You remember the Tate, don’t you? Sir Quinten of the BBFC decided that DESTRICTED should get an R-rating so it could play in the Tate. The can of Artist’s Shit a few posts down is from the Tate Collection. Behold the latest Artistic Merit from the Tate. According the art critic/host of the video, the runners are “having the time of their lives!” I think he need to get out more…

In contrast to the e-mail battle to get DAMON & HUNTER listed with the grown-up movies (as opposed to “adult” movies,) the rest of our filmography has appeared on IMDb sans drama.

It’s now possible for a casual IMDb visitor to look up both Xana & Dax and Matt & Khym, no having to log in, no having the secret “show me adult results” box checked. Whether or not this has something to do with the fact that Xana & Dax and Matt & Khym are straight couples, or it’s merely a matter of having worn the IMDb editors down with the Damon & Hunter episode, I don’t know.

I do know that sometimes fretting about this sort of thing seems like a lot of fuss over nothing, a distraction from the business of making my movies. Now that Ashley & Kisha is finished, I’ve got the backlog wittled down to four unfinished films. Maybe time would be better spend in the edit bay then worrying about IMDb listings and similar.

But in the last week I’ve had three different experiences that have reminded me why things like IMDb and Google, and how the hardware, software, and wetware resources at those, and other organization interpret sex, expecially sex words, matters.

* Yesterday I received e-mail from Good For Her announcing the awards event next month that Peggy is going to. In the subject line porn was spelled “P*rn”.

* A couple of days ago I got a note from Em & Lo, sex columnists at New York Magazine and elsewhere. In the subject line and throughout the body copy, sex was spelled “s*x”.

* Last week I sent a note to journalist Mark Glaser, with a link to a post on my blog. Mark wrote back to tell me that he couldn’t access my blog from his workplace.

No one has benefited more from the digitization of culture than I have. I have a comfortable life, living in a wonderful place, doing work I’m passionate about, all largely because of the opportunities this brave new digital world has provided me. But the same technology that makes it easy for information to fly around the globe also makes it easy to prevent people from receiving information, often without anyone even being aware that the information they have access to has been censored filtered.

For example, when I spoke to a representative at St. Bernard Software (conjures up an image of a benevolent protector, doen’t it?) the people who provide censoring filtering software to Mark’s workplace, he told me the default setting for their software is what they feel would be appropriate for a eight year old child.

A eight year old child? I was incredulous. What was internet filtering software like that doing on the corporate network of a journalism organization? The St. Bernard fellow explained that they sell to a lot of schools and libraries, so the defaults are set cautiously, and that network administrators can fine-tune the filtering to suit the needs of their workplace.

Well maybe that works in theory, but the fact everyone is busy, and St. Bernard’s sale force sells their software as a “turn-key” solution, “Just install it and our human-edited list of no-go sites will keep your kids safe, your employees hard at work, your workplace lawsuit free…” (I’m not speculating here. I spoke to the IT department at Mark’s workplace. “We’re not doing anything special here. Just running St. Bernard with the normal settings.”)

I’m both a parent and a businessman, I’m not unsympathetic to these concerns. But as parent and a businessman I have concerns of my own. The St. Bernard fellow told me they also sell their software to a lot of colleges and universities, and because their database classifies ComstockFilms.com as pornographic site, there’s a good chance that access to our website is blocked on campuses running St. Bernard software.

College students aren’t a very important part of our market (they don’t have any money), so I’m not particularly concerned about that (though that’s not the sort of university experience I want my daughters to have.) But I do sometime imagine an art or film studies professor going to look us up and not being able to access our site.

I also feel concerned about the prejudicial effect that being categorized and filtered in this way can have on our work, and our business. Amazon.com sells Shortbus, but they do not sell “pornography”. The BBFC gave Destricted an R rating, but “pornography” gets an R18. The catagorization of our films, at IMDb, and at St. Bernard, at the BBFC and elsewhere have a profound effect on who can see our work, where our films can be shown, and who can/will sell our DVDs. And in an increasingly wired world, the flick of a switch can send us or anyone else off into digital purgatory. (That’s how you get s*x and p*rn.)

So I’m relieved that Xana and Dax and Matt and Khym are listed with the grown-up movies on IMDb, out in the real world, with films like In the Realm of the Senses, Shortbus, and Pink Flamigos. If you’re registered at IMDb and wanted to go over and throw a few stars our way, that couldn’t hurt. They’re easy to find – just use the search function.

Yesterday was a blood-bath. The Google Site Index for Comstock Films continues to look extremely weird, full of robot.txt excluded pages, and even pages that haven’t been live on our website for years, and our Google search related traffic is in the toilet.

Why does Googles’s index of our site have pages that we took down two years ago? I don’t know. Why does it have pages from directories we’ve excluded from indexing in our robot.txt? I don’t know. (And yes, we checked them using Google’s webmaster tools.) Why doesn’t the site index have our important and well-linked to pages like index.html and main.html? I don’t know. I wish I did, and I wish I knew what to do to fix it.

Adding to my puzzlement, while here the US, ComstockFilms.com is somewhere around page 10 for the search ‘real sex’ our site continues to enjoy a relatively high position for the search in Australia (currently page 1) and the UK (currently page 3).

There’s a certain irony to this. Both Australia and the UK have government-imposed ratings for films, and our DVDs are illegal to sell in most of Australia and in all of the UK.

