THE ALWAYS FUNNY, ENTERTAINING, & WEIRDLY GENIUS KEVIN SMITH & SIMILARLY GIFTED SETH ROGEN SHOW WHY THEY ARE SO SUCCESSFUL AT WHAT THEY DO IN THIS COMPLEX MAGAZINE ARTICLE. I will warn you that this story does contain coarse, profane language, as they discuss topics closely related to their collaboration on the outrageous movie, Zack & Miri Make a Porno. But, as all of their fans are well aware of, they wouldn’t have it any other way. CHECK IT OUT & LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS. ENJOY
Story by Justin Monroe; Photography by Mark Mann
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You can tell a lot about a man by the porn he watches. you can tell even more by the porn he makes. But what about the movie he makes about the platonic slacker friends who decide to shoot an amateur skin flick because rent is due and money is low? In the case of Kevin Smith, who wrote and directed Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the raunchy comedy with equal parts hump and heart, and Seth Rogen, who stars as the film’s swinging dick, you can tell they love making people laugh as much as they love watching people make love.
Though Smith and Rogen represent two distinct comedy crews, their coming together seems as biologically fated as sperm meeting egg. Rogen, 26, who became a leading man in the smash baby-mama dramedy Knocked Up, has long been a fan of Smith, 38, who introduced viewers to his View Askewniverse (a world of recurring characters from New Jersey) with 1994’s Clerks. Smith saw Rogen for the first time in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and immediately wanted him to star in his next film—then wrote the role of Zack with Rogen in mind. While Smith favors dense, hyper-articulate dialogue, and Rogen’s posse leans heavily on improv, both like to find a happy ending by sifting through as much nastiness as their twisted minds can conjure. And as Complex learned when it sat with the comedic stars to discuss the adult arts, there’s no shortage of filth for them to draw upon.
So when did you first encounter pornography?
Kevin Smith: The first time I ever saw one, my mom, my dad, and I watched it together. [Rogen laughs.] No, my mom and my dad were at a family friend’s house and they went out to eat, and I stayed behind to watch TV. I went through her videotape collection and found a tape that looked like a professional tape, but in a regular VHS sleeve that you get at the store for your own recording purposes. There was something about it—the label was peeled off, but it was calling. I popped it in and I watched it with one eye on the TV and one on the door, one ear on the driveway.
Seth Rogen: How old were you?
Kevin Smith: I was 14 at the time.
Seth Rogen: Nice.
Kevin Smith: There was no Internet, and most of the adult magazines at the time, like Playboy, and even Hustler, never showed penetration. They would always show like a face or a mouth getting tantalizingly close to a cock. As it progressed in years, the tongue would inch out and always be a centimeter from the tip.
Seth Rogen: In Canada, Penthouse had full penetration.
Kevin Smith: Did they really? Goddamned Canadians.
Seth Rogen: We go right for the penetration.
Kevin Smith: But the biggest impression it made on me was the soundtrack done entirely on a kazoo. [Rogen laughs.] So, to me, the soundtrack of sex was a kazoo.
Seth Rogen: Every time you hear a kazoo now…
Kevin Smith: I’m like, “Oh my god, I gotta fuck!”
Seth Rogen: I initially thought you were going to say it was your family friend’s homemade porn. [Both laugh.]
Kevin Smith: I wish, man. Circa ’84, I don’t think anybody was hip to the idea of “let’s videotape ourselves fucking.”
What was your first time, Seth?
Seth Rogen: My friend stole a Penthouse. We must have been 12 years old or something. The girl who was heavily featured in it had one of those really dangly vaginas.
Kevin Smith: Meat curtains?
Seth Rogen: [Laughs.] I remember that was the first one I’d seen like really up close, and it blew my fucking mind. I was like, “What the fuck is that?!” Even to this day, I don’t think I’ve seen one quite so dangly, so it really made a very odd impression on me. Then when I was like 13, right when I got in high school, my other friend’s cousin gave him a porn; it was called The Fisherman’s Wife. Again, it blew my mind; seeing something going into someone else just seemed like something surgical.
Kevin Smith: It also taints your first sexual experience, ’cause you’re like, “I have to do like six or seven different positions in order for it to be considered sex.”
