The Babes4u Back Story — MADELEINE ALTMANN

Babes4U (working title)

The Babes4u Story

Based on the true Story of Madeleine Altmann who fought for the rights of free speech and went on to be the inventor of live porn online.

Madeleine Altmann, a suburban housewife drops off her kids at school and goes to work at a local TV station. It a happy and successful place full of volunteer seniors and kids. As soon as she gets to her desk a man walks in and throws an empty cardboard box on her desk. Handing her a manila envelope he tells her she is fired and needs to leave the building immediately. Reason for Termination: She is deemed too dangerous to be around children.

Flashback to: Madeleine is with her Mom in Bedford 20 years earlier having a discussion about sexuality. Some of the conversation revolves around Madeleine’ recent experience with sexual harassment from her previous last two jobs. We meet her siblings and find out that her mother had cancer but is in remission. Madeleine wants to go to the West coast to try her luck there but is worried for her mom. She convinces Madeleine it’s ok to leave and go find her own way out west.

Landing in San Francisco, Madeleine finds a room to rent with an older woman called. Tornado. She is a VIP host and formerly a stripper. They quickly become friends. She also makes a real connection with her advisor at school, famed underground filmmaker George Kuchar. While at S.F.A.I. Madeleine creates a LIVE interactive television show called Madeleine’s Variety Television, MVTV. The San Francisco Guardian calls it “David Letterman run amuck.” And the Chronicle says “on MVTV anything can happen – and usually does. Tornado is often a co-host on the hit show. The whole point of the show was to give as much power to the viewer as possible. They called the shots via phone calls in the control room and provided most of the content as well. Madeleine wanted everyone to have access to the airwaves at a time when big TV Networks controlled it all.

A curious professor named Nick West comes from New York to check it out and talks to Madeleine about joining his program back East. It’s an innovative new masters program at NYU called ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Its mission is “to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives.” They describe it as ‘The Center for the Recently Possible’. Madeleine is flattered by the offer but declines the offer. She just got a Graduate Degree, and she needs to make more money.

Taking advantage of San Francisco’s liberal bent, she starts a magazine-style show called Erotica S.F. The subject is SEX. It’s partly educational, partly erotic, and mostly profitable due to advertising sales. The topics range from the personal, to the political, to the professional. She gets the show aired in several other cities to expand the profit potential.

In order to promote her show, Madelene agrees to do a very risqué photo shoot for trending Future Sex Magazine. It’s a niche magazine in SF and she hopes hardly anyone will see it.

Halfway across the world in Germany, Andreas Uthoff, who works as a freelance trend writer picks up a copy of Future Sex. He reads the description and says ‘This is the perfect woman for me’.

Madeleine’s Mom comes to visit SF and sees an episode of ESF. Worried that her mom will judge her, they have a confrontation. Her mother does not understand why she would make a show like that but does not want to fight with her given the new turn of events. The cancer is back, and she only wants to show Madeleine unconditional love. Madeleine is worried that her brothers are not taking proper care of their mother back home.

AIDS is at the height of its epidemic, and San Francisco is an epidemic epicenter. Erotica S.F., as a socially responsible act, does an episode to raise money for the AIDS crisis. It’s a freewheeling show, and at one point a female performer does an improvisational dance number with a black rubber dildo. Viacom, the cable television giant and owner of the cable system airing Erotica S.F., decides that this is indecent and pulls the show. Unfortunately for them, the cable goliath is up against a David in the form of Madeleine Altmann. According to the Cable Act of 1884, indecency is to be defined by community standards, not massive, profit seeking corporations. She marshals the help of the ACLU and sues Viacom.

This is not some crusty, sleezy porn merchant in a wheelchair. Madeleine is a young, sexy, woman going up against a row of corporate lawyers in their grey suits. A much more appealing story for the press. She wins both a monetary settlement and, more importantly, upholds that giant corporations like Viacom can’t censor what Americans view.

Nick West, the professor who had traveled to San Francisco to see Madeleine’s cult classic MVTV, seeks her out again and this time woos her with a paid scholarship. She’s the type of diverse student they seek. Not to mention that the NYU Law School teaches about her successful fight against Viacom.

Madeleine does not want to leave her friends or her shows but feels a need to be closer to her mom who has come out of remission. And now that she is guaranteed an income, takes up the offer to move to attend NYU.

The program is led by a powerhouse of a woman, Red Burns. Most of the students don’t come with backgrounds in computer science: they’re diverse. Painters, poets, doctors, lawyers. As Burns says, ‘people who come from other disciplines, not just computer scientists, can now create their own forms of communication. Doctors and architects and educators can use more than words—they can use pictures and sound.’ But red Burns does not take a shining to Madeleine. She’s worried Madeleine’s sexy past will bring a bad reputation to NYU

While at NYU Madeleine meets Andreas through a friend. He is visiting NYC and staying with Lisa, another NYU student who he met in Germany. He came thinking he had a place to stay with Lisa and gets an altogether different experience. It's a comedy of errors how Andreas finally realizes that he has met the woman of his dreams. Madeleine and Andreas form a long-distance relationship and keep in contact when he goes back to Germany.

Meanwhile Madeleine is trying to figure out ways to harness this new technology and make some money while doing so. She’s confident in her sexuality. She’s a bit of an exhibitionist. Her feminist beliefs allow her to see potent female sexuality as a thing that women need to wrest back control of.

She’s a visionary. As Nam Jun Paik says, "Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body's new membrane of existence." Her brainchild is named Babes4U. It will allow men to interact with women via the computer. The World Wide Web is still in its nascent form. Pictures and videos are mostly exchanged and distributed via usenet groups, not live or interactively. There is no live streaming video or credit card transactions on the internet, that is until Babes4u came along.

