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?

Yesterday we got a nice mention at Fleshbot.com. Well not actual us, but we were mentioned in a post about an absolutely ravenous bunch of women fans of Damon and Hunter; both the real life couple in our movie of the same.

With the holidays and other minor chaos, the high definition transfer I mentioned earlier got pushed back to next week, so in the between time, Mrs.C and I have been working on a Making Of/Behind the Scenes featurette that is as unprecedented as shooting gay sex on film and mastering on HD.

We’re known for our two camera approach to shooting sex scenes, but during the filming of Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together there were in fact three cameras used: Mine (an Eclair ACL Super16 film camera), Peggy’s (another Eclair ACL Super16 film camera), and video camera that runs continuously throughout the entire scene. (You’ve already seen a bit of footage from this third camera in the humorous Mag. Change clip in last months Teamwork, Part 2.)

What we’re doing on this Making Of/Behind the Scenes is presenting each of these cameras, running sycronously through the multi-angle function that DVDs have.

The first camera angle will be footage from the video camera, with the footage from each film camera inset into each corner:

The second camera angle is the footage from my camera:

And the third camera angle is the footage from Peggy’s camera:

By using the ANGLE button on your DVD remote, you’ll be able to switch between these three angle as the DVD plays. There will be two audio tracks, one that’s just the audio we recorded during the scene, and a second track featuring commentary from me and my wife.

Watch just the two film camera angles with the scene sound track, and it’s like editing the scene yourself. Listen to our audio commentary track and switch between all three camera angles and you’ll get a peek inside our process, how we decide who will shoot what, how we “seen” inside each other’s head while we’re shooting, and how we (try to) cover each other’s mistakes, along with insights and background stories about the film!

Of course this is just a bonus feature. The main event is still the film, and what a fine film it’s turned into! Damon and Hunter marks the realization of a long-held ambition for me and Peggy; to capture real sex and real love between two very real men, and we couldn’t be more excited about it!

Before our meeting last week, the producer asked me if I could e-mail her “the story of how you met, fell in love, and how the 2 of you got into this”. This is the sort of thing that any proper company would already have in it’s press kit, but we don’t. While we have some expertise in making movies, as promoters we’re still neophytes. It’s a story I’ve told a hundred times, but never took the time to write down.

HOW MR. AND MRS. COMSTOCK MET, MARRIED,
AND BEGAN FILMING PEOPLE HAVING SEX, PART I

I knew Peggy was the woman for me the first time we went to bed together. No, we didn’t have sex, but we kissed and petted, and there was just something about the way her hands felt on my body that was different, like she could feel what I was feeling, like it was meant to be. When we finally did have sex, this feeling was only confirmed. Being with her felt different than anyone I had ever been with before; not so much better (well better too), but closer, like we were made for each other. Within a few years we were married.

Our first experience watching porn together came after moving into our first apartment. I got take-out from the local Thai joint and a couple of videos from the corner rental shop: one feature and one of the emerging gonzo genre, hoping for a spicy night in. The take-out was spicy, but the videos were a disappointment. We watched for a bit, then got bored and turned them off before we lost all interest in having sex that evening.

Perhaps most people would have tried another video. I didn’t. I started thinking about why the videos didn’t do anything for us, and because I’m a filmmaker, I thought about it from a filmmakers point of view. I thought about how jarring the gross continuity errors and jump cuts were, I thought about how silly the arch art direction was, I marveled at how a delicious close-up of a big, enthusiastic cock going into an eager, juicy pussy got deadly boring when the camera just sat staring as the seconds turned into minutes. And I started to think that I could do it better, that I could make a film, with plenty of close-ups of cunts and cock and cum, that a couple like Peggy and I could watch together, from beginning to end, without touching the remote even once, and when we got to the end still feel pretty revved up about having sex with each other.

Now aside from my own over-inflated estimation of myself as a filmmaker, there were two technological inventions that I thought would help. One was the rapid development of desktop editing. Right about the time that Peggy and I first met I got my first AVID, and by the time we were being disappointed by our first porno I had upgraded my system to the point I could do broadcast quality work at home, on my own time. The other was the internet, which among other things allowed people to meet, and have frank online discussions, all with the protection of anonymity. I knew the way I wanted to make films was going to 1) take a lot of time to edit; 2) require finding open-minded couples who were married or in other long term relationships. The AVID and the internet would make this possible.

