(From our upcoming BEN AND DESIREE)

More than two years ago, in post entitled No Sadness, Anguish, Pain, or Suffering I quoted a bit from Violet Blue’s blog about her upcoming edition of Best Women’s Erotica 2006. Said Violet:

“I don’t know, but I have to say that I’ve noticed a huge difference in the way that previous generations of women have edited erotic anthologies in comparison to my generations’ attitudes about sex. We don’t think that “literary” erotica, especially women’s erotica, needs to be somehow qualified by sadness, anguish, pain or suffering… A message to the publishers and editors (and filmmakers) who imbue the hot fuck with a moral: you’re not relevant anymore… I’m running totally sexually fucking amok with BWE ‘06. I’m tossing OUT all the fucking depressing submissions I’m getting. I want erotica that totally turns my head around, and makes me want to fuck.”

Two years later, The Guardians Josh Spero has identified “the disturbing nature of sex” as a hallmark of the Independent Film Channels “50 Great Sex Scenes in Cinema.” Says Josh:

“Many of the scenes are marked out by the disturbing nature of the sex. Take No 1 - Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland having grief-stricken sex in Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. It’s profoundly out of place given the rest of the film, yet it is tender, erotic and tells us about the characters, as meaningful sex scenes should.The disturbances continue through the top 10: Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello pound away at each other on the stairs in A History of Violence (2), with all the layers of deceit and mistrust involved; Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring have surreal sapphic sex in Mulholland Drive (3); while Secretary (8) and Betty Blue (6) are chock-full of odd, unhinged sex. Perhaps most disturbing is The Night Porter (12), where Nazi guard Dirk Bogarde and concentration camp survivor Charlotte Rampling reconnect.”

Let’s see; disturbing, grief-striken, deceit, mistrust, surreal, odd, unhinged, disturbing (again), and just for kicks, Nazi and concentration camp.

Notice anything?

Look, I know, drama require doubt, and as I said in Part 1, if you made a film about how great bicycling is, you’d virtually be *required* to subject one of the characters to a deadly, or at least greviously injurious wreck. That’s how story-telling (usually) works. But like Violet, I am simply sick to death of the idea that sex has to be contextualized by sadness, anguish, pain and/or suffering to be taken seriously.

Oh look! Another art-house film showing us how, even when people have wild, break the bedframe, smash the china, sing into each other’s assholes sex, they still can’t connect; not deep down inside where it counts. Did anyone besides me notice that in SHORTBUS when main characters finally got their restoritive, healing, last reel of the film sex, we didn’t get to see it!? Disturbing, grief-striken, deceitful, mistrustful, surreal, odd, unhinged sex is a reality worth of being closely observed. But sex that is merely connective, pleasurable, loving – well what sort of a pervert wants to see that?

Rant over.

I’m going to the beach!

The first commandment here at Comstock Films is, “Thou shall not ruin the evening.” By that I mean that we and several other couples we know have had the experience of renting a porno flick with the expectation that it would help raise the temperature of the evening, only to have it be be a complete buzzkill. In fact, in our experience, this is the rule rather than the exception with porn, and that sad fact is a big part of why I started making my movies.

By that measure, Bertolucci’s “erotic film” The Dreamers was a failure, at least here at Casa Comstock.

Between the fact that Spring has finally sprung, and Damon & Hunter is finally out the door, the sap has been rising around here, and last night probably would have ended in a tangle of arms and legs, save the fact that at 9PM we put Bertolucci’s ode to late 60’s Paris in the DVD player and settled in to see what a master of the medium might do, unburdened by proscriptions against full frontal nudity, or handling a cock in full view of the camera. But after the movie, instead of tumbling into bed together, it was more of a slump. Watching The Dreamers exhausted us.

In fairness to Bertolucci, I’m not sure he intended for The Dreamers to be a mood enhancer for us or anyone else. In fact, we woke up this morning still trying to decipher what his intentions were in making The Dreamers.

