In contrast to the e-mail battle to get DAMON & HUNTER listed with the grown-up movies (as opposed to “adult” movies,) the rest of our filmography has appeared on IMDb sans drama.

It’s now possible for a casual IMDb visitor to look up both Xana & Dax and Matt & Khym, no having to log in, no having the secret “show me adult results” box checked. Whether or not this has something to do with the fact that Xana & Dax and Matt & Khym are straight couples, or it’s merely a matter of having worn the IMDb editors down with the Damon & Hunter episode, I don’t know.

I do know that sometimes fretting about this sort of thing seems like a lot of fuss over nothing, a distraction from the business of making my movies. Now that Ashley & Kisha is finished, I’ve got the backlog wittled down to four unfinished films. Maybe time would be better spend in the edit bay then worrying about IMDb listings and similar.

But in the last week I’ve had three different experiences that have reminded me why things like IMDb and Google, and how the hardware, software, and wetware resources at those, and other organization interpret sex, expecially sex words, matters.

* Yesterday I received e-mail from Good For Her announcing the awards event next month that Peggy is going to. In the subject line porn was spelled “P*rn”.

* A couple of days ago I got a note from Em & Lo, sex columnists at New York Magazine and elsewhere. In the subject line and throughout the body copy, sex was spelled “s*x”.

* Last week I sent a note to journalist Mark Glaser, with a link to a post on my blog. Mark wrote back to tell me that he couldn’t access my blog from his workplace.

No one has benefited more from the digitization of culture than I have. I have a comfortable life, living in a wonderful place, doing work I’m passionate about, all largely because of the opportunities this brave new digital world has provided me. But the same technology that makes it easy for information to fly around the globe also makes it easy to prevent people from receiving information, often without anyone even being aware that the information they have access to has been censored filtered.

For example, when I spoke to a representative at St. Bernard Software (conjures up an image of a benevolent protector, doen’t it?) the people who provide censoring filtering software to Mark’s workplace, he told me the default setting for their software is what they feel would be appropriate for a eight year old child.

A eight year old child? I was incredulous. What was internet filtering software like that doing on the corporate network of a journalism organization? The St. Bernard fellow explained that they sell to a lot of schools and libraries, so the defaults are set cautiously, and that network administrators can fine-tune the filtering to suit the needs of their workplace.

Well maybe that works in theory, but the fact everyone is busy, and St. Bernard’s sale force sells their software as a “turn-key” solution, “Just install it and our human-edited list of no-go sites will keep your kids safe, your employees hard at work, your workplace lawsuit free…” (I’m not speculating here. I spoke to the IT department at Mark’s workplace. “We’re not doing anything special here. Just running St. Bernard with the normal settings.”)

I’m both a parent and a businessman, I’m not unsympathetic to these concerns. But as parent and a businessman I have concerns of my own. The St. Bernard fellow told me they also sell their software to a lot of colleges and universities, and because their database classifies ComstockFilms.com as pornographic site, there’s a good chance that access to our website is blocked on campuses running St. Bernard software.

College students aren’t a very important part of our market (they don’t have any money), so I’m not particularly concerned about that (though that’s not the sort of university experience I want my daughters to have.) But I do sometime imagine an art or film studies professor going to look us up and not being able to access our site.

I also feel concerned about the prejudicial effect that being categorized and filtered in this way can have on our work, and our business. Amazon.com sells Shortbus, but they do not sell “pornography”. The BBFC gave Destricted an R rating, but “pornography” gets an R18. The catagorization of our films, at IMDb, and at St. Bernard, at the BBFC and elsewhere have a profound effect on who can see our work, where our films can be shown, and who can/will sell our DVDs. And in an increasingly wired world, the flick of a switch can send us or anyone else off into digital purgatory. (That’s how you get s*x and p*rn.)

So I’m relieved that Xana and Dax and Matt and Khym are listed with the grown-up movies on IMDb, out in the real world, with films like In the Realm of the Senses, Shortbus, and Pink Flamigos. If you’re registered at IMDb and wanted to go over and throw a few stars our way, that couldn’t hurt. They’re easy to find – just use the search function.

A very nice note came in over the weekend. By permission of the author:

“Hi Tony,I suspect you are at the AVN Awards tonight — having a lovely time I hope — but I just watched _Matt and Khym_ (I was a pre-order customer) and couldn’t wait to email you. I found this couple utterly delightful and feel I could not overstate my praise for this film.

Coming on the heels of our misadventure with PBS, this note is especially welcome.

We make enough money through this work to sustain us financially, but against the constant backdrop of vilification, it can be tremendously draining emotionally. Whether it’s the OFLC or PBS, or printer that won’t print a poster because it’s “pornographic”, their cravenness and my own impotence in the face of that cravenness is exhausting, it’s discouraging, and sometimes I just want to quit.