The other aspect was more subtle. I knew the shooting style I wanted to use would be somewhere between what you might do for sports and a sit-com. Those magic moments happen when they happen, and you have to get the coverage you need when they happen – no second takes or resetting for the reverse. That meant shooting two cameras, and the natural choice for the second camera was Peggy. She didn’t have any experience, but she was a designer and writer, so at least she had an aesthetic sensibility and we could talk the same language. And besides, no one had any experience shooting sex the way I wanted to, including me. Once I showed her which buttons to press, we were both starting from the same place!

In Part II, I’ll tell you how we began meeting couples and testing my theories on how to make better sex films!

-TC

In Part I we learned how, after a disappointing evening with a couple of porn tapes, Tony Comstock begin to conceive of a different approach to challenge of capturing sex on film, and how he and his wife began to align their various personal and professional resources to begin exploring new possibilities.

HOW MR. AND MRS. COMSTOCK MET, MARRIED,
AND BEGAN FILMING PEOPLE HAVING SEX, PART II

The next step was to begin shooting studies or test shoots to begin to figure out what did and didn’t work. We began posting ads on various places where liberal couples congregated, the offer was simple: Let us film you making love, trust us to take the tapes away to edit, and in exchange you’ll get a professionally made, explicit, documentary-style film of the two of you having sex. No release necessary because we’re not going to sell or distribute these in any way. Of course there were a lot of “lookiloos”, people who thought it would be fun to chat with us about it, but were never seriously considering taking their clothes off, but amongst the lookiloos we began to find couples who took what we were doing seriously, and were exited at the prospect of being filmed while having sex.

The first time we actually “did it” was a little surreal. Leading up to the big day, we had met with the couple twice to make sure everyone was comfortable and on the same page. When the day came we set up a simple lighting scheme, told the couple “ready when you are”, and hit the ‘record’ buttons on our cameras. Tentatively the couple started to kiss and caress, and we began to move around them, looking for complimentary angles. At first Peggy and I were nervous, and so were they, but pretty soon they either forgo about us and the cameras, or maybe they were even getting off on the cameras, but whatever it was, they were digging each other, and we were getting great footage. When the shoot wrapped they thanked us for helping them have a new and exciting sexual adventure and we thanked them for being so generous and trusting. We packed our gear and the next day I began paring away at the roughly 90 minutes of footage (2 x 45) hoping to find the vision of sex that I wanted to see.

I worked on it on and off between paying gigs for the next few months. When I was done we had a seven minute vignette that used all the standard editor’s tricks – moving off a shot before it gets boring, fake match cuts to compress time, reaction shots, etc – the kind of things we expect when watching everything but porn. It wasn’t perfect, but it was so much more appealing than anything I had ever seen. There was plenty for us to improve on, even with our fledging technique, the raw footage we were capturing was hotter than anything in porn, and the way we were capturing it let me put it together in a way that was more crafted than anything in porn. I knew we were on the right track.

Over the next several years, we continued to shoot ’studies’. We shot him on top, and her on top, and doggy style. We shot spooning and reverse cowgirl. We shot oral and anal and fisting. We shot nearly everything a man and woman can do together without props. And after each shoot we’d “debrief”, analyzing how we moved and communicated so we could be in the right place at right time to capture sex in a way that was completely explicit without seeming forced or faked. (We actually had a pair of those little wooden drawing manikins that we’d put in various sex positions and figure out where we needed to be to get the coverage we wanted!)

Beyond technique talked about how to relate with couples to make them relax and feel confident and exited to be with us, but also comfortable that their boundaries would be respected. With each couple that we shot and edited, we learned more about who to be, how to be, and where to be to make the kind of sex films we wanted to see. Of course making each little film was a lot of work, and there came a point where we wanted these films to be seen by the world at large, by people like us who weren’t the least bit squeamish about sex, but just didn’t find that porn had much to offer them.

By this time our work had a pretty solid reputation and it was relatively easy to find couples who wanted to test with us, and why not? All the fun and excitement of starring in your own porn movie, but your porn movie will be lovingly shot and edited by an ernest young couple instead of a nasty pornographer. You don’t get paid $500 bucks, but you don’t lose you anonymity either; if you’re a teacher or a politician, or just a regular (but very sexy) couple who’d rather not have the notoriety of being pornstars.