The nearest I can tell is it’s a movie not unlike Ridley Scott’s White Squall, which seemed mostly like an excuse for Scott to linger endlessly on young boys’ lithe and tanned bodies, dripping with beads of water. Substitute Eva Green’s lovely, but jarringly miscast tits as the object of the director’s lecherous gaze, and voila – The Dreamers.

Of course the movie is beautifully made. Bertulucci is a visual stylist on par with Scott; at one point I turned to Peggy and asked, “What do you suppose it would be like to make a film where not one fold of cloth was out of place?” Bertolucci’s eye for art-direction photography is unerring. There’s more craft, style and talent in one shot that you’ll find in my entire career.

But lovely as it was to see nakedness rendered so well, (including a couple of pitch perfect muff-nuzzling shots that are conspicuous in their absense from the entire rest of the catalog of cinematic depictions of lovemaking), for us the movie fell flat. It moved us only to discussion of how fractured and unsatisfying the film was, and how the nudity and sex felt forced and inflicted, which only added to our disappointment and dissatisfaction.

Now keep in mind that I come to films like this from a particular and perhaps narrow perspective. The Dreamers is part of a long line of European arthouse films that step well accross traditional American boundaries of how, and how much sex is depicted. Along with her tits, Eva Green’s sparsely furred cuntlips make an appearence in this film; the first time I think I’ve seen a twat in a “legitmate” production, and it was wonderful to see just how beautiful a naked woman and her naked sex parts can look with the full force of a studio production gazing upon them.

But like so many films that have come before it, The Dreamers wraps its sexuality inside a tale of darkness and despair. A disquieting and decidedly unerotic incest theme runs throughout the film, coating the entire movie with a glaze of sticky shame. Perhaps for some viewers that makes it more interesting, more dramatic, or even more tantalizing, but for me it’s just tiresome. I am weary of the notion that sex need be rendered so darkly and joylessly to be worthy of serious cinematic inquiry.

(Side note: Over on Tiny Nibbles Violet’s been blogging about the movie The Bridge, a production which purposely set out to, and does depict the very real, very violent deaths of several people. Do you suppose there’s any risk that Eric Steele, the film’s director will be sent to jail or have his house taken away?)

Of course I’m not sure what the answer is. As I said in a previous post No Sadness, Anguish, Pain, or Suffering, with or without sex, happiness is not particularly dramatic. But I don’t think that means that sex has to be sick, twisted, or sad to make a good sex movie. A documentary “portrait of a couple” is one answer; not perfect, but servicable. It is, however, terribly limited. I don’t expect doing what I do would hold Bertolucci’s interest for very long. But I have some other ideas too…

What shall it be next? I Am Curiuos? We have it in both Blue and Yellow. Nine Songs? Intimacy?

Since speaking on Sunday, I’ve had a bunch of really nice notes show up in my inbox. Here’s the nicest part of the nicest note:

I wanted to thank you for your presentation yesterday at Q-Me Con.

I looked at your site and watched the preview for Damon and Hunter. I have to say that it gave me the most pleasant erotic sensations I have experinced in a long time. One thing I hear alot from gay men is that our biggest sex organ is our brain. I’ve always thought that wrong headed. I think the biggest sex organ is the heart. It seems your work is informed by that.

Not just informed by – it’s the very core of what I do!

Last week our upcoming film Ashley and Kisha got a nice mention on Ethnoerotica and I started to write a post (tentatively titled “Race Riot”) about what we’ve seen in terms of sale for Ashley & Kisha versus our other titles The long and the short of it is that lots and lots of people have preordered Damon & Hunter and Matt & Khym, lot and lots of people have bought Marie & Jack and Xana & Dax. But comparitively few people have pre-ordered A&K. But as I began to speculate on why this might be, I got bogged down and couldn’t pay off the title, so I quit.

