your credit card didn't go through. I think that the most innovative invention, besides figuring out a way to take a credit card online, is the aspect of real-time credit card billing, which means you know right then and there that the sale is approved.
It's sort of like how years ago you could take your Visa or Master Charge, as it was called at the time, into a grocery store and they'd put it through a zip-zap machine and if it was under $30 they didn't have to call the bank for approval. Same thing was true on the internet. You just assumed everything went through and then later on, days later, you'd find out that it wasn't approved. Well that's OK if you're delivering something. If you're shipping something you can wait those days. But if you're giving immediately available content, once they've watched that you can't really take it back. There's no return or stopping the shipping. So that reality of the economics required a real-time billing application, which was what these guys really did well. So the evolution of it within just a short period of time did things for companies like Amazon. It allowed them to ship that same day instead of having to wait several days to ship knowing that their credit card transactions had been approved.
NP: In the movie, before you came on board the code guys had found some partners with some extremely nefarious connections. Was that the case?
CM: You know, the nefarious characters, at least the importance of them in the film is very exaggerated. There were groups of people at that time, and still, mostly Eastern European, that are, and were, trying to get a hold on the business. But it was really more from a content side than from a billing side.
NP: So they were content providers that you would have to sign up in order to own the market.
CM: Yes, that's pretty true. You know in dealing with webmasters, which is what our clients were called, these were the people that produced the content to sell it and managed their own websites, you don't really know. I mean we did our due diligence in terms of who owned the company, but, at the end of the day, if they're producing legal content that was acceptable within our standards - some content was legal and not acceptable within our standards - you would sign them up as a client. But it was never, "Hey, you're going to bill for us and do it for free or we're going to break your legs." It was never that sort of a thing.
We had clients from all over the world that had all sorts of content. Some we signed and subsequently terminated, some we signed and had longstanding relationships with based on our reputation, but there were clients that I would say in another world or another life you'd probably never run across, but they were out there for sure.
NP: One of the more bizarre incidents in the movie was the subplot where you end up helping US intelligence track down terrorists. Was that story true?
CM: Yeah. The actual story about that is right after 9/11, CNN put up a list of the bombers that had gone down in the planes, and I took that information and wrote it down on a piece of paper and said to my partner, "Let's run these names through our database." He said, "You're crazy, but I'll do it anyway," and we sure as hell came up with a hit on one of these guys.
Through looking at his billing records, he paid with an electronic check, it turned out the check was written on a bank from San Diego. We called the FBI, they found the bank, and there was an apartment in San Diego where his statements went. They go to San Diego and kick the door in. All of this happens in the matter of about two hours. Inside they found a phone bill, it was for a cell phone that was still being used in Chicago, someone in the Hyatt Hotel in Downtown Chicago. The FBI went there - they televised most of it on CNN - and surrounded the hotel, went up to the floor, kicked the door in, used concussion grenades and things of that nature, and arrested this guy who turned out to be one of the bombers in Chicago who did not get on a plane. That helped them I think with additional information as time went by.
The movie zeroed more in on a character specific story, but in fact there was a website that the guy frequented, and it fits very well with the entire theme of the movie. I really think that at its core, besides being a tale of redemption and a guy trying to go home, it's also about the concept of hypocrisy, that everyone at some level is a hypocrite. Luke Wilson's wife is raising hell about the business he's in, but in the meantime she's wearing 30 carats worth of diamonds in her ears, driving a Jag convertible and spending her life shopping like crazy. Even while criticizing what he does, she's still enjoying the fruits of his labor. And I thought it was interesting that terrorists that were purportedly blowing up planes and killing innocent Americans and people from all over the world while they're talking about the depravity of America are sitting in an apartment in San Diego eating pizza and watching porn before they try to board a plane and kill a lot of people. So it fits very well with that hypocritical theme.
NP: Another point you bring up in the movie is how America loves its family values, and how household brands have to be seen as very sparkly clean, but that every name brand hotel virtually is making a huge amount of money by delivering porn directly to their hotel rooms - and they were doing that long before you guys were in business.