But at a certain point there just wasn’t that much left to learn by continuing to shoot tests. To take the work to the next level was going to take an investment of time and money I just couldn’t justify spending on a “hobby”, no matter how passionately I felt about the work. If we were going to continue, the idea was going have to prove itself commercially, and the first step in that process was finding real couples who were willing to sign a release. But as we began looking for people who were willing to take the risks of appearing in front of the public, naked, having sex, it was like starting over…

In Part III I’ll tell you how we transformed a curious hobby into a commercial undertaking.

-TC

Before our meeting last week, the producer asked me if I could e-mail her “the story of how you met, fell in love, and how the 2 of you got into this”. This is the sort of thing that any proper company would already have in it’s press kit, but we don’t. While we have some expertise in making movies, as promoters we’re still neophytes. It’s a story I’ve told a hundred times, but never took the time to write down.

HOW MR. AND MRS. COMSTOCK MET, MARRIED,
AND BEGAN FILMING PEOPLE HAVING SEX, PART I

I knew Peggy was the woman for me the first time we went to bed together. No, we didn’t have sex, but we kissed and petted, and there was just something about the way her hands felt on my body that was different, like she could feel what I was feeling, like it was meant to be. When we finally did have sex, this feeling was only confirmed. Being with her felt different than anyone I had ever been with before; not so much better (well better too), but closer, like we were made for each other. Within a few years we were married.

Our first experience watching porn together came after moving into our first apartment. I got take-out from the local Thai joint and a couple of videos from the corner rental shop: one feature and one of the emerging gonzo genre, hoping for a spicy night in. The take-out was spicy, but the videos were a disappointment. We watched for a bit, then got bored and turned them off before we lost all interest in having sex that evening.

Perhaps most people would have tried another video. I didn’t. I started thinking about why the videos didn’t do anything for us, and because I’m a filmmaker, I thought about it from a filmmakers point of view. I thought about how jarring the gross continuity errors and jump cuts were, I thought about how silly the arch art direction was, I marveled at how a delicious close-up of a big, enthusiastic cock going into an eager, juicy pussy got deadly boring when the camera just sat staring as the seconds turned into minutes. And I started to think that I could do it better, that I could make a film, with plenty of close-ups of cunts and cock and cum, that a couple like Peggy and I could watch together, from beginning to end, without touching the remote even once, and when we got to the end still feel pretty revved up about having sex with each other.

Now aside from my own over-inflated estimation of myself as a filmmaker, there were two technological inventions that I thought would help. One was the rapid development of desktop editing. Right about the time that Peggy and I first met I got my first AVID, and by the time we were being disappointed by our first porno I had upgraded my system to the point I could do broadcast quality work at home, on my own time. The other was the internet, which among other things allowed people to meet, and have frank online discussions, all with the protection of anonymity. I knew the way I wanted to make films was going to 1) take a lot of time to edit; 2) require finding open-minded couples who were married or in other long term relationships. The AVID and the internet would make this possible.

The other aspect was more subtle. I knew the shooting style I wanted to use would be somewhere between what you might do for sports and a sit-com. Those magic moments happen when they happen, and you have to get the coverage you need when they happen – no second takes or resetting for the reverse. That meant shooting two cameras, and the natural choice for the second camera was Peggy. She didn’t have any experience, but she was a designer and writer, so at least she had an aesthetic sensibility and we could talk the same language. And besides, no one had any experience shooting sex the way I wanted to, including me. Once I showed her which buttons to press, we were both starting from the same place!

In Part II, I’ll tell you how we began meeting couples and testing my theories on how to make better sex films!

Two days ago I received a note from a fellow who, although he liked many things about Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax, was rather disapointed that both love scenes ended with external ejaculation. Here’s a bit from his note (used by permission):

These videos have what I have been looking for that is missing from the usual “porn” videos with one exception. You claim that these represent real sex but in both cases the man pulled out prior to cuming and we were shown proof that he came…

Maybe these couples actually have sex in this way but I doubt it. If they do I suggest using some couples who do not as well. This was a particular issue in the Xana & Dax video where he spent some time masturbating himself to climax. Why miss out on the wonderful sensations of being in your woman before cuming unless you are not able to do so for some reason. That, to a large extent, ruined the movie for me.

Also, my wife does not often watch explicit videos because she misses the loving relationship aspect of sex that makes it good for her. There is much in these movies that I suspect she would enjoy but I am sure she would be put off by this as well. She has made similar comments about other explicit videos.

