An admission: When Bill and Desiree first contacted me I was hesitant about casting them. They were both very good looking, self-assured, well-spoken, and I had no doubt that they would gleefully deliver a lusty sex scene. But I was worried that we might not be up to the task; that we’d end up with something that made people think, “Oh, how sweet. Comstock Films does older people too. Isn’t that nice.” I didn’t want Bill and Desiree to end up as a sideshow, no matter how sincere.

Bill and Desiree

I needn’t have been worried. What we ended up with was sweet, but not in some cartoon caricature of “the sexy older couple”. Bill took wicked glee as he put Desiree through her paces, bring her to orgasm with fingers and tongue and toys and then finally with his cock, before giving himself over to his own pleasure. Their sex was real and raw and present, but giddy and playful as well. Then we sat and chatted for about an hour about how they met and how they fit together so perfectly. Bill read a love poem he wrote for Desiree, and our make-up artist and Mrs.C were swallowing hard and passing tissues to blot their eyes.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

-T.C.

I have been quoted as saying “Any asshole can make something sexy when you can’t show anything, but it takes effort to make things sexy when you can show everything.”

So this morning I’m an asshole. I can live with that.

Ben and Desiree

I’ll have more of Ben and Desiree to show you very soon!

-T.C.

Recently it was insinuated that Comstock Films produces exploitative, gay for pay lesbian sex scenes. The accuser based this charge on the fact that the lesbians he knows have “absolutely NO interest in performing for the pleasure of straight men.”

This seems a rather narrow, puritanical view of how lesbian women might choose to enjoy their sexuality, why they might wish to share themselves with the wider world by appearing on camera, or whom is entitled to enjoy watching depictions of lesbian sex (authentic or otherwise).

Brett and Melanie

At a personal level I’m stung by a remark like this. I am not utterly free from doubt about the worth and legitimacy of my work. It is a given in our culture that paying people to have sex is fundamentally wrong, no matter what the reason. Photographing them only compounds the infraction. So the suggestion that I or my subjects are motivated solely by money hits me in a spot where I feel particularly tender. (Of course I am motivated by money. Film is a hobby only for the independently wealthy.)

I suppose that’s what my art profs. from so long ago meant by “taking risks”; if you put your work in the world, in the hopes of approbation and adulation, you might not like every single thing you hear. A friend of mine advises “thick face, black blood”, which apparently is a Chinese phrase meaning “Don’t take it personally, and if you can’t help taking it personally, don’t let the other guy know he got to you.”

It’s also distressing to me that someone could so easily dismiss Ashley and Kisha, or Brett and Melanie, or Tina and Jennifer as “gay for pay”. It’s so presumptuous and so utterly dehumanizing. An apology is owed. Not to me; to them.

-T.C.

Since back in early January, when I made the decision to shoot this new work on film, I’ve been fairly well eating a hole in my stomach with worry. With the exception of the very biggest porn studios, nobody shoots hardcore sex on film. Even when studios like Vivid or Wicked do shoot on film, they emulate Hollywood-style production techniques. Nobody shoots spontaneous, try to keep up with the action, “gonzo-style” sex on film.

There are some good reasons not to. Film is much more expensive than video (a 60 minute MiniDV cassette is about $3.95. After processing and telecine, 10 minutes of Kodak 16mm filmstock is about $250.) Video records sound, film doesn’t (necessitating a whole second system to record audio). With video you only have to change tapes every 30-60 minutes, with film you have to change mags every 10 minutes. With video you can check what you’re doing as you go. With film you take your meter reading, double check, and then trust that you know what you’re doing.

All of this adds up to making shooting film a higher stakes, higher stress approach (even if you’re “only” shooting on video, there’s still plenty of stress), and makes you wonder why anyone would go through the expense and bother of shooting film. After all, it’s not like you’re ever going to need to make a print to show in a theater – this stuff is going straight to DVD, right? But all the stress just seems to fade away when you see the way human skin looks on film. Faces look better, bodies look better, cunts and cocks look better. (If you’re making a movie about sex, what could possibly be more important than how the cunts and cocks look?)