CM: Yes, absolutely, and I've used that analogy that James Caan used in rationalizing to Luke Wilson in the film. I've used that almost on a daily basis to people in my personal life or people that would question the integrity or the competence of what we were doing. I said exactly what you see in the film. Is Barron Hilton a pornographer? Is Steve Wynn a pornographer?
If you go to the grocery story and buy a package of Twinkies, and you pay for it and you go home and you eat it and die of a heart attack, did the grocery store kill you? Or did your choices? Where does the harm really come from?
Somebody's going to sell it. It's a transaction for us. We were being as responsible as we could to make sure we had the proper content, but that's about far as we could go. You sell to people all day and all night, and never once in six years did somebody say, "Man I love your company. It's a great service. I see you're company name on my credit card bill every month." Not once - and I know a lot of people. So again, you've got that hypocritical sort of stance.
NP: And despite the fact that no one would admit to using your service, the numbers your company turned over spoke volumes. Can you give me some numbers that would illustrate your company's growth?
CM: Well, I would say, without being very specific, well over a billion dollars in transactions over a year.
NP: When did you start out?
CM: '95 I think there was a kernel of an idea, but there wasn't really a business until late '96, early '97, and then I came in.
NP: And what was your growth like early on?
CM: It grew tenfold in the first year, the second year tenfold again. And I'm talking about numbers now in terms of money that was billed. We billed way more than that, but nine out of every ten transactions that we attempted were turned down by the credit card companies, [because] people didn't have credit or some problem with the card or the internet at the time. So the real sales that we made grew exponentially over a two or three year period, then started to level out. Now over the last three or four years - I've been out of it for six - but the last three or four years the numbers were back down to the original first/second year numbers because there's so much free content and nobody buys it.
NP: What prompted you to get out of the business?
CM: A sincere desire to have my family back, to spend more time with my family, and to get out of the craziness of that world and of that industry. I'd done it for six years, day and night, eighteen, twenty hours a day, and it was just exhausting. It was a personal lifestyle choice.
NP: I notice on IMDB that you have an upcoming project called Exxxit: Life after Porn. What's that about?
CM: It's a documentary examining the lives of about eighteen former adult film stars, male and female, very famous people in that industry. How they got into this business, how they were successful, and what's happened to them since fame has left them, and in what directions their life has changed. It's quite an interesting and emotional tale of what happens to people. It's not what you might imagine, that they all end up in ruination. I think their lives are very interesting.
NP: In the movie, your fictional wife has issues with what you did, which was one of the factors that makes your character want to get out. In real life, where do things stand now?
CM: I'm unfortunately divorced at this point. A couple of years after it was over with I went through a divorce. I'm very good friends with my ex-wife. We have four children together, we raise our children together...We can't be a couple, but we can be a family, and that's sort of where I am with that.
NP: Given that you ultimately lost your wife, and your family to some extent too, knowing what you know now, would you still do it all over again?
CM: You know, I always love answering questions like that because there's almost not a good answer. I'm a big believer in the butterfly effect. I think that whatever happens was supposed to happen, and it influences other things. I haven't lost my family, I lost my marriage. I lost a relationship with a women that I love very much, and it wasn't as a direct result of this business. There's other things that go on, just like any other family, that cause divorce. Divorce is a prevalent thing in our society unfortunately. My relationship in terms of being a family and a father and close to my children is unchanged and never fell apart.
Do I wish I hadn't got a divorce? Yes. Do I think had I not been in the business I would have gone through a divorce? I think I probably would have gone through a divorce regardless unfortunately. So I wouldn't change anything in the past because I believe it would change things for me in my present and I'm very, very happy. I've been very fortunate in my business career and I have a great life. I'm doing something, producing films, that I have a true passion for. I'm 51-years old and I find myself having the best time of my life professionally and personally. So no, I wouldn't change anything, but I do wish I had not gone through a divorce. But I don't attribute my business to causing the divorce. It definitely strained the marriage during a portion and undermined certain elements of the relationship, but I have to say I wouldn't change anything because I'm happy where I am now.
