Peggy and I watched 9 Songs last night, and whatever it is or isn’t as a movie, let me start off by saying 9 Songs is the most credible and craftsmenly cinematic depiction of sex I’ve yet to see. It was lovely and illuminating to see sex depicted by a filmmaker, and it left me envious and inspired.

It’s not a perfect movie by any stretch. The production, while rich compared to a Comstock film, is as paper thin as its characters. There’s barely a plot, and what little plot there is is not very interesting. In fact, at the risk of sounding like I think too much of myself, 9 Songs is confined by very much the same things that impose limits on what I can aspire to with my work.

There’s precious little precedence for how to show people having sex in a movie. You can pick up a clue here and there from porn, but it’s mostly a lesson in what not to do. Creatively, Winterbottom is in terra incognita.

More limiting, there isn’t much of a market for explicit films. By making the decision to show sex, Winterbottom caps the potential returns on 9 Songs from the start, and thereby restricts himself to what can be done on a tiny budget. (Reported as USD $160,000 with deferrals.)

This is the reality of making a sex film, and as a result, neither 9 Songs, nor our own “hardcore love stories” are really full-blown productions. They’re more like etudes, concise cinematic studies of what sex looks like on film, and how sex can be rendered and contextualized within the limits of the business and the medium, and how that can be shaped into a satisfying experience for our respective audiences.

To my mind this differs from both Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, a fully realized film that includes a lot of nudity and implied sex, and a typical porn film which is simply for-hire sexual encounters recorded on video tape. The Dreamers or porn are what they are, and invite judgment by that alone.

By contrast, 9 Songs and our own work invite the viewer to appraise the films not only by what ends up on the screen (still the most important aspect), but also as musings on filmmaking and for our (earnest) intentions. The hope is that by capturing the audience’s sympathy, the rough patches in the production might get the benefit of the doubt. It’s not an uncommon gambit for the low-budget filmmaker, and sometimes works.

Of course etudes can be wonderful in their own right. I don’t know if there’s a classical guitarist that hasn’t recorded Fernando Sor’s lovely Etude #5, and you don’t have to be a guitar student, or even a devotee of classical music to enjoy it.

But an etude isn’t a symphony, or even a concerto. For the enthusiast, an interesting, but unlovely etude can be just as charming as Sor’s #5. An unlovely symphony, as interesting as it might be, is grueling for all but the most devoted audience to sit through (and often for the musicians to play as well!)

I didn’t particularly enjoy 9 Songs, at least not in the same way or with the same depth that I enjoy a movie like Cinema Paradiso. I felt like a barely knew the characters, let alone liking them, so beyond how pretty they looked (which was very nice), I didn’t really care about seeing them have sex. But I did think 9 Songs was an interesting and worthwhile etude; far, far more ambitious than anything I’ve had the nerve to attempt. I expect to learn a lot from it on repeated viewings, and wish it wasn’t singular in the cinematic landscape.

That wish calls to mind something that film critic Richard Corliss wrote while praising Mike Nichols’ Closer, and lamenting the demise of the very adult cinema of the late 60s and early 70s, and wishing more of today’s filmmakers would tackle the subject of sex in a truly adult manner. Said Corliss:

“It’s terrific that a part-time moviemaker [Nichols] has directed so many films that cogently explore the language of sex. But it does suggest that the rest of Hollywood isn’t really trying. Seeing “Closer,” teetering from empathy to exasperation with each of its characters as one would with a real lover, a moviegoer has to wonder: Why can’t there be a dozen, a hundred films like this? Where’s the good and bad sex in movies? Why can’t directors locate where we live, how we love and lie to each other, and get closer to it?”

If the rest of Hollywood isn’t trying, perhaps it’s because there’s no money for the doing and little praise for trying. Indeed 9 Songs must be evidence of some sort of minor sexual pathology in Winterbottom’s psyche. Why else would an accomplished filmmaker subject himself to the trials of trying to make a movie on a low six figure budget, with the likely reward being the sort of snarky condescension that Winterbottom’s received for giving it a go?

