Daniel Price - Slick

And I’ll tell you something else for free: the whole nude experience was more rewarding for the women than it was for the men. Trust me. I was there. It wasn’t that sexy. And I’m saying this as a securely heterosexual man who, until that night, hadn’t been laid in three years. There was just too much skin. It desensitized me pretty fast.

I wasn’t alone. It took five minutes for the boyfriends’ raucous cheering to die down to obligatory applause. Once the hotel staff arrived, the guys were completely faking it. By then the whole thing was about as sexy as macrame.

“It’ll be better once we start obscuring the nipples and stuff,” David told me while snapping pictures. “Strange, isn’t it? Maxim ’s selling like hotcakes while Penthouse keeps losing half its subscribers. Gee, you think maybe men are starting to use their imaginations again?”

I smiled. “That’s crazy talk.”

“I’m serious. Look around. It doesn’t get any more naked than this. Where the hell else can we possibly go from here but back?”

Where indeed? If there’s one thing I learned from Jurassic Park , it’s that life finds a way. But David did convince me of one thing: he wouldn’t be around at Maxim much longer. Midlife crises aside, burnout was extremely common in the magazine trade. I mean how many times can you write the same “Please Your Man in Bed” piece for Cosmo before developing a facial tic?

Meanwhile, the Orono women were off on their own journey. At first they struggled to hide. The most exposed girls fought their way deeper into the crowd, causing the new outer layer to fight their way in. From above it must have looked like a kaleidoscope. Or Busby Berkeley’s dry dream. I’m not sure what psychological force took over, but it spread like current. In eerie synchronization, they simply stopped hiding and started cheering.

Makes sense, I suppose. The weather was gorgeous. They were out in large numbers. And they were defiantly breaking convention, like the Torches of Liberty brigade. By the time the men stopped hooting and hollering, the women euphorically took over. Some of the guys even asked me if they could join in on the nude thing and, you know, help the cause. Uh-uh. I was all for equal rights, really, but if we made this thing coed it would seem more like an orgy than a social protest. People would smell the marketing.

By 7:30, the next wave of staff arrived on the scene. Then the next. And the next. Within the hour, the courtyard was overflowing with spectators. As I’d hoped, the employees showed no ill will toward the protesters. It was kind of hard to take this seriously when being confronted with signs like fairmont unfair to monk seals! hey fairmont! ‘aloha’ also means goodbye! and my personal favorite: don’t you know you’re gonna shock the monk seal?

At 9:15, a DC-10 touched down on the airstrip. The press had finally arrived. The demonstrators were quite surprised to learn that the fourth estate, in this case, was simply a petite reporter and a three-man production crew. The reporter, Miranda Cameron-Donnell, worked for the Associated Press. The production crew worked for me.

“That’s it?” yelled one of the boyfriends. “You said the media would be all over this.”

And now they were. Yesterday, while most of the students were booting into the Pacific, I called the producers at each of Hawaii’s four major TV news markets. Since the Fairmont Keoki was a four-hour flight from Honolulu, I figured I’d give them ample lead time, just as a courtesy.

Naturally, they all went nuts for my premise. “Wow! Really? Cool!”

“Way cool,” I replied. “Swing on by.”

As I expected, they sighed and stalled: “Yeah, well, I don’t know. Keoki Atoll’s kind of far, dude. Tell you what, just send the VNR and the B-roll, and we’ll definitely use it. Just make sure to send it early enough so we can tease it.”

Ninety-nine percent of the world couldn’t translate that request for the life of them. That makes the other one percent of us very happy.

As you know, the news has changed dramatically over the last few decades. The media outlets have merged and merged and merged into what are (as of now) six multinational überconglomerates that control virtually everything you see and hear. This has led to an unprecedented streamlining of the news industry. It’s still going on. Just one month before, the newly consummated AOL Time Warner cut four hundred jobs at CNN. Why? The quick and easy answer would be profitability, but it’s also because of people like me. Publicists and journalists used to be flip sides of the same coin. Now we’re sharing space on a one-sided nickel. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s made both our jobs a hell of a lot easier. With the exception of AP and Maxim , I’m all the media I need for this event.

The video news release (VNR) is the dirty little secret that all flacks and hacks share. It’s do-it-yourself coverage. Using my own crew, my own script, even my own voice, I serve as the on-the-scene (but never seen) reporter. When all is said and done, I’ve got a professional-looking two-minute news piece, the kind you see every night at eleven. From there we use a portable uplink to shoot the whole thing into space. The final step is faxing notice to all the newsrooms. Hi. I’ve got a sweet piece on a mob of angry naked chicks. Interested? Here are the satellite coordinates. Go nuts.

For the budget-conscious news director, this is manna from heaven. It takes just minutes for Graphics to add their custom network overlays and Sound to dub a local reporter’s voice over mine. Presto. The station runs the piece as their own. There’s no legal requirement to cite the source, and that’s just the way we like it. The producers often mix it up a little to cover their tracks. That’s what the B-roll is for. It’s a no-frills collection of relevant interviews and visual clips, a media LEGO set they can put together any way they want. It’s a great system. On a slow news day, a thirty-minute show can squeeze in a good four to five minutes of VNRs, as compared to five or six minutes of real news. It’s pretty easy to tell the two apart. That fire in Century City? News. That new laser technique to remove wrinkles? VNR. If it promotes a product or company, it’s probably a VNR. If the reporter never appears in any of the on-scene footage, that’s because it’s not his story. It came from outer space.

I was glad the cavalry finally arrived. Keoki Atoll was six hours be hind the East Coast. I wanted to get this out by 11 a.m. so the eastern affiliates could tease the story all through prime time.

The video crew was from an L.A. production house called Metropia. Its three principals — Denny, Gray, and Vivek — were your standard ponytailed AV geeks. But they were masters of their craft. I flew them out here at great expense because I didn’t want to take a chance with an untested local outfit. If the final piece looked like crap, the stations wouldn’t run it.

I wished I had filmed their faces as soon as they broke through the outer shell of the brouhaha and got a look at the chewy, creamy center. Even Vivek, the gay one of the bunch, was stunned by the unprecedented display of natural breasts.

The last one into the fray was the AP’s own Miranda Cameron-Donnell. Established in 1848, the Associated Press was a nonprofit collective owned by more than fifteen hundred newspapers. In effect, they did what I did: ship their stories off to others. Unlike me, they got credit for their work. Also unlike me, their reach extended to over one billion people. That was why I called Miranda. Once she put her piece on the wire, it would get picked up by newspaper, radio, and Web outlets all over the world. There was quite a lot of power packed into that small frame.