Middle Men is in theaters now. For more information go to: MiddleMenMovie.com/.
A rarity in the world of pornography, Mallick didn't focus his attention on making or marketing sexual images, it was a few lines of computer code that excited him more. This revolutionary source code allowed users to pay for stuff any kind of stuff remotely via the World Wide Web. Naturally, like many technological breakthroughs, its potential was first exploited by the triple-x rated business community. Mallicks company made its millions by taking a tiny cut of each credit card transaction he facilitated in an industry that would eventually generate fifty-seven billion dollars per year globally. Essentially Mallick and his fellow third-party billers were the ultimate middle men.
Having made more money than anyone ever imagined, Mallick got out of the business hed helped invent while he was ahead and now works in Hollywood as a producer. Initially hed hoped to turn his stranger than fiction experiences working in the backend of the adult entertainment industry into an HBO television series. After teaming up with screenwriter Andy Weiss (of Punkd), the project morphed into what is now a major motion picture released by Paramount Pictures.
Luke Wilson plays Jack Harris, a character closely based on Mallick in Middle Men, an action packed, smartly written comic caper Mallick claims is eighty-percent based in truth. Given that on screen his story involves the Russian mafia, accidental murder, an affair with a 23-year old porn star, FBI agents, terrorists, and the bribery of an elected official, its intriguing to speculate exactly which twenty percent is purely fictional.
SuicideGirls called up Mallick and got some surprising answers from the internet pioneer.
Nicole Powers: The film carries the caveat that it's "inspired by a true story" and that story is yours. How much of the film is fictionalized?
Chris Mallick: About eighty percent of the film is pretty accurate, and based on events that actually happened in my life during that period of time. Luke Wilson's character, Jack Harris, is the most closely based in reality in terms of things that actually happened. The other characters in the film, for the most part, are composites of other people, people I've had experiences with in business over the years. A good bit of the comedy and the entertaining things that you're seeing in the film are from the minds of George Gallo and Andy Weiss, the co-writers. So we say about eighty percent of the movie is true and we think it's more fun for the audiences to figure out what twenty percent they don't necessarily believe.
NP: Well my take on it, having watched the film, is that you can't make that shit up. Knowing that truth is often stranger than fiction, I'm prepared to believe that the more bizarre events are probably based in truth.
CM: I think your instincts are correct. I say that all the time, you can't make this shit up. Because life is more interesting than fiction, and people do things that are so off the wall and so over the top that many times those are the things that really are more true. So yes, I agree with that assessment and I thinks it's fair to say that with this film. A lot of this shit you just can't make up. Obviously names have been changed and there's composites of characters so it doesn't zero in on any specific individual.
NP: Given that a lot of the humor was injected for entertainment purposes, I can imagine that your real life experiences were a lot more stressful and a lot less fun than what was portrayed in the film.
CM: Yeah. I'm 51, and it was probably, for me, the most stressful six-year period of my life. I'd been in business all my life, and while this was a business at its core, and I operated it as a business from 9 to 5, it's the afterhours and the entertainment that you have to do to entertain clients of that nature, and the trade shows that you go to and the conventions where a lot of insanity ensues.
NP: Talk a little about the inception of your business, how you came across the people who wrote the code and how you saw its potential way beyond what they had ever thought of.
CM: Well my career at that time was of a spin doctor or a sort of fixer of companies that had potential. I guess the common thread though all of them was they had a basic good business but they weren't necessarily the guys to operate a business of that size. I would come into companies, particularly start-ups, and arrange proper accounting and tracking and compliance depending on what the industry was. This was no different, with the exception of there was a tremendous industry out there, I mean maybe the second oldest industry in the world, people interested in seeing images depicting sex and nudity and things. To me it was a no-brainer market place. It was like ice in the desert, people are just going to buy it. And people wanted to buy it, the problem was no one could actually figure out how to pay for it.