Yesterday I picked up the Digibeta transfers from last month’s work my post house and today I got my first look at it as it was loading into the editing system. In a word, it’s luscious. Somehow film makes it both more “real” looking, and more magical looking too. Once you get a taste of what real sex looks like on real film, it’s hard to imagine going back to video. I’ll have some screen grabs soon – but not tonight. Tonight Mrs.C and I are drinking scotch whiskey and enjoying the way the warm buzz compliments the feelings of both relief and pride that we actually captured what set out to capture!

-T.C.

Last night we sent out our March 2005 newsletter and within minutes got back the usually collection of dead e-mail addresses. These usually are things like wet4you2002@aol.com or WePlayHardCpl@yahoo.com (not to my knowledge actual addresses); I think people go through e-mail addresses like these rather quickly. But this morning I awoke to two disappointing unsubs.

One was Jenifur of www.jenifur.com. I found her when googling name of the band that Billy Tallent got his big break with in the Bruce McDonald film Hard Core Logo. When I found her site I sent her a note saying something like, “Have you seen Hard Core Logo? It’s a great flick and there’s a band in it called ‘Jenifur’!” She wrote back asking where she might find it, so I sent her a link.

The other was from porn legend Tom Byron. I met Tom in the AdultDVDTalk.com Wednesday Night Chat. That was about 18 months ago; Marie and Jack was starting to break through commercially, and I was beginning to plot ways to shoot a follow-up on film. I teased Tom (and several other porn directors) quite a bit, suggesting that they trade up from their Sony PD150s to a real camera like the Aminima.

To Tom’s credit he took the teasing in stride (not so for some of his colleagues). We traded our current releases; a copy of my Marie and Jack for his then just released Evolution Erotica title Ass Eaters Unanimous (a full-length disc devoted to women licking men’s assholes). Moreover, Tom was surprisingly forthcoming with me in private conversations about the economics of the porn business, which helped me further refine my ideas on how to produce and market “real” sex on film.

Tom doesn’t come around ADT much anymore, either in chat, or on the forums, but lots of other porn industry people are regulars. Some of them, like Jenna Jameson use ADT primarily as a promotional venue, but others are “pillars” of the ADT community. ADT also has a wealth of viewer-written reviews of thousands of porn titles, from reviewers coming from both (all?) genders, and a wide range of tastes. The ADT Message Forums have a lot of chatter from slavering fanboys and hardcore addicts, but they also have hosted some of the most erudite and entertaining discussions of smut I’ve ever participated in. Look for threads/posts from folks like: Asmodeus, Bill, billyjizz, BSD, cobalt60, croy, Crucifixio Jones, GaySatyr, Hardware, Harri Patel, Kami,, Kimi Lixx, Kperv, licker, lindi, Loraine (that’s my friend Ell), Louisa, Max Booty, MLyons, oatmeal, petemurphy, Redish, Sir Noel Plum, skronker, Steph (ADT is her baby), sunchen, Tony C (that’s me), Tricia Devereaux (yes, the Tricia Devereaux), ultradamno, Valentino, VincentVanGauge, Walter Burns (have a primer on film theory handy). No doubt you’ll be taken aback by what some these people have to say, but then that’s the point, right?

I mention this because porn is still in its infancy, and its aestetics have barely been explored. Film itself is only 100 or so years old, and it’s only in the last 30 years that explicit depictions of sexuality have become widely available, and most of the discussion of porn centers on how it can or should be controlled. There is not yet a robust creative and critical community devoted to the aesthetics of the collision of sex and the moving image. But there might be the start of one on ADT. No doubt, dear reader, that your participation in that community would be welcome! And if you’re not receiving the Comstock Films Newsletter, but you’d like to be, you can do so by clicking here.

-T.C.

No, this isn’t about Martha Stewart.

Last week I rather triumphantly posted a link to a rough cut of the Xana and Dax interview, arranged into a nice, cogent sequence. I say triumphant, because it took nearly a year of off again on again work to finally find the story. (Please don’t misunderstand, it’s not the only thing I was working on last year, not by far. But still, it’s no fun having something nagging at you, seemingly insoluable.) Having cracked the interview I thought it would be smooth sailing when it came to blending the resulting 17 minute story with the 40+ minutes of their lovemaking.

