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March 05, 2008

LUCAS PR: Michael Lucas featured in leading Israeli newspaper Maariv

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Michael Lucas featured in leading Israeli newspaper Maariv

New York, NY (March 5th, 2008) -- Lucas Entertainment President and CEO Michael Lucas is featured in the current issue of Maariv, Israel's leading mainstream newspaper. The four-page article, entitled "Patriot," features photos and an in-depth interview with Michael—translated into Hebrew—which was conducted during his trip to Israel last week.

"I was thrilled to be interviewed by Maariv," said Lucas. "I've been giving more and more political interviews as of late, which make me very happy and proud. As a porn star you have to work twice as hard in order to be taken seriously by mainstream press, so I take this article with great pride."

Below are JPEG scans of the article as well as the English translation.

You can visit Maariv online at http://www.nrg.co.il.

For more information about Michael Lucas, visit http://www.MichaelLucas.com.

**** The Patriot Promote Tourist Hospitality

Michael Lucas, king of New York’s gay porn movies, is a proud Zionist (the word ge’eh in Hebrew can either denote someone who is proud or someone who is “gay”), slightly right-wing, denounces the gay parade in Jerusalem, is appalled by Gal Ochovsky and detests Islam. He is now visiting the homeland to realize a dream: to produce a local gay porn film that will turn Israel into the international capital of the gays. Boys, come on down.

Michael Lucas has been waiting for over two years to realize his life’s dream. New York’s porn king, the man who received a 2007 award for his appearance in “The most successful orgy of the year” dreams of “promoting the Israeli tourism industry”. Lucas, a proud Jew and Zionist, is planning on doing it his way. He believes a well invested porn film aimed at the global gay community is exactly what this country needs.

Why?
“Whenever I visit Israel I hear the same nonsense. People ask me if I’m afraid of random suicide bombers and if I’m sane. So it’s time people got a different outlook on Israel and that’s exactly what I intend to do. I’ll show the global community that Israel is a country with plenty of amazing men and I have no doubt this will attract tourists. By the way, I’ve already made films in countries which later became community tourist destinations”.

Lucas means every word. Here is a man who heads one of the world’s largest adult film production companies. Lucas Entertainment, the company he owns, is ranked ninth in the world in gay porn films. In addition to being CEO, he directs most of the films and acts in a large part of them. Production of his films is estimated at a quarter of a million dollars per film (the cost of three to four local feature films) and these are distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

“As you can see, money is not something I am lacking”, he says, sprawled out on a couch in his suite on the first floor of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. “For me, the idea of producing a film in Israel does not stem from financial motives but from a genuine desire to portray a different kind of Israel”.

His most recent attempt at expressing solidarity and portraying a different Israel fell through. His last visit to Israel was in August 2006, during the war. At that time he invited soldiers to attend, free of charge, an erotic performance he staged in several clubs in Tel Aviv and Haifa, in order to raise national morale. Reactions, to put it mildly, weren’t exactly encouraging.

“It didn’t really surprise me because there will always be people who aren’t pleased with the way I choose to do things”, he says. “But I know Israel to be a country that welcomes the homosexual community with open arms”.

Are you also familiar with the Israel where a former minister by the name of Shlomo Ben Izri claims earthquakes are a punishment for homosexual relations?
“I did hear of him, but you get the same from various groups in the USA. In any case, he could very well be right. Maybe it really was a couple of gays having extremely rough intercourse”.

Between the Russian and Chechnian mafia
Lucas is an odd bird. Even in terms of the porn industry, where there are many odd individuals. He makes a point of voicing his firm opinions against drug and alcohol abuse in the semi-publicistic columns he publishes in several magazines (we’ll get back to them) and he is undoubtedly one of the only stars in the gay porn industry that managed to squeeze his way into the heart of mainstream America. His closest friends include Bette Midler and fashion designer Marc Jacobs, who even let him use one of his Manhattan shops to film a scene for one of his most recent films.

He has been attracting more and more attention this past year. Except for his participation in two documentary films (one for HBO), he granted interviews to countless leading US magazines and talk shows and became a regular in the gossip columns. “I think it’s happening mainly because our society is so driven by celebrity adoration that it’s become an obsession”, he says. “Take Paris Hilton for example. Here’s a girl who became famous simply because of her wonderful ability to be Paris Hilton. People hunger for their dose of celebrity, that’s all”.