When I got there, as you see in the film, the guys have come up with this, they've started a business, and they basically in their real life story just needed a little help organizing their business and getting things straightened out. A lot of problems are borne out of any business that starts up in a field where there's not an instruction manual. This business did not come with a set of instructions. There was no right, wrong or proper way to do things with this exact industry because it was brand new.
The idea from me was, people go to adult bookstores, they go to adult movies. When I was a kid in New York, you would see all these guys sneaking into the peep shows in Times Square. You know these people are going out of their home and doing it. Now imagine you can get anything you want in your home and avoid the embarrassment of running into a neighbor, or anyone on the street seeing you, or dealing with a sales clerk as you're buying a piece of content or an object or something of that nature. So the market was already there in my mind and this was a way to monetize that. But it was never in my mind limited to adult entertainment. Anything that anyone would sell eventually, in my mind, would be online, as we take for granted now. You buy your airline tickets, your books, your magazine subscriptions, clothing, anything you can imagine is now online, and the reason we're able to do that is because a group of people came up with a code that allows you to put your credit card number in a machine remotely. It was a no-brainer in terms of a business opportunity.
NP: So is that code patented and used by the likes of Amazon.com now?
CM: Everyone uses the base of that code. It was never patented.
NP: Ouch.
CM: Yes. Guys back then when the internet was brand new, these were academics and they all believed in the open source community. The code base was put out there for people to improve upon, and many people improved upon it. It became widely used and widely known under the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. If you have someone out there who is a would-be competitor and they come up with a better way to handle a certain portion of a transaction in the backend, you want to let them do that because it does bring about a greater robustness in the software. So that's what happened with this, and people have taken that base code and have improved upon it for years and years.
At the end of the day, like in many industries, the adult entertainment world provides the capital and the fuel for that sort of development. I mean you arguably would not have had video or VHS tapes. As you saw in the movie Boogie Nights, they went from film to video to DVD as a direct investment of time and technology by the adult entertainment community, and you see that in a lot of things. It provides a lot of capital. Although nobody wants to admit it, it spurs a lot of growth.
NP: So the Amazon.coms of this world directly benefited from the breakthroughs brought about by the porn industry.
CM: Yes, I think that's fair to say. Most e-commerce companies out there benefited from the development of that code.
NP: So since you didn't have the patent on the code, you developed a billing company so consumers could be billed by a company they trusted for content they paid for from some random website of a specialist nature in Croatia of questionable origins.
CM: Yes, correct. Because there were no borders we could market all over the world. The key was it's very analogous to the telephone industry. When the telephone industry was emerging, every town in the country, every village, every hamlet, had their own phone company. Then, eventually, it consolidated and consolidated to the point where 15 or 20 years ago there were two main carriers. It's the same thing that happened in internet billing for third-party billers. Everyone said, "Oh it's a gold rush." They loaded up their wagons with their shovels and they traveled out West. Many of them weren't able to find the gold, they weren't able to operate because they were just a bit behind the curve. At one time I think we had 50 competitors. When I left we had one. So it came full circle, as many industries do, where you don't need a lot of vendors fulfilling that role, you just need the ones that are incredibly sophisticated - especially in terms of fraud prevention and data encryption security, and things of that nature.
NP: In the movie, the company was called 24/7. What was your company called in real life?
CM: It was Paycom Billing Services.
NP: And I guess it was about having a brand people trusted in the same way that Amazon does billing for third party sites today.
CM: Yes, exactly. You build the brand based on success and based on competitive issues such as pricing, speed with which you take a transaction. You know when Amazon first started, when you first tried to buy books they would say congratulations you've bought a book. Then the next day or two days later you could get an email from them saying sorry your credit card didn't go through. I think that the most innovative invention, besides figuring out a way to take a credit card online, is the aspect of real-time credit card billing, which means you know right then and there that the sale is approved.