I wish there were a dozen, a hundred more movies like 9 Songs. Not because Winterbottom seems to be getting closer to where I live or how I love, but because with 9 Songs Winterbottom is exploring the questions about sex and cinema that interest me, only with the benefit of more money and more talent. Will there be a 9 More Songs Mr. Winterbottom? Please?

The first commandment here at Comstock Films is, “Thou shall not ruin the evening.” By that I mean that we and several other couples we know have had the experience of renting a porno flick with the expectation that it would help raise the temperature of the evening, only to have it be be a complete buzzkill. In fact, in our experience, this is the rule rather than the exception with porn, and that sad fact is a big part of why I started making my movies.

By that measure, Bertolucci’s “erotic film” The Dreamers was a failure, at least here at Casa Comstock.

Between the fact that Spring has finally sprung, and Damon & Hunter is finally out the door, the sap has been rising around here, and last night probably would have ended in a tangle of arms and legs, save the fact that at 9PM we put Bertolucci’s ode to late 60’s Paris in the DVD player and settled in to see what a master of the medium might do, unburdened by proscriptions against full frontal nudity, or handling a cock in full view of the camera. But after the movie, instead of tumbling into bed together, it was more of a slump. Watching The Dreamers exhausted us.

In fairness to Bertolucci, I’m not sure he intended for The Dreamers to be a mood enhancer for us or anyone else. In fact, we woke up this morning still trying to decipher what his intentions were in making The Dreamers.

The nearest I can tell is it’s a movie not unlike Ridley Scott’s White Squall, which seemed mostly like an excuse for Scott to linger endlessly on young boys’ lithe and tanned bodies, dripping with beads of water. Substitute Eva Green’s lovely, but jarringly miscast tits as the object of the director’s lecherous gaze, and voila – The Dreamers.

Of course the movie is beautifully made. Bertulucci is a visual stylist on par with Scott; at one point I turned to Peggy and asked, “What do you suppose it would be like to make a film where not one fold of cloth was out of place?” Bertolucci’s eye for art-direction photography is unerring. There’s more craft, style and talent in one shot that you’ll find in my entire career.

But lovely as it was to see nakedness rendered so well, (including a couple of pitch perfect muff-nuzzling shots that are conspicuous in their absense from the entire rest of the catalog of cinematic depictions of lovemaking), for us the movie fell flat. It moved us only to discussion of how fractured and unsatisfying the film was, and how the nudity and sex felt forced and inflicted, which only added to our disappointment and dissatisfaction.

Now keep in mind that I come to films like this from a particular and perhaps narrow perspective. The Dreamers is part of a long line of European arthouse films that step well accross traditional American boundaries of how, and how much sex is depicted. Along with her tits, Eva Green’s sparsely furred cuntlips make an appearence in this film; the first time I think I’ve seen a twat in a “legitmate” production, and it was wonderful to see just how beautiful a naked woman and her naked sex parts can look with the full force of a studio production gazing upon them.

But like so many films that have come before it, The Dreamers wraps its sexuality inside a tale of darkness and despair. A disquieting and decidedly unerotic incest theme runs throughout the film, coating the entire movie with a glaze of sticky shame. Perhaps for some viewers that makes it more interesting, more dramatic, or even more tantalizing, but for me it’s just tiresome. I am weary of the notion that sex need be rendered so darkly and joylessly to be worthy of serious cinematic inquiry.

(Side note: Over on Tiny Nibbles Violet’s been blogging about the movie The Bridge, a production which purposely set out to, and does depict the very real, very violent deaths of several people. Do you suppose there’s any risk that Eric Steele, the film’s director will be sent to jail or have his house taken away?)

Of course I’m not sure what the answer is. As I said in a previous post No Sadness, Anguish, Pain, or Suffering, with or without sex, happiness is not particularly dramatic. But I don’t think that means that sex has to be sick, twisted, or sad to make a good sex movie. A documentary “portrait of a couple” is one answer; not perfect, but servicable. It is, however, terribly limited. I don’t expect doing what I do would hold Bertolucci’s interest for very long. But I have some other ideas too…

What shall it be next? I Am Curiuos? We have it in both Blue and Yellow. Nine Songs? Intimacy?