Just yesterday, I kvetched at Erika Lust about the men’s porn/women’s porn thing, and haven’t quite found myself satisfied with what I said there either.

Then today I had cause to read an entry I made nearly a year ago, after a wonderful phone visit with Jessica Holter, founder of The Punany Poets: Am I a Punany Poet?

I rather like what I said towards the end it:

In the past few years, sexually explicit material has fractured into an ever-increasing number of what “the industry” (mis)labels “fetishes”. There are segregations by sex act, by race, by age. There are videos that show nothing but young white women getting fucked in the ass by black men, or videos that show nothing but asian women having sex with each other. I don’t suppose there’s anything wrong with people wanting to see what they want to see (a photo I saw at an early age of Sophia Loren has left me easy prey for the word “Latina”) but as this fractured view of sexuality more and more defines pornography, it seems to imply that the way to reach the audience for graphic sex is by focusing on the most objective, quantifiable elements. I don’t think this is so. I think there ways to depict sex that can transcend race, gender, or sexuality, and Jessica, Linda, JAG [people who've said generous things about A&K] and the others are helping to sustain me in my belief that by focusing on the subjective aspects of the sexual experience, I can reach across boundaries of race, or gender, or sexual taste.

Of course our differences still matter – Jessica [Holter] is a African-American woman, raised in the South by old church-going lady who “still had cotton under her fingernails.” I’m second-generation Irish and Jewish, raised the in the white, middle-class suburbs of the West Coast – but those aren’t the only things that matter, and they’re not always the thing that matters the most. You don’t have to be African-American to be inspired by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen; you don’t have to be Jewish to feel the horror of The Holocaust; you don’t have to be young, black, or a lesbian to know when you’re watching Kisha ride Ashley’s face, you’re seeing something that’s as right as rain.

I’m not stupid. I know that when I say race or gender or sexual orientation aren’t always the most important thing, I’m saying it from the point of view of a person who’s never had his race, or his gender, or who or how I fuck held against me in any but the most trivial sort of way. And so I suppose it’s only natural that if I, as a middle-aged, white, straight man make a film about young, black, lesbian women, I’m going to have to prove that I can make the things they and I have in common count for more than our differences.

That’s fine. It’s my privilage and honor to have the chance to try.

In a recent blog entry on Waking Vixen, Audacia Ray reflects on how the writing on her blog has changed, and perhaps become a little more guarded:

These days I am sometimes afraid my writing is somehow dishonest, disingenuous because I’m not relating every orgasm, every late night soul-searching moment, every weird detail.

I wondered about this when I began keeping this blog. Making these films is my passion, but it is also my livelihood, and this blog exists to serve a very clear agenda – to promote Comstock Films and help us sell our movies so we can keep making them. Both because of this, and because there are parts of my life and my family’s life that are private, this blog is very much a calculated and crafted bit of “honesty” about the travails and triumphs of doing this work.

In that way, it’s not so different from the films that I make.

At its best, like David Simon’s stunning Homide: A Year on the Killing Streets of Baltimore or Anthony Lloyd’s haunting memoir My War Gone By, I Miss It So, non-fiction reads like a perfect novel—with the added amazement that real live human beings lived the story.

For the rest of us, those of us not quite as gifted as Mr. Simon or Mr. Lloyd, the conceit of the “truth” is a bit of a (much needed) crutch. “Based on a true story” or similar gives the writer or filmmaker a nice dodge for when things don’t quite add up so perfectly as they do in Homicide or My War Gone By.

In offering our audiences “the truth”, we ask for a little patience, a little indulgence, and if we don’t abuse their patience and indulgence, audiences are usually very generous. I very deliberately chose a documentary style for making sex films because I knew that it would help smooth over some of the rough patches that are part and parcel of the very low-budget world of porn, and I am ever grateful that our audiences are generous when they watch our films.

