“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.

Our first film, MARIE AND JACK: A Hardcore Love Story has been picked up by Amazon.com, where it’s listed as being a part of the Comstock Films “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex Series. The Amazon listing is also the first time we’ve been able to show off MARIE & JACK’s spiffy new NC-17 rating.

Many thanks to Ellinoz and Emerald for their very nice reviews of MATT AND KHYM: Better Than Ever. With their help, Amazon is doing brisk business on that title, and we hope some of you out there have some nice things to say about MARIE & JACK as well!

MARIE AND JACK: A Hardcore Love Story on Amazon.com

That’s the title of AVN’s cover story this month. In a nut shell, the article seems to suggest that since women (mostly) don’t buy what Chatsworth is selling, the women’s market is a niche market where the usual rules of making and selling porn don’t apply. Says Meredith Christopher, head of production at Adam and Eve:

“I really don’t think there’s a true women’s market. About 30% of Adam and Eve’s online customers are female and they buy primarily toys and lingerie. We think about 7 percent of women buyers actually buy video, which is a fairly small number. Women are happy with their toys. They don’t necessarily need the visual as much. My theory is that they’re open to adult video, they enjoy watching it with a spouse or a boyfriend, but I don’t know that they purchase it for solo use like men do.”

50 years ago, before most people had ever heard of Napa, or Sonoma, or Pinot Noir, one might have concluded that the American wine market was also a niche market where the usual rules for selling alchohol didn’t apply. True as that might have been, it misses the broader truth that American wine wasn’t very good, and Americans’ taste in wine wasn’t very sophisticated, and that people can’t ask something if they don’t know it exists.

I reckon that right now, all we really know about what women watch is that (most) women won’t watch crap, and that until we see erotic films that are made as well and thoughtfully made as the work of coming Njoy Toys or Fun Factory, we’re not going to have much of a clue what women do or don’t want to watch when it comes to sexually explicit entertainment.

Meanwhile here at Comstock Films, women continue to be a very important part of our audience. About half the people who buy DVDs directly from us are women, and our films do very well at stores that cater to women. We know from the letters we get that these women are enjoying watching our films both alone and with their lovers. (Hences Peggy’s tag-line for our new affiliate ads, “Women love real sex.”)

Also, while we like to think we’re equal opportunity arousers here at Comstock Films, the fact is, when I’m editing, it’s usually with a woman in mind as my audience. Call it my heterosexual bias, but when I’m cutting a film, I imagine the effect it’s going to have on a woman, particularly the effect it’s going to have between her legs. I’m not ashamed to say that making films that turn women on turns me on. It gets me fired up creatively knowing that my films are causing women to have gushy afternoon wanks, or inspire women to try new sex position with their husbands.

Does that mean I know what women want to watch? Well I suppose I know what some women want to watch. But I do know what films I want to make, and count myself lucky that enough women (and men) like watching them that I’m able to keep making them!

The Toronto sex store Good For Her will forever have a warm place in our hearts here at Comstock Films because Good For Her was the very first place that bought our first film, MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY. We sent them a screener, they watched it, and then they placed an order. After nearly a year of hearing other people tell us why MARIE AND JACK was great, but not salable, we were thrilled!

Now we’re thrilled all over again with Good For Her’s fantasitic review of our latest, MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER:

This installment from award-winning documentary-style filmmaker Tony Comstock is a revelatory look inside the intensely intimate and incredibly sexual relationship of two young, attractive people.

Matt & Khym – a loving married couple in their thirties – take us along on their incredible journey revealing the history of their partnership and the secrets of their romantic bliss.

During the interview, as they speak about their enduring attraction, the heat building between them is palpable and they have trouble keeping their hands off each other. The interspersed action shots of them together only add to the delicious tension.

The film ends with a breathtaking sex scene so honest and so fierce that it puts much of what’s on offer in the modern industry to shame.

Think there’s nothing new in the world of porn? Think again. Matt & Khym sets a new standard for documentary sex films.

If you’re up North and want to do your shopping in-country, nothing would make us happier than if bought our films from Good For Her. And if you’re in Toronto, Good For Her offers our titles for rent as well!

The story work on Ashley and Kisha’s interview is done. It’s smooth, it flows it has pace and panache. Right now I’m working the rhythm between the two shot and the close-up, using the camera choice to emphasis passages or highlight reactions. It’s one of my very favorite parts of making these films.

I am also monitoring the reshuffle of our Google site index and the the slow return of ComstockFilms.com (hopefully) back from page 15 obscurity to a relatively high ranking on the search term [real sex]. And that’s how I discovered that Sienna Miller didn’t have real sex in a recent love scene.

A week ago I didn’t know who Sienna Miller was, and mostly I still don’t. What I do know that she looks very nice bumping and grinding and humping with her co-star (I found a link to the clip on The Hater.) Warm glowing light, a roaring fire, and (what’s this now?) jump-cuts.

