Before I ever rolled a foot of film, before I ever made one video, before I ever took one picture of one naked lady I was a musician, or at least that’s what I thought I wanted to be. In high school I played in the band, sang in the choir, and even took the music theory course Mr. Winters was kind of enough to offer to the six of us who were interested. And after I graduated from high school I went to college and promptly declared my major as mathematics.

Yes, mathematics.

The same sorts of things that made music theory come easily to me also make math interesting and not too hard. Plus I had a high school math teacher who I adored and admired. Plus it was easier to imagine that studying math would bring me the comfortable middle class life style that I grew up in, and that I wanted for myself and the family I hoped I’d have at some point in the future. So for the first two quarters of my freshmen year I was a math major.

My career as a mathematician lasted til the begining of the third term, when there was a scheduling conflict between the math classes I needed to take and a small, but required part of the music major curriculum. (Still secretly longing to be a musician I was also taking all the required courses for a freshmen music major.) I begged the dean of the music school for an exception so I could take the third term of calculus, but he was unmoved. Forced to choose, I chose music.

Within a year music had given way to photography, but I kept taking math classes. I enjoyed the rigor, especially as a counter-point to the necessarily squishy aspects of learning about art and making art.

Had the music school dean relented, I’d like to think I might have ended up writing articles for a website like Stats at George Mason University, and in the company of people like Rebecca Goldin.

A lot of numbers get thrown around in the news, offered as proof of one position or another, and few people (and apparently least of all journalists) have the mathematical background to examine these “fact and figures” critically and rationally. This has given greater weight to the popular misapprehension that there lies, damned lies, and statistics. Figures lie, and liars figure, right?

This, of course, is nonsense.

The biases or suppositions of a statistical argument are more readily apparent and far more quantifiable than those of a rhetorical argument. But you have to have some familiarity and comfort with how numbers work to ask the right questions and understand the answers.

And an era where it’s possible, in fact common for an educated person’s math training to end with the quadratic formula, in an era where it’s social acceptable for an educated person to boast about their incompetence in math (can you imagine someone boasting they were illiterate?) it seems increasingly common for people who should know better to regard 2+2=4 as an assertion that just might yield to a clever argument or a well-turned phrase. (And I’m just talking about the progressive/liberal people I tend to find myself in the company of because I myself progressive and liberal. Let’s not get started about the assault on rationalism by religious fundamentalism.)

Myths and misperceptions swirl around pornography; some promulgate by pernicious and self-serving people, some a product of our collective imagination (both dark and hopeful) run wild. Getting to the truth about how big the business is, or how it help or hurts people is hard because when it comes to sex and money, nobody wants to tell the truth. We’re all quite sure we have too much or too little, and that everyone else is more satisfied and richer than we are. We’re all quite sure that we’re completely normal, except those little bits that we’d prefer that no one ever find out about us – ever.

Now I would be the last to suggest that we shouldn’t believe in things that cannot be quantified or measured. I believe in love, I believe in the family of human kind. Sometimes I even believe in God. But belief, (some might prefer faith) is not the same thing as superstition. And I don’t think it’s just happenstance that some of our most recent superstitious hysterias (Satanic Ritual Abuse, Erototoxins) have to do with sex. Superstition is fear’s handmaiden, and I believe that fear is the ultimate enemy of love.

But I also believe that love is more powerful than fear. This belief (perhaps ironically) solidified in me while the smell of fire and death hung heavy over my city. These few years later I am only more certain in this belief.

I make my films in the hope that they are ultimately about love, that they help push back the dark shadow of fear and superstition. But art is, of course, squishy. It cannot be proved with the quadratic formula, or by any other method. Judged, valued, accepted, rejected, but not proved. Making art and being moved by art is an act of faith that is very nearly my religion.

But I’d like to think that out there in one of those alternate universe, the ones we hear them talk about when my daughters and I watch the Science Channel, that there’s another me, another Tony Comstock. One who is an adored and admired math teacher.

I laughed out loud when I read my wife’s blog last night. From the first meeting there was no doubt there was something different about her, something to do with sex and gender and all that, but not something that has a name – not yet at least.