But I am also mindful. Mindful that in a memoir, blog, or a documentary film, “the truth” is always a little slippery. Anyone with any intellectual honesty knows how much their “truth” is shaped by both emphasis and omission, and the deciding factors in exclusion or inclusion can be generous or selfish, accidental or purposeful, naive or cunning. This does not make memoirists, or bloggers, or documentarians liars—or at least it doesn’t have to.

But it should make us thoughtful; thoughtful of what we include and exclude, thoughtful of what we emphasize and what we soften, thoughtful of what we choose to reveal and what we choose to conceal. On this there are no absolutes—and that’s what makes it interesting!

In her recent “Op-Ed”, AVN’s Heidi Joy Pike writes:

“This is my main problem with many “couples” or “woman-friendly” smut stores that I enter. While there’s all the instruments of a good time present — most of these stores have a bitchin’ novelty section and even, in many cases, a superb BDSM supply section — but when it comes to the porno, well, the offerings often come up on the anemic side. I have the suspicion that it’s because too many “couples” retailers aren’t updating their concept of what couples really like to see these days. Sexually, people are more advanced than ever in their knowledge of what gets them off and more vocal about sharing that with their primary partner. While traditional, plot-based features may be able to serve their titillation needs, there’s the general fact that gonzo’s got the goods to fill those needs quickly.

“Plot-based stuff is thoughtful and gorgeous, but the basic fact is that many people don’t need to have some director’s vision of — as good as it might be — pirates or vampires in love to get off. Something uncomplicated taking place on a couch in Granada Hills with two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both will do the job, too. It’s real stuff. The couch encounter is taking place in the real world, and it has an undeniable set of emotions that people can relate to. There are no characters diluting the lust, the fear, the wanting, the ambivalence, the drive. Nope, just real people feeling what they feel and fucking so other people can watch. No gorgeous locale and no Herculean amount of art direction can save a lackluster fuck, and all that effort to make things look like eighteenth century America for the fuck vid can really wipe the players out, resulting in sex that’s sometimes on the stale side.”

Great novelty section, superb BDSM equipment, “anemic porn section” – it sounds like Ms. Pike has just paid a visit to the newly open Babeland store in Los Angeles. But I think Heidi’s got it wrong as to why the porn section is “anemic”.

Have a look at these butt plugs from NjoyToys.com.

Njoy’s finely crafted beauties were conceived by a fellow with a background in the engineering and design of consumer products. They’re fabricated in a facility that also manufactures aerospace components. These are not “novelties”, they’re the latest in a growing world of highly refined pleasure instruments that are available in medical grade silicone, Pyrex, and now, thanks to Njoy, stainless steel!

Where once people had to be satisfied with flaccid (and vaguely off-putting) rubber phalluses from Doc Johnson Novelties, this new generation of pleasure instruments have raised the bar on what people expect when they plunk down their hard-earned cash for something nice to shove up their asses. No wonder the “couples” or “woman-friendly” smut stores that Heidi visits focus their attention on these sorts of products!

Now compare these lovingly made and altogether lovely sex toys to the “thoughtful and gorgeous” porn features that bore Ms. Pike, or the “two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both” gonzos that she says many couples prefer. Do any of these videos look as well made and carefully crafted as one of Njoy’s beautiful butt plugs? Of course not! Making a film is an enormous undertaking, and there is simply no way to make a film that is anywhere near as refined as an Njoy plug on even the most lavish porn budget.

But now let’s set craft aside. You’re not actually going to shove a video up your ass, so it doesn’t have to be as polished as a butt plug. But what about the sincerity of the offering? When I pick up something from Njoy, or Fun Factory, or Pjur, I have no doubt that what I’m holding in my hands was made with the utmost consideration of what I’m going to do with it, that the plug or vibrator or lube is going be used in the most intimate of ways.

But when I put a porn DVD in the player, I don’t feel that way. In fact, I feel waves of cynicism and/or apathy (”It’s just porn”) pouring out of the scene – and this is true whether I’m watching a “two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both” (charming way to put it, no?) gonzo or a “thoughtful and gorgeous” (?) plot-based porn feature.