Seth Rogen: Exactly. And then, at the end, the guy comes into an ashtray and the girl licks it out of the ashtray. I thought that was normal, like, “Oh, that’s what you do when you fuck somebody.”
Kevin Smith: You come in ashtrays to stop pregnancy! [Laughter.]
Kids nowadays have access to the filthiest shit imaginable online. Is that a bad thing? Are you surprised every 15-year-old isn’t a raging psychotic?
Kevin Smith: I feel sad for the youth because it used to be an insanely naughty thing to get your hands on porn, and now it’s just so accessible.
Seth Rogen: Oh, don’t feel bad about it. As I grew up, my sexual maturity developed right along with modem speed. Like, the hornier I got, the faster modems got. I feel like kids are going to look at porn no matter what. There were times when we were like 14 years old that we would just go online to find the sickest shit we could possibly find. That was the goal, and I don’t think it fucked us up. I think it got it out of our system, if anything. It doesn’t repress shitting in a woman’s mouth. You’ve seen it when you were 14—you know it’s not something you need to do.
Kevin Smith: Seeing someone shit on camera just made me want to hide my shit even more.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, exactly!
Kevin Smith: Like, “Nobody can see this angle of me.” It doesn’t look good with an attractive woman—it’s gonna look worse coming out of a hairy ass.
Seth Rogen: There was one where a guy was spread-eagle on a piano and a woman was eating his ass out; I remember thinking, “He looks so vulnerable!” I felt so bad for him! [Laughs.]
Kevin Smith: “Why won’t someone help him?!”
Seth Rogen: He looked like a turtle that had been flipped on his back!
Kevin Smith: Do you still surf net porn?
Seth Rogen: Oh yeah, definitely.
Kevin Smith: What is your preference? I find myself moving further and further away from styled shots and lights and shit.
Seth Rogen: Oh yeah, more amateur. The POV amateur!
Kevin Smith: It’s kind of sad and wrong, but there are websites where you can see people’s girlfriends.
Seth Rogen: Sex tapes and shit. Kevin Smith: Yes! It’s fantastic! You feel like such an insane voyeur and you just know on some level that the girl in the picture was like, “This was never meant to see the world.” But really, Largelabia.com is my favorite site. [Ed.—We think Kevin means Sexylabia.com, which is dedicated to “large labia and their sex appeal.” Loose lips sink ships, Kevin]] Seth Rogen: Really?! That’s your jam? [Laughs.] Large labia, man! Kevin Smith: I love to see dangling meat curtains. My wife is not like that, so I like to see how insanely misshapen they can be.
What’s the last thing that made you feel filthy just looking at it?
Seth Rogen: Gagging and choking girls seems to be seeping into the mainstream, and I don’t like that at all. Hopefully, it’s a fad; I’m hoping it rolls through town and just goes back to where it came from. Kevin Smith: I think “Two Girls, One Cup,” that was really the one. Seth Rogen: That was kind of the peak. Kevin Smith: It became viral and went mainstream, and it was covered on morning radio shows and shit. I remember, somebody was like, “It’s not real! They just shoved the ice cream up there!” It’s still ice cream coming out of an ass! Seth Rogen: I think once food is coming out of an ass, it’s shit. I don’t care if you ate it.
Have either of you had any really embarrassing discoveries of your porn?
Seth Rogen: Everyone’s found my porn and it’s always embarrassing, I have to say. I’m glad I’m not into anything weird. I know someone who’s married and his wife found his porn—and it’s all Latina porn. His wife is a white woman, and she was like, “What the fuck?!” [Laughs.] Kevin Smith: “I can never do this for you!” Seth Rogen: Exactly! “There is nothing I can do to become Latina! If it was anal, we could talk about it. There are things to explore, but I can’t change race for you.” Kevin Smith: I’m pretty forthright and open about it, so nobody goes, “I can’t believe he’s got a porn!” I mean, we’ve got a kid now, so of course we take better steps to not file it next to the Disney DVDs. Did your parents ever not catch you jerking off, but still know about you jerking off? Seth Rogen: They definitely found porn in my room, and they probably knew I’d been jerking off. Kevin Smith: That’s a fair extrapolation. Seth Rogen: “He’s not just looking at it and going back to bed!” [Laughs.] Kevin Smith: One day as my parents were walking out, my father said to me, “Do me a favor—those tissues under your bed? Just throw them out.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, my nose was really runny last night,” and he goes, “It wasn’t your nose, throw them out!” And I felt mortified, ’cause I felt like he was going to come back in two hours and have a discussion with me about how to jerk off properly and throw things out. Seth Rogen: “We don’t hoard our ejaculate—we throw it away!”
