Tim Von Swine

Followers of Porn Star Podcasts have probably listened to the Mike John podcast. Recently, I began getting transcripts made of some of the better interviews.
Here is Part One of the Mike John chat.
Thought his fans might enjoy reading. It's good stuff. (There are some typos ... I'll come annotate later)
(Note: I'm not going to edit out my initials, but for basic purposes, SD=Me)
Mike John Interview
POV Explosion

Adult DVD Talk - Porn star Podcast
Las Vegas edition 2007
January 9, 2007
In the Sports Book of the Venetian

Tim von Swine
Mike John
(chatty banter begins)
MJ: People think that if you are in porn that means blow jobs nonstop. I think my house might be one of the more boring ones on the entire block.

TvS Everyone thinks that when you are in porno that is all you do 24/7. Look, you do your job, you hang out, you go home, do some cylinders and that’s how you keep it pure. If you’re doing porno all the time, you’re in deep shit. You’re going to burn out.
SD: I’ve seen your house it's featured in many of your movies.
MJ: Yeah - "Teenage Spermaholics POV", specifically. That green couch has made quite a few appearances. It used to be brown (laughs).
SD: So your place is more like a scene from CSI now.
MJ: If you were going to take the blue lights the whole place would be speckled. Worse yet is the keyboard on my computer. You've got to be a real sicko to touch my computer. But....Eros lubricant will keep your computer working for a long time. If you have enough lube on your hands while you're hitting the keyboard you'll keep it greased. It keeps the keys moving like butter.
TvS: Ok ok....real quick, Mikey, from back in the day. Wasn't it Suzanne Storm? Mikey’s got some girls, man. Sunrise Adams, Suzanne Storm. You have some really epic POVs.
MJ: The first POV that got me to convince the guys that I could have a line doing it was Brianna Banks. (inaudible 24:20 Barrage?) That was great because Regan Singer whom I like and get along with very well brought her to Anabolic and he had this look on his face like he couldn't believe it. He didn't even know what to say. I took her to my mom's. My mom's from Denmark.
She lets me shoot at her house. She's very understanding. A 73 year-old lady who is very open-minded. When I told her I got locations she asked how much they cost and at that time they were around two or three hundred bucks - she said "That's outrageous! What's wrong with this house?" (laughter)
I was going to do a BJ because I started doing the POVs in "Down the Hatch"
SD: What inspired you...other than the desire to get with lots of women?
MJ: Rodney. I used to like Rodney movies – he never did full POVs, but he did segments. And I was like, "That's what it's supposed to be." Also, when I started doing this I had a strange feeling that a lot of the shooters were...fruity. Because I call it the "firing end" - if you are a heterosexual shooter, you should be pointing down the barrel not at the firing end. If you can see the penis hole during the cum shot, you're on the wrong end. You're on the receiving end. I make my movies for heterosexual whack-offs. You hear about this couple's crap and all that...in my time, if I got a girl, I don't need a fuckin' movie. I need a movie when I don't got nothing else to do. So anyway - camera angles to me were all fucked up. And POV is a camera angle that I always enjoyed. After a certain amount of time there was nobody doing it and I kept saying, "Look...what are we going to do here. These girls are being presented the same way across the business. There is no
POV being shot except for Rodney and (inaudible -22:10) And these owners at Diabolic could see right through me, thinking I just want to bang the chicks. (laughs)
I feel like I got started at a very fortunate time, because in my eyes, it was stagnant. People were shooting with – no disrespect – but when I went to Anabolic it was a two camera zoom. One guy was tight and one guy was wide, and you were sitting a distance from the action. I though: fuck this, let’s take people along for the ride, you know. So I got a camera and shot what I wanted to see. POV was one of the things. It happens to feel a lot better than shooting other scenes, too. There’s a little more motivation and inspiration behind it.
You gotta hold the camera up here (demonstrates) I do all kinds of things, like go from a low and flip it over my head and flip the screen while I'm going and take one hand off. It's like a Ouija board. Sometimes when I see a scene afterwards I don't even know how I did it.
TvS: Talent dictates where you go with the camera. You have to read off of what they are doing. The better the scene is the less you gotta move. There are times when it's so firing that you're moving and you don't even know it. You have to get in touch with what they are doing in front of you to make it pop. Anyone can stand there and get a medium shot. That was old days: two cameras like Mike said. If you want to really, really see what is happening, you got to move with your dance partner. You gotta let them go and get involved but not too much.
SD: The Zen oneness thing of the girl, your cock, your body, the camera...it's metaphysics.