Fame also came with the required dose of mannerisms. Lucas documents virtually everything he does. Whether it’s a visit to New York’s fashion week or a visit to the Wailing Wall, there’s always a video photographer with him. When personnel at the King David hotel tried to explain to him in a delicate manner that he and George Bush share the same suite and that even the honorable President didn’t complain, he dismissively said: “George Bush was raised on a farm, I want another room”. He got another room.

It’s rather hard to believe all this comes from a person who arrived in the USA a little over a decade ago as a penniless Russian immigrant who made money as a male escort. He doesn’t really like to talk about that time in his life even though he now holds Manhattan by the balls.

Lucas was born 36 years ago in Moscow as Andrei Treyvas (he says his family preferred he use his mother’s maiden name because it sounded less Jewish than his father’s name – Bergman). His mother was a literature teacher and his father an engineer. “I had a very happy childhood and grew up in a very liberal and intellectual family”, he says. “My grandmother taught music at the Moscow conservatory and my grandfather, like my father, was an engineer. It was a warm, pleasant home and I wanted for nothing. However, growing up a Jewish boy in Soviet Russia wasn’t easy. It began at school where everyone knew I was Jewish and gave me a hard time because of it. It later went on when I discovered my sexual orientation. Russia was, and perhaps still is, a homophobic, antisemitic country. So you can see that it wasn’t really a good place for me. Ironically, when I moved to the West, I instantly became “Russian” and as long as I lived in Russia I was never a “Russian”, I was always a “Jew”. I think that’s one of the reasons I admire Israel so much, because no matter where you are and what your situation is, you always know you can come to Israel and they will accept you for what you are”.

Like every good Jewish mother, Lucas’ mother dreamt of her son becoming a lawyer and the boy indeed graduated with a degree in Law in Moscow. During his studies, he opened a small travel agency and did very well. That is until the Russian mafia nearly took over his business. “Naturally once people saw there’s money to be had they wanted to cash in on it. It began with Russian mafiosos who asked me for protection and I quickly found myself dealing with Chechnian criminals asking for the same thing. Instead of making money I financed a bunch of criminals and their girlfriends and was forced to provide them vacations to England and Turkey. Ultimately I couldn’t take it any longer and closed the business”.

In 1995 he decided that he had had enough and boarded a plane. He landed in Germany with 200 deutsche marks in his pocket, lots of ambition and starting working as a male model. A few months later he participated in his first porn film. It was the only heterosexual film he took part in. He once said he really regretted having done that. “Not the fact that I acted in a blue movie but the fact that I acted in a German blue movie”.

Not just sex but a plot too
Lucas defines his entry into the porn world as a rational, intelligent career move. “From a very young age I had a huge passion to enter the entertainment world but I knew the odds”, he explains. “I was a poor immigrant with broken English, surrounded by tons of people who were much more handsome and much more talented than me. So I made a very rational choice and entered a world where I knew I had better odds of succeeding. I knew that competition in the porn world wasn’t too tough and I knew I could stand out and make something of myself. Ultimately, all the exposure I enjoy today, this lifestyle, is thanks to porn and I’m not ashamed of it, on the contrary”.

When did you pick up the phone to your mother and tell her: I know you wanted me to be a successful lawyer but I ended up in the porn industry?
“I never made that phone call. It has to do with the fact that my family is very intellectual and liberal and therefore respected my decisions. I never had to “break the news”. They understood from our phone calls what direction I had taken. Many people can’t understand this, especially when we’re talking about a Jewish family from Russia, but I think that because they are Jews they are much more open. Also, as a family of intellectuals in Soviet Russia, my grandmother had many homosexual friends from the conservatory, some of whom paid the price and were arrested for their sexual orientation. That’s why it wasn’t so unusual for my family”.