So when Ms. Pike says that “No gorgeous locale and no Herculean amount of art direction can save a lackluster fuck, and all that effort to make things look like eighteenth century America for the fuck vid can really wipe the players out, resulting in sex that’s sometimes on the stale side.” I completely agree with her. From a producer’s point of view, it’s just plain silly to try to make an “epic” on a six-figure budget, and from a director’s point of view, it’s probably a bad idea to muck up a good story with too much sex, or muck up good sex with too much story.

But when she goes on to say that gonzo offers an “undeniable set of emotions that people can relate to”, I honestly wonder what she’s watching.

Mostly what I see in a typical gonzo flick is bunch of people paid to show up at a sparsely furnished nouveau-riche Southern California McMansion (in Granada Hills perhaps), take off their clothes, and fuck while someone records it all with a handicam. That’s not an engaging fantasy or an emotional situation that I can relate to.

I’d like to give the director and the performers the benefit of the doubt that some more is happening, and perhaps if I knew the players better (as I presume an industry insider like Ms. Pike does), I would see these videos as an unvarnished document of a lusty sport fuck. Sex for sex’s sake is hot—most of the sex my wife and I have it sex for sex’s sake!

But that’s not what I see when I watch these videos. And if that’s what’s actually happening on the set, it’s not being recorded and edited in a way that I can see it. Apparently the “couple” and “women-friendly” smut shops with “amemic porno selections” can’t see it either.

Of course for me, the whole discussion begs the question: What about those of us who aren’t turned on by “thoughtful and gorgeous” features or “two people who fuck each other like they don’t care if the encounter will kill them both” gonzo?” Are we even on Heidi’s radar? Or have we simply been written off as prudes who just have hang-ups about sex and porn?

15 years ago, I bet the folks at Doc Johnson thought the same thing about people who weren’t interested in the cadaverous, flesh-colored rubber dildos they wanted us to buy. Of course this simply wasn’t the case. We were just waiting for someone to offer us something better – something worthy of the privilage of being shoved up our ass. And thankfully they did, and now there’s a wealth of very lovely toys and lubes for people like us to choose from.

Of course Doc Johnson is still out there, probably doing better than ever, and you can buy their stuff if you want to too. The point is it’s no longer your only choice if you want to shove something up your butt. Do you think that 15 years from now “the rest of us” will have a wonderful variety of sex films to choose from too?

In her comment to my post last post, How Deep Is Your Love, YogaDame offered:

“I suspect the story worked better for me than for you because of my strong empathy for the lead character.”

A playwright friend of mine once told me if you have an empathetic lead, you’re halfway home. I remember the lead performances in Revelations as being solid and engaging – well above what we expect from porn. But no, there probably wasn’t the same level of identification for me that there was for YD. (Ultimately, a filmmaker has precious little control over the experiences any one person brings to their viewing experience. The real masters of this art have an amazing ability to draw characters that are simultaneously real enough you feel like you could touch them, yet ambiguous enough that each of us can make them who we need them to be to connect with them in a powerful way. It’s a profound gift, one that I wish I had.)

So while it’s possible that a more personally compelling character would have helped, the two things I remember keeping me from being drawn into Revelations as far as I wanted to be were more related to that whole “inviting comparisons/ambitions” thing YogaDame mentioned in her review. Specifically:

1) I felt disappointed by the box-cover promise of a “35mm feature”. I expected that would mean seeing the sympathetic lead characters, having explicit sex, shot on film. Instead I got non-character driven vignette explicit sex on video (which I could have seen in many other productions); and then when the well-acted, sympathetic leads finally did the deed, while it was on film, it was simulated (which I also could have seen in many other, more fully realized productions).

