Peggy Comstock, on the set of DAMON AND HUNTER, burning through her first 1000 feet of Kodak 16mm filmstock.

Peggy and I met on the old  NYC cyberpunky BBS and ISP Mindvox about six months before they started offering IP service, so the first poking around the internet we did was on programs like gopher and telnet.

One day a new program appeared in the applications list: lynx. I tabbed down and the next thing I knew I was poking around the website of the National Wildlife Forencit Lab in my hometown of Ashland OR. (One of the thing they do at the lab is certify bald eagles as roadkill, which then allow Native Americans to use the feathers without violating the endangered species act. If you hang around the Ashland post office you’ll see little bald eagle sized cardboard coffins coming and going from the lab.)

Anyway, that was my first experience with the World Wide Web, and I sent a note to Peggy saying, “Hey, have you checked out this links thing? It’s pretty cool.” and she did, and within a few of months Mosaic came out, Peggy had taught herself HTML, put up a couple of award winning personal websites, and gone from being an administrative assistant to a producer/designer in her company’s new online division.

Of course it wasn’t long before basic format tags weren’t enough to get the job done, so as needed Peggy taught herself some java script, and PERL and CGI.

Then she dug into Photoshop and Illustrator and all the other tools and skills that an interactive designer needed in pocket to keep up with the times. She learned how to wrangle WP blogs and Zencart e-commerce; all while developing her own design aesthetic (which are house and garden benefit from as well!) She knows how to manage servers.

When I realized that the way I wanted to shoot sex was build on sports and sit-com style cinematography, Peggy learned how be a camera operator; first on video and then on Super16. “Women love real sex.” is Peggy’s line. So is “Learn through love.” Peggy designed our trade show booth and the show sponsors always ask if they can take a photo to show other small businesses that you can make a really nice booth without spending thousands and thousands of dollars.

And of course while this was all going on, Peggy carried, birthed and has been a mother to our two children. And oh yeah, somewhere in there she found the time to write a book that was published by Barron’s. And the three months of being first mate boat with a neophyte time skipper, two children, a dog and a cat; even though before that she had never spent more than four hours straight on a boat.

I’d reckon if you took the above criteria — knows designing, building and running websites inside and out, shoots award-winning erotic films on both video and film, published author, mother, and all the rest– you’d end up with a venn diagram describing a region with exactly one inhabitant – my wife. I don’t reckon there’s anyone who’s done as many different things and done them as well as my wife has.

She’s a great cook and a hell of a bargain hunter too. Most years we manage to put at least a little in savings, which let’s me do crazy things like make my movies the way I want to make them, or sail across oceans, or tell HBO to go to hell.

Earlier this year Peggy got interested in on open-source coding project centered around fan-fic/fair-use issues, the only problem was to be involved she need to know how to code in Ruby. So she started downloading tutorials and teaching herself Ruby. Now she’s a lead programer on the project and taking online courses from MIT. And learning Python. (I don’t know that that is but it sounds scarier than Ruby!)

I’m telling you this because she won’t; it’s not her way. She’s shy. She doesn’t like to talk about herself. And besides, she’s too busy walking the walk to talk the talk.

Six days out, I’m showing a little wear and tear

Our first erotic documentary film MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY was shot in one afternoon in the bedroom of my and Peggy’s Hells Kitchen apartment. Marie and Jack made love in and then were interview sitting on the edge of the same bed that Peggy and I slept in and made love in ourselves.

In fact, when the day was over, I wasn’t so happy about the shoot. The lovemaking was fantastic and I knew it was going to be wonderful, but the interview had drifted away from their relationship with each other and more toward their relationship with “the industry” than I had really wanted, and included too much testimony that was unsupportable with the footage we had (and the time I was still very much hung up on the interview/b-roll idea and hadn’t yet discovered how much room their was for anecdotes to breathe inside of my films. Someday I’ll take another pass at MARIE AND JACK, shaping it more like subsequent films.)

At any rate, I resolved to edit the lovemaking, which after fiver years of test-shooting was the first model release lovemaking footage we had shot, and use that to show perspective subjects how my approach to documenting sex was different from what people usually see.