MJ: It's a one-man-band operation. But for me I'm not much of an exhibitionist. There are a lot of guys who can do insane scenes. But if you give them a POV they can't fuckin' do it. It's just what happened to work for me. I don't know why, it just did. I turn on the camera and - boom - I can do this so I just run with it.
Plus, like I said, it was a niche that wasn't being filled. I always looked for weakness when I started. I wanted to find the thing that nobody else was doing. Like swallowing movies...nobody was doing swallowing movies when I started. At that time it was facials and bubble-blowing. I was like"OK, that's cool, but I like watching girls swallow. I was fortunate when I was getting started that there was a lot of open opportunity.
SD: As a consumer I remember when the stores would always get the new Anabolic stuff and it seemed like you had this boom moment.
MJ: They also expanded. They were - for all practical purposes - two best friends and one of the owner's wife. It was a small operation. Porno really blew up
10-12 years ago. When I started it was Anabolic, Evil, Elegant. Elegant was new for Christ's sake. It was Patrick (Collins?) had just left Evil, Ed Powers and Randy West. Metro was always there...It wasn’t like today. Back then you could book a girl a couple days in advance back then, now it’s January and I book for March. It's changed a lot.
I think the saddest part is that nobody seems to have any real imagination. They just wait for something that works and then the rest of the industry starts to copy. Same is for mainstream or any type of entertainment, I guess.
SD: The thing with POV, its raison d'etre is: “I’m a webmaster, bitch, suck my cock.”
TvS: I just want to interject because - listen, I'm not a POV guy, I've done POVs here and there, but I think the reason that the POV explosion has happened is because they've realized that they are very cheap to do, and a lot of guys are shooting over a dude's body, so it's not even a true POV. That's the new genre. That's the flavor of the year. It's exploded. Everyone is adding this to their monthly releases.
There are reasons to do it. They are selling. The race to the bottom is on. (laughs) as always. It would be nice to see POV movies where people were actually holding the camera themselves so they could see just how fucking hard it is to focus on staying with a chick. You can't hide in the POV. You're as naked as she is. It's hard not to cheese-ball, hold the wood, flip around in positions, hold the camera make it work, not move too much, etc., etc. When it works it’s a really good example of one-on-one hetero bang-out. It's really great. When it doesn't work, you just get dizzy, get a headache and fast-forward.
SD: I guess this is the basic question, but how did you get started with your background in Venice Beach.
MJ: The Anabolic guys came to Costa Rica where I was running around for years. I was pretty well known in the strip bars and the hooker places because my intention was to get into the porno business, I just had a few things to do before I got there.
When they [Anabolic guys] came down there to do the World Sex Tour, they started asking around at bars and everybody kept mentioning me.
SD: You were the Costa Rica facilitator.
MJ: I was known for that down there. So they did: they came and got me out of this tiny little hotel. One of my friends told me that the Anabolic guys were there and I thought that it was someone pulling my leg. I went out to the lobby and I saw Chris the owner who was a performer with Malibu back in the day. I said, "I've been waiting for you guys!" The other owner of Diabolic Greg - we all hit it off. Sean Michaels and Mark Davis flew in. I got them all girls, I translated and drove around with them. For helping out with them, they said to call them up if I ever needed a job. Well, a week later...
SD: Destiny came down and found you.
MJ: Yeah, in the middle of the jungle.
SD: Sounds mythic, you know, how religions get started.
MJ: I'm telling you, if that kind of opportunity knocks for a person like me comes your way, you better pay attention. ’re not going to let it get back.
SD: When you were over there you probably saw some gnarly things. What has changed since then?
MJ: Well - there are 2 types of people
1 pornographers who belong here, and 2) business men who need to get the fuck. Because all they are doing is devaluing what we do driving the price into a place where we won't be able to produce the kind of content that fans like to see. You've got these guys who have come in the last five or six years and they are rigid businessmen. They don't care about porno, they don't watch porno. They don't give two shits. They're just sniveling thieves with basically a "burn the house down" mentality.
It makes it so that everything is racing to the bottom. This [porno] is a legitimate form of entertainment like anything. Unfortunately, like I said, some businessmen came around and sucked us into a shit hole. And now it's all about climbing out. With Jules Jordan video, that's what's going on.
The only two people who have ever offered any kind of legitimacy to an independent producer like myself is Stagliano and Jules. And that's it. The rest of these clowns decided to sell it all out.
Edited by - skronker on Feb 18 2008
Edited by - skronker on Feb 18 2008
Edited by - skronker on Feb 18 2008