Even in 1996 (when I saw the film) porn had long history of short-changing it’s audience and I felt deceived, which probably made me less sympathetic to the production as a whole. (I’ve learned some hard lessons of my own that porn audiences are less inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt than indie film audiences, and frankly I don’t blame them.)

2) Make no mistake, the Regan/Bush years were a time of considerable repression for pornographers, but by the time I saw the film in 1996, the phrase “New World Order” had be so thoroughly lampooned that it seemed a bit dated and a little “on the nose”. (For you youngsters, “new world order” was a Bush Senior catch phrase.)

These things underscore the considerable risk that a filmmaker takes in being ambitious.

I recently watch “Saturday Night Fever” with the director’s commentary. SNF was considered a low-budget production, but even still, the director recalls re-shooting a scene because when he was looking at the dailies he decided they had put the female lead in the wrong color costume. Can you imagine re-shooting a porn scene because one of the players was wearing the wrong color leotard? It certainly would never happen on the budgets I have to work with. The purr of a cine camera running is the sound of money flying out the window!

Whatever the problem with the unused film footage from Revelations (and there are a dozen ways it can go wrong without knowing until it’s too late!), the result was that the release was delayed, which may have made the theme seem less topical (though perhaps more topical today then when it was shot!), and necessitating a cheat of the “35mm feature”. You can’t very well go to the expense of shooting all that film and then not mention it on the box cover. (In fact, we find ourselves in a somewhat similar situation. Our upcoming titles are mixed format: sex on film, interview on tape, and I have every intention of marketing these titles as “shot on film”.)

Many years ago Peggy and I watched the fascinating Tokyo Decadence, an SM themed Japanese indie. While not nearly as porny as we had expected, it was utterly watchable (if rather bleak) – until the last reel. Suddenly a very credibly made film went completely off the rails, deteriorating in production quality and narrative to the point that it was completely incoherent.

By chance a few years after seeing Decadence I ended up meeting the producer (he kept a desk-office in the post house I used), and I had a chance to ask him about the baffling end to Tokyo Decadence. His response was simple, and delivered in a heavy Japanese accent, “Oh, we run out of money.” No excuses or justifications. Just a sly grin that said seemed to say, “You win some, you lose some.”

Unlike the writer, the filmmaker doesn’t have the luxury of infinite revisions. At a certain point the money runs out. And while a big studio might possibly shelve a project, an independent producer has no choice but to take what they have to market. There are bills to pay, and the only way to pay them is by selling your work, warts and all.

But it’s not all bad news for the filmmaker. There’s never any excuse for typos in a book, and they stick out like a sore thumb. But movies, even big-budget Hollywood movies are filled with the cinematic equivalent of typos, and worse. But somehow audiences understand that part of the bargain struck between director and viewer is to try to look past as many of those mistakes and miscues as possible. Films are watched as much for intentions as execution.

This is especially true for low-budget filmmakers like me. Blogs, behind-the-scenes bonus features – we use every trick of the trade to help you see our intentions, even if they aren’t always fully realized on the screen. When you watch an earnest little independent production, the most important character for you to feel empathy for is the filmmaker!

So when we take risks (and as we sometimes overreach), and it’s done with the hope that we’ll get little empathy from you; that you will understand and sympathize with our struggle to bring our vision to the screen.

An online friend, YogaDame, has just given a very nice five-star review to Revelations, a 1992 film by seminal “by women, for women” director Candida Royalle. Coincidentally, Revelations was the last porn video that Peggy and I watched (c.1996) before embarking on the adventure that has become Comstock Films.

Revelations is a solid, well-made porn feature, with lots to recommend it. And YD’s enthusiastic, but even-handed review is a great starting place to decide if this is one to add to your rental queue or library. Her only real reservation about the film comes in the Thumbs Down section of the review:

“My only concern is that Revelations is ambitious enough to perhaps invite comparisons to mainstream movies, which in turn can only lead to frustration and disappointment. For reasons too complicated to discuss here, the budgets of adult movies are miniscule (tiny even when compared to independent films), such that none will ever fully compete on the mainstream level. For those of us who love adult features in and of themselves, however, this one stands out for overall excellence.”

