Inside Deep Throat

by Bill Henry on Feb.15, 2005, under Bill Henry's Movie Reviews

Inside Deep Throat
Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato
Ironically enough, not opening wide, but selectively beginning 2/11/2005
3 *
With people so interested in such things (and despite my complete disinterest), I have dedicated lectures/discussion groups to the question of motion picture grosses (the totally meaningless numbers breathlessly reported by entertainment reporters too ignorant to know how meaningless and pointless these numbers are). Unfortunately the numbers have become part of the movie hype machine and end up driving a substantial part of planet Hollywood.
During these discussions I will often ask people, what is the highest grossing movie they have yet to see? I have a close friend who has never seen Titanic or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (I guess is he is waiting to see if these ever catch fire with the public). As for me, I usually throw out titles such as This is Cinerama (a promotional film for the ultra wide-screen exhibition format which was one of the major releases of the 1950sâ€”it actually made more money than any film released in Cinerama and is rarely revived because there are no theatres to properly show it) or Superstar (the Molly Shannon-starring Saturday Night Live spin-offâ€”missed more by luck than design).
It turns out I was lying because as a new documentary reminds us, that while produced for only $25,000 Deep Throat is estimated to have grossed over $600 million in illicit box office. Though the numbers seem a lot to swallow, the movie Inside Deep Throat details the story behind this seminal porn film (just a few more, the third grader in me needs to get this out of my system). The filmmaking team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (best known for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Party Monster, and a number of salacious works for Home Box Office which co-produced this movie with Imagine Filmsâ€™ Brian Grazer) looks at how the movie came about while not shying a away from a number of sideshows and related controversies. The film is narrated by Dennis Hopper, himself no stranger to producing short-lived cinema revolutions with low-budget movies that become box office bonanzas.
Before Americaâ€™s porn production capital moved to the San Fernando Valley (and before the VCR made porno â€œmoviesâ€ as dead as repertory theatres), the capital of pornography was Times Square and the movie that changed porno from 8mm film loops of various sex acts to features with pretensions beyond the porn ghetto was Deep Throat. In many ways, it was an actual feature film and represented a half-step forward from the â€œeducationalâ€ films which attempted to stay under the radar of the vice squad by superficially pretending to be marital aids. The film starred Linda Lovelace (born Linda Boreman) whose pimp/husband who had exhibited Lindaâ€™s abilities at fellatio giving DT director Gerard Damiano the idea to go to Florida and shoot a feature-length movie about a young woman who could only achieve orgasm through oral sex.
From what moments of the movie are shown here (including a bit of Miss Lovelaceâ€™s sword-swallowing abilities), the movie looks like the usual, limp tedium that would become the porn standard. But as the makers of Inside Deep Throat seem to believe, what was on screen was nowhere near as interesting as what was happening off-screen. Deep Throat became acceptable mainstream entertainment with couples and the NYC intelligentsia (who would normally never entertain such fare) going down to Times Square. The movie spread nationwide and ran in many cities for most of the â€˜70s. Meanwhile, the anti-porn crusaders geared up for various criminal prosecutions. Richard Nixonâ€™s Department of Justice takes the lead for awhile, but soon will have bigger fish to fry. Left unmentioned in the movie is the coincidence of the New York City opening of Deep Throat and the break-in at Watergate by members of Richard Nixonâ€™s Lonely Tapes Club Band. A footnote to the Watergate affair is that the movie was mainstream enough that the anonymous background source who gave a substantial amount of damaging information regarding the Nixon White House to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was nicknamed â€œDeep Throat.â€
Surprisingly, the movie notes, is that the usual blue-haired Miss Grundys (led by future felon Charles Keatingâ€”it turns out it is acceptable to screw your shareholders, but not girls) are joined by the feminists of Women Against Pornography. And although she at first groups the marching WAPs as girls who just are not pretty enough to get a man, Linda Lovelace later joins their number claiming in two books, Ordeal and Out of Bondage (Linda Lovelace and Sean Connery have the same titles for their autobiographies) that she was forced to participate in Deep Throat and that the movie is nothing more than a recording of her being raped.
