I just got off the phone with my friend Phil. He and his wife Masae were the first couple we ever shot – the very first test shoot we ever did when we embarked on this approach to sex and cinema nearly ten years ago. We’ve stayed in touch with them over the years. We’ve shot a couple more tests with them (to work out threesome shooting), they house sat for us a few Summers ago, and we used their house for our shoot last month during the Blizzard of 2005. They’re two of the nicest, sexiest, most authentic people we know.

Anyway Phil called to see how our adventure in San Francisco went and to let me know that they feel like they’re at a point where they want to make a lasting statement about how important sexuality is in their relationship. He and his wife and their lover would like to shoot a released love-scene and interview with us. I couldn’t be more honored that they’d ask us to help them make that statement.

It also gives me a nice feeling of “closing the circle”. When we first approached Phil and Masae with our ideas I didn’t have much beyond a few Legshow Magazine layouts and some decidedly unsexy corporate work to show them. We wanted them to get naked, have sex, and then lets us take the tapes back to the edit suite to work on them, all with the promise that they wouldn’t end up on the internet. I don’t know why they trusted us but they did, and we made them a beautiful little tape that they still enjoy watching to this day (I think they’ve shown it to a few other people too.)

Since that first shoot with Phil and Masae, we’ve become a little more sophisticated with our approach. We shot them with a mismatched paired of Hi8 cameras; now we shoot a pair with Super16s with matched lenses. When we first shot Phil and Masae we went on pure instinct; now that instinct is informed by years of experimentation and study. But one thing was there and the begining, and hasn’t changed at all — Phil and Masae were and are two very real people who agreed to share their very real sex with our cameras. That night they might have been having sex for the camera that night, but they were together for each other. And ten years later they still are. And from what they’ve told me, their sex is better (and wilder!) than ever.

-T.C.

We make films about being in love, and how much fun it is to have sex with someone when you’re in love. One of my fondest hopes is that our films might help start an evening off in the right direction, might help set the tone for a night of lusty, lovingly carnal revelry.

In the coming weeks we’re going to set up a page on our Website specifically to solicit and share people’s stories of how watching a DVD from Comstock Films helped them set the mood for a romantic evening. But in the meantime, if any of you feel like jumping in right now with a story of how watching Marie and Jack helped set the mood for a loving and lusty evening, we’d love to hear it!

-T.C.

“There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

Another big snow storm is headed in tonight, so as soon as the car was fixed, we scooted out of the city without seeing Christo’s gates. For years I’ve had a Christoesque idea (but much smaller in scale) involving kites and water. Out were we live there’s just the right sort of place to do it. Maybe when the weather warms up a bit.

-T.C.

Between the run-up, travel to and from, and doing the actual work, we are still recovering. I’ve got a nasty chest cold this morning, and Mrs.C still asleep. Our car’s exhaust system gave up the ghost curbside at the begining of the outbound leg of our trip, and we’ve “stranded” for the last two days waiting for an engine pipe. And it looks like another big snow storm is moving in later today, which could further delay us from getting back to our own bed. I haven’t seen my wife have an orgasm in a week at least. But over the long weekend I did a few other people having orgasms.

I saw Khym smiling and clenching and cumming. I saw Tina ride wave after wave of orgasm after orgasm for at least 20 minutes. I saw Jen (hands cuffed behind her back) respond favorably to a vibrator and dildo combination. I saw Desiree come several times, to fingers, tongue, dildo and cock.

I saw Melanie (looking every bit the part of a modern 50’s pin-up) ride her lover’s oversized black cock to orgasmic bliss. I saw Brett mount her lover and then grind away, until her teeth clenched and her body suddered. And I saw our second Desiree find her way to three distinct orgasms, each one accompanied by joyous sobbing.

We saw men having orgasms this weekend too. Matt and Bill shot deep into their lovers’ bellies. Ben blasted thick white jets of semen as his wife stroked him into her hungry mouth.

Of course that’s just the begining of what we saw and heard. There’s much, much more that I can’t wait to share with you. But first I think we’re going to get our car fixed, get back home, kick this cold, and have a few orgasms of our own!

-T.C.

We had some eroneous code in our store that was preventing some of you from ordering from us. You probably been getting an error like:

Auth Response: The orderid: 19921108488224 has already been used. The value must be unique

This has been fixed and orders should now go through with no problem.

Many thanks to those of you who were persistent enough to keep trying, and follow up with us by phone and/or e-mail!

-T.C.

P.S. We’re half way between S.F. and home. Mrs. C and I are exhausted to the point of near collapse. But the trip was amazing, the film’s in the lab. I’ll have more to tell and images to show very soon. If what I saw through the lens is what we got on the film, I think we’ve got something really, really special!

There’s a long list of people to thank. For now let me just say that whenever I do a project I end up feeling humbled by the level of dedication people are willing to bring to the work we do. But in this trip to the Bay Area I was utterly overwhelmed my crew’s and subjects’ willingness to believe that this work is worthwhile, to do whatever it took to make things happen, and to bring the best of what each one of them had to offer to our collective effort. My deepest and most heart-felt thanks to all of you!

