Porn Valley- Wankus from KSEX was on the Sinsations 3 shoot this past week playing himself. During some down time we talked about the future of KSEX and the many changes that are being incorporated in the show's schedule this week http://adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=15502.
True, Wankus has been dealing with some internal drama caused by the change of KSEX ownership, and he refrains from talking about it. At least on the record. Oh, for a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels when you need one.
I likened the situation to the dust settling and Wankus laughs that the dust has just been kicking up. I was telling Wankus about this e-mail that had gone out last Thursday from former KSEX porn jocks Jimmy Mofo and Flower Tucci. Wankus said he hadn't heard about it, but it reads like this:
"This is real short but will have more details coming soon! I just learned thru e-mail & then verified it with the program director that Our show "Tushy Talk" was CANCELLED today, effective immediately by NEW owners who took over last week. Flower & I are sorry as fuck that we didn't get a chance to say goodbye to the fans of the show! But we promise you that "Tushy Talk" will be back LIVE & nastier & sicker than ever somehow, somewhere! THIS SUCKS BIG TIME."
"I wish them the best," says Wankus. "First I didn't send them that e-mail- the new owner did. But I talked to both of them on the phone." Accordingly, KSEX is re-launching the station this Monday.
"It's going to be called the new KSEX radio.com," Wankus says. "The hook phrase changes. It's not going to be 'we get it in' on any more. It's 'we keep it coming.' There's going to be fresh logos, fresh looks, fresh sound- some of the sounds are going to be similar. We'll have some similar shows, but we're going to tweak 'em and work on improving the quality and getting back to program quality and what people are doing along with the content of the shows and the prepping of the shows.
"For the last year we've been basically letting it ride," he concedes. "It was thanks for showing up- that kind of thing. But we haven't been fine tuning like we were in the beginning when we had our best sound. We had our best sound when we started. That was the first year. So now with the new owners' changes and the promise of future planning, we are going to get back, not to micromanaging, but really grooming our talent to be the best hosts they can be so we can go to the next step."
The next step, says Wankus, is going to be satellite programming.
"After that we want to turn it into a TV station as well," he reveals. Last week Wankus mentioned something on the air about KSEX going to a 12 hour broadcasting day. I was wondering how far along he was with that.
"I don't want to say they've given me a time line," he comments. "But they've given me an estimated time for the improvements to happen. It's basically 90 days to where they want me to tweak the shows to where we're proud of them, completely- every single show on the station. When we do that, the first thing we're going to make is our satellite push. They already have some connections and contacts with Sirius and some interest with Sirius. But they don't want to give a half-ass product to them. They want to make sure it's tight and a really well-run ship."
Wouldn't a Sirius deal take KSEX off the Internet, he's asked.
"No, because what they'll do is they'll use Sirius as a way to bring people to the web," he explains. "Our radio shows always have been pretty much focused on audio, not visuals. Some of the shows in the past have gotten out of control and people have said some crazy things- and it wasn't entertaining because all you would hear was oooh, aaaah, that feels good. When you have adult stars, things happen. Like on the show with Julian. Michelle Lay sucked his dick. But the entire time, I'm narrating, I'm talking, I'm cracking jokes. We were having fun. It didn't help his hard on any, but at the same time, you have to think for somebody's who's just listening. And that's what we're really going to try to do. So when and if we go to Sirius, it depends on the deal. The deal might be only on some of the shows or the deal might be we have our own channel. We don't even know that yet. It's too premature to guess.
"If we go there, it'll be, hey if you think this is hot, you should be watching us on the Internet. Go home and check it out at www.ksexradio.com. Hopefully they'll be able to work it as a marriage together. You can hear it on Sirius but you can see it on KSEX.com. We'll try to use all the portals to bring one to the other. We'll try to bring the KSEX audience to the Sirius show and vice-versa. Either way that'll work for us.
"After we get the shows running the way we want and we feel like we've got a nice strong presentation, we'll hopefully do the satellite push," Wankus continues. "Once we have the rhythm there and everything's going well, hopefully we'll want to expand our hours. We're hoping for that within six months. We want to do 12 pm to 12 am California time which, if you do the math, covers the entire world at some point for prime time. Then there will be one 12 hour replay of all the shows you missed. And of course we'd like to add Saturday and Sunday into the mix down the road, too. This way we'll be seven days, almost 24 hours live.
