So last night was it, the big hometown premiere of DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER, and I will not deny that I was both excited and nervous at the prospect of our film playing in a theater in front of a New York audience.

First let me tell you what wasn’t so great. Something was goofy with the theater’s video projection equipment, and the color rendition for DAMON AND HUNTER was a dark, muddy green version of the film’s true colors. It fairly well changed Damon’s ethnicity, plugged up the shadows in the sex footage, and gave a slight purplish cast to the jism. DAMON AND HUNTER is without a doubt the best looking film I’ve ever produced, so seeing it looking less than its best was disappointing. But the fact is, compared to all the very nice things that happened during the Passion Plays CineKink session, it hardly mattered.

The coolest thing that happened (for me) when DAMON AND HUNTER was up was sitting in the very last row of the theater, and seeing my movie through a forest of heads. It looked just like a shot out of movie where we’re in a theater, only in this movie it was my movie that was up on the screen, and it felt super cool! But as nice as that was, it wasn’t the best part of the session.

The very best part of the session is that every single one of these very sexy films got the right kind of laughs (and none of the wrong kind!). Shared laughter is the ultimate audience experience, and is what makes seeing a film in a theater so different from watching it at home. Every single one of the films made us all laugh together. Sometimes it was titilated laughter, sometimes it was nervous laughter, sometimes it was knowing laughter, but it was always the right kind of laughter, never born of the unintentional self-parady that is so much a part of the usual experience of seeing sex films. But there was one collective “uh huh!” laugh that I especially want to tell you about.

The film was Jennifer Lyon Bell’s HEADSHOT, a short erotic art film with a simple premise: we see a fellow get a blowjob, from start to finish, but all we ever really see is his face. We hear the voice of the (obviously talented) felatrix a few times, and see the back of her head briefly when she first introduces herself, but other than that, all we see is the lucky young man’s face as she sucks him off.

The “uh huh!” laugh came about two thirds of the way in. She’s found her rhythm and he’s settle back to enjoy the ride. His eyes are closed when suddenly they pop open wide and he looks down, as if to say “Whoa, woah! Now that feels really good!”

Of course we all know that moment, from one side of it or the other. “Yeah, baby yeah. That feels so good. Don’t stop… Woah! Wow! That feels really good…” and you have to look down to see what sort of delicious trick is being played! And in that instant of collective recognition of 150 or so people thinking “yeah, I’ve been there” the audience let out a knowing “uh huh” sort of chortle in one collective voice.

Whether we suck dick, or get our dicks sucked, or both, in that one subtle cinematic moment, all of us saw ourselves up on the screen, all of us saw our own story being told, all of us were moved to give a collective, affirmative and apprecitive response–and it was magic! For me it was the highlight of the festival!

Were there moments like that in DAMON AND HUNTER? I think so. I hope so. But the truth is I was too self-conscious to really be in those moments myself. Afterwards so people said some very nice things, but it was all a bit of a blur, and frankly, after week away from my wife, I was eager to get packed up and get home to make some “uh huh” moment of our own.

Many thanks to Lisa for putting DAMON AND HUNTER in such wonderful cinematic company! The Passion Plays session at CineKink was a fun, sexy, and provocative evening out!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22nd, 2006 at 9:42 am and is filed under CineKink, Damon & Hunter, Jennifer Lyon Bell, film festivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.