He was also concerned that this might also be the case in Matt & Khym, which he had on pre-order. I wrote back:

Dear XXX,

Thank you for your thoughtful e-mail. It very succinctly addresses some of the vagaries of shooting sex scenes of people having unscripted and and undirected sex. With your permission I’d very much like to use your letter in an upcoming blog post. FYI, Matt and Khym’s love scene ends with Matt ejaculating inside of Khym. No particular effort is made to “prove” that he ejaculated, but afterwards Khym does reach down to catch a little on her finger and taste it.

Yours,
Tony Comstock

This seemed to (mostly) satisfy his concerns:

From your response I take it that Xana & Dax and Marie & Jack choose to handle the men’s ejaculation without any direction or suggestions. If so I wonder if that is how they normally have sex or if they did it that way because they thought that it might be expected, maybe from watching “normal porn”. You might want to make it clearer to those you film that they don’t have to do things differently, especially that.

I am not complaining if that is normal for them. It just seemed faked because of the way men’s ejaculation is handled in most porn.

The “might make it clearer” comment reminds me of the conversation I had with Desiree in the weeks prior to shooting her and her husband Ben.

“Oh, so you don’t want him to cum all over my face then?” she asked in response to my saying I just wanted them do have nice normal natural sex.

“Um well,” I stuttered, ” I don’t want you to do something you don’t enjoy when it’s just the two of you just because the camera is there, or because you think we want or need you to do something like that.”

“Oh no. I love having Ben blow on my face. I think it’s great, we do it all the time!”

“Well okay then. Please don’t let our being there inhibit you!” (It didn’t. Desiree had three orgasms that were very nearly disturbing in their intensity.)

Meanwhile, a tempest in a teapot seems to be swirling over similar question about what is and isn’t real over at SuicideGirls.com. Between kids, station wagon, suburban tract house, and a BMI of 26, I’m not really an alt kind of guy, (and even when I was young and broke and played my guitar too loud, I still wasn’t wasn’t an alt kind of guy) so I don’t really know that much about SuicideGirls, besides the fact that the chicks have downtown hairstyles, tats and piercings, and the photography style tends toward the deep focus/small focal plane style that I don’t really dig.

I do know what I thought I knew about SG, which was that I thought it was some hip, alternaporn site, run by technologically empowered female scenesters who were using the internet and cheap digital cameras to deconstruct the traditional pin-up. Okay, that’s cool in concept, even if I don’t really dig it as art, let alone as stroke material. Now it turns out that maybe SG is just some site run by some guy who’s making money off a lot of 18 year old girls’ yearnings to be a little less anonymous in the celebrity-obsessed world that we inhabit. Somehow that doesn’t seem quite so hip.

So what’s it all about, Alfie?

Back during that internet thing, people would sometimes say, “Content is king,” and the inflection they used seemed to indicate they thought they were offering a pearl of wisdom. Well here’s my pearl of wisdom, at least when it comes to making sex films: Context is king. Context is king, and when you use ‘reality’ as your conceit you walk a fine line. Most audiences are sophisticated enough to know that “the truth” is not the same thing as what you would have seen if you were on the set that day. But they’re also sensitive enough to know when the “reality” you try and present is too far way from what they would have felt if they had been on the set.

I don’t know what the “truth” is about SuicideGirls. The truth about Comstock Films is that all the way along there is a conspiracy between me and the couple I’m working with to present a very idealized portrait of their sexual relationship. It’s no more (or less) real than the nightly news or a novel.

Before their scene I asked Matt and Khym how they intended to enjoy Matt’s orgasm (experience has taught me not to assume that a “real couple” doesn’t enjoy the “so fake” external pop shot). When they told me that he was going to cum inside of her, I made a couple of suggestions for how we could visually signal the audience “yes, it really did happen.” The result can be seen in that lovely Comstock Films button that Mrs.C made for us.

Does that ruin it for you? I hope not.

Woah. A lot of (maybe too much) ranting on here about porn philosophy and film theory. How about some ranting about something measurable and quantifiable. How about a little on why todays porn looks the way it looks?

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FOCAL PLANE

Even 70mm film, used in Hollywood epics (the cinematic standard is 35mm) is a pretty small negative compared to what is used to produce a lot of the high-end imagery we see. Despite claims to the contary, 4″x5″ film is still the industry standard for most commercial photography. 120/220 twenty is used where speed of loading is important, but even there the RZ and GX680 are more popular that Hassleblad because (in a rectangular crop) the negative is nearly twice the size. When you see the same subject shot with both 35mm and 4″x5″ there’s just no comparing the sharpness and and detail of the smaller negative to the larger negative. In other words, in photography, size matters.

