A Life Through Film #048: Private Parts
Howard Stern takes control of his narrative to the delight of his adoring fans and to the bored confusion of everyone else
Release Date: 3/7/1997
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
It’s tough to believe now in an era of infinite content at our fingertips, but we used to have to work for our slop. Not me personally, but, you know, people in general.
The ideal day for some involves no silence. As soon as they wake up, they doomscroll until they’re simultaneously emotionally numbed and highly anxious enough to face the day. From there, it’s Airpods in so that any combination of music, podcasts, audiobooks, YouTube videos, or TikToks can fill their ears until they fall back into bed later that night. Even when someone else comes up and tries to talk to them, most people keep those earpods in, desperate for the conversation to end so they can fill their mind with noise, noise, glorious noise.
And the most magical part is that we’ll never run out. Every hour of every day, there is new content for us to half pay attention to while we scroll through our social media feeds or draft emails. At Happy Hour you can tell your friends about the stuff you kind of learned today from a semi-remembered true crime podcast instead of engaging with the world immediately around you. See, it’s good for your brain to constantly be exposed to new sounds, ideas, and visuals! It’s educational!
This isn’t me being judgmental by the way; a second monitor YouTube video is almost always frying my brain while I try to do actually engaging or important work. I may not be able to focus my attention on a blank page anymore, but I can tell you a lot about various American wrestlers who worked in All Japan Pro Wrestling in the ‘80s and ‘90s.1
Back in the day, tuning out the world and killing brain cells using technology used to be way more difficult. The devices we used for it were far less portable than they are now. You had to find the time to spare on the couch in front of the TV or next to your radio rather than just have immediate access to an incredibly strong computer in your pocket ready to show you the world’s worst, most interesting things.
Our palliative lights and sounds weren’t just harder to access, there were a lot less of them too. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’ve just discovered that you love Hall & Oates. Sure, go to Tower Records and buy a couple of their CDs. Get one or two more after that. Talk to a friend-of-friend music snob to see if there are any notable side projects or related artists you should check out. Eventually, though, you’d eventually hit a wall. There’d be no more CDs in stock near you, none of the people you know could help you learn more, and only a few acts are putting out the smooth adult sophistipop that you crave anyway.
Nowadays, if I punch Hall & Oates into Spotify, I’ll get multiple unending playlists and custom stations to help me explore them, their influences, and followers. I could dedicate my whole week to Hall & Oates without even having to do much work at all.2
Just because it was hard to kill your mind with constant media doesn’t mean that people didn’t crave it back in the day. What was primetime TV except a chance to turn to NBC at 8 so you could lay back and take it all in for a couple hours after dinner? Still, the start and stop of individual pieces of content could make it hard to get as lost as you’d like in that media. What do you mean there were no nine and a half hour long videos analyzing a single video game to numb my mind to in 1997? Set it and forget it, that’s what I say. Let me put something on and have it go forever.
Thankfully, there was at least one solution to this problem before the rise of the infinite internet: talk radio. Morning traffic boring you to tears? Lazy day on the porch filled with nothing but the twittering of birds? Tune that radio to KWAN 107.3 for hours of banter and antics, occasionally interspersed with the greatest rock hits of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and today. Maybe there will be a giveaway, maybe there will be laughs. At least there will be something, and it’ll be there until lunch.
People have always and will always love to yap. Today, we’re looking at one of the biggest yappers in morning radio history, and how at the peak of his popularity he was able to enter the visual, relatively short form medium of film to shocking success and attention.
I’ve listened to, cumulatively, less than 10 minutes of Howard Stern’s radio show in my life. In the context of the tens of thousands of hours of his various programs that have gone out over the airwaves over the years, I may as well have never heard of him. I like to think I get his shtick, but at the end of the day I’m hardly an expert.
Honestly, it’s a bit unfair for me to imply that people only listen to shows like Stern’s for background noise. The shock jock has built a massive, multi-generational fan base through decades of stunts, controversy, and celebrity interviews. He’s also earned a fair number of haters as well, but no matter which side of the line you fall on Howard Stern, you have to admit he’s engaging.
In 1997, Stern was broadcasting out of New York City every weekday morning for four or five hours starting at 6 AM before being syndicated across the country in enough major markets to earn him a listenership of around 20 million people. Not unlike recent column subjects Beavis and Butt-Head, Stern was the pure male id of his medium. His fascinations for years were juvenile and primal: beautiful naked women, and people who looked or talked funny, in that order. Thanks for tuning in.
Stern refused to ever self-censor, often throwing out heinous comments and running insensitive extended bits all in an effort to get attention and draw ratings. Masturbation, qualms with his own penis size, and homophobic stereotypes were frequent topics, but nothing was ever off limits.
