Say Fred and Wilma:

For those of you looking for quality, classy porn without the comercial, “bow-chicka-bow-wow” feel, Comstock Films are some you MUST check out! Wilma gives Comstock Films two big thumbs up!!

Tony’s couples are REAL couples, not some paired actors/actresses all caked made-up. These folks are the real deal, natural beauties and handsome gentlemen. The love and caring felt between lovers is evident; Tony captures this beautifully. But, the fucking action is hardcore!!! Yummy!!! This approach, in my opinion, appeals to both women and men.

An early inspiration for Comstock Films were the amateur photos that I started to see online back in the mid-nineties. Like Fred and Wilma, these folks were putting their sex photos online for the sheer thrill of it. Often (but not always) anonymous, these photo offered rich testimony to the idea that voyeurism could be part of an absolutely consensual, mutually satisfying, and altogether fun encounter.

In the five or so years preceding the production of Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story Mrs. C and I shot perhaps a dozen “private studies” with couples like Fred and Wilma. Never intended for release, these studies allowed me to develop a technical and creative approach that we hoped would bring the heat, joy, and “realness” that is so abundant in a site like Fred and Wilma’s to a film about sex.

I hope you’ll agree with me that the investment of time was worthwhile.
-TC

Says The Porn Hater:

Ever see a really hot sex scene in a mainstream Hollywood movie and think “Wow, that’s really hot. Too bad they cut to the curtains blowing in the wind right when it got good”? Ever wish someone would make a film with real sex that’s as hot as the sex scenes in Mulholland Drive or Body Heat? Well then you need to check out Comstock Films.

“While he doesn’t have a large catalog of films (yet), what he does have is so much sexier than what is normally referred to as “erotica” that the term just doesn’t do it justice. It’s like calling a Ferrari a car or Scarlett Johansen pretty. Make sure you watch the preview clips and see just how far ahead of the porn industry Tony Comstock is.”

Thank you Porn Hater!

-TC

Our place is becoming the crashpad of choice for some of the most powerful of the truly independent women’s voices in the porn biz. Last Spring found Steph of ADT in my bed, and next weekend my sheets will be wrapped around the irascible, irrepressible, and always lovable Violet Blue. (No, not that Violet Blue, the real Violet Blue.) In a world where the idea of a woman’s voice is rarely more than a marketing ploy, Steph and Violet are the real deal.

As the ‘momma bear’ of ADT, Steph walks a fine line between maintaining an atmosphere that supports the rancorous exchange of free ideas, while not letting the place sink too far into fanboy/raincoater malaise. ADT was established as a place where the people who actually pay money to watch porn could have a voice, and contains thousands of reviews written by the fans themselves. In addition, ADT host a thriving message board, and you can be sure that anytime a porn company puts out a product where the promises on the boxcover don’t match the contents of the disc, it’ll be splashed all over the ADT forums, with an ensuing embroglio over whether or not the company was deliberately trying to deceive, or just stupid. (Sadly it’s usually the latter not the former.) As a result, Steph has the distinction of being threatened with lawsuits by nearly ever major player in the adult video business. (Fortunately threats don’t amount to much in the face of incontrovertible fact.)

Violet has made a career (and plenty of enemies) giving people the unvarnished truth about sex; whether it’s the facts on HIV prevention or the sorry state of the jizz biz. The author of more than half a dozen books, she stands virtually as a one woman island proclaiming “Sex doesn’t suck. The sex business doesn’t have to suck either.” In Violet I see a Jane to my John the Baptist; an often lonely and angry voice in a sea of ignorance, greed, and indifference. As a result, Violet has legions of devoted fans who know they can trust her to tell it like it is.

Both of these women have been incredibly supportive of our efforts. Until Violet declared Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story one of the five best films of 2003, getting people to even look at our film was tough. After that, doors began to open, phone calls got returned, and sales picked up.

Steph continues to go out of her way to highlight our efforts on on ADT. A tiny little studio that doesn’t give them a nickle of advertising revenue mysteriously appears in prominent places on the site and my sales pitch changes to “Did you see the nice listing we got on ADT?” More often than not that closes the deal right there.

I’m proud that we’ve made films that these women have put their reputations and their businesses behind. We’ve worked hard and taken risks to show that sex films don’t have to suck. But that pride doesn’t make me any less appreciative of Violet or Steph taking the chance to go out on a limb for us, spending a little of their hard-earned credibility to let the world know that they think we’re doing something special.

