A person would have to be dead inside to view this and not come away thinking along the lines of “what this couple has is special, and that is something I desire in my life as well.”

That’s the conclusion that The Visitor reaches in their very nice four and a half star review of MATT AND KHYM on ADT.

The Visitor’s review is full of all sorts of details, which is incredibly flattering to read. It’s a great feeling to think that someone is watching something we made so intently. One passage is particularly:

The word ‘real’ keeps coming to mind. Although the cameraman gets good angles, it is never obtrusive. Unlike the more commercial porn where the actors are in positions meant specifically for viewing and not mainly for true genital contact, this couple really does make love. The grinding together of their pelvises, the kissing, the neck nuzzling. You know this is real, and even though some explicitness is not there as in the real hard core stuff, this is a real turn-on seeing true love-making. (On a technical note, film, not video, is used, which gives it a more ‘real’ feel. Although at first I thought the lighting would be an issue, but in watching it, it is like you are right there in the bedroom with no artificiality.).

There is this idea that when depicting sex, a filmmaker has to choose between being explicit and being cinematic, between being erotic heat and emotional weight. (Mike Nichols, “I think sex in a movie is boring… Sex is very powerful as part of a fantasy… But to stare directly at it is to be wasting most of what’s available in drama and in film.” John Cameron Mitchell, “We tried to de-eroticize the sex to see what kind of emotions and ideas are left over when the haze of eroticism is waved away.”)

I think Nichols and Mitchell and others are wrong.

I don’t think staring directly at sex is a waste, and I don’t think that eroticism is a haze that has to “waved away” to see have a cinematic experience of emotions and ideas, and we began making these films one of the questions I wanted to answer was whether or not sex couple be depicted in a way that was completely frank, while still being cinematic, emotional, and erotic.

Now I don’t pretend that any of my films are on par with Mike Nichols, or even John Cameron Mitchell, in scope, sophistication, or artistry. My films are nothing if not modest in the objectives and execution. But I do think they’ve suceeded (modestly) where Nichols and Mitchell and others haven’t even dared to go.

(From “Matt and Khym: Better than Ever”)

If you’re not a registered user with your super-secret “adult titles” search enabled, you can’t.

You can find 9 SONGS, a film about a fictional pair of rock-show going, coke-snorting lovers, that famously features explicit footage of felatio, cunnilingus, coitus, and even a pop-shot.

You can find PLAGUES AND PLEASURES ON THE SALTON SEA, the film that shared the Best Documentary prize with DAMON AND HUNTER at the 2006 Melbourne Underground Film Festival.

You can even find MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY, our first erotic documentary title.

But you can’t find DAMON AND HUNTER: DOING IT TOGETHER.

Says IMDB:

“The IMDb contains over 400,000 different movie titles. The aim of the database is to cover as many titles and genres as possible. As a result, some of these titles contain words or expressions that some of our users may find inappropriate and some movies themselves may also fall into this category. To provide some level of control for those of a sensitive nature some adult titles have been made searchable only by users who are registered with the IMDb and have requested access to this material.”

“Inappropriate.” Apparently an intimate film about two young men in love, and loving one another is “inappropriate.”

Caligola,, Bob Guccione’s notorious bait and switch production isn’t “inappropriate.”

Neither is Love Camp 7, the infamous Nazi exploitation flick. (From the IMDB listing, “The film contains numerous scenes of women prisoners being abused, tortured and humiliated by their Nazi captors. Indeed the whole purpose of the work is to invite male viewers to relish the spectacle of naked women being humiliated for their titillation. LOVE CAMP 7 contains both eroticised depictions of sexual violence and repeated association of sex with restraint, pain, and humiliation.”)

Apparently Pink Flamingos, which (among other things) features an actor eating dog shit, isn’t “inappropriate” either.

But according to IMDB, DAMON AND HUNTER, an award-winning documentary film featuring a consentual love-scene between committed lovers is “inappropriate,” and viewers with more delicate sensiblities must be protected from the pain they might feel should they accidentally stumble across DAMON AND HUNTER in the course of browsing through IMDB.