Sunday I had the privilage and the pleasure of chatting with Christophe and Diana for an upcoming episode of Blowfish Radio

One the long bus ride into the city to meet them I watch Cinema Paradiso. On the long bus ride back out I ordered I Am Curious, Yellow, I Am Curious, Blue, Nine Songs, The Dreamers, and Intimacy. I guess I should have got Last Tango in Paris while I was at it.

Other than my own productions, I’ve never been on a porn set. Everything I know about how other people shoot explicit sex comes from discussions with porn makers and performers, and from what I can infer from looking at the results; and mostly what I can infer is that “the formula” for making porn is very different from making love, or even for having good sex.

Marie and Jack alluded to this during their interview in Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story. When they made their decision to pursue a porn career, they rented a few porn videos to get a better idea of what would be expected of them:

JACK: We only started watching so that we knew what we were supposed to be doing. Like if we were going to work for a particular company, we’d rent one of their movies to see, you know, how they shot.

MARIE: It was like the same positions every time; doggie, missionary, reverse.

You can see this passage on our video podcast in Episode 1 of Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story

Responding on her bulletin board to a fan’s lament that contemporary porn lacks spontaneity, Nina Hartley breaks down today’s typical approach to shooting a sex scene even further. Says Nina:

Yeah, things were different when I started.

It gets boring, certainly.

It does sound boring.

Our approach to shooting a sex scene is a little different. From Hunter James’ interview in the May issue of DNA Magazine:

DNA: You’ve had sex on camera before. Can you tell us about your previous experiences and how they differ from Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together?

HUNTER: When you make porn for a studio there is usually a lot of direction: suck his cock, move your hand out of the shot, say this and say that. For this they just turned on the cameras and let us do what we do normally, without interruptions.

In the behind the scenes featurette Damon and Hunter: The Making of a Love Scene, which is included on the Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together DVD, Peggy and I lift our skirts a little, reveal our secret formula as it were.

When you watch The Making of a Love Scene, you’ll see that our approach is rather different when compared to what Marie and Jack or Nina Hartley describe. It’s born out of my background as a documentary filmmaker, which is mostly about finding interesting people in interesting situations, and then doing our best to stay out of the way while we try and keep up.

It’s not the only way to shoot a sex scene. It might not even be the best way. But it’s not boring, at least not to me. I don’t think the results are boring either, and I hope when you see our films, you’ll agree!

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.

About a year ago I made a post about the effect of small chip/focal plane imaging on the look of contemporary pornography, Size Does Matter, which was in large measure a self-serving (if true) rant on how and why the larger focal planes in film cameras make it easier to create pleasing images of naked people; and how the teenie tiny focal planes (and correspondingly small/cheap lenses) found in today’s digital cameras have ushered in an era of slightly out of focus, wide-angle, infininate depth of field, and generally unflatteringly shot porn.

This is not a way to make yourself popular in the indie art scene. Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Panasonic and the rest have spent billions and billions of dollars playing on the aspirations of a gerneration of filmmaker hopefuls.

“Your (digital) dreams can come true! You just have to want it enough, and buy our lastest $3500 camera and the latest $2500 computer” (Those seem to be the marketing magic price-points).

You won’t make a lot of friends in Williamsburg or other hipster enclaves telling indie film wannabes that The Man is selling them a pipedream form of a bunch of electronics that will be obsolete by the time they get the box home. (In fact, I’m a panelist at the upcoming Q-Me Con, a weekend devoted to queer digital media, and have been wondering whether I should just go, smile, play nice and make connections; or tell people, who will be paying $25 to hear what I have to say, what I really think about the digital swindle.)

Still, that doesn’t mean people can’t do lovely work using low-cost digital tools. I’ve got a pair of Sony PD100a cameras that I’ve had since the week they came out. They’ve been all over the world with me and they’ve shot some of my favorite projects, including Marie and Jack and Xana and Dax. More recently we’ve been using the Panasonic DVX100AP for our interviews, which uses a clever 3:2:2:3 pulldown scheme when shooting 24P, and that integrates very nicely with the 24fps film we use to shoot the actual humping.

