Director Eli Roth revealed that he once took an interesting approach to raise money for his early films. "This can't be true, dude. Get this: To fund his films in college, Roth worked as an online cybersex operator for Penthouse, posing as a woman," Rob Lowe said to Roth, 53, on the Thursday, August 21, episode of SiriusXM's "Literally! With Rob Lowe" podcast. Roth admitted to Lowe, 61, that it was true. "I did. Now you would call that catfishing," the Hostel director quipped before getting into the details. "But back in 1992, I walked into my friend's room and I was like, 'What is that?' And it was a computer terminal. [He] was like, 'This is called a modem. It's 800 BAUD.' 800 speed was like a fast machine. And you could type a character and it would be there a second later." Howard Stern's 'Private Parts' Costars Explain Forgotten Cameos Roth then asked what his friend was going to do with the device, and the pal told him that Penthouse was "paying" him "$12 an hour" to pose as a woman and talk to men online. "He's like, 'You just have to make up a character. Pretend you're a girl and these people want you to type dirty messages to them,'" he recalled. "I'm like, 'Wait. Do they know you are guys?'" Roth explained that his friend told him the customers were not aware but claimed that Penthouse was "only hiring guys" because they would know what to write to other men. "It was just literally text messages. So I go, 'But who's on the internet?' ... What is the internet, even?' And they're like, 'It's doctors and scientists that get terminal access,'" he reflected. "So it was, like, rich New York City people and, like, doctors and scientists and, like, very wealthy people that were spending 50 cents a minute or a dollar a minute to talk to us. So these guys were spending, like, hundreds of dollars a night." After running the numbers on how much he could make, he decided to join the team. "I can't really explain what we said without being too graphic, but we would have ... 20 people in my dorm room all around going, 'Yeah, come on, don't do that. You make 'em wait for it,'" he said. "I remember going back to Boston to my parents' house and I was typing, like, a hundred words a minute." When Roth's parents asked where he learned to type so quickly, he told them it was because of all the screenwriting he did at school. While working with Penthouse, Roth created multiple characters who had different and intriguing backstories. "I had all these different characters. One was Moira. The beautiful bisexual French girl who couldn't understand why it was illegal to sunbathe topless in Central Park. It was like beyond her, she kept getting arrested," he said. "Then I was, like, Tammy or something, who was a heavy metal groupie who had had sex with all the members of Guns N' Roses and Poison. That was her whole thing was a heavy metal sex meeting act. Then there was Allison, who was divorced, and she was a writer. So she was trying to meet characters and she would try to be sexy but be bad at it. And the men were like, 'Allison, I can't have sex with you. I respect you too much.'" Marston Hefner on Dad Hugh's 'Hypocritical' Mistake, Continuing Family Legacy As Roth portrayed countless different women, he would come across repeat customers. When Roth and his friends were finishing up their time at Penthouse, they decided to come clean. "The last night we went on and we're like, 'We're gonna tell them. We're telling them we're guys,' and we did it," he recalled. "I remember us sitting there like Dr. Strangelove, hitting the button. Like, we typed out the full confession and we were like, wrestling ... and we hit send and we told them, 'We are guys, Penthouse only hires guys,' and the guy goes, 'Ha, you're so funny, Tammy, shut up. Tell me what you're wearing.' We're like, 'No, I'm serious dude. We're actually guys.' It's like, 'Tammy, you are the best.' ... They wouldn't believe it." Roth's venture seemingly paid off, as he has since helmed numerous films, especially in the horror genre. He has directed Thanksgiving, Borderlands and more and produced TV shows including Hemlock Grove and Fright Krewe.