In 1982, a plane taking off from DCA crashed into the 14th Street Bridge between Arlington and DC. 78 people died. The next day, Stern called the airline during his show and asked how much a one way ticket from National Airport to 14th Street would cost him. A few years later, he and his wife Allison suffered a miscarriage. Stern was on his show days later proving that not even his own personal tragedies were off limits.
“We’ve got him in formaldehyde,” he joked.
Stations that carried Stern’s syndicated show were subject to millions of dollars worth of FCC fines over the years, but the ad revenue more than made up for it. At his most popular point on terrestrial radio, companies were paying $3,000 a minute to advertise on the Howard Stern Show, and why wouldn’t they? Who was listening more to a guy tell crass, offensive jokes in between descriptions of lascivious lesbian encounters than the coveted consumer demographic of men aged 18-35? So long as those millions of listeners heard an ad for their insurance plan or whatever, these companies eventually grew indifferent to the show’s content.
The vociferousness of Stern’s fans meant that even by 1992, he was at the center of a growing multimedia empire. In addition to his regular radio program and irregular pay-per-view specials, the disc jockey had been the star of his own TV show on New York’s WWOR superstation which was then syndicated to other major markets around the US. In case you thought a transition to the visual would soften Stern’s product, The Howard Stern Show featured such luminous segments as “Hooker Hollywood Squares” and “A Tribute to Breasts.”
Despite strong ratings, WWOR cancelled Stern’s TV show in ‘92 because studio and host couldn’t come to an agreement on money after two seasons. Shortly afterwards, Stern made his first ever appearance on The Tonight Show. As he sat across from Jay Leno, the DJ brashly insulted Arsenio Hall, Ed McMahon, and WWOR for not respecting him enough to pay for more of the show.
But who needs TV when you can be in the movies? Stern was proud to announce to the world that he had signed a movie deal with New Line Cinema. His first feature film, he promised, would be a “disgusting” comedy that would make hundreds of millions of dollars atop the box office when it released the following summer. As Stern hyped up this movie that didn’t have a script, creative team, or story, Leno quite reasonably asked him what the project was called.
Stern, the great rambler, the master bullshitter, the filler of dead air, took only a breath to search the top of his mind for the answer.
“Fartman.”
Audience in uproar, applause break, we’ll be right back.
Granted, this gassy outburst wasn’t a total non sequitur. Fartman, the noble superhero who fights crime with the power of his own flatulence, had been a Stern character dating back at least a decade. His Fartman trademark (conveniently filed a couple months after this Leno interview) shows that Stern had been acting out ludicrous skits with the persona since ‘81.
If I’m being totally honest, “Fartman” isn’t a terrible idea for a stupid comedy given the era. The cinematic superhero craze was still young in 1992, buoyed mostly by Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns. The language and tropes of the genre were established thanks to the Christopher Reeve Superman movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s, all ready to be lambasted in spoof form. At the same time, the market wasn’t so oversaturated with dudes and dudettes in capes that there was even a hint of genre fatigue. If there was a time to do a Fartman movie, I guess 1993 was as good a time as any.
New Line Cinema agreed, despite Stern basically forcing them into the concept with his unintentional pitch on live TV. Producer David Permut got to work commissioning scripts and searching for the cast and crew of the planned Fartman movie, starring Stern himself as the titular (tootular?) hero. However, this project and the DJ’s involvement with New Line eventually collapsed in a dispute over merchandising. The studio wanted to own the licensing rights to the Fartman character, and in essence to Howard himself. Stern, not wanting to compromise on his anti-merch values, walked away from the deal.
The host had hyped up this movie and deal with New Line to his adoring fans for months at this point. To have nothing to show for it after all that time made Stern feel like a loser and a liar. In a funk, he isolated himself for months, eventually emerging in late 1993 with his first book, Private Parts.
The memoir was an attempt to reconnect himself to his audience by giving them his professional and personal backstory, warts and all. Rather than smoothing over the rough patches in his life, Stern used the same strategy that had made him successful on drivetime radio and bared it all. Low self-esteem as a result of his upbringing, years of professional struggle, all the embarrassing details of his own sexual history, and more. Private Parts was more confessional than auto-biography, and it ended up being Simon & Schuster’s fastest selling hardcover of all time to that point.
Soon after, producers from Rysher Entertainment approached Stern to see if he would be interested in adapting Private Parts into a feature film, with its author reprising his role as himself. Despite the clear acting challenge, Stern, who had never been in a movie before, agreed to the project.
