Eon McKai and I are having afternoon drinks at Silverlake’s Red Lion Tavern. The Red Lion is a comfortable German place staffed by older Teutonic ladies in dirndls who serve sausage platters to an assortment of old guys in floppy hats, businessmen, and what people in the old days called “slackers”.
McKai is 25. He has a scholar’s appreciation of the old days and a recent graduate’s lack of first-person experience with them. Eon is the type of person who can use the phrase “years ago” and it will mean 2001. That is not to say he won’t know exactly what happened, but I feel like telling him that, as a person gets older, recent history includes the first time a Space Shuttle exploded. That would only end in tears, so I recalibrate my perception of Time.
Nerve.com called McKai, who was raised and educated in southern California, “The New Pornographer”. He is that, but so is every porn-star boyfriend who picks up a camera. McKai is more accurately a postmodern pornographer; a person who uses porn’s history on itself in the service of making something that suits his own whims.
We talked about Art School Sluts, his first feature for VCA, and Kill Girl Kill, a wall-to-wall that is being released today. We talked about suicide girls real and patented, the porn stars Keiko, Brooklyn, Houston, and Jesse Jane, and the legacy of VCA.
You have a master’s degree in film and you work on the other side of the hill in a mainstream editing job. For you, working in porn is a choice. Beyond saying, “I can do this,” at what point did you say, “I want to do this?”
“I first saw porn when I was way too young. On the Internet. Friends’ parents would also have tapes and DVDs and stuff. I became quickly fascinated with the classic stuff, like Café Flesh.”
McKai includes clips from porn’s film and video era, including a scene from Café Flesh, on Art School Sluts, as a snapshot of his education.
“There was a film and video crossover period (in porn). Those movies seem to be really earnest with a lot of heart. I don’t know. It seems like when you’re exposing an inch of film you need to be much more deliberate. Whereas people are just blasting through videos these days. As a director you’re encouraged to produce a line and create a series.
“I was very much from the Internet world, like Suicide Girls and EroticBPM, Burning Angel. This was my kind of girl, my kind of scene. I’d taken some early photos for SG. I was always kind of hung out on that site. That was the kind of erotica I enjoyed. I thought, “if I were to step into adult, this is the kind of movie I’d deliver.”
When you showed up at VCA, what did they make of you?
“Any old person who saw my product would always refer to it as goth. But anybody who makes this kind of thing calls it alt porn.
How did you cast your two movies for VCA?
“MySpace.com has been a never-ending treasure trove of girls who want to do porn with me. Also, there’s a lot of girls who e-mail me and just want to hear that they’re hot enough to be in a porno movie. You know what? If you’re young and you’re cute, chances are there’s going to be people who want to watch you have sex. Whether it’s really the right decision for you is another matter.
“There are very few who make it past three e-mails back and forth. They don’t know they need to have a test from AIM, they don’t know how much it costs. And they pay for the tests. I’m not going to get in the habit of flying people out. If you fly out here, I can guarantee you work. You invest in a plane ticket and an HIV/AIDS test; you get spending money for a week in Los Angeles.”
Brooklyn, pierced, tattooed, and rangy cover girl of Kill Girl Kill, met McKai at a casting call at VCA. “He’s just raw, real, and electrocutes you,” she said. “He’s the new generation of porn. He looked at me and said, ‘It’s you.'”
Brooklyn, raised in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, has not worked for Suicide Girls but has worked for McKai’s friends in Williamsburg, Burning Angel.
McKai says , “A Suicide Girl isn’t a porn star, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be an adult film that caters to that audience.
“I can say, ‘I know you’ve had a couple of drinks tonight and you say you want to be involved with a porno movie, but come back tomorrow and tell me if you’re sure. You might think it’s really cool, but you’ll have to answer to at least one person about it.”
You’re shooting for a younger demographic…
“Girls in porn are young…when they come on the set of my films, they’re seeing young men and women. They see a peer. Veronica Jett was yelling at her agent on the hne at the time, saying, ‘you don’t understand – I’ve hooked up with these guys in a much different way.’
“When you buy an adult movie, you’re just looking for a girl you’d like to see get fucked. I’m trying to make the movie with the girl you’d like to see get fucked with a little more personality, so you know the movie was made by someone like you.”
VCA has a lot of history and resources. How did you employ them?
“I got advice from Jim Malibu, who’s continued to be a friend a and a mentor. One of the first things he did was ask how many anal scenes I had.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know. Whatever the girls want to do.’
“And he said, ‘Well, from a marketing standpoint, you should do two anal scenes.’