Much more impressive than anything we’ve done with these tools are the wonderful comedy shorts coming from Kirby Ferguson’s Goodie Bag television. By now I’m sure you’ve seen the catchy and hilarious Do You Take it in the Ass?, but that’s just one of about two dozen very funny shorts that Kirby and his friends have produced – all on low-cost home video equipment. See Kirby & Co have some nifty little after-market extras that don’t come with the stock $3500 camera: Talent and creativity!

With that as a starting point, Kirby has gathered around him a crew of very funny, very hard-working actors, muscians, comedians. Throw in very clever writing, committed and credible acting, great musical choices and crisp editing, and Kirby’s shorts are like the one or two genuinely hilarious sketches SNL still manages to crank out each season. Would they be better on Digibeta? Sure, but Kirby & Co aren’t “waiting for funding”. They’re doing it now, with the tools at hand, and it’s great!

These bits funny as postage stamp videos sitting at your computer, but Kirby sent us his DVD and Peggy and I have been watching on the big screen and they’re even better! Zippy Whipcracker, a self-help infomercial send up, and one of the “oldies” not available at Goodiebag.tv had us laughing so hard Peggy started weeping. If you’ve enjoyed these online, do yourself a favor and buy yourself a copy of the Goodie Bag DVD today.

(See? Size still matters.)

The dark side of sex isn’t really my thing, and I continue to be frustrated that when “the mainstream” takes on sexual themes there seems to be no issue in revelling in violence and sickness, but a hard cock stretching open a wet pussy is strictly forbidden.

Never the less, this period piece from Bret Wood is pretty eye catching.

http://www.kino.com/psychopathia/

In her recent “Op-Ed”, AVN’s Heidi Joy Pike writes:

“This is my main problem with many “couples” or “woman-friendly” smut stores that I enter. While there’s all the instruments of a good time present — most of these stores have a bitchin’ novelty section and even, in many cases, a superb BDSM supply section — but when it comes to the porno, well, the offerings often come up on the anemic side. I have the suspicion that it’s because too many “couples” retailers aren’t updating their concept of what couples really like to see these days. Sexually, people are more advanced than ever in their knowledge of what gets them off and more vocal about sharing that with their primary partner. While traditional, plot-based features may be able to serve their titillation needs, there’s the general fact that gonzo’s got the goods to fill those needs quickly.

“Plot-based stuff is thoughtful and gorgeous, but the basic fact is that many people don’t need to have some director’s vision of — as good as it might be — pirates or vampires in love to get off. Something uncomplicated taking place on a couch in Granada Hills with two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both will do the job, too. It’s real stuff. The couch encounter is taking place in the real world, and it has an undeniable set of emotions that people can relate to. There are no characters diluting the lust, the fear, the wanting, the ambivalence, the drive. Nope, just real people feeling what they feel and fucking so other people can watch. No gorgeous locale and no Herculean amount of art direction can save a lackluster fuck, and all that effort to make things look like eighteenth century America for the fuck vid can really wipe the players out, resulting in sex that’s sometimes on the stale side.”

Great novelty section, superb BDSM equipment, “anemic porn section” – it sounds like Ms. Pike has just paid a visit to the newly open Babeland store in Los Angeles. But I think Heidi’s got it wrong as to why the porn section is “anemic”.

Have a look at these butt plugs from NjoyToys.com.

Njoy’s finely crafted beauties were conceived by a fellow with a background in the engineering and design of consumer products. They’re fabricated in a facility that also manufactures aerospace components. These are not “novelties”, they’re the latest in a growing world of highly refined pleasure instruments that are available in medical grade silicone, Pyrex, and now, thanks to Njoy, stainless steel!

Where once people had to be satisfied with flaccid (and vaguely off-putting) rubber phalluses from Doc Johnson Novelties, this new generation of pleasure instruments have raised the bar on what people expect when they plunk down their hard-earned cash for something nice to shove up their asses. No wonder the “couples” or “woman-friendly” smut stores that Heidi visits focus their attention on these sorts of products!