Coincidentally, a copy of our first film MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY is currently at the Motion Picture Association of America, and we expect a rating decision by the end of the month. No doubt the film will receive an NC-17, which means adults only.

50 years ago there were only two ratings; adults only and general audience. Children couldn’t get into adults only films, not even with their parents. Adult films were for adults in the same way that bars are for adults.

But somewhere along the way we lost the idea of exclusively adult cinema. Yes, the MPAA has an adults only rating, but it’s an economic dead-zone. SHORTBUS went out unrated, rather than bear the stigma of the NC-17 rating. (Many media outlets will not accept advertisements for films rated NC-17, and some theaters will not show them.)

Conversely, the ultra-violent SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a film that is utter inappropriately for children was given an R by the MPAA, which means kindergardeners can go see it, provided they are accompanied by a parent or guardian.

I can understand (both commercially and ethically) the MPAA wanting save PRIVATE RYAN from the burden of carrying the NC-17 rating, but the idea that it’s a film suitable for children of any age, provided they are accompanied by an adult is manifestly absurd. Although what can be shown is far more permissive than it was 50 years ago, in the process we’ve given up the space for adults to experience genuinely adult films.

Meanwhile, in Australia and the UK, there is a litigate adults only rating. In Australia and the UK, rated-R means no one under 18, and that’s the rating films like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN receive in those countries, (and SHORTBUS and DESTRICTED because they’re not intended to arouse!)

(Lest I sound too in love with the Australian and UK system, please remember that their systems are manditory and governement imposed, and that’s why our films are illegal to sell in Australia and the UK.)

MARIE & JACK will have its MPAA rating by the end of the month, an NC-17; and have no intention of running from the rating. In fact, we intend to embrace it, to wear our NC-17 as a badge of honor.

Like the rest of our work, MARIE & JACK is a film for adults about the very adult experience of sex. No, it’s not okay to bring your kids. Maybe you think it’s okay to bring them to see SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but you can’t bring them to see MARIE & JACK. It’s grown-up time now, and this is a movie for grown-ups to watch with other grown-ups. We don’t want to here your 12 year-old giggling, or you stammering when she asks an awkward question. Get a sitter, or stay home, or wait for it to come out on DVD.

DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER just got its first review on the consumer review site AdultDVDTalk.com, and what makes this review especially interesting is it’s from straight man.

Last year, when we had our one day Katrina fund-raiser there was a fellow who wanted to make a donation, but had already either bought or pre-ordered everything we offer, everything except DAMON AND HUNTER. He’s a customer I know by name, and I saw his name come through with a pre-order for D&H about 12 hours into fund-raiser, followed shortly by an e-mail that said, “What the heck, it’s for a good cause!” The below is from the end of his review:

Gay or straight, Tony has created a film that has something to offer everyone, even if the sex isn’t going to be up your alley, he has still painted an enlightening look into the lives of Damon and Hunter that can entertain, and possibly educate, viewers of all sexual orientations. And he does it all with class and a beautiful visual styling that should please all viewers. After the film is over, don’t forget to check out the extras, The Making of a Love Scene feature is worth the purchase itself if you are interested in the techniques that go into making a film. Even if you keep it to yourself that you viewed it, I’d give this film a chance, I’m glad that I did.”

A lot of people seem to think that it’s the erotic charge, the “intent to arouse”, that separates art from porn. When SHORTBUS was still in pre-production, John Cameron Mitchell was quoted as saying:

“The purpose of pornography is to arouse, whereas here the priority is the emotional life of the characters. Sex has been cheapened by porn. Why can’t we not focus on sex, as porn does, but make sex part of the film?”

Since SHORTBUS’s release he’s offered that the sex in SHORTBUS was intentionally de-erotisized to make cinematic space for other emotions.

When explaining granting DESTRICTED’s and R-rating, dispite its graphic sexual content, Sir Quentin of the British Board of Film Classification said that Destricted was so explicit that it would normally attract an R18 rating but he judged that it was a work of art not intended to arouse:

“In purpose and effect, this work is plainly a serious consideration of sex and pornography as aspects of the human experience. We think that there are no grounds for depriving adults of the ability to decide themselves whether they want to see it.”

I admire John Cameron Mitchell tremendously, and I’m sure Sir Quentin is a perfectly nice fellow as well. But on this “intent to arouse” thing, I think they’re wrong, wrong, wrong. (I really think they’re wrong.)

In fact, the central concern of my films is to try to find a way to create sympathetic and engaging characters, use their relationship to create an engaging story-line, without undercutting the eroticism of the sex, which is to say, the power of the sexual image to make cocks hard and pussies wet. In fact, if anything I’m trying to find a way to use character and relationship to make the sex more erotic and arousing in my films.

With that as the central artistic concern of DAMON AND HUNTER , Flash’s very kind review is especially gratifying. It’s exciting to think that I’ve made a film where the characters and their relationship are sufficiently compelling to not only get a straight man from the beginning to the end of a gay sex film, but to earn a five-star review in the process!

From the BBFC website:

“Occasionally, a work lies on the margin between two categories. In applying the criteria in these Guidelines in such a case, the BBFC takes into account the intentions of the film-maker, the expectations of the public in general and the work’s audience in particular, and any special merits of the work.”

I am curious by what process the BBFC divines intentions, expectations, who is or isn’t the audience, or what they regard as special merit.