But that was hardly that. The shock jock ended up turning down so many prospective scripts for the Private Parts adaptation over the following months that he nearly walked away from the project altogether. At one point, the studio threatened to replace him with Jeff Goldblum, a move that Stern said would have caused the movie to tank but that I personally would have loved to see. Imagine the droll, slightly kooky delivery from Goldblum as he runs a bit about saying the N-Word.
In a Rolling Stone cover story from early ‘97, Stern says that he had rejected movie offers for years before the failed New Line deal because he didn’t want to star in your average crappy comedy. The man’s brand was juvenile and offensive, but it was still a brand he wanted to protect. Ironically, Stern had a personal friend who had inspired countless crappy comedies that was willing to come onboard to salvage the Private Parts project.
Ivan Reitman, director of Ghostbusters [4.5/5], Stripes [3.5/5], Twins, and many more, was recently in this column as one of the main producers on Space Jam. His comedic direction had guided the humor tastes of the 1980s, as well as the careers of guys like Bill Murray and Arnold Schwarzenegger (in his post action era). His movies weren’t often well-reviewed, but their box office receipts spoke for themselves, and a few (like Ghostbusters) have lived on as comedy classics. On top of that, Reitman was connected out the wazoo, which led to both Danny Devito’s disappointing turn in Space Jam and the salvation of Stern’s Private Parts.
Reitman knew that there was a solid comedy to be mined from the shock jock’s book, and took over as lead producer to pull together a team he could trust to make it. Neither screenwriter Len Blum (who had worked with Reitman on Meatballs and Stripes) nor director Betty Thomas liked Stern all that much as a personality when they were asked to help bring his Private Parts to the big screen. But they both have similar stories of being won over by him.
Despite his brash, loud, irritating persona on the air, the real Howard Stern shook like a leaf from nervousness when he met the writer and director. Thomas, in particular, was quite taken by him; she mentioned in a 2020 interview that she went from hating Stern to developing a serious crush on him, one that persisted for decades after. Blum, a comedy writer who had worked with some of the funniest people of the prior two decades, realized after hanging out with Stern and his radio crew that he hadn’t laughed so hard in years. Both he and Thomas came aboard the Private Parts team.
After months of shooting around Stern’s radio duties, the promise that he had made all those years before on Leno had finally come to some fruition. The final product was released in early 1997 amid the Star Wars Special Edition releases. For a single week, Howard Stern was quantifiably more popular than Luke Skywalker.
Private Parts is a strange movie in concept. It assumes that the person watching it is already one of Howard Stern’s many fans, since it’s filled with references and characters that seemingly require no introduction. Yet it’s also an origin story, a tracing of Stern’s life from an uneasy childhood to a happily ever after as a successful family man and radio host. People unfamiliar with the world of Stern and his show get a crash course on his past and style, even as the star spends the movie saying that most people who’ve never listened to him don’t like him on principal.
I think Private Parts works best if you know either zero things about its subject or a hundred million things. As someone who only has a passing understanding of Howard Stern, I found it decently funny, but also disingenuous in a cowardly way.
Stern’s film producers, his director, and anyone else whose financial well-being is connected to his success pitch the DJ as a bold truth teller. He says the things that regular Americans who listen in on their drives to work are afraid to say. He refuses to let a whiff of idol worship enter his studio when interviewing celebrities. He takes them to task on subjects that no one else is willing to bring up. He’s a rare honest voice who speaks truth to power over the airwaves.
It’s a noble description of Stern, one that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny whether you look at his real life or Private Parts. The movie paints its protagonist as someone who was repeatedly professionally punished for his crass sense of humor and shocking on-air stunts. The powers that be couldn’t handle Howard having sex with a female listener through her radio, or his plan to give away a free toilet to the listener who called in with the loudest bowel movement. He was just too forward thinking!
Except the Stern of Private Parts rarely faces actual consequences for his actions. At the beginning of his career, he’s meek on the mic and ineffective at drawing an audience. Later on, he’s a sophomoric boor with fame and a fanbase in the tens of millions. Despite countless threats of termination from buttoned up superiors, no version of Stern in Private Parts never once loses his job because of his behavior. Every job he leaves is by his own volition, and almost always because he’s ready to take the next step up the radio ladder.
Not only does this undercut the storytelling of the movie, it’s not even accurate to Stern’s real life. Private Parts shows Stern as the king of DC radio before deciding to take a job at WNBC in his native New York. His work at these stations propelled him to notoriety, and in reality he was fired from both of them.
Not including these real threats to his livelihood nor much mention of the millions of dollars of FCC fines accrued by the show over the years undercuts the movie’s own idea of Stern’s importance. He’s being annoying and crass on air, but he never loses his job or anything, so why is he being framed as God’s bravest Free Speech soldier?
