Just seven months after its release, DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER is already going into its second pressing, and XANA AND DAX: WHEN OPPOSITES ATTRACT is going into its third!

The new pressings gave us a chance to update the covers of both titles with the awards and recognition both these films have received, if you don’t mind my saying it, the new packages look pretty impressive!

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!

Perhaps the most promising encounter I had at last weekend’s Q-Me Con was meeting Paul Stovall, a New York based actor and writer. He came up to me after the panel and said some very nice things, and we chatted too briefly. When I got home there was a very nice e-mail waiting for me, saying among other nice things “I think that if your talent comes anywhere close to your intelligence, then there is something really revolutionary probably going on with your work.”

Flattery will get you everywhere.

Paul and I ended up having a really great chat on the phone, mostly about his smart script ideas for a multi-camera street shooting film production concept I’ve been noodling about for a couple of years. One of the things I learned about Paul is that he’s in John Cameron Mitchell’s upcoming Short Bus, a film that for several years went under the working title of The Sex Film Project, and is reported to be “a real film with real sex”. (Paul is a tall, well muscled, and good looking. Let’s hope he’s in one of the sex scenes!)

I have been a huge admired of Mitchell since seeing Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It is, in a word, fantastic. I used to see posters for the stage show around New York, but not being a go out to a show person, I didn’t see it. I’m deeply regretful. But at least I got to see the movie, and you should too!

If anyone can close the real sex/real film gap, I think it’s Mitchell, and as envious I might be of him and his talent (true green monster style jealousy!) I’m hoping Short Bus is a smashing success. First and foremost, I’d like to see another great film from the mind of John Cameron Mitchell. Secondly, Mitchell’s spent years on this film, mostly raising money for it, mostly because investors are leery of sinking money into a project that has explicit sex in it (the budget figure I heard was $2.5M, or about four times the budget of porn blockbuster Pirates) If Short Bus succeeds, then maybe on Mitchell’s next outing he’ll be able to spend less time on raising money, and more time on making the movie.

Now let’s draw the circle a little tighter.

The Director of Photography for both Hedwig and Short Bus is Frank DeMarco. I had a chat with Frank back in 2003 about Ultra16, a 16mm 16:9 variant he developed. It’s a less expensive conversion than Super16 because the optical center of the camera doesn’t have to be moved, and because nearly all 16mm lenses will cover the Ultra16 image area. You simply grind the gate out between the perfs and presto, 16:9 on your Bolex, K-3, ACL or any other standard 16mm camera with standard 16mm lenses. I had just purchased 3 ACLs and a bunch of 16mm glass, plus I had a K-3 that I wanted to make 16:9 capable; all in all about $10K worth of machine work going the Super16 route, so I was really curious about Ultra16.

The catch is that you need a very specialized expensive bit of gear on the telecine end. Each gate size – 16mm, Super16, 35mm, Technoscope (perf non anamorphic 2.35), etc – needs it’s own gate on the Rank or Spirit or whatever machine you’re doing your film transfer on, and that’s where Ultra16 died. Although Frank had an Ultra16 gate made for his Arriflex and it worked perfectly, not enough people got on board, so no Ultra16 liquid gate for transfers. Frank’s opinion was that with the improvement in film emulsions since he first had the idea, if you wanted to do 16:9 on the cheap it made more sense to crop the top and bottom of the normal 1.33 16mm frame in telecine. A few weeks later my ACLs went out for Super16 conversion. One of these days like to do the K3 so I have a rugged, spring-driven Super16 camera as backup for those “back-of-the-beyond” projects.

(Where are you going Tony?)

It’s the DeMarco connection.

When Peggy and I shot Damon DeMarco and Hunter James it was our first outing with our Super16 modified ACLs, and as far as I know, the first time that an extended explicit gay sex scene has been captured on film since pornographers stopped using film in favor of video over 25 years ago.

This morning I’m up early, sitting with my infant daughter on my lap, reading blogs and trying to let my wife get a little quality sleep and I’m on Damon Demarco’s Blog, and there are a bunch of pictures of John Cameron Mitchell wearing the same blue striped shirt at several parties spanning several years.

This I can dig. Also in 2003, while I was in the middle of producing a film that saw me doing about 65K miles of air-travel, I found a really great deal on blue polo shirts at one of the discount clothing stores on the North side of 34th Street. I bought 12 of them (at $8/each) and now when I have to travel somewhere I just pile the appropriate number in my roll-aboard and a few pairs of khakis and I’m done. I might look like a BestBuy sales associate, but it’s one less thing to worry about when I’m going somewhere.

Wait now, we’re almost home.

I am 99 44/100% sure that when I met Paul Stovall last Sunday at Q-Me Con, he was wearing a blue polo shirt.

Do you believe in coincidence? I used to.