Sex Sells: ‘Middle Men’ Feature

by Khassaundra Delgado

Interview by Katie Matthews

Images © Middle Pictures, INC.

Sex sells – there’s no question about it. This theme resonates throughout director George Gallo’s latest film, Middle Men. The movie paints a portrait of the Wild West of the digital age – an era in the mid 90’s and early 2000’s where there were no rules and no limit to how much profit could be made. The new film from Paramount Pictures is based on the experiences of producer Christopher Mallick, who found himself ensnared in the burgeoning world of Internet commerce.

The film follows Jack Harris (Luke Wilson), a businessman from Texas with a penchant for fixing other people’s problems, as he helps a friend with a Los Angeles -based business and winds up in the middle of an Internet pornography billing company discreetly named 24-7 Billing. He and his partners, Wayne Beering (Giovanni Ribisi) and Buck Dolby (Gabriel Macht) become millionaires in a matter of mere months, and find themselves in over their heads. Harris soon learns that in the world of Internet pornography, it’s best not to mix business with pleasure.

The idea for Middle Men began as Mallick’s idea for an HBO television series. He hired writer Andy Weiss (Punk’d) to write the pilot, and once director George Gallo got word, he and Weiss rewrote the television series into a feature film. Gallo, a bold director who moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1982 with only $800 in his pocket, was clearly the right man for the job. “We just became buddies,” Gallo says of himself and Mallick. “I wasn’t interested in doing a movie about porn, per se. I was more interested in the Wild West aspect […] the movie really is about a guy trying to find his way home. That’s really all it is about. It’s a guy who made a deal with the devil in some way and tries to unravel it in a way. That’s like a Greek tragedy; that’s a classic, old story that goes back four, five thousand years. Those are the stories I love, and they’re still relatable today. This is just a new way to tell that story.”

This isn’t a movie about porn; rather, it’s a movie about greed, ambition, lust and pleasure – and the men who experience all of these things as they rise to power. As James Caan, who plays corrupt lawyer Jerry Haggerty says, “This movie is about a bunch of bad people and I play the worst […] It’s a morality tale in a very immoral way.” Giovanni Ribisi echoes Caan’s sentiments: “Ultimately, it’s about so much more [than porn]. It’s about America and the American Dream and how these guys go in and achieve that.”

Middle Men is a classic tale of greed and ambition, with Jack Harris in way over his head. “I just felt like, okay, this is a regular guy like me, and he just got into this crazy business, where he just got drawn into it incrementally,” Luke Wilson says of his character. The movie itself is fast-paced, a whirlwind of activity and a meteoric rise to tremendous wealth, with Jack Harris as the calm in the storm. In the end, the viewer walks away remembering that in regards to ambition and greed, any business – pornography or otherwise – can be a dirty business.

Middle Men is scheduled to hit theaters August 6, 2010. For more information, visit http://www.middlemenmovie.com.

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