The image of Stern as a pariah of mainstream radio is of utmost importance to his fame. He constantly refers to himself as an outsider, and much of his early career is defined by a heavy chip on his shoulder against those who push back against his style. If you only ever watched Private Parts, you’d wonder why someone with so many opportunities has such a persecution complex.
Only watching the movie also gives you a limited perspective on Stern’s most controversial material. The script focuses on moments where the host pushed the boundaries on sex and vulgarity on the radio, such as a time he had a woman strip nude live in his studio as he described it over the air to listeners.
Sure, Stern is famous for stunts like that. He also mocked Selena the day after her 1995 murder by saying that “Spanish people” are “shallow” and have “the worst taste in music.” Was that him stripping back the mystique of celebrity culture? Or when he challenged former child star Dana Plato on her sobriety live on the air, causing her such emotional distress that she died of an overdose the next day?
Did Stern speak for the misfits and weirdos when he mocked and played with the cremated remains of one of his frequent guests, a mentally ill heroin addict he called “Space Lesbian”? Was he the voice of a generation when he called Lorena Bobbit a liar for claiming that she was raped by her husband John before she cut off his penis, before he then platformed John on his show and joked about the domestic abuse allegations against him?
Listen, I have no problem when comedians choose to be loud obnoxious assholes as a bit. I get it; I listen to The Yard podcast every week. But at least be honest with your audience about who you are. Being an asshole and propagating toxic ideas, whether earnestly or not, doesn’t make you the voice of a generation or someone who says the things everyone else wishes they could say. It just emboldens the shittiest among us into thinking you are. How do we keep falling for this?
I don’t love Private Parts, but I don’t hate it either. I actually find Stern’s ability to go back and inhabit younger versions of himself quite impressive, and there’s a brilliant performance from a young Paul Giamatti in the back half as a pernicious NBC radio programmer that far outstrips every other acting job in the movie. Unlike Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, the soundtrack is appropriately kick ass. Lots of rock and alternative that does a good job reflecting the movie evolving from the ‘70s all the way to the then-current ‘90s.
But in reality, so much of Private Parts just sits in regular mediocrity. Stern’s performance is impressive for a non-actor, especially compared to co-host Robin Quivers’s failure to ever come off like a real human being, but not all that spectacular overall. Thomas has a few impressively layered shots of big crowds, but her overall style is anonymous to say the least. I didn’t laugh much while watching Private Parts, but I didn’t groan at many whiffed bits either (bar one all-too-long joke of Stern doing an impression of a stereotypical Black woman during his first day on the job at a Detroit radio station).
If I had been a career Stern fan or hater, I’m sure the movie would have elicited a much stronger emotional reaction from me. But I listen to the radio for the music, man. At no point in my life have I ever enjoyed hearing the annoying mewlings of anonymous men and women (mostly men) coming over the airwaves into my car. Get back to the tunes, dude! I was trying to get the Led out!
My experience of watching Private Parts wasn’t just hindered by outside context, but by the passage of time as well. The emotional throughline of the movie is Stern’s relationship with his wife Allison, a beautiful, brilliant woman who was the only girl to ever give him the time of day. Even as he becomes increasingly lascivious on the air, he promises to her that it’s all an act, and the movie’s few dramatic moments center on the tension that arises between husband and wife as they argue about what can and cannot be talked about on the air.
Stern’s narration always hypes up Allison as the core of his heart, even as he mocks the mentally handicapped recipients of her incredible social work. The movie ends with a shot of the happy family arm in arm, but that tension of what part of their personal life is and isn’t allowed to be content is never actually resolved. Maybe it never was. Despite painting himself as the world’s biggest wife guy in Private Parts, Stern and his wife split up a few years after the movie came out. He later remarried a fashion model 18 years his junior. Celebrities gonna celebrity I guess.
Stern always painted himself as an outsider in the media landscape, but his edge drew a certain critical appreciation that his movie benefitted from. Private Parts has a surprisingly high 74% on Rotten Tomatoes. Edward Guthmann at the San Francisco Chronicle scored it 3 out 4 stars, even as he repeatedly brings up how inaccurate the movie is to its subject’s real life. Janet Maslin at The New York Times, meanwhile, saw Private Parts as the mainstream transformation of Stern from “scourge of the airwaves to a sweetheart of the screen.”
