Micheal McKinley is the organizer behind the growing Sunset Junction street fair. McKinley has been with the festival since its inception in 1980, and has worked on other big-scale festivals, including L.A. Pride. He took a few minutes to talk to us about this year's festival, which takes to the streets on August 23 and 24.
What’s new this year?
We’re going to have a skateboard area, a bicycle park, stilt walkers, and we’re putting banners of local young artists up and down the streets. Every year we have different entertainment acts—some we’ve had before, a long time ago, but it’s all new from last year. There are 48 acts.
How do you deal with the local businesses that don't want to participate?
With any event, whether it’s a movie shoot or marathon, there’s always going to be inconvenience. We try to be the least invasive as possible, but the reality is that sometimes that’s just the way it is. We feel that the benefit of the event outweighs the negative. I don’t know if there is a solution to make everybody happy. We try to meet with them, sometimes we come to a solution, and sometimes we don’t. I know there’s a skateboard festival in Huntington Beach that has the same problem, the gay pride festival in West Hollywood has the same problem—it’s the nature of the beast.
How have you been able to generate a bigger crowd each year?
Maybe because the word is out on this event, or maybe it’s because of the talent. We don’t really have a strategy, it’s more like street marketing. We all have our connections, and Sunset Junction is known. We have our own Web site, we have something on MySpace. There was a documentary done on Sunset Junction about eight years ago that played at ArcLight, and it was in several film festivals.
[We get vendors] through word of mouth. We have 250 vendors; about 40 to 50 of those are nonprofits. I would say our vendors have a 70-percent return rate.
Is the bike park part of a green initiative?
There are a lot of bike riders in this part of town, and we’ve gotten a lot of calls from people asking if they can ride to the festival instead of driving. So we decided to have a place for them to park their bikes. It cuts down on traffic, it saves the environment, and it’s a statement of alternative transportation.
Tell me more about the skateboard park. How did this come about?
Red Bull sponsored [Sunset Junction's summer photo class], and the brand has a series of events throughout the city. One of them was a skateboard park in Venice Beach. When I saw it, I thought it was really cool, and I wanted to do that at Sunset Junction. Red Bull is sponsoring the skateboard park.
How do you secure talent?
I book some of it, and two people on my team book some of it. Because the street fair has a legacy, we all have connections with different people. [People on my staff] are DJs—they’re into world music, so they know those people. I’m into soul music, and I book most of the soul acts.
What do you do when you have unforeseen challenges, like unpredictable weather?
We did have a challenge a couple years ago. When we were setting up, we had some flooding. We were biting our nails for about an hour thinking about shutting down the festival. But we ended up moving one block, and it went over successfully. I don’t think you really know what you’re going to do until it happens.