Well smooth sailing it wasn’t. I thrashed for most of the weekend getting nothing done. I started to second guess my decisions about the way the story was sequenced and was growing more and more frustrated. A four hour phone call with my friend Ell didn’t help, nor did staying up the rest of the night analyzing our access logs. I finally got to sleep just as the sun was coming up, woke up a couple of hours later, and then thrashed the rest of the morning, accomplishing nothing. I was well beyond not being able to see the forest for the trees. Finally around noon, I more or less begged Mrs.C to come in to the edit bay and help me.

By six that evening we had a third of the interview/lovescene intercut sequencing done. That leaves nearly ten more minutes, but it’s starting to take on a real rhythm. As a reward for the hard work, I took the time this morning to really refine a three minute section. It still needs a few tweaks, but I think it’s in good enough shape to offer as a preview:

Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract

Enjoy!

-T.C.

Proud of My Red State Values

-T.C.

One of the things that’s been seeping into my thick skull, is that as much hard work lies ahead of me in post, I’ve got twice as much work ahead of me marketing the work that we’ve done.

Post is easy, all it takes is the time. If something’s not coming together, it’s a 90% certainty that it’s just because you haven’t spent enough time working the footage. All things considered, I think the seven scenes/interviews we shot in the last month and half are going to take less time per finished minute than most things I’ve worked on (cross my fingers I don’t regret typing that!) But marketing… Ugh. Marketing. Isn’t the idea to make something that’s so good that “the world will beat a path to your door”? Nice as that sounds, I realized that that’s a one in a million. Creating is hard work. Selling what you’ve created is even harder work.

Selling Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story was an educational experience to say the least. You can’t sell people something by telling them what it isn’t. “It’s not amateur” or “It’s not gonzo” or “It’s not really a documentary”. You can’t sell an isn’t. So I’ve been playing around with different buzz phrases. “Porn for people who don’t like porn”, “Films for people who like sex”, and others too embarrassing to mention.

Recently I’ve been auditioning “Red State Values, Blue State Visuals”. I don’t like it because I don’t believe family or loyalty or commitment belong to the Red States. And I don’t believe that sexual happiness belongs to the Blue States. But I do like it because everytime I say it to someone they seem to understand what I mean right away. And I do like it because it seems to say that whatever our political differences, we are sexual beings. I like it because it says that showing sex on film doesn’t have to mean showing sex that is devoid of the human connection we all yearn for.

So we’re going to give it a whirl, maybe even make some t-shirts. (We’re already working on New York Society for the Suppression of Vice t-shirts.) I’m also taking a long hard look at “Another Hardcore Love Story from Comstock Films”, as in:

Ashley and Kisha:The Right Fit
Another hardcore love story from Comstock Films

Something about how that rolls off the tongue seems to be the right fit for what we’re doing!

-T.C.

I’ve finally got the Xana and Dax interview roughed out into a pretty cogent little narrative. At just over 17 1/2 minute, it has a beginning, a middle and and end, with some nice little diversions along the way – like facesitting, cocksucking, and the joys of doggy-style sex.

As a treat to you, dear reader (at least I hope it’s a treat,) I’ve uploaded a QuickTime movie of their lovely little story. It’s nearly 20 megs, so you’ll need broadband as well as Quicktime 6.5 to view it. But even at 20 megs, it’s very heavily compressed, so please don’t judge the DVD quality by the .mov file. (You’re much too sophisticated to do something like that, right?)

Do listen to all the sweet things they say about each other. Do watch for the subtle little facial expressions that let you know that they really do love one another – the slight nod of the head or wrinkle of the nose. And do imagine what it will look like when this is blended with the roughly 45 minutes of lovemaking we shot. If you’d like to see full-sized pictures of what Xana and Dax look like making love, click here.

So with those caveats and provisos, I’d like to invite you to meet Xana and Dax, a quarter hour of their reflections on falling in love, staying in love, and having great sex. I think you’re going to like them!

-T.C.

I just came across this little bit of nonsense:

Lesbian’s picture in tux banned from school yearbook

It reminded me that Mrs.C wore a tux to our wedding nearly 10 years ago (so did I).

Hang in there, Kelli Davis! Stay strong! It’s not like that in every part of this great nation. Not yet, anyway.

-T.C.