In a love-scene, jump-cuts are a hipper version of cross-dissolves, and they solve two editing problems that come up when cutting love-making.

Like a cross-dissolve, a well executed jump-cut can be understood as passage of time. The couple is going at it mish jump-cut now she’s on top, and we, the modern movie-going public understand that it’s not a magic act, it’s a symbolic passage of time.

The other problem they solve is you don’t need the sort of shot coverage that a match-cut would require. You can move people through time and space with jump-cuts, showing all the different ways the couple humped and bumped, without going to the time and trouble of actually moving the couple through time and space. The mismatch between shots stands in for all the missing action and time.

Comtemporary filmmakers like jump-cuts in love-making scenes because the old standby, the cross-dissolve has become associate with Hallmark movie of the week montages, and late-night cable softcore. 9 SONGS has jump cut in the love-scenes, INTAMCY has a few, Erika Lust uses them in THE GOOD GIRL too.

So far, I haven’t used jump-cuts or cross-dissolves in my love-making scenes.

I know it’s old fashioned, but I like cross-dissolves as a way to symbolize the passage of time and/or create a dreamy atmosphere. But you can’t throw them around willy nilly. Every time I try to use them in these films, they’ve ended up feeling jarring and discordant, so I’ve taken them back out.

I haven’t used jump-cuts either, but that’s more philosophical.

As accepting of jump-cuts as modern audiences are, a jump-cut is still more noticable than a match cut or other techniques used to create flow or compress time. Jump-cuts feel more mannered and remind me I’m watching a confection. To me, traditionally editing feels less obtrusive, especially in a love-scene, and that make the love-making scene feel more more “real”, and “real sex”, the kind that people whe really care about each other have, is what I want my films to feel like.

At any rate, all props to Sienna Miller’s PR people. All the buzz of real sex on film without having real sex on film. Clever! I’m taking notes!

My lovely wife came up with both copy and the art. At least two of the two images came out her camera as well. Talented woman my wife is.

What I think is so clever about the copy is that it’s vaguely confrontational, yet utterly inarguable. A simple yet somehow provocative statement of fact. (Not the bellicose hystrionics you’d get from me.)

BTW, my wife is a hell of a writer. Published a book and everything. Why not go over to her blog and ask her to post more regularly. Ask her about her garden…

Yesterday was a blood-bath. The Google Site Index for Comstock Films continues to look extremely weird, full of robot.txt excluded pages, and even pages that haven’t been live on our website for years, and our Google search related traffic is in the toilet.

Why does Googles’s index of our site have pages that we took down two years ago? I don’t know. Why does it have pages from directories we’ve excluded from indexing in our robot.txt? I don’t know. (And yes, we checked them using Google’s webmaster tools.) Why doesn’t the site index have our important and well-linked to pages like index.html and main.html? I don’t know. I wish I did, and I wish I knew what to do to fix it.

Adding to my puzzlement, while here the US, ComstockFilms.com is somewhere around page 10 for the search ‘real sex’ our site continues to enjoy a relatively high position for the search in Australia (currently page 1) and the UK (currently page 3).

There’s a certain irony to this. Both Australia and the UK have government-imposed ratings for films, and our DVDs are illegal to sell in most of Australia and in all of the UK.

Coincidentally, a copy of our first film MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY is currently at the Motion Picture Association of America, and we expect a rating decision by the end of the month. No doubt the film will receive an NC-17, which means adults only.

50 years ago there were only two ratings; adults only and general audience. Children couldn’t get into adults only films, not even with their parents. Adult films were for adults in the same way that bars are for adults.

But somewhere along the way we lost the idea of exclusively adult cinema. Yes, the MPAA has an adults only rating, but it’s an economic dead-zone. SHORTBUS went out unrated, rather than bear the stigma of the NC-17 rating. (Many media outlets will not accept advertisements for films rated NC-17, and some theaters will not show them.)

Conversely, the ultra-violent SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, a film that is utter inappropriately for children was given an R by the MPAA, which means kindergardeners can go see it, provided they are accompanied by a parent or guardian.

I can understand (both commercially and ethically) the MPAA wanting save PRIVATE RYAN from the burden of carrying the NC-17 rating, but the idea that it’s a film suitable for children of any age, provided they are accompanied by an adult is manifestly absurd. Although what can be shown is far more permissive than it was 50 years ago, in the process we’ve given up the space for adults to experience genuinely adult films.

Meanwhile, in Australia and the UK, there is a litigate adults only rating. In Australia and the UK, rated-R means no one under 18, and that’s the rating films like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN receive in those countries, (and SHORTBUS and DESTRICTED because they’re not intended to arouse!)

(Lest I sound too in love with the Australian and UK system, please remember that their systems are manditory and governement imposed, and that’s why our films are illegal to sell in Australia and the UK.)

MARIE & JACK will have its MPAA rating by the end of the month, an NC-17; and have no intention of running from the rating. In fact, we intend to embrace it, to wear our NC-17 as a badge of honor.

