I had to responde to a nice comment at a different forum, one that we run. The points I made there are interesting, so I'm going to share it here. Bear with me.
Apology accepted. Most of the registered members have many other interests in mind than what we share in this forum. That's totally obvious. And the new format of the forum... not so new anymore, lends itself for the atomization of interests. And there are so, so many. Some have three, four times the number of posts more than the average. One case in point is Mature Ladies.
I can totally understand the lack of interest.
The GIMP site is open to all tastes. And although I agree that we deserve some attention, it's not obligatory, but it could be nice to have more than a very few people paying attention to what we have to offer.
When we first began this journey, we had one film,
Red Feline On The Cross, with our dear Camille in the leading role of a martyred woman who at the end suffers a nasty crucifixion. But before she's nailed the cross, Camille suffers a lot of torture. A lot. When we released that film, in the early days of the internet and before the existence of DVDs, Streamline, and so on, one year before this site was even created, we found some kind of niche. The little original investment of less than 500 dollars turned into a money making movie, one that continues today.
One thing that I'd like to point out is that Jac had made a very famous movie before, a docu-drama on Haiti. That film's budget was over 500,000 dollars and it took 8 years to make. Mostly raising the money and traveling a lot to make it, it include clandestine shooting inside Haiti, post production in Cuba, lots of work in the US and Canada. That film was a critical success, but it never recovered the half a million dollars. It was sold to TV in the US, England, Germany and other countries. It opened at the Cannes film festival, in 1988, to fantastic reviews and an enthusiastic audience that included none other than Graham Greene.
Jac travelled for almost three years from festival to festival to grand accolades, awards, reviews, sales ... and yet...
Jac, his coproducer and a friend at the Hotel Nacional, Havana, Cuba.
Red Feline on the Cross was released in VHS format -remember those?- The first VHS was sold in February. By April the film was making over 1000 a week... and it grew from there. It made money... lots of it. We were selling it at 70 dollars a tape. Crazy right? That film began an industry, small, yes, but an industry, nevertheless, that now has more than 40 films out there.
The niche we found was one very much into CRUX. That term did not exist the way we know it now, it came to be soon after the release of our film. So, naturally, our films have CRUX in them, but that's not all they have, they have a lot more.
JUSTINE (2017) is our most successful film of late, after
Maleficarum (2011) which continues to be the number one seller after all these years. Justine is catching up, it might go over Maleficarum at some point.
It's a great film, with an engaging story, based on De Sade's novella, where Justine has endless monologue and a lot happens to her. To be honest, if one were to use the entire book for a film, it would be a very looooooong film, better yet, it can easily be made into a long, very long series.
But for the film Jac decided to take those elements that he liked the best, choosing the main characters from a big bunch to tell one part of Justin's tale of horror, where Jac included a CRUX scene which is not the book.
Agent X was made a couple of years before
Maleficarum and at that time it was our best seller. Another one of those films that cost little to make, but sold very well.
It was early in Amy's acting career. For her it was a way of shaping up her acting and directing skills. It was also a way of gaining a large audience.
Dead But Dreaming is one of those films that was the fruit of a long plan in the making. When it was finally made, it had all it needed to be a great film. Good story, good production values, everything. Worth seeing.
I can say that we have some good films coming up. Three of those are in the line of
Agent X. One of them is
Agent Honey Trap, where Jac and Mila have a lot of fun torturing poor Dani.
If you did manage to get to this point, all I need to say is that we have great films and it's worth seeing them. A lot of people do.
(...)
Thank you for your attention.
You Margot,
)).