To create the “illusion of sharpness and detail” in the cinematic image, one of the easiest tricks is to show some difference between what’s in focus and what’s out of focus. What’s in focus (the subject) will look sharp and detailed by comparison to what’s out of focus (the background). (There are other reasons to employ this technique, and it’s common in still photography as well.)

If you look at modern porn, especially modern video porn, you seldom see this pleasing contrast of focus between figure and field. As porn (both moving and still) has become more and more dependent on consumer gear, it has in turn become more and more dependent on gear with small focal planes. Focal planes on cameras like the Sony VX1000 and it’s decendent are about 1/3″ inch measure diagonally. “Palmcorders” have even smaller chips, a tiny as 1/5″ diagonally. Compare that to the 1/2″ or more commonly 2/3 inch on broadcast video equipment, or the approximate 1″ diagonal measurement of non-anamorphic 35mm wide screen. That means that when you see smut shot on a Sony PDX-10, the total area of the film plane is less than a tenth the area of a broadcast video camera, and about 4% the size of the cameras that are used to shoot your favorite T.V. shows or movies. As I said before, in photography, size matters.

This focal plane size difference is part of why movie, TV shows, classic 70s porn and and even early shot-on-pro-gear video porn has a look to it that can’t be replicated by today’s consumer gear. Sure, the CCDs in today’s consumer cameras outperform yesterday’s professional chips in, but the chip size and lenses on these consumer cameras severely restricts the kinds of images that can be made. Because of the immutable physics of optics, particularly the relationship of angle of view, focal plane size and depth of field, this effect difficult, sometimes impossible to achieve shallow depth of field with small focal plane consumer video cameras.

The distinctive look of small focal plane photography has uttlerly changed the face of porn. I suppose whether or or not you like that change is largely a matter of personal taste. I don’t. Resolution issues aside, deep focus shows all the clutter in the background. When pornographers are savvy enough to attend to this, they clear out everything, so the sets in “high-end” porn always has a stark, sterile look. You’ll never see the pleasingly art-directed cluttered background of a “real movie” because all that clutter (that helps create a sense of place and mood) looks terrible when it’s just as in focus as everthing else. (For the same reason that large diamonds cost much more than small diamonds, there will never be large CCDs (these perform the same function as film in a film camera) in consumer gear, nor will consumer gear have higher quality lenses.)

And with out the soft/sharp relationship, everything looks soft, which further compounds the fact that images from this kind of gear are soft. The lenses aren’t very good, the lens flaws are spread over a proportionately larger part of the focal plane, and the tiny CCD’s gather up the image aren’t all that good. The final image has soft, plasticy sameness to it. This is a big part of what makes porn look different from everything else. It’s part of what makes people say “ewww, that’s porn.”

That’s not to say that high-end consumer gear (sometimes called “prosumer”) has no place in making pretty pictures. Both Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story and Xana and Dax: When Opposites Attract were shot on the Sony DSR PD100A, a camera with a very small chip. But we had to work hard to compensate for the limitations of the gear. These days we’re using a combination of video (for the interviews, where we have absolute control over every aspect of the light) and film (for the lovemaking, which is a little more “catch it as you can.”)

Using film for the “catch it as you can” part runs contrary to a lot of conventional wisdom about where to use film and where to use video. Our reason are both technical and aestetic. More on that in another instalment.

-T.C.

I just got off the phone with my friend Phil. He and his wife Masae were the first couple we ever shot – the very first test shoot we ever did when we embarked on this approach to sex and cinema nearly ten years ago. We’ve stayed in touch with them over the years. We’ve shot a couple more tests with them (to work out threesome shooting), they house sat for us a few Summers ago, and we used their house for our shoot last month during the Blizzard of 2005. They’re two of the nicest, sexiest, most authentic people we know.

Anyway Phil called to see how our adventure in San Francisco went and to let me know that they feel like they’re at a point where they want to make a lasting statement about how important sexuality is in their relationship. He and his wife and their lover would like to shoot a released love-scene and interview with us. I couldn’t be more honored that they’d ask us to help them make that statement.

It also gives me a nice feeling of “closing the circle”. When we first approached Phil and Masae with our ideas I didn’t have much beyond a few Legshow Magazine layouts and some decidedly unsexy corporate work to show them. We wanted them to get naked, have sex, and then lets us take the tapes back to the edit suite to work on them, all with the promise that they wouldn’t end up on the internet. I don’t know why they trusted us but they did, and we made them a beautiful little tape that they still enjoy watching to this day (I think they’ve shown it to a few other people too.)