So anyway, Violet will be in my bed at the end of the month. Sadly, like Steph’s visit, she’ll be sharing the bed with her beloved and not me. They’re in town as a part of the Extra Action Marching Band’s East Coast tour. I’m going to do something I rarely do, which is go out late at night to a hip venue like The Knitting Factory and see them play. If it’s late I’ll crash on the sofa bed, but otherwise I’ll beat it on home and let the two of them have their little Manhattan love nest.

See you soon, Violet!

-TC

Or in this case buttons and banners.

Over the past couple of months we’ve had a number of requests for banners or buttons that people could put on their blogs or websites to declare their support for Comstock Films. Mrs.C finally found the time to put a couple put together and here they are:

I’ll admit I was a little startled when these requests started coming it. It was almost like having fans or something. Like we were Beautiful Agony or Suicide Girls or something. Not unwelcome in the least, but definitely unexpected.

I’ll assume that if you know how to copy these and put them on your blog, you know how to link them too. And if you do put one of them up somewhere, please do let me know!

-TC

Tags: Real Life Real People Real Sex

Mrs.C hates it when I do this. She’s the one in charge of managing our bandwidth and she thinks putting a 26 minute preview of a work in progress is not the best use of our limited resources.

Too bad, honey.

We got pre-orders for this title the day we put it in our DVD shop, and since then we’ve had a steady stream of folks who have taken us up on our offer of a really good price if they can just wait a while for us to finish film. Those pre-orders have been encouraging, but they’ve also had the unexpected side effect of making me feel the weight of people’s expectations. A few folks have written asking for updates, and one or two decided to take advantage of our policy of giving refunds on pre-orders to anyone who asks. But the vast majority of folks have simply been waiting, quietly and patiently while Mrs.C and I have worked on this title.

Damon and Hunter: Doing It Together (formerly “For the Love”) represents a number of firsts here at Comstock Films. It’s our first gay film, and it will also be our first shot on film release. If I can refer you to an earlier blog post “Team Work” you’ll see Mrs.C and me, each with a Super-16 camera on our shoulder. Once you figure stock, processing and telecine, 16mm film costs about a dollar per second of footage – and that’s for each camera. As you can see from the photo, when we shoot a sex scene we shoot two cameras.

We chose to shoot the sex on film because film give the lovemaking a look and feel that you just can’t get from videotape. Never mind the FinalCutPro plugins and 24P cameras you might have heard about, for now the only way to make your work look like it was shot on film is to shoot it on film. But when you compare that to the $3.00 or so that a MiniDV tape costs (60 minutes), even the $30 cost of a Digibeta (30 minutes) tape, you can see why our choice to shoot this on film has made us extra conscious about making sure that we take the time to make the film that we want to make, the film you expect us to make, the film that needs to be made.

But the backbone of this film isn’t what Mrs.C and I do with the film cameras. As delightful as it is to see Damon and Hunter naked and fucking and sucking, and as beautiful as it looks when it’s shot on film, sex is only really interesting to me when I start to understand who Damon and Hunter are, and why, out all the people they might have fallen in love with, they fell in love with each other. Without that understanding it’s choreography, but it’s not dance; it’s running a scrimmage instead of playing a game.

What I’d like to show you today is what that backbone looks like laid bare. The clip I’ve got is 26 minutes of Damon and Hunter telling who they are and how they met and how the sexual pleasure they give to (and take from!) one another is a huge and important part of who they are as a couple. As you watch, you’ll notice that there are some black pauses; chapter marks if you like, places where I want let you catch your breath for a moment. There’s still sound work to be done, so to really enjoy this clip put on some earphones, or if you have external speakers, turn them up. Hunter says some funny shit half under his breath, and you don’t want to miss it!

You’ll also want to keep in mind that this is a 27 minute clip squeezed down to 21 megabytes. Naturally that takes more than a little compression, and degraded the audio and video. But you’re all savvy net surfers, so I don’t really have to tell you that, do I?

While you’re watching I’d like you to imagine what this story is is going to feel like once we start integrating the footage of Damon and Hunter’s lovemaking into it. For those of you who’ve seen Marie and Jack or Xana and Dax, you’re halfway there. Even if you’ve only seen our previews, you’ve still got a pretty good place to start.

When it’s done, Doing It Together is going to be every bit as raunchy, every bit as raw, and every bit as sweet as anything we’ve done so far. Thank you so much for waiting as long as you have. We won’t make you wait much more!

Rough Cut: Damon and Hunter Narrative Backbone, Interview Only, Scratch Audio

Enjoy!

