Blow Up Dolls

Above box covers for the cult classic, Scout's Honor.

How did you two come up with the idea of making a doll porno?

Steve: I came up with the idea of doing blow-up dolls because I was totally obsessed by porno shops when I was like 18...I saw blow up dolls and thought "god that's so great!"

Cathee: We spent a lot of time at porno shops.

Steve: And I made this teeny tiny movie.

Cathee: Once we had the two characters developed we started making movies. (Their first blow-up doll movies were I Touch Myself and Tonight's the Night.)

Scout's Honor in addition to being very funny is also very demented, how did you two get so tweaked?

Cathee: He started it. We met when we were twelve in a mall and we've been partners in crime ever since. When I was younger he and I would do really fucked up pranks like try and freak people out by following them in our car...basically just to entertain ourselves because we lived in such a boring place that we just had to. I think that he just kind of demented me from a very early stage.

Where did you grow up?

Cathee: In San Diego. The outskirts of San Diego--El Cajon.

Did either of you have any film or art training before making the movies?

Cathee: Just decorating the house for huge Halloween parties and doing gore make-up on each other and that kind of stuff.

Steve: I started literally in a garage.

Cathee: In his mom's house in this tiny little garage space.

What does she think of movies like Scout's Honor?

Steve: Both my parents have seen Scout's Honor and they both love it. They call us real offbeat.

Cathee: My mom's never seen it and my Dad loves it. He totally gets it. He thinks it's awesome

Cathee Wilkins with her Hi 8 camera.

What's the development process?

Cathee: The development is pretty spontaneous. We have the story and we write it down and talk about it. And once we get on the set it often changes.

Steve: We made one with no dialogue and then we made another one that had a little bit of dialog and it just kept escalating, getting bigger and bigger until now and we're making a new one that's called Deep Africa.

You're making the new movie on video. Why video why not super 8 film?

Steve: I don't know what it would look like on film

Cathee: I love the way it looks on video. It's so clear and bright. It looks so beautiful on video.

What kind of response did you initially get from Scout's Honor?

Steve: People were put off by it. They thought it was too weird, they thought it was too harsh. Film Threat reviewed it and gave it a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. They didn't like it very much.

Has anyone pointedly criticized the film for its subject matter?

Steve: Well, the militant lesbian community has complained but we just laugh it off.

Cathee: Or wannabe film students at San Francisco State who think that we have some sort of religious stand point because of the priest thing.

Now the film has a cult following.

Steve: People do an entire club dedicated to the movie. In San Francisco they'll fill the whole place with blow up dolls and have blow up doll night and show the movies.

Cathee: Sometimes we've been out at bars and there's our movie up on the screen and someone has put psychedelic effects over it. Who knows how they got it.

Steve: Now there's a new interest in the movie--it's like executive types but that's because they see money there.

Cathee: I think that South Park has cleared a path in a way that wasn't there before.

Do you see a blow up doll sitcom in the future of network TV?

Steve: It would have to be toned down.

Cathee: And I don't know if it would work toned down because the cussing and fucking are really the charm.

Steve: It's the gratuitousness of it.

Cathee: If they weren't having sex it could be just anything being animated.

Steve: It's really about the props. It's really just one big prop movie.

Steve Hall and Cathee Wilkins with Summers and
Candy on the set of their new film, Deep Africa.

Tell me about the new movie.

Steve: We never thought we'd do this again.

Cathee: Yeah we never thought we'd do another blow-up doll movie.

So why do it?

Steve: We ran into the opportunity to use the mold of an American icon.

What icon?

Steve: It's a secret.

Cathee: It's also totally back to roots. It's just filler. It's something to do when we're not doing something else.

Can you give me a brief summary of the story line?

Steve: Two girls who order something very special from deep Africa that comes and lives with them in their apartment in Los Angeles and it becomes their slave.

Cathee: They abuse it but they end up getting something out of it

Are the blow up doll characters based on real people?

Cathee: Candy is loosely based on my attitude

Steve: Some of them I wish were?

Cathee: I wish I knew the girls. These dolls are so ours. We've been around them for so long that I feel that they belong to no one else. I feel like we're the King and Queen of Blow-up dolls. I honestly can't stand to see anybody else abusing them in any way. I get personally offended by somebody cutting their hair or throwing them across the room because they're like my girls.

How do you feel about these dolls being objects of sexual gratification for some people?

Cathee: Well you know I have to put my finger in their butt and pussy to hold them up so they become pretty much non sexual to me.

Steve: I think it'd be weird, but I'd like to meet people who actually have relationships with them.

Cathee: I'd love to. I think Candy is so beautiful. I can't imagine if she was real . . . she'd just be getting laid all the time. So I can see fucking this one but I don't know about Summers. Summers is a little scary.

What I don't understand about the sex thing is that the doll material is pretty rough....

Cathee: Yeah it's real rough around the edges. It's real tight.

It seems that there would be some danger involved.

What kind of taboos do you address in Deep Africa?

Cathee: Well there's fucking for money . . . there's no lesbian sex in this movie

Steve: It has an interspecies type f sex

Cathee: Just abuse in general.

Any social redeeming value?

Steve: No none at all. There's no lesson to learn at the end of it. It's just one big prop movie.

Cathee: It's just candy for the eye.

Scout's Honor is available for rental at VideoActive in Silver Lake and Naked Eye and Leather Tongue in San Francisco. Deep Africa will be finished in June 1998.