There may be more squinting these days on the streets of Hollywood. To mark its 18th birthday, MrSkin.com, the web’s top repository of mainstream screen nudity, erected a billboard July 30 at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue featuring screenshots from all 43,412 female nude scenes on its servers.
Related Stories
“We launched on Aug. 10, 1999 — we’re joking that we’re finally legal,” says Mr. Skin himself, CEO Jim McBride, a 54-year-old father of three from Chicago. The site, which sees 9 million uniques per month and costs $72 a year for full access, hit the big time when Judd Apatow heard McBride on The Howard Stern Show and wrote it into 2007’s Knocked Up — “the second-best movie product placement of all time, after E.T. and Reese’s Pieces,” gushes McBride.
MrSkin.com’s earliest available scene is Hedy Lamarr in 1933’s Ecstasy; the most recent, Alison Brie from Netflix’s Glow. Among movie stars, Susan Sarandon notches the most nude appearances at 15, while Angelina Jolie is a close second with 14. McBride claims that studios and PR agencies send him screeners with nude scenes bookmarked, though he won’t name them, and that stars are more flattered than creeped out by the attention. When Alexandra Daddario, whose True Detective lap-dance scene is among the most viewed, won the site’s “2017 Whack-It-Bracket,” she tweeted, “To all the men who’ve ever turned me down … now all you can do is look at photos and cry the salty tears of regret.”
Not immune to Hollywood’s gender-parity debate, McBride founded MrMan.com in 2014, featuring the goods on everyone from Harvey Keitel to Jake Gyllenhaal. But traffic has disappointed. “We were naive,” he admits. “We thought there would be a huge amount of women coming. But it’s mostly gay men.”
This story first appeared in the Aug. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