Since that first shoot with Phil and Masae, we’ve become a little more sophisticated with our approach. We shot them with a mismatched paired of Hi8 cameras; now we shoot a pair with Super16s with matched lenses. When we first shot Phil and Masae we went on pure instinct; now that instinct is informed by years of experimentation and study. But one thing was there and the begining, and hasn’t changed at all — Phil and Masae were and are two very real people who agreed to share their very real sex with our cameras. That night they might have been having sex for the camera that night, but they were together for each other. And ten years later they still are. And from what they’ve told me, their sex is better (and wilder!) than ever.

-T.C.

No philosophizing today. We’re at t-minus 48 hours from leaving the homestead, getting our dependents settled at a relative’s house and finding our way to LGA for our flight to Oakland. There are a few crucial details yet to be attended to, like making sure the seven crates of gear shipped out West are on track to arrive before we do, FedExing 14,000 feet of Kodak 7274 (big hassle to take film on airplanes since 9/11, I’m not doing hand inspection of 40 cans of film!), and of course making sure our clothes and toothbrushes are packed.

In the midst of this we did manage to get our e-commerce/shopping cart set up for Comstock Films, and we’re running a pre-order special on upcoming titles. Half off the regular price if you order before we go to press, and fully refundable if you find yourself short of rent money before we send the master out for replication. It’s got to be about the cheapest, lowest risk way to become an “investor” in a film project!

Aside from providing a little working capital to grease the production wheels, this pre-release offer will help us gauge interest in the titles so we can better judge how many DVDs to run. We underestimated with Marie and Jack and had to go through the added expense and hassle of re-upping. (Of course that did let us do a little redesign of the insert to include our Penthouse Magazine blurb, which should help with brick and motar sales, so maybe our underestimation will end up being a blessing.) For better or worse (mostly better I think) business is as much a part of filmcraft as knowing filmstocks or f-stops.

I’ve got a lot more to say about beer and Prohibition and porn, but I’m going to save it for a little later. In the meantime, Forbes.com has two articles that provide some good background information for my next rant.

-T.C.

Forbes Article One

Forbes Article Two

I just got off the phone with Violet Blue. She was one of the first people to put the full weight of her reputation behind our first film Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story by naming it one of her top five films of 2003. Violet’s also just the sort of friend you want to have when you need a good bull session, which is what we just had.

Violet also asked me to be a guest on a radio series about indecency she’s hosting throughout this month on a San Francisco pirate radio station. I’ve never been on the radio or TV before, and am not so sure that I’m ready to have my opinion broadcast to the world without the benefit of revisions. There are things you say in the heat of a conversation with someone you trust (like Violet) that might not be quite ready for the general public. But after warning her about all the impolitic or off-color things that I might blurt out before thinking, and receiving her assurance that she’ll keep me on track so that I’m not a total bore or a complete asshole, I’ve agreed. If she’s willing to make a promise like that, Violet must have a pretty high opinion of herself as a radio host. For all of our sakes, I hope she’s right. In any case, once it’s over we can all go out to dinner. Violet will have a chance to meet my wife and my cinematographer.

In the world of porn, there seems to be some confusion over the difference between a director, a cinematographer (aka director of photography), and a camera operator. The impression seems to be that directing, cinematography and camera operation are all things the director should do. It’s not that one person can’t do more than one of these things; there are directors who operate (Kubric being a famous example), and DPs often operate on low-budget independents. But outside of porn it’s rare that you hear of a director/cinematographer/camera op. Over on ADT I often read posts that say “so and so isn’t a real director, he doesn’t shoot his own stuff.” If actually looking through the lens is the measure of a “real” director, then there are very few directors outside the world of porn.

I think this point of confusion comes because when a movie is done really well, as the audience you have no real awareness of how many people, (all experts in their respective arts and crafts,) it actually took to create the utterly transparent experience that is the gold-standard of Hollywood filmmaking. Sure they have all those credits at the end, but I suspect a lot of people think most of those people are on the job because somebody knew somebody, because the union says you have to have five guys, even when you only need two. I mean come on, do you really need one guy called the Director of Photography and then another person to operate the camera? Well yes you do. It helps to have an A.C. and a loader too!

We won’t have an A.C. or a loader when we’re out in San Francisco later this month, and our director (yours truly) will be pulling double duty as our A camera operator. But we will have a cinematographer. If you like the way our films look, the credit belongs to him.

-T.C.