But there is a difference between telling them you’re coming out of the closet to telling them you work as a male escort and star in porn films.
“I didn’t call them up and say Hey Ma, I’m a porn star! They simply understood that on their own. I told my mother my dream was to make it in Hollywood and though it would have been wonderful, unfortunately it was pretty remote. And she understood. You know how many people I met along the way who dreamt of Hollywood? Hundreds. People who worked in Los Angeles in restaurants and bars and dreamt of the day they’d get their big break, but it never happened. Then they came to me and asked for a job. So I merely sidestepped the process”.

One of the wisest moves he made shortly after arriving in the States was to set up his production company in New York and not in LA –home of the porn industry. With minimum competition he managed to become a monopoly in a short period of time. “I think what set me apart from other companies was that my films looked different”, he says. “I raised the bar and turned the product into something very glamorous. It’s not only sex, it’s a good story and an interesting plot. It may sound somewhat pathetic but when thousands of blue movies are produced every year, all I had to do was add a little plot and glamor and change the picture. I made a product that people could take home without feeling guilty or ashamed. It looks good on the outside and good on the inside”.

This is an industry that is constantly criticized. Can you understand why?
“I don’t have to take a critical stand on it, why should I? To tell you the truth, I don’t watch porn movies except the ones I was in, and it’s not easy watching yourself in a film like that because you’re very critical”.

Do you watch them so that you can improve?
“That’s one reason. It’s not that I watched porn for the porn, because it doesn’t really interest me. I watched my scenes in order to do it better the next time. Today, however, I don’t have to do it anymore”.

Even though you can afford to retire you still insist on being in your movies. Why is that?
“Mainly because I can (laughs). Why shouldn’t I be in them if I have so many fans? My motto is supply and demand. Once there’s no more demand, I’ll stop. It’s not that I enjoy it, it has nothing to do with enjoyment. When you have sex on camera you’re doing it for the cameras. Not for yourself, not for whoever is doing it with you, but for the camera. You’re mind is always on the angles, the lighting and so forth. It’s a job like any other”.

It seems the American porn industry isn’t too happy with his over exposure. Recently he has been forced to deal with two law suits: One filed by a competitor who claims he is fraudulently taking over the market and the other filed by a production company that owns the rights to the films of Italian director Federico Fellini. The company is suing him for copyright violation after he distributed his porn version of one of Fellini’s canonical works of art “La Dolce Vita”, in 2007.

His colleagues don’t really know what to make of him. At the last Gayvn awards (an event dedicated in its entirety to gay porn films) he got a barrage of ice cubes thrown at him by his peers when he went on stage to receive the award for best film of the year. “This industry is not really made up of the most intelligent people I have met. After all, this isn’t the Oscars”, he says with a smile. “So when I got on stage for the 14th time that night and took home the award for best film, there were some discontented drunks who threw the ice from their empty alcohol glasses on me. My motto is as long as it makes media noise, it merely promotes my interests”.

The Angelina Jolie precedent
If there is something Lucas specializes in it’s creating noise. Lots of noise. Last year he crowned himself unofficial spokesman of the Israeli policy and he’s infusing it every opportunity he gets. The columns he writes in gay-lesbian magazines and in his blog breed quite a few enemies. He gets a lot of hate mail every week and several Moslem organizations have waged all out war on him. Last week he came to lecture at Stanford university and was greeted by a group of Moslem students who demonstrated against him. In a rare act, Wikipedia editors have recently locked his entry to editing because of the unflattering compliments his adversaries added from time to time (from writing that he is a racist to indicating the size of his genitalia).

“The American liberal left is certain I belong to the wrong camp because of my opinions”, he says. “I’m supposed to alter my thoughts to match the left in the US and Europe, the one that butts heads with Israel whenever it can, and when that doesn’t happen, people don’t understand why”.

A small turn of the Jewish-Arab switch is all it takes for Lucas to launch a monologue in which he attacks Islam with an impressive variety of arguments and ends by glorifying Israel. When asked if a porn star isn’t supposed to deal with more optimistic matters, he cries out: “Why is it a strange combination?! Doesn’t Angelina Jolie speak out about hunger in Africa? As long as you have a large following of fans, and with all modesty I have quite a few, and you have lots of media attention, why not take advantage of it? Sure I can talk about how I put it in and take it out and how much fun it is and then all my porn fans will be happy. But I prefer to talk about other things. I know that at the end of the day the things I say aren’t new, I’m not inventing the wheel and the things I say are quite mundane, but for most of the American population I am inventing the wheel. These are matters they never considered nor read about, because they aren’t really interested. They don’t understand that Islam’s lack of tolerance for homosexuals and the rest of the world threatens us all”.