-TC

Tags: Damon Demarco, Hunter James, Real Gay Sex, Real Gay Love

The same friend from the Freddy and Eddy message board was kind enough to send me scans of the Men’s Fitness cover and article, and the rumor is true. The August 2005 issue has an interview with Tera Patrick and gives us her list of the ten best adult videos that “are best for for passionate together time.”

Well guess what? Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story hold the number one spot, beating out titles like Stud Hunters from Femme Films and Beautiful from Wicked Entertainment.

Of course it’s just one woman’s opinion, and I’m not sure I agree. Good as Marie and Jack is, I think Xana and Dax is even better. I guess the only thing for you to do, dear reader, is get them both and decide for yourself!

-TC

There is an as yet unconfirmed report from a Men’s Fitness subscriber that the most recent issue (August?) of has a cover story on “getting your girlfriend to watch adult movies” and has listed Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story first in their list of the top ten adult films for couples/girlfriend viewing.

Can any of you, dear readers, corroborate? If true, it sure is good news!

-TC

tags: Men’s Fitness, Couple’s Porn, Porn for Women, Shameless Self-promotion,

Says the SFist:

Don’t think for a minute that porn made in San Francisco is going to imitate the low, unerotic and wholly artificial quality that signifies SoCal’s sad contributions to the porn pool…documentary filmmaker and now critically-acclaimed couples’ erotic filmmaker Tony Comstock stopped in a few months ago to capture several local couples for his tasteful, shot-on-film couples’ series (which began with bestseller Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story)

“Critically-acclaimed erotic filmmaker”, I do like the way that reads. I like it very much!

-TC

tags:San Francisco, Real Couples, Real Sex, Fisting

This blog is getting a little heavy with all that talk talk talk; which is good, but needs balanced out. What better to provide some balance than some hype Hype HYPE!

About a month ago I was contact by journalist Amy Wolf, who was writing an article on DIY porn. We’ve already spent too much time on how I feel about the word “porn” so you can imagine she got an ear-full on that score. She also got an ear-full on DIY.

It’s not that what I do isn’t DIY (I am doing it myself), and even by the meager standard of the indie film world, our work isn’t low-budget, it’s no budget. But DIY porn conjures image of a gang of friends getting together fueled by ambition and good intention, hoping to change the world with a PD150 and Powerbook.

That’s not quite how things work here. We do shoot on video, but we also shoot plenty of 16mm film. I don’t pay my crew top dollar, but I do pay them union scale. The people who appear on camera are also properly compensated. In short, the investment of resources in each film we make is measured in tens of thousands of dollars, which is still a pityfully small amount of money by film standards, but not really what people think of when you say “DIY porn”.

Well the upshot of this is that Ms. Wolf decided not to include us in the DIY article (Oh no!). Instead she wrote an entire article about Comstock Films (Hooray!). Some highlights from Ms. Wolf’s article:

“Comstock Films has managed to break into new filmic territory by refocusing on the intense emotional bonds that fuel physical intimacy. The films empowers couples to reclaim the right to engage in, enjoy and watch hot, raunchy sex. Xana, of Xana and Dax: Opposites Attract, confesses while sweetly grinning to her lover, “It’s very romantic just to fuck.” “Tony Comstock seeks to infiltrate the minds of even the most conservative couple who are one step above doing “it” through a hole in the bedsheet. Consequently, he features couples that have traditional, often nuptial, home and sex lives.”

“Although Comstock works with demographically diverse couples, all relationships are rooted in good-old monogamy and fairytale notions of true love.”

 ”Sex doesn’t have to be bad, and neither do sex films. In the early 70s, porno movies were part of a larger social struggle against shame. The proliferation of porn stemmed from a Supreme Court ruling that clarified nudity as not obscene. Tony Comstock cannot fix or undo porno, but he will continue making movies until everyone, even your great aunt on oxygen and your fourth-grade teacher, are having copious amounts of good sex – and not feeling ashamed.”

You can read the rest of Amy’s very nice write up here.

Thank you Amy Wolf!

-TC

Lots of very good ideas floating around in the comments of this blog. Fuel for my fire; the proof of this is that Mrs. C and I have been spending some very productive time in the edit bay, putting theory to practice; turning footage into films! To all of you who pre-ordered Damon and Hunter: For the Love, your wait is nearly over, and I think this “mental group grope” that has been going on here and elsewhere in the blogosphere has helped to make it a better, tighter film.

It’s also spun off a few other ideas that I want to address in upcoming posts. I’ve just come in from mowing the lawn (my long ideas come while mowing, my short ideas while in the shower), and I want to get these down before they flitter off, and hopefully the brain trust will start rolling them around in their heads.