Coming Soon!

Have you every noticed that talking/debating about porn is (mostly) more engaging than actually watching it?

Anyway, Ms. Naughty, just back from bushwalking and wine-guzzling has added her two cents to the porn/blowjob/feminism debate in a post entitled Boring Blowjobs and Feminist Facials. This is the part that jumped out at me:

“Can a facial ever be “feminist”? My answer is yes. As always, context is everything.”

I agree. Context is everything. I’d even go as far as saying context is the only thing. Porn is often criticized for being fake and/or lacking context, but this is utterly untrue.

Porn is vividly real and hypercontextual. The very essence of photographic pornography is the depiction of actual sex, and it doesn’t get more “real” than two people actually fucking.

The problem is that (overwhelmingly) the reality depicted and the context in which it’s placed is utterly unappealing if not downright offensive. But when it comes to photographic images of sex, like the words “porn” and “feminism”, “reality” and “context” are at least as slippery.

Is “reality” the degree to which the viewer becomes engrossed in the narrative conceit of the film, or does “reality” extend to how well the narrative conceit jibes with the particulars of the production?

Similarly, is context limited to the moment when the house lights go down to the final fade to back? Or does it include the director’s Q&A after, or the Behind-The-Scene on the DVD? Or how about an e-mail exchange between the film’s director and a disappointed viewer? This is a post I made back in September of 2005 entitled Real Porn (No, Really):

Two days ago I received a note from a fellow who, although he liked many things about Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax, was rather disappointed 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 piercing, 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.

As a director my ideal is that everything that an audience needs to know to enjoy one of my films should be presented within the confines of the film itself. If any information from “outside the frame” enhances the enjoyment the film, that’s fine, but the film itself should be the essential experience. If a viewer is on the fence until I’ve explained my intentions at the Q&A, or they seen everyone goofing off and having a good time in the BTS, or been given my assurances that it was “real” in a private e-mail exchange, then in my mind, the film has failed that viewer.

But film is first and foremost a commercial undertaking, so as a producer and marketeer, I recognize that creating and shaping an external context for our work is an essential part of the art and business of making films. “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex”; that’s the “frame” with in which we present our “erotic documentaries.” (Of course “erotic documentaries” is yet another frame.)

But for all the effort we put into framing our work, there’s a limit to how much control we have over the context in which our films are understood. By my reckoning, at the very most even a filmmaker like Steven Speilberg only has control over 49% of how any given viewer sees and understands one of his films.

I work on the assumption that I have even less control, so a lot of my effort goes into being mindful of vast space into which viewers will pour their own understanding and life experiences, and recognizing that each viewer is going to create their own context, based on their own understanding of sex, relationships, and pleasure.

Sometimes this works.

Well something is definately up.

On November 7th, the day after I posted Real Sex, Nina Hartley, and the Googlebot, our Google-driven traffic dropped by 40%, and has stayed there for the last week.

Okay, fine. No one, not even Comstock Films is entitled to high Google rankings.

But while our overall Google traffic has dropped by 40% in the last week, our visitors on the search [nina hartley] have doubled, and that’s on top of the ~400% increase reported in my first post. In fact, [nina hartley] is now our #2 search term, outranking [real sex] or even [tony comstock]. (Meanwhile, our visitors on the search [real sex] have virtually dried up altogether.)

I’m not happy about losing our [real sex] visitors; they were among our best search related customers (second best actually.) But I’m even less happy seeing that once again, Google seems to be dicking around with their sex-related search just ahead of the holiday season, and in there dicking around, they seem to have come up with a picture of our site that just isn’t accurate. We’re getting visitors we shouldn’t get, and people who are probably looking for exactly what we offer are getting sent somewhere else.

I’m a filmmaker, but I am also a merchant, and like any other merchant, this is an important time of year for us. In the last year we’ve done a lot to be less dependent on search-driven sales to make ends meet, but those sales are still an important part of how we’re able to pay our bills. A 40% drop in Google-driven visitors can’t be good for us, and could be very bad.

Last year I got e-mail from a reporter who said she wrote for a British newspaper called The Metro. Never having heard of it, I was cautious when I talked with the reporter, and didn’t expect much.

But it turned out The Metro prints about two million copies of each edition and is read by about five million people each day. After the article ran orders from the UK picked up substantially.

Last week another Metro reporter got in touch, wanting to know my take on YouPorn, and how budding internet exhibitionist could put their best foot (tit?) forward. This time the communication was entirely through e-mail, and it offers a good chance to compare what I wrote with what made it into print. Here’s what I wrote:

Tony Comstock’s Tips for Putting Your Homemade Smut Online

Keep these things in mind and you can make pics and vids that are dirty fun, not dirty stupid. And if someday in the future someone tries do get down on you for it, you can say “Yeah, that’s me. I’m having sex. And don’t I look good!”