Inside Deep Throat is to be congratulated for not shying away from this particular point. For if Ms. Lovelace (later Mrs. Marchiano) is to be believed (and the story she recounts in the books makes a compelling case), then it is difficult to see the movie as the good, clean fun and precursor of greater societal openness on sex that experts such as Camille Paglia, Helen Gurley Brown, and Hugh Hefner would have us believe. The movie shows enough of Lovelaceâ€™s publicity promoting the movie (and enough of the movie to show her a far too limited actress to pull it off) to make you wonder how much of her later denial is regret rather than fear. However, there is no denying that her then-husband Chuck Traynor is more procurer than spouse. He would later perform the same services for porn queen Marilyn Chambers and would begin his own term performing â€œDeep Throatâ€ on Lucifer three months to the day after Ms. Lovelace would die from injuries sustained in a car crash. Something the movie reveals that I had not known is that in her declining (as opposed to reclining) years, Ms. Lovelace had returned to working with dirty magazinesâ€”possibly some AARP equivalent of porn.
It is hard to pick a favorite moment from a movie filled with so many, but among the nominees are: Some cracker moralist complains to Deep Throat actor (although technically you would have to say that what people do in porno movies is not really acting) Harry Reems on a talk show that [Reems] speaks as if the Bill of Rights was meant for him; the Memphis federal prosecutor Larry Parrish laments that now because of the war on terror, the Justice Department is unable to zealously prosecute pornography, Deep Throat director Damiano complaining that nowadays porn videos are just a series of sex scenes without any of the story and character that his had (this actually had the audience that I saw this with pause for a moment and then explode in derisive laughter).
But the winner has to be when Hugh Hefner (an interviewed expert, but here in archival footage) is seen debating with Against Our Will author and feminist anti-porn crusader Susan Brownmiller. At one point Hef (that is what all of us in the know guys call him) is rudely interrupted by Ms. Brownmiller and her companion who corrects his word choice. Despite the fact that Mr. Hefner is neither talking to or about Ms. Brownmiller she shrilly demands that he adhere to her word choice and with fascist zeal she refuses to allow him to go on until he bows his neck to her rhetorical sword.
But here is where the humor kicks in. Rather than leveling a verbal broadside at Ms. Brownmiller and her fellow feminazi brownshirt and declaring that she had no right to tell him how to express himself (freedom of self-expression being a right Mr. Hefner would gladly cede to her and one might say that along with the naked girl pictures is a principal that Mr. Hefner has dedicated his life to), Hugh Hefner is too much of a gentleman (insert knowing laughter here) to deliver a verbal return volley to a lady in publicâ€”even one who is wallowing in such sanctimonious rudeness.
The movie also shows scenes from the famed 1979 Women Against Pornography March on Times Square. I have a little more personal knowledge of that event because I covered it for my college paper. I went fully convinced of the moral rightness and in full sympathy for the assembled WAPpers. But as speaker after speaker escalated the hysterical shrillness as porn was blamed for everything from domestic violence to female genital mutilation. And although almost everyone was careful to say that they did not believe in censorship, they seemed just as quick to assert that education was not fast enough and steered listeners to a position where censorship was the only solution. By the end of the day WAP had convinced me that pornography was bad and that their numbers were replete with dangerous lunatics who represented a real threat to civil liberties.
We now live in a world where pornography is readily available, rarely consumed in public, and is used with little concern for running afoul of the legal authorities. With no pretensions towards either art or education, the porn world seems less exploitative of the women who are featured in itâ€”many of whom are now profit participants. Tourists visiting the post-Giuliani family friendly Times Square are more likely to have their pockets picked by a familiar brand name while the most profitable screwing is done by corporate America. Such moral crusaders as Richard Nixon and Charles Keating have revealed that their moral stances were hardly as concrete as they claimed. Nowadays, pornography seems most exploitative of the poor idiots that buy it as well as buy into it.
Deep Throatâ€™s greatest sin seems to be that everyone seems to think it is something special rather than just first.
But I am hardly an authority. I mostly find â€œadult filmsâ€ titillating (I swear, last one) for a few minutes and then boring and uninvolving. There is an old joke about porno movies that I never really got. It goes, why do women watch porno movies to the end? They want to see the part where they get married. The part it took me a second to appreciate was a reflexive question of who does not watch a movie to the end? Pornâ€™s target audience is probably supposed to be less concerned with overall cinematic quality. If I want uninspired storytelling and tedious, repetitive filmmaking, I already have the regular studio releases.
–Bill Henry