It's sort of like how years ago you could take your Visa or Master Charge, as it was called at the time, into a grocery store and they'd put it through a zip-zap machine and if it was under $30 they didn't have to call the bank for approval. Same thing was true on the internet. You just assumed everything went through and then later on, days later, you'd find out that it wasn't approved. Well that's OK if you're delivering something. If you're shipping something you can wait those days. But if you're giving immediately available content, once they've watched that you can't really take it back. There's no return or stopping the shipping. So that reality of the economics required a real-time billing application, which was what these guys really did well. So the evolution of it within just a short period of time did things for companies like Amazon. It allowed them to ship that same day instead of having to wait several days to ship knowing that their credit card transactions had been approved.
NP: In the movie, before you came on board the code guys had found some partners with some extremely nefarious connections. Was that the case?
CM: You know, the nefarious characters, at least the importance of them in the film is very exaggerated. There were groups of people at that time, and still, mostly Eastern European, that are, and were, trying to get a hold on the business. But it was really more from a content side than from a billing side.
NP: So they were content providers that you would have to sign up in order to own the market.
CM: Yes, that's pretty true. You know in dealing with webmasters, which is what our clients were called, these were the people that produced the content to sell it and managed their own websites, you don't really know. I mean we did our due diligence in terms of who owned the company, but, at the end of the day, if they're producing legal content that was acceptable within our standards - some content was legal and not acceptable within our standards - you would sign them up as a client. But it was never, "Hey, you're going to bill for us and do it for free or we're going to break your legs." It was never that sort of a thing.
We had clients from all over the world that had all sorts of content. Some we signed and subsequently terminated, some we signed and had longstanding relationships with based on our reputation, but there were clients that I would say in another world or another life you'd probably never run across, but they were out there for sure.
NP: One of the more bizarre incidents in the movie was the subplot where you end up helping US intelligence track down terrorists. Was that story true?
CM: Yeah. The actual story about that is right after 9/11, CNN put up a list of the bombers that had gone down in the planes, and I took that information and wrote it down on a piece of paper and said to my partner, "Let's run these names through our database." He said, "You're crazy, but I'll do it anyway," and we sure as hell came up with a hit on one of these guys.
Through looking at his billing records, he paid with an electronic check, it turned out the check was written on a bank from San Diego. We called the FBI, they found the bank, and there was an apartment in San Diego where his statements went. They go to San Diego and kick the door in. All of this happens in the matter of about two hours. Inside they found a phone bill, it was for a cell phone that was still being used in Chicago, someone in the Hyatt Hotel in Downtown Chicago. The FBI went there - they televised most of it on CNN - and surrounded the hotel, went up to the floor, kicked the door in, used concussion grenades and things of that nature, and arrested this guy who turned out to be one of the bombers in Chicago who did not get on a plane. That helped them I think with additional information as time went by.
The movie zeroed more in on a character specific story, but in fact there was a website that the guy frequented, and it fits very well with the entire theme of the movie. I really think that at its core, besides being a tale of redemption and a guy trying to go home, it's also about the concept of hypocrisy, that everyone at some level is a hypocrite. Luke Wilson's wife is raising hell about the business he's in, but in the meantime she's wearing 30 carats worth of diamonds in her ears, driving a Jag convertible and spending her life shopping like crazy. Even while criticizing what he does, she's still enjoying the fruits of his labor. And I thought it was interesting that terrorists that were purportedly blowing up planes and killing innocent Americans and people from all over the world while they're talking about the depravity of America are sitting in an apartment in San Diego eating pizza and watching porn before they try to board a plane and kill a lot of people. So it fits very well with that hypocritical theme.
NP: Another point you bring up in the movie is how America loves its family values, and how household brands have to be seen as very sparkly clean, but that every name brand hotel virtually is making a huge amount of money by delivering porn directly to their hotel rooms - and they were doing that long before you guys were in business.
CM: Yes, absolutely, and I've used that analogy that James Caan used in rationalizing to Luke Wilson in the film. I've used that almost on a daily basis to people in my personal life or people that would question the integrity or the competence of what we were doing. I said exactly what you see in the film. Is Barron Hilton a pornographer? Is Steve Wynn a pornographer?