“So I found myself saying on shoot days, ‘Oh you do anal? You want to do anal in this scene?’ It wasn’t ever, ‘We need an anal scene! You gotta do anal!’ It was only if they were selling anal; we bought it.”
VCA was in flux, McKai said, when Kill Girl Kill was going into production.
“When you see people threatened with their job, it’s insane what they do to each other. I watched Veronica Hart be axed as a director. I watched Antonio Passolini, become the creative director, help Art School Sluts get made, and then get axed. I watched Jim Nitts go from being the financial advisor to being the head of VCA to getting fired. I watched Jim Holliday die. To watch the three of them get defamed, and not because they were bad people, but for some business thing I don’t understand. (I can hardly do my taxes.)
“I’m at home reading the Legs McNeil book (The Other Hollywood); Freddie Lincoln was all over that book. And then he’s on (adult industry trade website) AVN saying, “I’m a director and I need work’? He should be considered a god.
“I knew a lot of history from talking to people like Jim Holliday, Antonio Passolini, and Veronica Hart. Major fucking icons. I hate to sound like a bleeding heart, but we have to have some idea of what our history is. We’ll all either go to to jail, like people did, or be doomed to making really bad movies.
“I will never shoot in the Valley. It’s this rinse-repeat attitude in the adult business. You’ve got a couple of blondes, a big lawn, some sun, and Poof! you’ve got a Jim Holliday movie.”
McKai was a fan of many of the films in VCA’s catalog, and pitched the company on a remake of one of their chestnuts.
“I want to bring back the New Wave Hookers series but do it Now. VCA owns it. It would be NEU Wave Hookers. Electroclash girls looking at the Dark Brothers’ stuff.
“A lot of the VCA stuff was cooler then than anything made at the time. When it was making the first Dark Brothers stuff it was really groundbreaking for its era.
“But they don’t get my idea. I’m collecting pictures of electroclash kids at clubs and they’re saying, ‘but you don’t want to do it retro?’ It’s a lot of leading them by the hand. For the moment, they’re listening. If I do another big budget film with VCA, that’s what I’m going to do. I’d also like to make a Lolita goth movie. Might be crossing some boundaries, though. Emo Girls Eat Cum or something.
“If anyone could really go into the past of porn and say someone was being truly punk rock: it was VCA. I think it was/is in their culture to take risks.
“Maybe it’s too much for people to handle. Maybe people just want to jack off. I don’t know.”
It’s interesting that you appealed to them with their history.
“I felt it was the only thing that would get to their gooey center.
“The thing about working with Eon is that it was like working with the old guys before they were the old guys,” Art School Sluts star Keiko said. “It was really good to work with someone who had a vision rather than someone who wanted a blowjob.”
McKai’s cast is hand-picked, and he doesn’t imagine any variations on “The McKai Girl.”
Do you have plans to have crossovers, like Keiko Loves Houston?
“That would be very surreal. I don’t like fake boobs. “
What about the card-carrying, board-certified emo girl, having a scene with Jesse Jane?
“Jesse Jane has fake boobs!
“That’s a controversial issue. I was talking to people in the altporn scene who don’t have a problem with fake boobs. They say that if you’re into piercing and body modification, it’s just an extension of that. But I’m OD’d on fake boobs.”
Do you think porn is dirty?
“Yah, it’s dirty.”
Do you think it should maintain its dirtiness?
“It’s different for different people. I can watch something that’s dirty but not ironic. You can watch porn ironically. You can watch porn desperately. You can watch porn with a partner. You can make porn movie that are really sweet. Veronica Hart made porns that were dirty, yes, but they had very sweet, sex-positive themes.
“Thematically I would like to go a lot of further.
I would like to assume that the people who watch my movies have their heads screwed on and we can go to some places that we probably – shouldn’t. The lawyers in this business want to make sure that people’s minds are protected. Certain things are off limits, I guess, and certain things don’t interest me. I’m not interested in seeing a father fuck his daughter.
“I’m a big Harmony (Kids, Gummo) Korine fan, and there’s places that he goes, that if you inserted fucking in the movie, you’d go to jail.
“(Porn) is the only place where you could actually express a feeling you have and go to jail for it. Filmmaking doesn’t get more outlaw than porn, no matter how safe films have become. They’re still coming after us.”
Eon is dressed the way you’d expect an educated club kid to dress. He has the sideburns, earring, buttons. I don’t ask, ‘Mightn’t this all be a phase, this emo/electroclash/shoe-gazing/junglist thing you’re all worked up about?’ He’s a true believer.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve. I’ve got so many girls from the hype that’s come out of Art School Sluts that I need to keep shooting. I’m one of the few people who are at a big company who has this freedom, so I feel it’s my civic duty to shoot these girls.”
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