Thomas Roche of Eros Zine writes:

Comstock Films has been creating some of the most interesting offbeat porn around. Their last title, Xana & Dax: When Opposites Attract followed what should be a tried-and-true video-erotica format, because it’s so damn effective: interview scenes spliced with hardcore sex. The resulting video portrait feels bizarrely intimate, especially since the sexual scenes feel so strangely natural, disarming, and hot.

Both Xana and Comstock’s first release, Marie & Jack were about straight couples; Damon & Hunter, shot on film, is about the relationship between two gay men. In choosing this feature, you might think that TC may be torpedoing his chances for mainstream distribution — mixing gay & straight content just isn’t done in Porn Valley. But if you spend any time reading his blog, you’ll walk away with the sense that he doesn’t so much give a flying fuck. In that sense, Damon & Hunter goes to a brave place, a place unsullied by the ringing of 818 cell phones and the clickety-clack of stiletto heels.

You can read the rest of Thomas’s very nice review here.

Thomas is right. I don’t give a flying fuck, but that’s just as much a business decision as it is a creative one.

Mainstream porn distribution is built on the idea of churning out a high volume of low profit margin work. Studios are lucky if they clear a few thousand dollars on each title, so the key to any sort of financial success is to keep costs as low as possible and crank out as many titles as possible.

Even if a person had the skills and desire to do more finely crafted work, by working in this environment they would be handcuffed by a business model that doesn’t allow for the investment of the kind of time and money that it would take to elevate their work. (This is what I mean by “film will not yeild to an act of will”.)

Over the past couple of years we’ve had a few inquiries from “mainstream” porn distributors, but none of them has been able to understand our business model: we spend as much time and money as we can possibly justify on each title, and then hope that the films have the longevity needed to recoup our investment. We bank on selling more copies of fewer titles.

This approach what lets us shoot film when almost everyone else is shooting handicam, this is what lets us take months to edit our films when most porn is edited in days. By not tying ourselves to high-volume/low-margin and all the other “rules” of mainstream distribution, we can afford to make the films that we want to make, the way we want to make them. We can even make (shock! horror!) a gay title if we want to, and I can’t wait for the chance to do it again!

For those of you who have been waiting too long for us to finish Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together, I offer signs that your patience will soon be rewarded.

This is the very lovely cover Peggy has designed for the DVD, image selection courtesy of Those Boys. A round of proofing and the artwork goes out today! (This also means there aren’t many days left to get Damon and Hunter for $12.95.)