"What we've been doing which is also great, we've been recording all our archives on Super VHS which is like the lowest form of broadcast quality, but it works great for us for Internet because it's no big deal. But it sucks for cueing things up. You have to encode it to put it in the members area to archive it. We're working on a system that immediately archives to hard drives so if you tune into The Wanker Show at 7:15 and missed the first 15 minutes, you can go into this archive section and click the same night's show. You're just 15 minutes behind but you're not missing a thing. So that's another thing that we're trying to put together right now."
Another point to be made in this grand scheme of things is the fact that KSEX will be at its Burbank digs only until next month. Then it moves to the Valley.
"The lease runs out in May," says Wankus. "But we've been wanting to move anyway even before this change happened. We found a space but someone else wants it and they had the application in first. We're trying to offer them all kinds of money because we want it and it's perfect. It's in Chatsworth and it will be a lot more convenient for most of the talent. Burbank's not bad for people to go to but during rush hour and because we're on the tail end of Burbank, it's really a pain in the ass. Not to mention that it's not a city that's really porn-friendly and it's not like we're welcome guests there. So Chatsworth would be perfect. It's near all the studios and it's pretty much an easier drive for people to get to. So we think that would be better for us and, of course, the rent is like half. That also helps."
Wankus had been laying out teasers about these KSEX changes months ago so obviously it wasn't an overnight decision. He's asked how all of this came about and who approached who.
"About a year and a half ago or two years ago is when KSEX first started breaking even on the revenue," he replies. "It took us a lot of money spent. People don't realize this, thinking, oh, it's just a shitty little company. Oh, they only pay their deejays a small wage. They don't realize that a payroll is ridiculous. You add up all the deejays that are on the air, it seems small for somebody who shows up for one hour a week. But there are people who work full time slots there and it's not small money. It's not the greatest money, but it's reasonable if you put in the time. But if you add it all up, you're spending a lot of money- if you're tacking on the salaried employees and people behind the scenes and rent and overhead, expenses, accessories and equipment. We were spending- and you can quote me on this figure but I'm not sure if it's completely accurate- near fifty grand a month; maybe sixty grand a month. For a small company, that's a lot of money.
"So it took us until about a year and half ago to break in," Wankus continues. "But unfortunately because we really didn't push the marketing based on spending so much money over the years, we weren't really growing at all. In fact, we entered into a deal with camz.com. You might remember that where KSEX was going to be featured on their network. Our original thoughts were this is going to be great for us- they have a lot of users and more and more interested in KSEX. It ended up, people were joining Camz and getting KSEX and all the other shit Camz has to offer so we ended up losing money doing it. We had the bigger audience but we weren't making any money. So we shot ourselves in the foot. Nothing against Camz. They're great people but it was a bad move for us."
Chris and Allison, the KSEX co-owners, subsequently re-mortgaged their houses and scrambled to come up with the money to keep KSEX afloat.
"Chris' wife even had to go take a job accounting somewhere just to keep money coming in and paying for everything," Wankus states. "That's not good. These were people who made millions on the Internet in the Nineties and now they're scrambling just to keep KSEX alive. Unfortunately because of lack of funds we really couldn't go to the next level. So we talked a year ago about selling a piece of KSEX. We already felt like we were doing great things with the programming but we needed help with somebody to help push this thing to the next level. And we were willing to give up half it to do it. We had a lot of bidders but we turned a lot of people down because we knew they were going to use it just for their own benefit to pump just their company, make some ugly changes and we didn't want to take that chance.
"The strongest interest was from Adam & Eve," Wankus goes on to say. "Part of that was because Sean Trotter was still there and was really pushing for it because he thought it would be a great marriage. We had interest from Black Widow. We had interest from Defiance. We had interest from about a dozen different people. And then after a few more months, we said, look, we can still have the same philosophy of selling to the right person but why not see what someone will offer us if we sell the whole thing. That's always a nervous thing because you never know what the future's going to bring. But it got to the point where it was becoming a headache and that wasn't growing where we wanted it to grow.
"Long story short, Sean Trotter left Adam & Eve but he still had the desire to have KSEX as part of one of his properties along with his new partners. They pretty much started a company that's going to be touching on ever angle of the business. And they've got the backing, too. There's going to be really good things for that company to come. So they stuck to their guns about KSEX. It was flattering because the first thing they said to Chris was, yeah, we're interested in buying the company only if Wankus comes along with it. And that was really cool because in any of these types of situations you never know what the future brings and they saw I played a key role and I'm glad. So what they did was instead of outright just buying the company, they bought out Chris and Allison and I maintained 20% of the company as an owner. The rest of the parties have the remainder so, therefore, I'm still in the mix and they've got me under contract so I can't go anywhere. And I don't want to go anywhere. The heartbeat's back. I feel like, hey, these are people that are going to spend some money and make this shit go where it needs to go."
