Violet Blue gave us a very nice plug on her blog yesterday, which not surprisingly, caused a nice little bump in sales. Violet was our earliest, and is still our most powerful ally.

To give you an idea of just how powerful — back at the beginning of 2003, I gave myself a year to try and prove or disprove that my “vision” had commercial potential. Six months later I had sold perhaps a few hundred copies of Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story.

But late that year, Violet put her considerable reputation behind our work by naming Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story one of the top five adult films of the year, putting us alongside films like like John Stagliano’s Fashionistas, and Belladonna’s Evil Pink.

After that, things started to happen. We were able to get the film into Good Vibrations and Babeland, and once those stores were carrying it, getting other stores to carry it was much easier.

Violet continued to plug and promote our work at every opportunity. When our second film Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract was released, Violet called it one of the best adult films ever. Within a few weeks, X&D had sold as many copies as M&J sold in its first year.

The strength of Violet’s ongoing support has allowed us to elavate our production standards. Before Violet singled us out, we were shooting MiniDV; now we’re shooting Super16 film and mastering in HD — something that no other producer of explicit adult films is doing.

Given all of this, it’s no surpise that I feel a lot of affection for Violet, and a deep debt of gratitude; which I told her in the thank you note I sent to her for the nice plug in her blog. Here’s part of what Violet wrote back:

“What you are doing is beautiful alive, vital, real and so needed by so many people. you are making sex a beautiful thing again and giving people the strength to claim their sexuality as a life force.”

Life force? Usually that’s the kind of thing I’ll shrink back from; it makes what we’re doing seem too important, and I don’t want the responsiblity. Except the same day that Violet sent that to me, I also got a note from a viewer.

She describes herself as a relatively normal woman in her early 30s – job, marriage – the whole middle America thing. Except recently she and her husband have grown apart. He thought he married a “good girl” (her words), and he’s not so thrilled about how adventurous she’s become sexually, and doesn’t approve of her porn collection, which includes some titles that a “nice girl” would never watch, let alone enjoy. As a result, she and her husband are estranged and she watched Xana and Dax alone:

“I really loved it. I was blown away. It came very close to restoring some faith in me that people really can be that into each other, and that sex and love can be related to one another. It would be nice to have that type of relationship, or at least a fuck with that kind of passion, sometime.”

Of course there’s a bit of sadness in that quote, but it also makes me feel like we’re doing something very special here at Comstock Films.

On one hand, in Hollywood, love stories are as popular as ever, and no love story is complete without at least one close-up of eager, glistening mouths finally finding each other. The raw, wet, fleshy beauty of love and desire, but always rendered from the neck up.

On the other hand, porn is said to be a $15 billion/year industry producing over 10,000 titles a year. Yet in all of that overwhelmning output, in all those hard cocks and wet pussies, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a convincing depiction of love. Sex? Yes. Desire? Perhaps. But never convincing depiction of love.

That’s why I started making these films, to show the raw, fleshy beauty of sex in the context of love. That’s the kind of sex I’m most familar with, that’s the the kind of sex I enjoy the most. And showing that kind of sex makes what we do different from what you’ll see anywhere else.

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