Like the rest of our work, MARIE & JACK is a film for adults about the very adult experience of sex. No, it’s not okay to bring your kids. Maybe you think it’s okay to bring them to see SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but you can’t bring them to see MARIE & JACK. It’s grown-up time now, and this is a movie for grown-ups to watch with other grown-ups. We don’t want to here your 12 year-old giggling, or you stammering when she asks an awkward question. Get a sitter, or stay home, or wait for it to come out on DVD.

Since the great Google scare of 2006 I’ve noticed some very good things happening in our search-driven traffic. Specifically traffic generated by the searches ‘tera patrick’ and ‘nina hartley’, and others of dubious Relevance has been slowly drying up as our PageRank on those terms has been steadily falling.

I know people who come to Comstock Films on those search terms aren’t finding what their looking for because Google Analytics shows their page count average is extremely low. So that’s good for them.

It’s good for us too. If someone’s looking for a picture of Tera Patrick or for a review of Nina Hartley’s new book, more than likely they’re just going to be pissed off if they get end up on our site. Angry people don’t buy our DVDs, at least not if they’re angry at us!

Unfortunately, this tweeking has also moved our ranking in more Relevant search terms way way down. Of course I think we should be at the very very top of the search ‘real sex’, but my own biases aside, this morning the returns for the ‘real sex’ search look goofy. Should Comstock Films be utterly and completely outranked by a book about chastity, or a YouTube clip of turtles fucking, or article about cybersex? I hope not! Overnight we’ve dropped precipitously in other searches that traditionally work well for us too.

If it sounds like I’m sending up a flair, well hell yes I am! Propane is nearly $3/gallon, and this cold snap has us burning it at a prodigeous rate. Hey Google! Got an ETA on when this latest tweek will sort itself out? It’s not supposed to get above freezing for another week!

Update

Since the above post, I took a look at the Google index for ComstockFilms.com, http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.comstockfilms.com&hl=en, and noticed some odd things.

For starters, neither index.html or main.html are anywhere near the top, not first page, not fifth page. In fact, Peggy’s blog is number one, which is nice for her, except she’s not the most active blogger in the world. It’s certainly not our most important page. (At least now I have an explanation for why last week we suddenly started getting all those visits on the search ‘ovusoft blog’.)

No less odd is seeing casting.html at #6, a page that hasn’t been active in two years. No reason that should be ranked so high. None of the archive pages from the old blog should be there either. On the fear those old pages may have been giving us a duplicate content ding, we excluded them from being indexed in our robot.txt six weeks ago, and the bot’s been by for a visit three times since then.

It looks to me like a hiccup in the Googleverse, which is actually a relief. Better a bug that gets fixed, than a re-ranking that could turn our world upside-down. But I’m reminded of the old phrase, “when America gets a cold, the world gets pneumonia”. When Google has a “bad hair day”, little guys like Comstock Films end up with a bad hair cut!

One of AdultDVDTalk.com’s most prolific and respected reviewers, Astroknight, has just posted the first review for MATT AND KHYM: BETTER THAN EVER. Here’s my favorite part of his very nice review:

“It takes a wonderful look at not just the sexuality between a couple, but how it got to be there. That thought of sex as a journey doesn’t seem to come up for too many directors, but at the same time is something that almost any couple who’s been together for any length of time realizes. It’s a movie about passion and romance not only existing together, but also feeding off each other to draw two people even closer. It’s a beautiful thought, and one that had a smile on my face within the first few minutes of the movie.”

The thing I love about reading Astroknight’s reviews of our films is that they come from someone who is truly passionate porn. Astro’s written about 2000 (yes, 2000) reviews for ADT, covering nearly the entire porn spectrum. He’s both a porn conesuer and a porn omniover. He’s as likely to pass out praise (or scorn) to a gonzo anal raunch fest as to a couples feature.

When Astro gives us praise, it gives me a feeling of extra satisfaction. A lot of the people who enjoy our films don’t really like porn, but I also like knowing that Astro thinks what we do is pretty nifty too. I like the idea that there are straight people like our gay film, gay people like our straight films, and people like Astro who can dig the Comstock vibe too.

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.

“I remember being brought to tears by the sex scene in _Marie and Jack_, and upon reflection it occurred to me that that was because I had never, from the outside, witnessed explicit sexual intimacy like that — that is, despite my considerable viewing history of porn, I had never watched two people in love like that have sex. With Matt and Khym, that reaction in me was even stronger, and I was brought to tears a number of times both while they were speaking and also during their sex scene.

“Thank you, so much, for what you do. I am of the belief that sexuality is truly one of the most important aspects of humanity/life, making its vilification by puritanically-based social factions (which seem so very prevalent in our contemporary society) all the more concerning and, in my option, detrimental. Efforts like yours and Peggy’s are quite heartening to me, and I am pleased to take this opportunity to express my appreciation. My best to both of you.

Namaste,
Emily M.

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.