Now compare these lovingly made and altogether lovely sex toys to the “thoughtful and gorgeous” porn features that bore Ms. Pike, or the “two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both” gonzos that she says many couples prefer. Do any of these videos look as well made and carefully crafted as one of Njoy’s beautiful butt plugs? Of course not! Making a film is an enormous undertaking, and there is simply no way to make a film that is anywhere near as refined as an Njoy plug on even the most lavish porn budget.

But now let’s set craft aside. You’re not actually going to shove a video up your ass, so it doesn’t have to be as polished as a butt plug. But what about the sincerity of the offering? When I pick up something from Njoy, or Fun Factory, or Pjur, I have no doubt that what I’m holding in my hands was made with the utmost consideration of what I’m going to do with it, that the plug or vibrator or lube is going be used in the most intimate of ways.

But when I put a porn DVD in the player, I don’t feel that way. In fact, I feel waves of cynicism and/or apathy (”It’s just porn”) pouring out of the scene – and this is true whether I’m watching a “two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both” (charming way to put it, no?) gonzo or a “thoughtful and gorgeous” (?) plot-based porn feature.

So when Ms. Pike says that “No gorgeous locale and no Herculean amount of art direction can save a lackluster fuck, and all that effort to make things look like eighteenth century America for the fuck vid can really wipe the players out, resulting in sex that’s sometimes on the stale side.” I completely agree with her. From a producer’s point of view, it’s just plain silly to try to make an “epic” on a six-figure budget, and from a director’s point of view, it’s probably a bad idea to muck up a good story with too much sex, or muck up good sex with too much story.

But when she goes on to say that gonzo offers an “undeniable set of emotions that people can relate to”, I honestly wonder what she’s watching.

Mostly what I see in a typical gonzo flick is bunch of people paid to show up at a sparsely furnished nouveau-riche Southern California McMansion (in Granada Hills perhaps), take off their clothes, and fuck while someone records it all with a handicam. That’s not an engaging fantasy or an emotional situation that I can relate to.

I’d like to give the director and the performers the benefit of the doubt that some more is happening, and perhaps if I knew the players better (as I presume an industry insider like Ms. Pike does), I would see these videos as an unvarnished document of a lusty sport fuck. Sex for sex’s sake is hot—most of the sex my wife and I have it sex for sex’s sake!

But that’s not what I see when I watch these videos. And if that’s what’s actually happening on the set, it’s not being recorded and edited in a way that I can see it. Apparently the “couple” and “women-friendly” smut shops with “amemic porno selections” can’t see it either.

Of course for me, the whole discussion begs the question: What about those of us who aren’t turned on by “thoughtful and gorgeous” features or “two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both” gonzo?” Are we even on Heidi’s radar? Or have we simply been written off as prudes who just have hang-ups about sex and porn?

15 years ago, I bet the folks at Doc Johnson thought the same thing about people who weren’t interested in the cadaverous, flesh-colored rubber dildos they wanted us to buy. Of course this simply wasn’t the case. We were just waiting for someone to offer us something better – something worthy of the privilage of being shoved up our ass. And thankfully they did, and now there’s a wealth of very lovely toys and lubes for people like us to choose from.

Of course Doc Johnson is still out there, probably doing better than ever, and you can buy their stuff if you want to too. The point is it’s no longer your only choice if you want to shove something up your butt. Do you think that 15 years from now “the rest of us” will have a wonderful variety of sex films to choose from too?

In her comment to my post last post, How Deep Is Your Love, YogaDame offered:

“I suspect the story worked better for me than for you because of my strong empathy for the lead character.”

A playwright friend of mine once told me if you have an empathetic lead, you’re halfway home. I remember the lead performances in Revelations as being solid and engaging – well above what we expect from porn. But no, there probably wasn’t the same level of identification for me that there was for YD. (Ultimately, a filmmaker has precious little control over the experiences any one person brings to their viewing experience. The real masters of this art have an amazing ability to draw characters that are simultaneously real enough you feel like you could touch them, yet ambiguous enough that each of us can make them who we need them to be to connect with them in a powerful way. It’s a profound gift, one that I wish I had.)