-T.C.

Many thanks to those of you who have already decided to take the plunge and “invest” in Comstock Films! It truly warms my heart to see so much support for work that we’re doing, and send us off on our San Francisco adventure with our confidence and optimism freshly re-invigorated. And as we were looking at the pre-orders this morning and trying to figure out how we could give people who’ve pre-ordered an acknowledgement (a stock certificate perhaps?) my wife had an idea:

“Why not give people who pre-order access to a password protected directory where they can see previews from the title they’ve purchased?”

Why not indeed! So that’s what we’ll be doing when we get back next week. While I load and sync and catagorize footage, she’ll be putting together the infrastructure. When you pre-order any Comstock Films title, we’ll give you membership in the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, compete with a password to the NYSSV Secret Stash where you can see preview clips of the title you’ve ordered – something extra on top of the stills and sample clips that will be available on the rest of the site. Sound like fun? It sure does to me! (But then I love the illicit thrill of sharing a sexy secret!)

We’re taking a digital camera out West with us. I’ll see if I can post a production still or two over the weekend.

-T.C.

No philosophizing today. We’re at t-minus 48 hours from leaving the homestead, getting our dependents settled at a relative’s house and finding our way to LGA for our flight to Oakland. There are a few crucial details yet to be attended to, like making sure the seven crates of gear shipped out West are on track to arrive before we do, FedExing 14,000 feet of Kodak 7274 (big hassle to take film on airplanes since 9/11, I’m not doing hand inspection of 40 cans of film!), and of course making sure our clothes and toothbrushes are packed.

In the midst of this we did manage to get our e-commerce/shopping cart set up for Comstock Films, and we’re running a pre-order special on upcoming titles. Half off the regular price if you order before we go to press, and fully refundable if you find yourself short of rent money before we send the master out for replication. It’s got to be about the cheapest, lowest risk way to become an “investor” in a film project!

Aside from providing a little working capital to grease the production wheels, this pre-release offer will help us gauge interest in the titles so we can better judge how many DVDs to run. We underestimated with Marie and Jack and had to go through the added expense and hassle of re-upping. (Of course that did let us do a little redesign of the insert to include our Penthouse Magazine blurb, which should help with brick and motar sales, so maybe our underestimation will end up being a blessing.) For better or worse (mostly better I think) business is as much a part of filmcraft as knowing filmstocks or f-stops.

I’ve got a lot more to say about beer and Prohibition and porn, but I’m going to save it for a little later. In the meantime, Forbes.com has two articles that provide some good background information for my next rant.

-T.C.

Forbes Article One

Forbes Article Two

So far this year we’ve managed to get surprised by our anniversary (”Is it today?” said Mrs.C), Mrs.C’s birthday, and now Valentine’s Day. No flowers, no box of chocolate, no card. I’m quite sure Mrs.C doesn’t have anything for me either.

This is one of the downsides of being an independent. Schedules are less regular. The boundries between work and personal time dissolve and then vanish. It’s hard to remember what day of the week it is. Life becomes a series of small crisises, punctuate by larger ones. Birthdays and anniversaries and holidays get forgotten.

Of course there’s a sweet side too. I’ll make sure to bore you with that too!

-T.C.

I’m not quite forty years old, which means I can remember when the idea of imported beer was pretty exotic. Considering the American alternatives at the time, it’s no small wonder that folks would get pretty excited about beers like San Miguel or Dos Equis or Tuborg (the golden beer of Danish kings). But what a lot of people don’t know is that American beer wasn’t always characterized by the thin, bitter lagers that Budweiser and Miller and Coors offer.

Before Prohibition, America had breweries in almost every town. Some of them, like Anheuser-Busch were already on their way to becoming national giants, but there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands more that served regions, or cities, or even just neighborhoods, often run by German immigrants who presumably knew a thing or two about brewing good beer.

Then came Prohibition. The biggest brewers got into near-beer or soda pop or anything else that kept their labor and captial working, but the little breweries were virtually wiped out. In 1933 the giants like Anheuser-Busch emerged from Prohibtion with almost no competition, and after a dozen or so years of drinking bathtub gin and moonshine, Americans seemed to have forgotten that beer could be more than a cheap way to get a buzz.

It took nearly 60 years for Americans to begin to re-discover that we were capable of brewing good beer. I still remember my first pint of Cascade Head Ale at a McMininan’s pub in Oregon. It was like a revelation. In one sip, I finally tasted what a hundred bottles of Pabst and Rainer had merely been hinting at. Sure, it still came with a nice buzz (especially their Terminator Stout), but the mellow high was only half the pleasure. This was beer you really could drink for the taste!

This Friday I’m going to sit down with Violet Blue and Carol Queen and do a radio show about why porn is so bad. I think the story of American beer and what it became under the influence and decades-long after effects of Prohibition is part of the answer.

-T.C.