It’s been 10 years since I saw Revelations, but I still remember going into it with high hopes that it would be that magical combination of a “real movie with real sex”. And I still remember watching with a sense of frustration and disappointment. It almost seemed like two movies cut together; one a low-budget but credible dystopic-future scifi, and the other a softcore-ish erotic vignette video. And in the end I felt like the two worked at cross purposes.

As I ruminated on why I felt this way, I decided that a big part of it was simply a matter of money. The “film” part of the film was just too thin in art direction and production design, and the sex part was shot on video. Although the creative conceit accounted for the mixed media, the effect on me was that I was always aware that I was watching a production, instead of feeling like I was transported into a world where the characters lived and the action took place. I never quite got pulled into the story, and I never quite got turned on by the sex. Indeed, our own “pornumentary” approach was born in large measure as a way to try and take another tack on the problems inherent in five-figure (aka porn) budgets; which in my mind is largely a problem of managing the audience’s expectations, and avoiding unfavorable comparisons. (I’ll readily admit our approach has problems of its own.)

The most enjoyment that Peggy and I have ever gotten from a porn movie was a fairly recent viewing of The Opening of Misty Beethoven, which we enjoyed quite a bit. Perhaps some of the sex scenes dragged a little, but the movie part was so fun and sexy that it didn’t bother us. We certainly never felt the urge to hit the fast-forward button, either on the talking part or the fucking part. So I think it’s fair to count Peggy and me as people who would sorely love to see a modern adult feature that was as much fun. We knock around ideas for narrative style hardcore films, and I’d be thrilled to make a feature style, sexually explicit film that YogaDame thought worthy of a five-star review.

But as I thought about it last night with YG’s “invite comparisons” still ringing in my head, I had this thought: Who in their right mind, if they could produce something as witty and fun as Misty today, would limit their potential returns on a project by gumming it up with hardcore sex? If you only had a porn budget to work with, could you ever possibly make a feature style porn movie that didn’t invite unfavorable comparisons to better financed, better crafted films?

John Cameron Mitchell, director of the fantastic show and movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch has been saying he wants to for about five years. But as far as I know, he still can’t raise a budget ($2.5M was the figure I heard, twice that of the “big budget” porn epic Pirates) for Short Bus, his proposed explicit sex movie project; and I’ve little doubt it’s in large part because when investors look at the potential returns for a sexually explicit movie, they put their check books back in their pockets.

Now maybe some of you are saying “Money money money! Where’s the commitment to art?” Well if that thought crossed your mind, even for a moment, I’ve got a question for you:

Let us suppose that you’ve written a wonderful short story. It’s been published in some trendy erotic anthologies and even received some nice mentions in the literary mainstream.

Let us suppose that this story is all about sex, is filled with cunts and cocks and cum, and stinks to high heaven with joyful rutting.

Let us then suppose you’ve received two offers to turn your story into a movie.

One is from a well-established porn feature producer/director, who offers you $10,000 plus a percentage of the gross.

The other is from an up-and-coming independent feature producer/director, who also offers you $10,000 plus an equal percentage of the gross.

The porn version of your story would include explicit sex and would have a production budget of $75,000. (Close to the figure Royalle gave me for her more recent Stud Hunters, or that Jenna Jameson quoted for Jenna Loves Bella)

The indie version of your story would be R-rated and would have a production budget of $750,000. (About half the budget of the much lauded low-budget indie The Squid and the Whale.)

Which offer would you take?

I was reading Hunter James’s blog today and saw that he and his boyfriend Damon have been cast in John Cameron Mitchell’s new project Shortbus.