We’ve been here before.

Last Summer, the Australian OFLC “protected” the good people of Sydney from accidently stumbling into the queerDOC Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and being exposed to DAMON & HUNTER.

Last Fall, a printer in North Carolina refused to print the above poster for DAMON & HUNTER, lest anyone in their plant be exposed to the image of two men about to kiss.

IMDB’s been here before too. Last January, IMDB hid John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS in the section for “inappropriate” films. (An uproar ensued across the indie film world prompting IMDB to move SHORTBUS from the “inappropriate” section to the “appropriate” section” by the end of the day.)

Of course compared to us SHORTBUS and ThinkFilm are a marketing juggernaut. John Cameron Mitchell’s been quoted in a hundred places pronouncing that SHORTBUS isn’t arrousing and isn’t porn, where I’m quite proud of the fact that (at least for some people) DAMON AND HUNTER is quite arousing, and I’m ambivalent about the p-word. (Short version, it tells you more about the person saying it than it does about the film they’re applying it to.)

I’m also ambivelent about trying to get IMDB to change the listing. Not because I’m happy to have DAMON & HUNTER hidden away, but because I know that trying to get IMDB to change it will take a lot of time and effort. Comstock Films is me and my wife Peggy, there’s only so much of us to go around. And after financing, producing, editing, and marketing these films, there’s not always that much left over for fighting battles with people like the OFLC or IMDB. Sometimes I feel a little ground down,

What I am not ambivalent about is that Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together is not “inappropriate” film, and if “sensitive” IMDB users don’t need to be protected from stumbling across listings for CALIGOLA, LOVE CAMP 7, or PINK FLAMINGOS, they most certainly don’t need to be “protected” from accidentally seeing the listing for DAMON & HUNTER.

UPDATE

You can also find HONEY AND BUNNY, which played along side DAMON & HUNTER at the New York CineKink Film Festival, and features close-up shot of a half-eaten peach lodged in a woman’s vagina, as well as FILTHY FOOD, which also played with D&H at the CineKink Film Festival, and features close-up footage of a woman performing “oral sex” on a variety of foods in the place of penises, vulvas, and breasts.

“The erotically charged plot is not meant to arouse the audience-No one got a hard-on watching this film.” — Film Director John Cameron Mitchell after the Cannes premiere of SHORTBUS

Well maybe not at Cannes, but it looks like maybe someone over imdb.com got a boner.

“Western man, especially the Western critic, still finds it very hard to go into print and say: ‘I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection.” — Kenneth Tynan

Yesterday’s post about DESTRICTED drew a post from Ms. Naughty which I’ve excerpted:

“I would say [DESTRICTED's] definition is fair enough…“If society was OK with porn’s place as a masturbatory tool, we wouldn’t have to talk about art being “disguised” as porn or vice versa.

Certainly attitudes toward sexuality and masturbation have their effect, but in the case of film it’s worth looking at this from a producer’s point of view.

When it comes to dollars and cents, the label “porn” is extremely marginalizing. Witness John Cameron Mitchell’s recent comments RE: SHORTBUS. “No one got a hard-on watching this film” says Mitchell. That’s a way of reinforcing the position that SHORTBUS isn’t porn. And with a budget of $2.5M — more than any porn film ever made — Mitchell and his backers can’t afford to have SHORTBUS shoved off into the porn ghetto, where returns are measured in thousands, not millions.

What I have noticed recently in reading reviews of films like THE DREAMERS, 9 SONGS, etc. is how venomously critics use the word “porn” - derision indeed. Whatever these movies’ failings, they look and feel nothing like any of the porn I’ve ever seen, and it makes me wonder just what sort of porn these critics have been watching that they feel a comparison is appropriate.

In fact it’s not, and in much the same way that “faggot” is used to dismiss a person’s sexuality as inappropriate and as the ultimate and overriding aspect of their humanity, these critics use the word “porn” to dismiss explicit sexuality as inappropriate subject matter and label the director’s interest in making such films questionable, and likely the product of a quirk or defect in the director’s psycho-sexuality.