So while it’s possible that a more personally compelling character would have helped, the two things I remember keeping me from being drawn into Revelations as far as I wanted to be were more related to that whole “inviting comparisons/ambitions” thing YogaDame mentioned in her review. Specifically:

1) I felt disappointed by the box-cover promise of a “35mm feature”. I expected that would mean seeing the sympathetic lead characters, having explicit sex, shot on film. Instead I got non-character driven vignette explicit sex on video (which I could have seen in many other productions); and then when the well-acted, sympathetic leads finally did the deed, while it was on film, it was simulated (which I also could have seen in many other, more fully realized productions).

Even in 1996 (when I saw the film) porn had long history of short-changing it’s audience and I felt deceived, which probably made me less sympathetic to the production as a whole. (I’ve learned some hard lessons of my own that porn audiences are less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt than indie film audiences, and frankly I don’t blame them.)

2) Make no mistake, the Regan/Bush years were a time of considerable repression for pornographers, but by the time I saw the film in 1996, the phrase “New World Order” had be so thoroughly lampooned that it seemed a bit dated and a little “on the nose”. (For you youngsters, “new world order” was a Bush Senior catch phrase.)

These things underscore the considerable risk that a filmmaker takes in being ambitious.

I recently watch “Saturday Night Fever” with the director’s commentary. SNF was considered a low-budget production, but even still, the director recalls re-shooting a scene because when he was looking at the dailies he decided they had put the female lead in the wrong color costume. Can you imagine re-shooting a porn scene because one of the players was wearing the wrong color leotard? It certainly would never happen on the budgets I have to work with. The purr of a cine camera running is the sound of money flying out the window!

Whatever the problem with the unused film footage from Revelations (and there are a dozen ways it can go wrong without knowing until it’s too late!), the result was that the release was delayed, which may have made the theme seem less topical (though perhaps more topical today then when it was shot!), and necessitating a cheat of the “35mm feature”. You can’t very well go to the expense of shooting all that film and then not mention it on the box cover. (In fact, we find ourselves in a somewhat similar situation. Our upcoming titles are mixed format: sex on film, interview on tape, and I have every intention of marketing these titles as “shot on film”.)

Many years ago Peggy and I watched the fascinating Tokyo Decadence, an SM themed Japanese indie. While not nearly as porny as we had expected, it was utterly watchable (if rather bleak) – until the last reel. Suddenly a very credibly made film went completely off the rails, deteriorating in production quality and narrative to the point that it was completely incoherent.

By chance a few years after seeing Decadence I ended up meeting the producer (he kept a desk-office in the post house I used), and I had a chance to ask him about the baffling end to Tokyo Decadence. His response was simple, and delivered in a heavy Japanese accent, “Oh, we run out of money.” No excuses or justifications. Just a sly grin that said seemed to say, “You win some, you lose some.”

Unlike the writer, the filmmaker doesn’t have the luxury of infinite revisions. At a certain point the money runs out. And while a big studio might possibly shelve a project, an independent producer has no choice but to take what they have to market. There are bills to pay, and the only way to pay them is by selling your work, warts and all.

But it’s not all bad news for the filmmaker. There’s never any excuse for typos in a book, and they stick out like a sore thumb. But movies, even big-budget Hollywood movies are filled with the cinematic equivalent of typos, and worse. But somehow audiences understand that part of the bargain struck between director and viewer is to try to look past as many of those mistakes and miscues as possible. Films are watched as much for intentions as execution.

This is especially true for low-budget filmmakers like me. Blogs, behind-the-scenes bonus features – we use every trick of the trade to help you see our intentions, even if they aren’t always fully realized on the screen. When you watch an earnest little independent production, the most important character for you to feel empathy for is the filmmaker!

So when we take risks (and as we sometimes overreach), and it’s done with the hope that we’ll get little empathy from you; that you will understand and sympathize with our struggle to bring our vision to the screen.

An online friend, YogaDame, has just given a very nice five-star review to Revelations, a 1992 film by seminal “by women, for women” director Candida Royalle. Coincidentally, Revelations was the last porn video that Peggy and I watched (c.1996) before embarking on the adventure that has become Comstock Films.