Then I get a note like Emily’s, or I read a post like Jenn P’s, and I feel like we’re doing something important, something that matters, something that makes the world a better place. And I decide I can quite tomorrow.

A few days after the Boing Boing post about Google’s sexblog snafu, I was exchanging e-mail with Mark Glaser, who writes the PBS blog MEDIASHIFT. Mark also talked to Violet Blue, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan, and the result is a very thoughtful piece about how the power wrapped up in Google’s search algorithyms can hurt the little guy.

The piece opens with a long quote from Chelsea Girl’s Love Letter to Google. It quotes both me and especially Violet quite a bit. It quote’s from my blog, and even refers readers to it. But the piece does not link to my blog. Nor does it link to Comstock Films. And though it mentions them, it does not link to Pretty Dumb Things or Tiny Nibbles either.

It does link to Search Engine Land, it links to Matt Cutts, and it links to Boing Boing.

Perhaps it’s just an oversight. I hope so, but ten years’ experience of trying to bring the best of what I have, as a filmmaker and as a human being, to the depiction of sex makes me doubt that’s the reason that the PBS article doesn’t link to Comstock Films.

We’ve had printers refuse to print our inserts and posters because they were “pornographic”. I had my words used without attribution, let alone a link. Hell, I’ve even had a government ban one of my films from an entire continent.

So when PBS runs a story that started with a post that I made on my blog, and then doesn’t even link to my blog, it doesn’t surprise me. Am I disappointed? Yes. But surprised? No.

Fortunately, our situation with Google seems stable. If anyone goes looking for us as a result of the PBS piece, they should be able to find us!

P.S. Should anyone care to contact PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, you can do so here. Tell ‘im Tony says “hi”.

P.S.S. I knew something wasn’t quite right. The editors at MEDIASHIFT had no problem linking to TinyNibbles.com in the January 4 Top 5 Stories post. What do you supposed happened between this week and last?

Last year, porn legend Nina Hartley revealed the secret formula for making boring porn.. But Nina was talking about the creative side, and no discussion of the creative side is complete without looking at the business side. Like any good detective will tell you, follow the money and you’ll usually find out why people do what they do.

Well as it happens, the same day the New York Times declares that porn is a $13 billion/year business, over at Adult DVD Talk Oren from Anarchy Films blows the lid off the business side of the skin biz. Says Oren:

An average gonzo cost about $13,500. Than editing hard and soft is about $1,200. Design a sleeve is about $600, authoring is about $700, sleeves are about $500, replication is about $1,500 for 3000 pcs. So if you do the math right you looking into a $18,000. A good distributor will bring you back about $19,000 in the first 45 days of release. To keep a company going you need to release about 50 movies a year with an invesment of at least 1,000,000 in cash. (do the math).

Do the math indeed!

If the average gonzo flick (the mainstay of the industry) costs $18K out the door, with 12,000 +/- titles/year, that puts the total annual production, post-production, replication and packaging costs somewhere around $216M/year. The Times is asking us to believe that $216M investment is generating annual revenues of $13B. How’s that for a return on investment! Even with promotion and overhead you’ve got to like those numbers!

The only problem is, the figures that actually make sense and are supported by any evidence are Oren’s. Look at any porn video and it’s easy to see the producers didn’t spend a lot of time or money on it.

But the numbers reported by the Times are complete fabrications that have be reported as fact without the journalist even taking the time to run them through a calculator.

If Americans are spending “90 cents on porn for every dollar they spend on Hollywood movies” where are the $12M/picture stars with homes in Malibu and East Hampton? Where are the the $10K/day cinematographers or the $2000/day steadicam operators? Where’s the craft-services table piled high with an endless supply of Heineken and Perrier? They’re nowhere to be found because there’s not enough money in porn to pay for them.

Yes, I know, I know. The money flows to a secret cabal of ultra-discreet distributors. As PBS reported, “That’s why you don’t see most of them running around in the Rolls they keep that in the garage and take out on weekends.” Talk about a porn fantasy!

The simple fact is, even Jenna Jameson — porn’s biggest superstar ever — doesn’t make as much as an ensemble player in a run-of-the-mill network sitcom, let alone rake in $1M/episode like each cast member of Friends did — for six seasons! “Big budget” in porn means high five figures. The budget for an “epic” like PIRATES still doesn’t top a million.

And if you think porn is making 60-fold returns on these films, just stop and think a minute. Do you think Hollywood (or Wall Street!) is so encumbered by ethics that they could resist a 6000% return? If there was that kind of return on investment in porn, the “mainstream” would get over its squeamishness pronto, and every single studio, including Disney, would have an “adult” division.

So why do the New York Times, and PBS, and the AP keep reporting this nonsense? For the same reason people make porn; because it’s fun to go slumming, because it’s titilating to take an “unbiased” look at the “adult industry” because putting something “trashy” in the business section spices it up a little. And mostly, because no one’s checking the facts.