This is what made into the article titled I Spy with My Little Eye:

Want to look good on camera? Erotic filmmaker Tony Comstock shares his top tips:

*Smile! The most consistently sexy thing a person can do is smile. Yes, pouty can be oh-so- sexy, but an authentic smile shows you’re having fun. it also gives a feeling of reality to the images that commercial porn doesn’t have.

It’s a simple fact of life that these sorts of things get edited for length and style, and overall I’m happy with how The Metro distilled what I said (though I do with they had got more of the gist of my primping tips. I was talking about making sure you don’t have spinach in your teeth more than making sure your twat is well-groomed.)

But it doesn’t always turn out this way. Last month I had a go around with a magazine that had given us some great coverage last year, and came back for “tips” on an upcoming sex article. The magazine wanted me to be their “expert” on how couples might move from smoothly from position to position.

My first thought was “no.” I’m a filmmaker, maybe even an expert in making a certain kind of sex film, but I’m no sort of bedroom advisor. But it’s publicity, right? So I reconsidered and decided that after 10+ years of watching people have sex, and ten years of editing loving-making with special attention to “transition continuity” I might have some useful things to say about how to get position to position smoothly. My underlying theme was (big surprise) don’t worry too much about it.

Big mistake.

When the magazine’s fact-checker showed me “my tips”, not only was it like they had been written by someone else in terms of style, most of the tips completely contradicted what I had said. I referred them back to the original text, but to no avail. The upshot was that I got a terse note from the managing editor that they had found a different “expert” to sign off on the article.

Oh well.

Dealing with “the press” can be a funny thing. On one hand, good press coverage is vital to a small company’s success. Good press relation is the marketing budget at a place like Comstock Films. On the otherhand, there is sometimes an odd expectation that the little guy (that would be us) will be willing to do anything to get in a magazine, or get on TV. Often times there’s a strong feeling that the article is already written, or the “documentary” segment is already cut, now there’s just trying to find some faces to put on their preconceptions. (TV people are by far the worst. We’ve had very odd encounters with HBO, the BBC, and the CBC.)

But what good is it to be on TV or in a magazine if the picture they want to paint isn’t you, isn’t your work, isn’t something you’d be proud to put your name on? So you learn to say no. You think about the spike in sales that came with the last bit of national coverage, then you remind yourself that who you are and what you do got you where you are today, and you say no.

Unless it’s the right time to say yes.

Google’s search algorithms would seem to have undergone another fairly major revision, at least around sexuality. What makes me say that? In the last month, people finding their way to ComstockFilms.com on the search [real sex] have fallen by about 80%, while people finding their way to ComstockFilms.com on the search [nina hartley] have risen by about ten-fold. Yesterday we actually got more visitors looking for Nina Hartley than we are looking for real sex, which probably isn’t good for Nina, Comstock Films, web-searchers, or Google for that matter.

I suspect this has something to do with the Googlebot trying to distinguish between spamblogs and original content, but who can know for sure?

The good news is that this hasn’t had nearly the same effect on us that the Great Google Disaster of 2006 did. Since last year we’ve taken steps to make sure our fortunes aren’t so dependent on the visisitude of inscrutable Googlebot.

Why do I make films? So I can get note like this!

Tony,
My wife and I watched this DVD last night. It was a wonderful change from the more typical adult films on the market. You feel as though you really get to know Matt and Khym. There are so many similarities between my wife and I and Matt and Khym. We met when I was just out of high school and my wife was still a junior in high school. We are both in our early 40’s and rarely can you find an adult film with people our age. Just like Matt and Khym, once we bought our home it seemed as though we always have others living with us. Even now, with 2 children and a mom in the home it feels as though we do have to “sneak around” to make love. We also look forward to the day when we can “do it” any time the feeling is there. The lovemaking scene was wonderful. We barely made it all the way through before our own desires took over. Thanks again for a great film about making love.

Sincerely,
L–, California

“Porn is about fantasy.” In the last ten years, I’ve heard that refrain a thousand times; mostly as an excuse for pornography’s manifold shortcomings. Fantasy as an excuse for misogyny. Fantasy as an excuse for racism. Fantasy as an excuse for bad movie-making.

And what about empathy?

DIE HARD is a fantasy, with automatic weapons and explosions and a dozen other things (we hope) we’ll never experience in real life. But it’s our empathy with Everyman John McClane that makes the movie work. If we don’t care about John McClane, we don’t care about the peril he is in, and we won’t care when he triumphs in the end. This is entertainment 101, understood at least since Aristotle.