Revelations is a solid, well-made porn feature, with lots to recommend it. And YD’s enthusiastic, but even-handed review is a great starting place to decide if this is one to add to your rental queue or library. Her only real reservation about the film comes in the Thumbs Down section of the review:

“My only concern is that Revelations is ambitious enough to perhaps invite comparisons to mainstream movies, which in turn can only lead to frustration and disappointment. For reasons too complicated to discuss here, the budgets of adult movies are miniscule (tiny even when compared to independent films), such that none will ever fully compete on the mainstream level. For those of us who love adult features in and of themselves, however, this one stands out for overall excellence.”

It’s been 10 years since I saw Revelations, but I still remember going into it with high hopes that it would be that magical combination of a “real movie with real sex”. And I still remember watching with a sense of frustration and disappointment. It almost seemed like two movies cut together; one a low-budget but credible dystopic-future scifi, and the other a softcore-ish erotic vignette video. And in the end I felt like the two worked at cross purposes.

As I ruminated on why I felt this way, I decided that a big part of it was simply a matter of money. The “film” part of the film was just too thin in art direction and production design, and the sex part was shot on video. Although the creative conceit accounted for the mixed media, the effect on me was that I was always aware that I was watching a production, instead of feeling like I was transported into a world where the characters lived and the action took place. I never quite got pulled into the story, and I never quite got turned on by the sex. Indeed, our own “pornumentary” approach was born in large measure as a way to try and take another tack on the problems inherent in five-figure (aka porn) budgets; which in my mind is largely a problem of managing the audience’s expectations, and avoiding unfavorable comparisons. (I’ll readily admit our approach has problems of its own.)

The most enjoyment that Peggy and I have ever gotten from a porn movie was a fairly recent viewing of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, which we enjoyed quite a bit. Perhaps some of the sex scenes dragged a little, but the movie part was so fun and sexy that it didn’t bother us. We certainly never felt the urge to hit the fast-forward button, either on the talking part or the fucking part. So I think it’s fair to count Peggy and me as people who would sorely love to see a modern adult feature that was as much fun. We knock around ideas for narrative style hardcore films, and I’d be thrilled to make a feature style, sexually explicit film that YogaDame thought worthy of a five-star review.

But as I thought about it last night with YG’s “invite comparisons” still ringing in my head, I had this thought: Who in their right mind, if they could produce something as witty and fun as Misty today, would limit their potential returns on a project by gumming it up with hardcore sex? If you only had a porn budget to work with, could you ever possibly make a feature style porn movie that didn’t invite unfavorable comparisons to better financed, better crafted films?

John Cameron Mitchell, director of the fantastic show and movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch has been saying he wants to for about five years. But as far as I know, he still can’t raise a budget ($2.5M was the figure I heard, twice that of the “big budget” porn epic Pirates) for Short Bus, his proposed explicit sex movie project; and I’ve little doubt it’s in large part because when investors look at the potential returns for a sexually explicit movie, they put their check books back in their pockets.

Now maybe some of you are saying “Money money money! Where’s the commitment to art?” Well if that thought crossed your mind, even for a moment, I’ve got a question for you:

Let us suppose that you’ve written a wonderful short story. It’s been published in some trendy erotic anthologies and even received some nice mentions in the literary mainstream.

Let us suppose that this story is all about sex, is filled with cunts and cocks and cum, and stinks to high heaven with joyful rutting.

Let us then suppose you’ve received two offers to turn your story into a movie.

One is from a well-established porn feature producer/director, who offers you $10,000 plus a percentage of the gross.

The other is from an up-and-coming independent feature producer/director, who also offers you $10,000 plus an equal percentage of the gross.

The porn version of your story would include explicit sex and would have a production budget of $75,000. (Close to the figure Royalle gave me for her more recent Stud Hunters, or that Jenna Jameson quoted for Jenna Loves Bella)

The indie version of your story would be R-rated and would have a production budget of $750,000. (About half the budget of the much lauded low-budget indie The Squid and the Whale.)

Which offer would you take?