Mitchell was the creator and star of the of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which Mrs.C and I loved, and I’ve been hearing about this project on and off for a few years now. I can’t help but be both curious and hopeful about Mitchell’s promise to give us real sex in the context of a real movie. Commenting on his aims in Shortbus Mitchell says:

“The purpose of pornography is to arouse, whereas here the priority is the emotional life of the characters. Sex has been cheapened by porn. Why can’t we not focus on sex, as porn does, but make sex part of the film?”

The integration of graphic sex into a film with same ease as kissing or graphic violence is, in many people’s minds, the holy grail of sex on film – a film you could enjoy as pure cinematic entertainment, only with cunts and cocks and cum.

But the above quote has me wondering: Is placing priority on the emotional life of the characters antithetical to the audience’s own arousal? Does setting out to arouse the audience (and get them off if I can!) necessarily cheapen sex? I sure hope not, because if it does, I’ve really gone off in the wrong direction with my real life sex stories.

-T.C.

Violet Blue is hard at work editing the 2006 edition of Best Women’s Erotica, and today on her blog she writes:

“I don’t know, but I have to say that I’ve noticed a huge difference in the way that previous generations of women have edited erotic anthologies in comparison to my generations’ attitudes about sex. We don’t think that “literary” erotica, especially women’s erotica, needs to be somehow qualified by sadness, anguish, pain or suffering… A message to the publishers and editors (and filmmakers) who imbue the hot fuck with a moral: you’re not relevant anymore… I’m running totally sexually fucking amok with BWE ‘06. I’m tossing OUT all the fucking depressing submissions I’m getting. I want erotica that totally turns my head around, and makes me want to fuck.”

While it’s relatively easy to write a “Penthouse Letters” stroke story with happy ending (no pun intended), it’s no small trick to keep a more substantive story about hot sex from veering into “sadness, anguish, pain or suffering”. Drama requires elements like balance and consequence. Never mind steamy sex, if the characters in a story are having too much fun riding bicycles, you can be sure that someone’s going to have a bad wreck. That’s just the way that story-tellling works. (I think we have the ancient Greeks to thank for this.) Add to that our deep cultural suspicion of pleasure (sexual and otherwise), and it adds up to a lot of stories about people having really great sex, but paying for it in the end. (Let that be a lesson to you, dear reader!)

How then can you tell stories about good sex that don’t end badly? I’ve had some success avoiding sadness, anguish, pain, and suffering by employing the “slice of life” device. In my “hardcore love stories” the much needed sense of drama and consequence comes from constantly being aware that the people on screen are real flesh and blood human beings; that their friends and neighbors and family might see them fucking; that by choosing to share themselves with us in such an intimate way they are, in fact, taking a very real risk.

Of course this “real life” approach is a limited way to explore both sexual pleasure and story telling, and as long as we’ve been doing this work, Mrs.C and I have also been throwing around ideas for how we could produce fictional sex films that wouldn’t tumble off the sadness/anguish/pain/suffering cliff. Between story-telling considerations, audience comfort, and the ever-present constraints of low-budget filmmaking, it’s a tough nut to crack, but I think we’ve laid a good conceptual foundation, and we’ve even got a couple rudimentary of treatments we’re working on. After Violet’s proclamation this morning, I’m very eager to see Best Women’s Erotica 2006. I want to hear more stories about people having good sex and not having to pay for it in the last reel!

Speaking of good sex and happy endings, I’ve got a new tease for you; the first from last February’s San Francisco Bay Area shoot:

Barely out of their teens when they first got together, Matt and Khym spent many years generously taking care of others instead of concentrating on themselves. Now in their thirties, Matt and Khym have taken the time to rediscover the joys of married life and married sex. In this clip, Khym and Matt talk about their first encounter and their first impression of each other, and Khym reveals a surprising secret…

Matt and Khym: Better Then Ever

I think you’ll find this clip utterly free of sadness, anguish, pain or suffering, and hopefully it will make you want to fuck too!

-T.C.