In more recent times it has been suggested that arousal is incompatable with empathy; that desire, enflamed by explicit depictions of sex, casts a haze through which no other emotion can penetrate; that this haze must be “wiped way” in order to see other, deeper, more important emotions.

This is rubbish.

Well the public screening of ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT did not take place, but there was a judges’ screening of it, and the other six banned films. And guess what? They like us! They really like us! Best Foreign Film, Best Foreign Film and the second most covetted award at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, Most Gratuitous Use of Sex. (The first being Most Gratuitous Use of Violence.) Here’s the full list of awards:

BEST FILM
A Nocturne
Dir: Bill Mousoulis

BEST FOREIGN FEMALE ACTOR
Mihiro - Love Runs Faster Than Blood

Many thanks to festival director Richard Wolstencroft. The Melbourne Underground Film Festival sets the standard for what an underground film festival ought to be; a fearless challenge to the status quo, and a shot across the bow to the powers that be!

It’s four in the morning here and I just finished a long chat with a representative of the OFLC.

“Ashley and Kisha” has not been classified, which meant that the OFLC could have given it a festival exemption to play at MUFF.

But OFLC refused to give it a festival exemption on the basis that my previous three films were classified X.

I asked why Destricted, which features work by Larry Clark, who’s previous film was refused classification, was given a festival exemption to play the same night as Ashley and Kisha, across town at ACMI, a and they could not answer.

I asked why Destricted, which features brutally mercenary depictions of the most loveless anal sex, was given a festival exemption and they could not answer.

Their suggestion was that we submit “Ashley and Kisha” for rush classification, in the hopes that we would receive a R classification.

But…

When I asked why 9 Songs, which feature actors performing cunelingus, felatio, ejaculation, and penetration was given an R, while our films which depict actual lovers are given an X, they could not answer.

When I asked why Shortbus, which features, among other things, an actor masturbating and then ejaculating on his face was given an R, while our film, which explore sexual pleasure inside the context of committed real-life loving relationships, they could not answer.

When I asked why numerous videos from the Sinclair Institute, which feature various sex acts performed by paid models, and presented under the guise of education are given R , while our film, which are held in the libraries of The Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana, Planned Parenthood, The Gay Mens Health Crisis, The San Francisco Sex Information Hotline and many other health and education organizations are given an X, they could not answer.

They have told me the process is subjective and imperfect; yet this process has a “perfect” track record of marginalizing our films.

Now they would ask that we once again submit our work to this subjective and imperfect process, pay $1,000 for the privilege of doing so, against the hope that the fifth time’s the charm.

I may be a fool, but I’m not that kind of fool.

Writing about “Ashley and Kisha” Megan Spencer said, “The sweetest thing - Kisha & Ashley is one of the sweetest love stories you’re ever likely to see committed to film. The Comstocks once again put their perfect documentary formula to good use - true love and real sex - on screen; what’s not to like?!”

True love and real sex, what’s not to like indeed?

Obviously the OFLC has no problem with real sex. It has granted its R classification to 9 Songs, Shortbus, and many other videos containing real sex. It has granted a festival exemption to Destricted, which contains real sex.

One can only conclude that the problem the OFLC has is with true love, and what a pity that is; for this film, for the people who wanted to see it, and for Australia.

“Dear Mr. Comstock,

“We would like to screen ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT at Out on Film in Atlanta. The festival will take place October 11-18, though at this point a specific screening date and time has not been determined…”

We do have a date, time, venue for ASHLEY AND KISHA at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and a great mini review from Australian film critic Megan Spencer:

“The sweetest thing - Ashley & Kisha is one of the sweetest love stories you’re ever likely to see committed to film. The Comstocks once again put their perfect documentary formula to good use - true love and real sex - on screen; what’s not to like?!”

ASHLEY AND KISHA: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT
10.15pm Saturday 29th September Glitch Bar in Fitzroy.

Poster coming soon!

“Tired of watching “erotic” movies where cheesy gay for pay chicks bore each other? Well, Ashley & Kisha: Finding The Right Fit is the movie for you.”

That’s the opening line from a
very nice review of ASHLEY AND KISHA on the black lesbian erotica site Kuma. The review closes with this:

“Ashley and Kisha seem to be a little nervous at first, after all there are other people in the room. Once they get into the zone, it’s like the outside world doesn’t exist. They aren’t performing/putting on a show, they are focused on loving each other. It’s a very beautiful film.”

It’s a point of pride with me that our set run in a way that it is a place were people can lose themselves in one another, even while we slide around them, cameras purring, even with the magazine changes, and the other things that usually aren’t there when people make love. So it’s nice when the people we film tell us they were able to let go and enjoy themselves, and it’s nice when people who watch our films can see that the couple is actually there for each other’s pleasure, the camera a privileged witness, rather than the sole reason they are having sex.