The Rabbinical establishment in Israel doesn’t really like your community either. I assume you know that two years ago a marcher in the gay pride parade in Jerusalem was stabbed.
“How can you compare a stabbing by a person who obviously isn’t sane to the way Islam has been terrorizing homosexuals for decades? You think someone would ever try to organize a parade in a Moslem country or even come out of the closet? The Israeli left doesn’t understand that whenever the parade in Jerusalem hits the headlines, it doesn’t end in Israel. The world doesn’t draw the simple facts from it – that Israel is a liberal country that accepts homosexuality – rather that a gay marcher was stabbed by a Hassidic Jew. That’s the story that will open the newscasts in the States and that’s the story that I get thrown in my face everywhere I lecture. So to what extent does it help the gay community in Israel and Israel as a whole? Very little”.

So I gather you are against having the gay parade in Jerusalem?
“In my opinion, sending drag queens to Jerusalem is like waving a red cape in front of a raging bull. Tel Aviv is 45 minutes from Jerusalem and the parade is received with open arms there. To me it’s just stupid. The world is constantly waiting for Israel to screw up, that’s a fact, and in recent years everytime the parade in Jerusalem makes headlines, Israel is portrayed as an obtuse society that doesn’t enable homosexuals to parade down its streets.

“I don’t know, it seems quite a few people have a vested interest in depicting Israel in a distorted fashion. Like Gal Ochovsky for example and his film “The Bubble”. It’s merely anti-Israel propoganda by an Israeli film maker and you go so far as to give him awards and celebrate the film instead of punching him in the face and saying ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ I watched the film with a friend, a CNN reporter, and the audience was in tears, no less. When we left he said he thinks we can learn a lot from the movie. I asked him what he learned and he told me the unavoidable conclusion is that one should never date Arabs. That’s how I see it too”.

Did you tell Ochovsky what you think?
“I met him once during one of my visits here. He asked me what I thought about his movie and I said it was ‘very interesting’. I think that made him a bit mad because he’s used to being treated like Fellini”. (Gal Ochovsky responded: “I remember an encounter with Michael Lucas at Shirazi’s party in Tel Aviv. As far as I recall, he wasn’t dressed and was just about to get on stage. He stood before me naked and we shook hands. I think it’s best he focus on porn. At least in that respect he has some extremely outstanding advantages”).

Towards the end of the month Lucas will leave politics behind and begin seeking local stars for an Israeli film he is working on. “The biggest problem with this project that I have been working on for a long time is that I cannot find actors”, he confesses. “It’s not for lack of amazing men in Israel, but because this country is so small that people don’t feel comfortable taking part in this kind of movie”.

Have you already considered a name for the movie?
“I only start shooting in May so I have time”.

How about “Zionism”? (the word Zion in hebrew can either denote Zionism or sexual intercourse)
“Catchy name but people won’t get it”.

(A NOTE FROM MICHAEL LUCAS: I would like to make a remark about Gal Ochovsky, the director of "The Bubble." I do consider myself a liberal in the real sense of the term, not in the way that has been degraded by the likes of Rosie O'Donnell and Michael Moore. In Israel, I ran into the same so-called left wing extremists. As you can see in the article, the sarcastic response of the director to me is, in a simple translation, that I should shut up and talk about porn and porn only, that I have no right to talk about anything else. Using this logic, the cook can only judge the food and the doctor can only judge the illnesses. This is precisely where my problem with the left is: The formula that the left uses today is that if you don't agree with their point of view, you are a moron and should be silenced, humiliated, and loathed. I call it intellectual terrorism. It's similar to the institution of Islam in that both the left and Islam don't accept any other point of view. The difference is that Islam tortures you physically while the left tortures you intellectually. Gal Ochovsky is a great example of that.)

Posted by Michael at March 5, 2008 02:01 PM

Comments

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