In that respect, I would say that DESTRICTED’s and similar definitions of porn and erotica are anything but fair. At best it’s a useless construct that doesn’t really tell us anything about the work labeled “porn” or the work labeled “erotica”, save the economic ambitions of the person doing the labeling. (For some reason the phrase “straight looking/straight acting” pops to mind.)

More often such definitions are divisive, poisonous even; perpetuating a sort of Krafft-Ebing continuum for sexually explicit art, only instead of having poorly framed discussions about where the line between healthy and unhealthy sexuality lies, we have no less illuminating debates about where the line lies between porn and art. While this might lead to a lovely academic wank fest, it’s the wrong question, or at least a question I find utterly banal.

Let me lay my cards on the table about hanging the label “porn” on our work:

On one hand I have no qualms with being labeled “porn” because it lets people know in no uncertain terms that these films are absolutely frank in the way they depict sex and absolutely intended to arouse. If Mitchell proudly states that “all of the orgasms and all of the semen is real” but “no one got a hard-on watching SHORTBUS”, I am no less proud of the fact that my films also have real orgasms and real semen. Additionally, I am proud that my films have inspired countless happy erections, orgasms, and ejaculations. I’m please and happy that my films make people feel good about themselves and make them feel good about sex.

But along with the proclamation of sexual frankness, the word porn comes with a wagon-load of baggage and restrictions that I hope won’t be applied to my work. Like any artist, I want to have my work widely seen and widely respected. And like any business, we need to make money off the the work we do. The label porn is an obstacle to wider distribution of our films.

And just as I’m sure that directors who contributed to DESTRICTED don’t want to be lumped in with MEATHOLES, THROAT GAGGERS or CUM DUMPSTERS, I don’t want to be lumped in there, either. These are extreme examples, but by and large porn is cynical and poorly crafted; an insult to both sex and cinema. I am nothing if not sympathetic to filmmakers who do not want their work labeled as porn.

But what’s so very wrong about the the Porn vs. Art/Erotica vs. Porn question is that it supposes that whether or not SHORTBUS has crossed the line from art to porn (or whether our own DAMON AND HUNTER has crossed the line from porn to art.) is a relevant question.

It’s not; at least not if we’re evaluating the work without concern for its commercial potential.

Like Krafft-Ebing’s PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS, this porn/art nonsense supposes a continuum where there is none. It separates sex from the rest of life, porn from art, and then tries to draw a line, or at least define a grey area. (Lest we go too far!)

This, of course, is sillly.

Sex is not apart from the rest of our lives, and in this context “porn” is merely an inflammatory, and largely meanless descriptor. (So is “erotica” for that matter.)

Either SHORTBUS is or is not a worthwhile viewing experience; either you are comfortable or take issue with the methods JCM used to achieve his vision. Either you enjoy watching DAMON AND HUNTER and are comfortable with the way it was produced or you’re not. Whether or not you got wet or hard only matters in as much as it helped or harmed your enjoyment of the film.

The rest is marketing spin or sophistry, or both.

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.

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?

I was reading Hunter James’s blog today and saw that he and his boyfriend Damon have been cast in John Cameron Mitchell’s new project Shortbus.

Mitchell was the creator and star of the of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which Mrs.C and I loved, and I’ve been hearing about this project on and off for a few years now. I can’t help but be both curious and hopeful about Mitchell’s promise to give us real sex in the context of a real movie. Commenting on his aims in Shortbus Mitchell says:

“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?”

The integration of graphic sex into a film with same ease as kissing or graphic violence is, in many people’s minds, the holy grail of sex on film – a film you could enjoy as pure cinematic entertainment, only with cunts and cocks and cum.

But the above quote has me wondering: Is placing priority on the emotional life of the characters antithetical to the audience’s own arousal? Does setting out to arouse the audience (and get them off if I can!) necessarily cheapen sex? I sure hope not, because if it does, I’ve really gone off in the wrong direction with my real life sex stories.

-T.C.