The Guide Gets It!
I had an interview yesterday with Lisa Vandever and Darklady on Darklady’s Ynot radio show (link forthcoming), and the very first question Darklady asked me was, “Your name isn’t really Tony Comstock, is it?”
It is not, and the question puts Darklady in a (to me surprizingly small) group of people who even think to ask.
“Tony Comstock” was part of the same moment of inpiration that gave me “Real Life, Real People, Real Sex”. In that instant I saw what I was doing as a crusade to reclaim images sex from extremist of all stripe; from those who seek to use the awesome power of sex to advance their own selfish and hateful agendas. As I said to Caitlin Corrigan in Clamor Magazine:
“By taking his name, by calling ourselves Comstock Films, that’s my way of saying this company is going to be devoted to bringing that same fervor that a Comstock-like person would use on being agitated, incensed, and hateful; but we’re going to put it into professionalism and energy and enthusiasm for the work that we do.”
In that moment, I had thought I was being clever, I had thought I was making an obvious, winking joke that most people, or at least most people who spent any time thinking about sex and censorship would get. But most people don’t. Richard Corliss, film critic for Time Magazine, quoted me twice, and never seemed to notice. Nor did the writers, researchers or editor at Jane, Men’s Fitness, Esquire, Tango, or Time Out New York. Or maybe they did, and they just didn’t think it was clever or funny.
But Giacomo Tramontagna of Guide Magazine noticed, and in his September review of DAMON AND HUNTER he wrote about it:
“It’s worth noting that the director’s pseudonym, Tony Comstock, pays subversive tribute to Anthony Comstock, the militant prude who in 1866 founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and set the tone for American censorship into the 20th century.
Turning the tables on his namesake, this 21st-century Comstock has made it his mission to acknowledge the role of sex in human relationships, depict it graphically, and celebrate its power.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself!