She remembered her interviews with sex industry workers back in SF. How unsafe it often was with the guys harassing or attacking them. She hated how the male club owners made the biggest profits of all. Why not put those women in a safe environment, while putting them in control of the content and maximizing their profit? She conceptualizes how it will work. Her first pass requires software to be downloaded onto client’s Windows computer, a process that takes hours and sometimes cuts off mid-download. Start again. Need is the mother of innovation, and Madeleine has the brains to see where it needs to go. She hires a brilliant German programmer to create her own tech solution. Babes4u also develops the concept of the micro-payment, a pay by the minute credit card-based system that she later licenses to others.

She convinces her old friend Tornado to move to NYC and help her. She can deal with the talent while Madeleine deals with the new technology. She’s much older than Madeleine, and that makes her seem responsible. It turns out in time that Tornado really isn’t so stable or responsible.

Madeleine rents a studio space on 14th Street and 8th Avenue. Not the shopping mall it later becomes, but a street filled with drug rehab centers and sleaze. She sets up her studio with the cheapest furniture that can be found. Her future clients are not going to be concerned with interior design. She creates three live recording areas that each have a camera connected to a computer, connected to a high throughput T3 internet connection. They’re also room for the back-end staff that keeps the business running. Babes4U runs 24 hours a day. A schedule of the performers is available for clients.

The studio is located above a Mexican restaurant that has a live, and loud, mariachi band every night between 10:00 PM and 3:00 AM. Prime time for her new on-line sex business. They install wall-to-wall carpeting, brown of course, but it does little to stop the rattling. Then come the endless covers of the new hit song ‘Macarena’.

Next door to the studio is a recording studio whose nighttime clientele are rap performers creating the soundtrack for this period in New York, along with their endless entourages. The recording studio doesn’t allow smoking, so they spend lots of time smoking cigarettes and weed in the filthy hallway. The flow of women from Babes4U going to use the shared bathroom sends these men into a constant frenzy. The opening door reveals a pornographic fantasyland for them. The word spreads and just keeping men out becomes another business challenge.

The Babes are paid hourly and get profit sharing. Besides being the boss, Madeleine is a Babe too. She won’t ask a woman to do something she won’t do herself. Her employees appreciate this. And there’s quality control. And the business is just starting, so every penny counts.

Madeleine tumbles deep into the world of exhibitionism and fantasy. She eventually creates three on-line personas and pretends to the customers they are sisters. The oldest is Pauline, the strict one, the boss both on and off-line. No one dares forget it. She keeps all the babes at the office in line, and online she keeps all the customers begging for more. Pauline is also popular for knowing all about the technology. This is before computer technology is ubiquitous. Many of the customers on-line are serious computer tech heads. It really turns them on to be able to talk tech and talk dirty at the same time. The middle ‘sister’ is Brigitte. She’s the sassy, vivacious middle sister. Smart ass and brassy she thinks a great deal of herself and is jealous of other girls. She tries to get all the customers to say that she’s the cutest one and that they like her best of all. She loves the work and is always excitable. Gigi is Madeleine’s persona pretending to be the youngest of the three ‘sisters’. She’s the most innocent and her older sisters are always looking out for her, being very protective.

In general, the customers are intelligent and polite. They come from all sorts of professions, but there are many computer programmers, lawyers and accountants. It's all about having a fantasy and wanting someone to act it out. And now the opportunity to interact live with a babe, blew customers away. It’s acting it out, but in a virtual space. It's a safe place to experiment with your sexuality and explore new kinks. The Babes spend a great deal of time discussing sexual politics and teaching guys how to have fun with even their most odd imaginings.

Tornado, falls for one of the customers who spends an enormous amount of time in chat, hours every day. He spends thousands of dollars on live video every month. He’s a realtor who lives in London.

Fraud is an anathema for the business. Back then, Madeleine was not really being harassed by the extreme right-wingers or feminists. In fact, women tended to approve of what she’s doing. Being a woman run porn business helps in many ways. It means the guys love it because they feel they’re helping the women that they had all along been accused of exploiting. Women love her because she is reclaiming female sexuality back to its rightful owners. The customers love it because it’s the ultimate safe sex.

The press falls in love with the story. They can sell sex themselves, but under the shroud of political correctness. A young, over-educated, female entrepreneur creating a new business model for the oldest business in the world. She ‘leans in’ before the term is created. The massive press coverage brings in business beyond Madeleine’s imagination.

Of course, there’s drama. And politics. NYU is mortified. This is NOT the kind of ‘delight’ they envisioned bringing into people’s lives through new technology. Madeleine becomes class president and news cameras are at the NYU commencement. Her Family finds out and is embarrassed for her, but then come around.

Tragically, the innocent virtual peep show created by this brilliant feminist, sexually confident woman gets quickly corrupted by the profit hungry and the morally corrupt to be what now in part fuels the rampant misogyny in our culture. Within a year of inception there are numerous competitors online. Madeleine walks away, but the notoriety follows her into her future. And we come back to her having gotten fired. It was in part due to rebuffed sexual advances from her boss who uses her past against her. Madeleine fights against unlawful termination. This was before #metoo and a local lawyer eager to curry favor with town influencers, fought and lost against Madeleine. Now that lawyer is a State Senator and when he sees Madeleine he pales, the fear of what he’s done haunts him and jeopardizes his reputation.

Babes4U tells the story of the beginnings of the internet as most of us know it, and how the boldness, innovation, and fearlessness of visionary women who leaned way in, created a new frontier.

Contact: altmannart@gmail.com