Even a small film is a collaborative effort, taking the enthusiastic cooperation of everyone involved. Damon and Hunter were real troopers. My wife (in the foreground) has been a real trooper for going on ten years.

-T.C.

This week, on a site I frequent called Adult DVD Talk, a porn company called 3rd Degree anounced the release of video featuring asian women which they cleverly entitled Slant Eye for the Straight Guy.

Porn has a long tradition of riffing on mainstream titles; things like On Golden Blonde, Forrest Hump, or Edward Penishands. These are gems of wit compared to the trend in contemporary gonzo titles, featuring catchy titles like Big Black Wet Asses, Cumfart Cocktails,or Teenage Anal Princesses. And these beauties are positively benign compared to countless titles that reflect a profound fear and hatred of women or sex or both; titles like Cum Dumpsters, Throat Gaggers or I Never Knew Kendra Jade was Such a Cock Up Her Ass Gang Bang Slut. (Doesn’t that just roll off your tongue?) It’s against this backdrop that there’s a now long running thread on ADT dicsussing whether or not Slant Eye for the Straight Guy is an offensive title.

The defense of the title goes something like this: it was an asian, female staffer that came up with the title; no offense was intended; and anyway, it’s just porn. Quoting Mike Quasar a director for Zero Tolerance, “I still can’t believe that this is still an issue. Do any of you have any clue as to how incredibly insignificant porn is in the grand scheme of things?” To me, Mike’s comment is a sad half-truth.

I think of porn as the collision of sex and the moving image, and no one could describe either sex or the moving image as insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Yet somehow, in this collision, both sex and the moving image emerge diminished. It is difficult to find good sex in porn, and near impossible to find good filmmaking. Instead, the universal human experience of sexual desire and the most important art and communication medium of our time are combined to produce work that rarely even rises to the level of mundane.

Yet in spite of this, if anything, porn seems to be overly significant in the grand scheme of things. It’s significant enough that a little over a year ago, and in the midst of a war, our Commander in Cheif saw fit to declare Protection from Pornography Week. It’s significant enough that the mainstream media routinely freebases the porn industry; no sweeps-week is complete with some sort of porn exclusive. (These come in two flavors, either Porn Is More Mainstream Than Ever! or The Real, Ugly Truth Behind the Flesh Trade!) For something so insignificant, porn sure gets a lot of press!

At any rate, it’s a school day, which gives me seven uninterupted hours to work on syncing Damon and Hunter’s scene, seven hours to match the images of sucking and fucking and loving to the slurping and smacking of lips and the firm gentle thud of bodies joyously colliding (there’s that word again.) Certainly there are folks who will be at least as offended by what I will do with Damon and Hunter as anyone is by Slant Eye for the Straight Guy. Hopefully I’ll have the good sense to say nothing. Hopefully the work will speak for itself. But if I can’t hold my tongue, one thing you can be sure I won’t say is, “It’s just porn.”

-T.C.

Today I’m syncing up the film from Ashley and Kisha’s love scene with the audio track. Because my older model cameras don’t burn timecode onto the film, and because the nature of the action doesn’t allow for picking up a slate for most shots, much of the syncing has to be done off of visual cues. It’s tedious work, made more tedious by the fact that we shoot two cameras which makes for twice as much work. I’ve been at it since about 9:00AM this morning and have about 75% done. My eyes are tired and I’ve sort of hit a wall. Time to bitch about it to the blog, right?

Although this work is done on editing equipment, it’s not really editing, it’s prep work – there’s no creativity, and next to no craft. On a bigger production this work would be done by an assistant, some hotshot kid just out of film school getting paid $5/hour, or maybe even an unpaid intership. In exchange, she’d get a chance to watch the master work. It’s not as bad a deal as it might sound. There are very few real artists when it comes to editing. I wish I had had a chance to apprentice myself to someone who really knew what she was doing.

BTW: Using “she” in the above paragraph isn’t just a way to be clever and PC. Back in the early days of Hollywood, the entire editing process was regarded as “women’s work”. Men did the directing and photography and once that was done, the tedious, detail-oriented job of putting it all together was left to women. As a result, editing is was one of the first places that women rose to prominence in filmmaking.

Anyways, I am at the very begining of the editing process on Ashley and Kisha. In fact, editing the love-scene is easy compared to the much more difficult task of turning the raw footage from their interview into a story. Then the two elements are merged and hopefully a sweet and sexy little film is the result. Kisha had one of the best orgasms I’ve had the pleasure of filming. Maybe knowing that’s at the end will make it easier to sit through 15-20 minutes of my pretense.

-T.C.

One more from last Saturday’s shoot.

From last Saturday’s shoot.

“You take it on faith, you take it to the heart. The waiting is the hardest part.”

We shot last Saturday, during the big blizzard. Monday I took the film into the lab. Wednesday I sent over instructions for the colorist. Thursday morning the colorist called me pre-session for some clarifications, and that afternoon my account exec called me to let me know the worktapes were going out FedEx that evening. Today is Friday, and today is the day the FedEx man is supposed to bring me my transfers; eight cans of film and a long day’s work distilled down into four of those tiny MiniDV worktapes. (Don’t worry, the “real” transfers are on Digibeta.)

I’ve already screened, loaded and cataloged the interviews (shot on video.) It’s good stuff; some of it is very good stuff. But today will be our first look at the sex, and the sex is why we do what we do, and that’s why the waiting is the hardest part.

-T.C.

My name is Tony Comstock, I am a filmmaker, and this is my blog.

I make films about sex. I work with straight people, gay people, lesbian people. I don’t really care who sticks what where. I do care whether or not the people I work with are actually enjoying being with each other and being on camera. I’m not a good enough filmmaker to create the illusion of people enjoying themselves, I can only hope to capture it when it happens. To that end I work exclusively with people who have sexual relationships with each other when they’re off camera.

Some people call what I do porn. I pay people to have sex while I film them, so I suppose it is not an inaccurate description. Still, it’s a label I’m uncomforatble with. As a woman we worked with last weekend said, “Porn is so degrading to sex.” I couldn’t agree more, and I’d add that porn degrades filmmaking. I’m trying the best I can not to be degrading to sex or filmmaking.

Right now I’m in the middle of production of several scenes. We shot two last weekend here in New York, and have several more lined up for the middle of next month out in the Bay Area. I decided to start this blog because the process of organizing, shooting and editing these scenes makes me think too much about what it is I’m trying to do with this work, and a blog seems like it might be good place to vent, masticate and ponder.

When I was in school, most of my teachers encouraged the keeping of a journal as an adjunct to artmaking, a practice I’ve rejected for my entire professional life. Yet here I am, nearly twenty years later, journalling. Most of what my teachers tried to teach me has turned out to be true. You can add “keep a journal” to a long list of their good advice.

A word of warning and a plea to anyone who might read this. I am a terrible speller and typist. My errors defy spell check, and leave those whom I prevail upon to proof-read for me utterly baffled. I humbly ask you, (dear reader,) to give me the benefit of the doubt. I am not the semi-literate idiot I might sometimes appear to be.

-T.C.