If you go to the grocery story and buy a package of Twinkies, and you pay for it and you go home and you eat it and die of a heart attack, did the grocery store kill you? Or did your choices? Where does the harm really come from?
Somebody's going to sell it. It's a transaction for us. We were being as responsible as we could to make sure we had the proper content, but that's about far as we could go. You sell to people all day and all night, and never once in six years did somebody say, "Man I love your company. It's a great service. I see you're company name on my credit card bill every month." Not once - and I know a lot of people. So again, you've got that hypocritical sort of stance.
NP: And despite the fact that no one would admit to using your service, the numbers your company turned over spoke volumes. Can you give me some numbers that would illustrate your company's growth?
CM: Well, I would say, without being very specific, well over a billion dollars in transactions over a year.
NP: When did you start out?
CM: '95 I think there was a kernel of an idea, but there wasn't really a business until late '96, early '97, and then I came in.
NP: And what was your growth like early on?
CM: It grew tenfold in the first year, the second year tenfold again. And I'm talking about numbers now in terms of money that was billed. We billed way more than that, but nine out of every ten transactions that we attempted were turned down by the credit card companies, [because] people didn't have credit or some problem with the card or the internet at the time. So the real sales that we made grew exponentially over a two or three year period, then started to level out. Now over the last three or four years - I've been out of it for six - but the last three or four years the numbers were back down to the original first/second year numbers because there's so much free content and nobody buys it.
NP: What prompted you to get out of the business?
CM: A sincere desire to have my family back, to spend more time with my family, and to get out of the craziness of that world and of that industry. I'd done it for six years, day and night, eighteen, twenty hours a day, and it was just exhausting. It was a personal lifestyle choice.
NP: I notice on IMDB that you have an upcoming project called Exxxit: Life after Porn. What's that about?
CM: It's a documentary examining the lives of about eighteen former adult film stars, male and female, very famous people in that industry. How they got into this business, how they were successful, and what's happened to them since fame has left them, and in what directions their life has changed. It's quite an interesting and emotional tale of what happens to people. It's not what you might imagine, that they all end up in ruination. I think their lives are very interesting.
NP: In the movie, your fictional wife has issues with what you did, which was one of the factors that makes your character want to get out. In real life, where do things stand now?
CM: I'm unfortunately divorced at this point. A couple of years after it was over with I went through a divorce. I'm very good friends with my ex-wife. We have four children together, we raise our children together...We can't be a couple, but we can be a family, and that's sort of where I am with that.
NP: Given that you ultimately lost your wife, and your family to some extent too, knowing what you know now, would you still do it all over again?
CM: You know, I always love answering questions like that because there's almost not a good answer. I'm a big believer in the butterfly effect. I think that whatever happens was supposed to happen, and it influences other things. I haven't lost my family, I lost my marriage. I lost a relationship with a women that I love very much, and it wasn't as a direct result of this business. There's other things that go on, just like any other family, that cause divorce. Divorce is a prevalent thing in our society unfortunately. My relationship in terms of being a family and a father and close to my children is unchanged and never fell apart.
Do I wish I hadn't got a divorce? Yes. Do I think had I not been in the business I would have gone through a divorce? I think I probably would have gone through a divorce regardless unfortunately. So I wouldn't change anything in the past because I believe it would change things for me in my present and I'm very, very happy. I've been very fortunate in my business career and I have a great life. I'm doing something, producing films, that I have a true passion for. I'm 51-years old and I find myself having the best time of my life professionally and personally. So no, I wouldn't change anything, but I do wish I had not gone through a divorce. But I don't attribute my business to causing the divorce. It definitely strained the marriage during a portion and undermined certain elements of the relationship, but I have to say I wouldn't change anything because I'm happy where I am now.
Middle Men is in theaters now. For more information go to: MiddleMenMovie.com/.