A lot to swallow
Inside Deep Throat unveils the hardcore porn groundbreaker.

By Dennis Harvey

Deep Throat
photo courtesy of AP Wide World Photos/Universal Studios
LORD KNOWS THE ability to suppress the gag reflex is something we all could use these days. But that particular talent will never again have the cultural impact it did in 1972, when Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat thrust hardcore porn out of back rooms and into the mainstream, at least for a while. Even presidential spunk on an intern's dress had just passing political significance; Deep Throat was the B.J. that truly shook the world.

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's new documentary, Inside Deep Throat, is a terrifically entertaining perspective on a phenomenon that looks weird even by Me Decade standards. Given our current standoff between prudery and prurience, it seems impossible that just a generation ago all barriers looked to be falling down for good; that porn and the Hollywood mainstream might couple, erasing the dividing line between them; that dropping trou and doing the deed for art's sake might someday result in somebody thanking the Academy for really, really liking them.

It was a moment that now feels more fantastically distant than, say, Narnia.

Deep Throat wasn't the first hardcore feature. It certainly wasn't among the best – Radley Metzger, the Mitchell brothers, and Fred Halsted would soon do much better. But it was the wee gimmick pic that opened all filthy floodgates.

Harry Reems
photo courtesy of AP Wide World Photos/Universal Studios
Director Gerard Damiano shot the film for $25,000 in a few hectic days. When his leading man failed to show, production assistant Harry Reems, né Herbert Streicher (who'd already appeared in similar enterprises), assumed that position for a big $250 payday. He played the wacky doctor who discovers sexually frustrated Lovelace's physiological anomaly: her clitoris is located well down her windpipe. (Yes, this is meant to be ridiculous – Erica Jong's latter-day "harrumph" notwithstanding.) Applying his own especially plump tool, the doc manages to give the lady her first experience of full erotic satisfaction. Everybody's happy. Fin.

Advertised with the tagline "How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle?" Deep Throat came along at just the right time, in the right way. Its comic slant made it OK for audiences already wet from hearing about the sexual revolution to go see an actual porno. Opening June 1972 in Manhattan, the film attracted publicity that bred more and more. The New York Times published an essay about "porno chic," which, if it didn't really exist beforehand, certainly did afterward. Suddenly everyone had to see what the fuss was about. The only appropriate response, natch, was to say, (a) you liked it, and (b) what's the big deal, anyway.

Nixon's White House felt otherwise. Deep Throat provided the administration with the perfect high-profile opportunity to shut down such smut for keeps. Legal actions were brought in numerous states against anyone associated with the film, and curiously, hapless Reems ended up hounded the most.

Alas for Tricky Dick, the term Deep Throat became associated with his administration in more ways than one. By bicentennial prez Jimmy Carter's dawn, the courts lost their hard-on regarding preventing consenting adults from buying tickets to watch other consenting adults do stuff.

On-screen Lovelace untangled her tingle, but offscreen Deep Throat wove a very tangled web indeed. Bankrolled by mob-affiliated types, then shown at "dirty movie" houses largely controlled by ditto, it purportedly grossed $600 million plus – none of which ended up in the pockets of Damiano (who was "asked" to relinquish his percentage early on) or other creative principals. Nobody quite knows where all that money went. Up a lot of noses, I'd bet, and into a lot of Long Island-Miami Beach monster homes.

Damiano made another record-setting adult film (The Devil in Miss Jones), a few very interesting ones (Memories within Miss Aggie, The Story of Joanna), some that went where civilians fear to tread (Enema Bandit, Let My Puppets Come), and numerous clock-punchers with great titles (Splendor in the Ass, Candy's Little Sister Sugar). He's comfortably retired. Reems, a likable actor who very nearly "crossed over" (skittish studio execs axed him from Grease), became a born-again Utah real estate agent refreshingly unashamed of his "past." Lovelace is a sadder story – I'll leave it to the movie to detail why.

I haven't been a big fan of Barbato and Bailey's prior works, which tend to take on sensational subjects – Tammy Faye Bakker, Los Angeles street hustlers, Monica Lewinsky, etc. – in a snarky, insight-lite way. But with a larger budget and A-list producer Brian Grazer (whose idea this was) breathing down their necks, Inside Deep Throat emerges as a multileveled narrative that says a lot about American sexual attitudes then and now, while also reveling in retro-'70s pop kitsch.

It is surely the only movie that will ever unite interviewees Dick Cavett (pricelessly silly in his old age), Andrea True (a zaftig drag queen in hers), Gore Vidal, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Wes Craven, Helen Gurley Brown, Al Goldstein, Susan Brownmiller, Georgia Spelvin, and Carl Bernstein under one thematic umbrella. (I left out Camille Paglia, but then she'll get under any thematic umbrella.) Watching Inside Deep Throat is like attending the ultimate Studio 54 cocktail party you were born too late for, or were just too granola at the time to get invited to. 'Inside Deep Throat' opens Fri/11 at the Clay Theatre, 2261 Fillmore, S.F., and Act I and II, 2128 Center, Berk. See Movie Clock for show times.