You would not know this to look at her. She is tall, has a great figure and a beautiful face, and if you saw her walking down the street, you’d think “This world was made for women like her.”

You’d never know she was an alien, working hard to keep her shiny emerald skin hidden.

Peggy and I are at the point in our middleclass, suburban, heterosexual lives where we are vastly outnumbered by our dependents – cats, dogs, and not least of all, children. Add to that the obligations of running an independent film company, and sometimes it feels a little busy around here. I’m not complaining, not at all. My life is lush and abundent to the point of overflowing. But sometimes it seems like we spend more energy on other people’s sex than on our own.

However, last night our eldest was away at a sleepover, giving us the illusion of having the house to ourselves (if you don’t count that cats complaining about the quality of their fodder, the larger dog snorning and the smaller dog yelping, and our infant daughter refusing to be left alone for more than 37 minutes at a time) and had ourselves a lovely little early Valentine’s Day. We opened a bottle of wine and I made a quick garlic shrimp and pasta.

“How did I get to be a mother of two?” say Peggy with a mixture of sardonisism and disbelief as she worked her way to bottom of her second glass.

When her glass was empty I showed her, or at least something approximating the procedure. It was a little sucky, and a little fucky, and altogether very nice. And that was Valentine’s Day at Casa Comstock.

For an slightly more sardonic take on February 14, check out My Sucky Valentine, a fundraiser for San Francisco Sex Information, and hosted by the sardonic, but always lovable Thomas Roche. It’s tonight, February 11, at the Center for Sex and Culture.

If you go, you are encouraged to wear their sexiest, skimpiest, kinkiest sleazewear. This year’s event is on a “Gangster of Love” (some people call me Maurice!) theme.

Tales of sexual woe will come from Eros Zine columnist Tori Ann McCabre as well as Carol Queen, Thea Hillman, Daphne Gottlieb, Violet Blue, Mistress Morgana, mi blue, and Simon Sheppard, as well as Mr. Roche himself.

There will also be special dance performances from Bombshell Betty and Lady Monster Burlesque — who will be performing both a hard-edged modern dance set to her own track from the forthcoming Revolting Cocks album as well as more traditional burlesque.

The doors open at 8pm, the show starts at 9pm, they won’t kick you out until 1am.

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!

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.

“There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.”

Another big snow storm is headed in tonight, so as soon as the car was fixed, we scooted out of the city without seeing Christo’s gates. For years I’ve had a Christoesque idea (but much smaller in scale) involving kites and water. Out were we live there’s just the right sort of place to do it. Maybe when the weather warms up a bit.

-T.C.

We had some eroneous code in our store that was preventing some of you from ordering from us. You probably been getting an error like:

Auth Response: The orderid: 19921108488224 has already been used. The value must be unique

This has been fixed and orders should now go through with no problem.

Many thanks to those of you who were persistent enough to keep trying, and follow up with us by phone and/or e-mail!

-T.C.

P.S. We’re half way between S.F. and home. Mrs. C and I are exhausted to the point of near collapse. But the trip was amazing, the film’s in the lab. I’ll have more to tell and images to show very soon. If what I saw through the lens is what we got on the film, I think we’ve got something really, really special!

There’s a long list of people to thank. For now let me just say that whenever I do a project I end up feeling humbled by the level of dedication people are willing to bring to the work we do. But in this trip to the Bay Area I was utterly overwhelmed my crew’s and subjects’ willingness to believe that this work is worthwhile, to do whatever it took to make things happen, and to bring the best of what each one of them had to offer to our collective effort. My deepest and most heart-felt thanks to all of you!

-T.C.

So far this year we’ve managed to get surprised by our anniversary (”Is it today?” said Mrs.C), Mrs.C’s birthday, and now Valentine’s Day. No flowers, no box of chocolate, no card. I’m quite sure Mrs.C doesn’t have anything for me either.

This is one of the downsides of being an independent. Schedules are less regular. The boundries between work and personal time dissolve and then vanish. It’s hard to remember what day of the week it is. Life becomes a series of small crisises, punctuate by larger ones. Birthdays and anniversaries and holidays get forgotten.

Of course there’s a sweet side too. I’ll make sure to bore you with that too!

-T.C.