Wankus is very conscious of the fact that people will read his soundbites in the recaps and immediately assume that he's an asshole and because of that, they hate KSEX.
"KSEX is a beautiful thing," Wankus replies. "The vehicle is phenomenal and even with a couple of thousand listeners, the marketing and exposure that people coming on KSEX get, tied in with the coverage that you do on Adultfyi and scattered other sites- even the message board where people are pumping their shows- stars and directors and movie companies realize they can get a really nice pulse. I'm not saying we make people famous [it's fair to point out that Cytherea was greenhouse bred on KSEX] but this is a place where fans can interact with them and they can remind people that they're still doing their thing; they're talking freely- they're not scripted so you can get to know the real stars. And sometimes you find out you didn't want to know the real stars! But it's such a great product that I'm proud to be part of."
Wankus will also be the first one to tell you that he suffered burn out, notably for the fact that he was no longer there at KSEX on a nightly basis.
"Now I'm there just on my show nights," he points out. "Still chipping in behind the scenes but I used to be there every minute of the day. But now I'm excited again."
But it's also pointed out that with Wankus' involvement with Team Tyler and other projects his thinness could be spread to linguini proportions. He says no.
"What a lot a people don't know about Tyler [Faith] because I'm such a press whore is that she's not just a gorgeous adult star putting her face on a company. She's an intricate part of Team Tyler," says Wankus. "I have the big mouth so you may hear my name a lot but she gets a lot of shit done behind the scenes that people don't realize. She's been the production manager behind every one of her movies. Half the stuff that I scripted were her ideas. She keeps the company organized from bookkeeping to set notes to whatever to having a strong say in the talent we hire based on her experience on who will most likely work well together. She's even making calls for Black Widow (distributer) now pushing her line to people they haven't sold yet. She's very focused on her career, she's 'wicked' smart, if I may use a Boston term and of course, I should mention, she's an amazing performer that I've yet to see any girl in porn compete with in passion and performance. So, as long as Tyler's running the shop, Team Tyler won't really suffer if I get a little busy on the side. Same time, this new company is dying to work in conjunction with Team Tyler to a certain fashion. They're already talking about doing a movie together- and they already have for themselves 16 or 18 movies in the can. They want to do a conjunction flick, a Pirates-kinda-thing where they can combine forces for one and Ric Williams (Black Widow) thinks all of this would be great. "
"Secondly, we hired Soxxx [Jay Von Mohr] as an assistant program director. He has earned the right to take my fucking job. The guy is phenomenal. He gets it. He's a hard worker. He can delegate and be a strong leader and, at the same time he's not too good to take out the garbage. He's a worker. So that will help me with the KSEX duties. He can handle a lot of the stuff that ties up my day. Unless KSEX explodes right away with all kinds of crazy, responsibilities, I think for now the shuffling's not going to be a big deal."
Wankus also mentions that Tyler Faith will be making her directorial debut in short order.
"So she'll be directing and producing and I'll probably edit and write the music," he also points out. "We make a great team and I can juggle two roles for now. I DO want to say that I really can't wait until Tyler gets in the Director's chair because she has natural skills in this area, even though she never officially directed a flick. When she asked me to direct for our company, it wasn't just to save money. She knew I was very creative and as a mainstream performer and improv guy, she had confidence that I'd do well--not to mention I had a credit before Team Tyler that got rave reviews (DVSX, Sakura Tales 6). Anyway, one of the things Tyler instilled in me was to shoot like a female director. Meaning, get the shot in the girls' best interest. The shot's not good just because I see pink. Many male directors go right for the gusto and because the pussy angle is smokin' hot, they fail to notice that this poor girl is in a position where her gut's hanging in a weird way, her implant bags have dents, there's leakage from pre-scene preperations, whatever. I kind of always had that eye to stay away from that shit anyway because as a porn fan, I hated seeing that. But Tyler really opened my eyes to a lot of things in general that current award winning directors still don't give attention to. She'll be a great director.
Tyler learned a lot from Jill (Kelly) and the beauty of our relationship is, Tyler and I learn a lot from each other. We're growing together personally and in business. While it gets a little frustrating a times building a new company, it will have such a payoff if all goes well because two people, completely in love succeeding in two areas most don't...a porn romantic relationship and a porn business relationship. Wish us luck ! (laughs)"