Rita Kempley at The Washington Post wasn’t impressed though. I particularly like how the sanded down struggles of Private Parts made her incredibly annoyed with Stern’s persecution complex:
Move over, Mahatma, there's a new martyr in town: St. Howard of Megahertz, and oy, has he suffered. As a kid, his dad called him a moron, then he couldn't get a date in college, and, the greatest indignity of all, he had to work in smaller markets before landing a gig at WNBC Radio in New York
During that 1992 Leno interview where he ultimately doomed his relationship with New Line Cinema, Howard Stern made a lot of bold predictions for his movie. Without a whisper of doubt, he called that it would make $200 million at the box office and be the number one movie in America.
One out of two ain’t bad. Private Parts had a lot of hype around it and a built in fanbase, not unlike the Star Wars re-releases that it interrupted at the top of the charts. It debuted with a box office take of $14 million, edging out its closest competitor, Disney’s Jungle 2 Jungle, by a couple million. But of course, the Jedi returned the following week, and Stern fell to the mighty Special Editions. From there, Private Parts didn’t make much noise. It left theaters three months after release, having grossed $41 million on a $25 million budget.
Stern has never returned to the big screen, instead choosing to grow his radio empire to an even more lucrative scale. His program was syndicated in even more markets year on year, and though listenership began to decline following the new millennium, it was still a major deal when the host left terrestrial radio altogether. In 2006, Stern signed an exclusivity deal with satellite radio provider Sirius (now SiriusXM) and never looked back, now free to say whatever he wanted without fear of FCC or corporate oversight.
Yet, rather than push him further to the extreme, the freedom softened the aging shock jock. Sure, he’d still say ridiculous things and featured a rotating cast of oddball characters, but Stern himself would admit that the chip was rapidly disappearing from his shoulder. Maybe lacking a clear nemesis (i.e. government censorship, annoying bosses) and all those guaranteed millions in his pocket allowed him to calm down a bit. Believe it or not, he’s earned a bit of respectability in recent years.
Stern has developed a reputation as one of the most thoughtful celebrity interviewers on the promotional tour. Rather than eschewing celebrity worship to insult and demean his famous guests, he instead strips back all the bullshit to get at the human beneath all the glitz and glamour. Figures like Lady Gaga, Bill Murray, Amy Schumer, and more have found themselves baring all (emotionally, this time) in Stern’s studio, his calming, honest presence acting as a truth serum of sorts.
This continued relevance is impressive given the modern media landscape. Where once the idea of a loud crass guy saying outlandish things directly in your ear was a radio novelty, it now describes 90% of all content on the internet. Everyone has gained access to the internet airwaves. The next Howard Stern won’t have to struggle from regional station to station until he finally finds his voice. They’re building an audience from their home office, grinding out algorithmically aligned content in order to sell a burgeoning audience to the highest bidding advertisers. The game hasn’t changed all that much really; all that’s different is the number of players.
Stern’s longtime fans have balked at this progression to respectability, but the causes are noble. The DJ has stayed with his second wife since their 2008 marriage and become an advocate for both animal rights and transcendental meditation. His own therapy journey, in private nowadays, has also been key. In one interview, he had to own up to his past behavior to Madonna, a woman he had never met but had brutally mocked for years:
I used to say bad things about everyone. I was angry, quite frankly. I was an angry young man.
And yet I don’t think Private Parts is a movie made by an angry man. The nervousness that endeared Stern to both its writer and director is palpable as you watch him try to convince everyone that he’s just a silly guy who loves his wife, even if that’s not exactly the truth. That truth, the story of an incendiary man who struggled for years with how much of his own life to bring to the public, is far more thoughtful than a 90 minute gross out comedy would allow.
If only there were a space where Stern could discuss his thoughts and evolution in long form, rambling context.
Rating: 2.5/5
What Else Was In Theaters? Appropriately, a piece of actually interesting outsider art released in theaters the same day as Private Parts. The Watermelon Woman, written, directed, and starring Cheryl Dunye, is the first feature film to be made by a Black lesbian. The film is an interesting examination of love, race, and how easy it is for the history of marginalized groups to fall through the cracks. It’s acting and editing are a bit amateurish at times, but much of its importance still shines through.
The Watermelon Woman received a limited release in American theaters and only made about $40,000 at the box office, but it was a festival darling and remains an important entry in the New Queer Cinema movement that I wrote about all the way back in this column’s first entry. 3.5/5
Next Week: It’s been a minute since we saw Jim Carrey in this article, so let’s check in on the biggest comedic star of the ‘90s with a review of his latest smash hit, Liar Liar.
See you then!
-Will
Quick Top 3: Stan “The Lariat” Hansen, Vader, and Mick Foley, who I just recently found out worked a whole Champion’s Carnival tour in the early ‘90s! Crazy!
Realistically I’d listen to “Out of Touch” right away and realize it was never getting better than that before moving on to another band