R. Kelly, pioneer of celebrity sex tapes, was recently acquitted of child porn charges. Were you disappointed?
Seth Rogen: Apparently it was not him. Whether he’s guilty of that or not, he does some nasty-ass shit, it seems like.
Kevin Smith: I advocate ass eating. I am a big fan of ass eating, but not for the underage. I can’t even watch the porn sites that are “barely 18” and shit like that. Doesn’t do it for me; I just feel old. But I was staying at a hotel in Albuquerque, and I discovered three categories of porn that I had not yet seen. And they weren’t even insanely out there. One was “Over-40” porn. Seth Rogen: Oh yeah, that’s big, that’s big. Kevin Smith: I couldn’t imagine any business traveler going, “I want to see someone over 40.” Seth Rogen: “That looks like my wife!” Except for young guys, probably. Kevin Smith: That was strange. The other was “All British.” Seth Rogen: That’s big, too. People are into accents. Kevin Smith: The one that I had never heard of, never thought of—and this is a no-brainer—was called “Tomboy.” It’s basically chicks with short hair, small boobs, and athletic bodies. It was just like the idea of fucking your best friend in grade school. Seth Rogen: That girl you always hung out with. Kevin Smith: The girl you wrestled with before you knew how to kiss. I bought the Tomboy just to see. Seth Rogen: And how was it? Kevin Smith: Only one I would consider a tomboy. The other two just had short hair. The British one was completely bald. One looked like a chick from the ’80s with very Billy Idol slicked hair. There was one, whose image sold the video, who looked like a classic tomboy. And it was kind of fun. ’Cause as a viewer, you’re used to long hair being whipped around and shit. It was kind of neat.
Is there enough comedy in porn?
Seth Rogen: You know, I like it when porn stays as fucking far away from comedy as humanly possible. I went to the AVN Awards maybe five years ago, and one thing I learned is that porn stars are not fucking funny! They are good at a lot of shit I am not good at, but telling jokes is not one of them. The part of your brain that makes you funny dies the second you fuck nine women a day for 10 years straight. Kevin Smith: I don’t think porn even needs a soundtrack. They don’t need to dress it up. Just get in close with a camera and show angles that you don’t get to see when you’re doing it yourself. I would love it just dry and you could hear [Smith makes the sound of slapping genitals]. Seth Rogen: I like my porn like a Charlie Rose interview: Black background, just the facts.
Homophobia—cop-out or craft?
Kevin Smith: See, I don’t think we’ve done anything that’s homophobic. It’s more homoerotic than anything. Seth Rogen: Exactly—we celebrate male relationships. We don’t damn them. Kevin Smith: We did take shit from this dude Scott Seomin at GLAAD who campaigned against Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Seth Rogen: Semen? Kevin Smith: It’s spelled S-E-O-M-I-N, but… Seth Rogen: That guy should never make a public announcement about anybody!
Kevin Smith: In some ways, he was the perfect guy. But they went after us because they felt the movie was homophobic, and I was like, in one moment one of the two titular characters says that he would suck the other one’s dick. That’s homoerotic. That’s not putting down gay. That’s upholding gay in a somewhat mainstream film! Seth Rogen: We got some shit for 40-Year-Old Virgin, for the whole “You know you’re gay” thing. But I am the least homophobic guy you’ll meet. I’ll suck your dick right now. [Laughs.] To prove it, I’ll put your dick on my forehead!
Speaking of all this man-on-man action, Seth, how gentle is Kevin on the casting couch?
Seth Rogen: Pretty gentle. He’s a gentle lover. Kevin Smith: I said I’m an ass eater, dude. I give as much as I take.
And Seth was pretty willing?
Kevin Smith: He was gentle, like all Canadians. It was a Canadian kind of love.
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