Filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have taken a hot button topic and turned it into a piquant and incisive sociological treatise on the societal attitudes towards sex and sexuality and how those attitudes, oddly, havent changed much even with the sexual revolution. That it’s also a look at the eternal struggle between art and commerce, with the artist coming out on the, shall we say, short end of the stick, is a bonus in the morality play.
It was 1972 and the sexual revolution was in full swing, spurred on by the Pill, which the Catholic Church decried in no uncertain terms, and to the distinct unease of the Establishment, as it was called in those days, as one liberation movement after another popped up and demanded equality for its members. DEEP THROAT, with its explicit sexuality, coherent and sometimes funny script that raised it a notch or two above a stag film, and, most subversively, its unabashed, if anatomically incorrect, celebration of female sexual fulfillment, became a flash point. The court battles that followed fueled the publics curiosity for the film, drawing both elderly matrons curious about what a dirty movie was like and celebrities who wanted to be in on the current fad. This, in turn, caused the government to escalate its attempts to get it out of circulation, which in turn boosted box office. Apparently none of the prosecutors were familiar with the adage that theres no such thing as bad publicity. For a brief moment, its star Linda Lovelace was a celebrity and porno chic was the hippest thing going.
Bailey and Barbato capture a time when sexual freedom had a tinge of both innocence and rebellion about it, before everyone became jaded. It was a time when big stars like Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were doing explicit, though simulated, sex scenes; MIDNIGHT COWBOY was the first X-rated movie to win the Best Picture honors from the Academy; and porn actresses didn’t have fake balloon breasts and kabuki-style makeup. Many of the principals are a whimsical lot who reflect those times, Gerard Damiano, the hairdresser turned filmmaker, inspired by the way his clients complained about the thudding boredom of their sex lives, and the film’s Florida distributor, whose wife, just off-camera, is still worried about his talking too much about the producers mob connections being the most memorable. Damiano shows off the posters from his porno films displayed right next to the school pictures of his two kids.
Then there’s the other side. That the people who made DEEP THROAT, on both sides of the camera, were shortchanged in light of the $600 million that it made for its $25,000 investment should come as no surprise. The difference is that when it comes to light that a singer never made a dime off million-selling records, say, there is a sense of outrage. The reaction to the highs and lows of Linda Lovelace, who made $1200 and Harry Reems, who made $250, says much more about the audience than the abstract concept of justice. Bailey and Barbato force the issue front and center, Lovelace fired from non-show biz jobs when her past is revealed, Reems, who tried and failed to break into mainstream films because of nervous studio execs, ending up panhandling on the streets of Hollywood. Even the filmmaker, Gerard Damiano, who at one point owned one-third of the film, was made an offer he couldnt refuse by his partners and, for all intents and purposes, never saw a dime of the most profitable film ever made. Most haunting is Lovelace’s sister, still angry, personifying with her invective how dangerous people would be if looks could kill.
As commentary and context for that era and ours, there are sexual linebacker Norman Mailer and his one-time nemesis, sexual anarchist, Gore Vidal; Erica Jong, who created a different sort of firestorm with her novel Fear of Flying; Camille Paglia spitting out lengthy pronouncements as though she cant get the words out fast enough; and, perhaps inevitably, both Cosmopolitan Emerita Helen Gurley Brown offering beauty tips not suitable for general audiences, and Hugh Hefner, I guess because he’s Hugh Hefner. Nothing they say, though, makes it any less appalling and/or funny that during the first of DEEP THROATs three obscenity trials, Freud’s by then thoroughly debunked theories about the seat of female gratification, were actually presented as evidence by the prosecution to prove that the film was grossly misleading.
The filmmakers make a point of showing the scene in DEEP THROAT that inspired its name in all its glory. This accomplishes two things. One, it wouldnt be fair to tease an audience that hasn’t seen the film to talk about Lovelace’s complete lack of a gag reflex and not show it. Two, it shows us exactly what some people are so scared that the rest of us will see. The question becomes if they are more afraid that we will be hopelessly corrupted, or that we won’t. Considering that the film’s most vigorous prosecutor, Larry Parrish, a lay minister and staunch conservative, saw it dozens of times in the course of prosecuting the case, and still sticks by his decision to prosecute, speaks volumes in answer.
Ultimately, INSIDE DEEP THROAT isn’t about the specifics of this particular film and its ramifications, fascinating as they are. Instead, it’s a look at how the same people who were annoyed about pornography thirty years ago are still annoyed about it and are even more annoyed that the rest of the world isn’t. The religious right and radical feminists both of whom want to define obscenity on their terms without regard for freedom of speech (as Roy Cohn in one clip puts it to Harry Reems, what makes you think the Bill of Rights is yours?), or the infinite variations of human sexual identity.
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