Then a couple of months later, on 9/11 my and Peggy’s world was turned upside down, along with everyone else’s. Suddenly I had time on my hands.

Another month after that I was at a book launch party that was within smelling distance of “The Pile”. I’m not kidding when I say smelling distance. The Pile had a queer, unforgettable odor that I hope I never smell again. I still remember being able to look down the street from the club where the book party was being held and seeing the great heap of smoldering debris lit up in the bright blue white of the work lights, and how they contrasted with the yellow of the sodium vapor of the regular street lights.

It was at this party that my life took a fortuitous turn. Inside their were how to find your g-spot demos, and how to use cut open condom for a dental dam demos and all manner of other sex positive hijinx. But the thing that caught my eye were the monitors that were set up showing the very best of the sex-positive videos I had read about at places like Good Vibes and Toys in Babeland.

Of course I had been too cheap to actually buy them, so I only knew them from the glowing write-ups in catalogs and in the various books that constituted the sex-positive cannon at the time. This was my first chance to actually see them with my own eyes.

And they were terrible.

I know, that’s not a very nice thing to say, but they were really bad. And I thought to myself, “If this is the cream of the cream, then I have to finish MARIE AND JACK.”

And I did. In one month of 12 hour days I finished MARIE AND JACK right around Halloween, and when it was done I decided that it wasn’t so bad after all, in fact it was pretty good; certainly the film could hold it’s own when compared to other things I had seen, and I began (what turned out to be the very hard) task of trying to get people to watch it.

Good Vibrations? Too short, too much talking, no one will buy it. Toy in Babeland? We review every film we sell and have not gotten to yours yet. Libida? Same is TiB. Xandria Catalog? No one answers the phone. Freddy and Eddy? Yeah, it’s around here somewhere. (A few years later Freddy and I laughed about all the crap people would send them and how low he and Eddy’s expectation were of yet another ‘amateur porno”.

Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was pretty discouraged. So I decided I’d spend the next year doing everything I could think of to try and get MARIE AND JACK seen and sold and if after a full year of banging away I’d concede that “everyone” was right and that while MARIE AND JACK was a great little film, it wasn’t commercial and that my vision of what sex and cinema could be wasn’t commercial either.

As it turns out, my vision of sex and cinema was commercial. Not so commercial that Peggy and I make as much money as we did before Comstock Films, but we make enough (so far) and we’ve put something in the world that we think makes the world a little bit better.

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Bermuda is quite lovely. During the day it’s about 72 degrees. At night it’s about 68. The water is 74 degress day and night. My crew just came back to the boat and brought rum, ice and Coca Cola. A 125 foot cutter just came in, crew wearing matching togs.

For what I spent on things like life-raft, ditch-bag, flairs and all the other crap I needed to make INTEMPERANCE ready for an offshore passage I could have flown down here with my family and staying in a nice hotel for a week, seen all the sites, and left nice tips.

Instead,  I sailed over in what some of the more experienced skippers are saying were some pretty nasty condition (triple-reefed beating across the Gulf Stream would be a clue). I’m anchored out with two guys, eating our meals off a campstove (though truth be told, Darius is an excellent cook, and I’ve never eaten better in my life) making repairs to the boat and watching for a fair weather chance for the next 700 miles of our voyage.  That busted knuckle is still busted because I keep banging it into things.

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I described this trip as “a midlife crisis, minus the convertible and the age-inappropriate girlfriend.” But sitting here right now, on my boat that is now in better shape than when it left New York 10 days ago, with the smell of another fine dinner wafting up the companionway, and reflecting on the way I seem to like to do things, it might be midlife, and it might be crisis conditions getting here, but it’s not a midlife-crisis. I just seem to like doing things the hard way.

And I guess I’m just going to have to get used to that. Because I reckon that if all goes right, I’ve got another 30 or 40 trips around the sun I have to make before I can finally take a break.

Captain Comstock enjoying a hard-earn rum and coke in St. George’s Harbor, Bermuda