Porn Valley- It has been thirty-three years since Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com first went down on one of Time Square’s triple-X fleapits in Manhattan and came up a pop-cultural landmark that reverberates to this day. The lasting impact, both personal and societal, of this seminal porn flick is now chronicled in a breezy documentary that dwells mostly on the wider political legacy still being played out today in the morality schisms of America and elsewhere. However, it is the aching human stories left behind in Deep Throat’s destructive wake that stay with you and help elevate what would have been a routine cinematic history lesson, albeit one so handsomely produced, into a theatrical experience.

Produced by Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer for a generous $2m, Inside Deep Throat cost more than eighty times that of its source material. The expense would seem more than justified given the evident commercial pay-offs of a documentary that will command acres of TV and print coverage, and spit out every double entendre pun in the media lexicon.

The same curiosity that made Deep Throat such a hit with the 70s in-crowd, celebrities and all, will surely come into play again on the specialised circuit. Only this time, the titillation will have long since gone. The sight, momentarily glimpsed here, of Linda Lovelace’s full-on acts of sword-swallowing fellatio has lost much of its prurient potency thanks to the ubiquitous VCR, disc-players, pay-per-view smut and the numbing onslaught of spammed erotica. Which is precisely the point: Deep Throat was the film that first alerted the underworld to porn’s mainstream potential and in so doing help make hardcore flesh-peddling a legit enterprise that penetrates every corner of contemporary life.

Quite how Deep Throat became so chic, even to the point of becoming a by-word for adult pleasure and the nickname for Nixon’s Watergate whistleblower, has never been entirely explained. And it is the reason why a curious new generation of literate theatre-goers might want to revisit one the many watershed moments in the sexual revolution to find out what the fuss back then was all about.

Certainly, the original Deep Throat has got to be the most shoddily assembled, poorly-lit movie ever to have a full-length documentary devoted to it. Filmed over the course of six days in sleazy Miami motels with $22,500 of crime money, the 62-minute creation was a laughably amateurish effort that revolved around a single conceit: Sexually unsatisfied, Lovelace’s character consults a physician and learns that her clitoris is located in the part of the anatomy usually reserved for one’s tonsils. No prizes for guessing how her predicament gets resolved. Still, that intentional comic absurdity was more plot than all the 8mm looped stag films that had been circulating until then. A global phenomenon burst into flame, stoked by a $3m injunction from a New York judged that declared Deep Throat too obscene for public consumption and fuelled by a popular desire in the early 70s to defy convention.

From the onset of Bailey and Barbato’s documentary essay, Deep Throat is declared to be the most successful independently produced movie ever made. With a worldwide gross estimated by the FBI at some $600m, this box office aberration theoretically eclipses all other word-of-mouth sensations such as The Blair Witch Project. Theoretically, because none of that stash can be adequately accounted for today since everybody involved along its supply line was on the take. Distributed by the mob, the prints were dropped off at theatres that would later be shaken down for an extortionate slice of the gross receipts. Some of those that didn’t comply saw their movie-houses burned down.

While fascinating to the movie industry as a distribution case study, this side-story is only touched upon by the filmmakers. And, judging by the press notes for their documentary, so are many other tales that have accumulated around Deep Throat in the ensuing three decades. Having gathered 800 hours of material, the filmmakers had tough editing choices to make, one of which was to skew the focus away from its desperate star into a wider treatise. Before she was Linda Lovelace, pimped by her sexual svengali into becoming a worldwide brand for uninhibited lust, she was Linda Borman, the fresh-faced daughter of a New York cop. Years later, she briefly trying to make amends, or perhaps just her rent, as an anti-porn crusader. A car crash ended her penniless life in April 2002, before this film was started.

When she was alive, producer Grazer himself flirted with the idea of doing a Hollywood biopic of Lovelace but abandoned the project in favour of a non-fiction film that assessed the insinuating cultural impact of her defining performance. The resulting film certainly offers plenty of contextual grist as the likes of John Waters, Norman Mailer, Alan Dershowitz, Hugh Heffner, Erica Jong, Gore Vidal and Camille Paglia all weigh on the zeitgeist effects and its First Amendment implications.

Having previously curated an entire documentary series on the history of erotica (Pornography: The Secret History Of Civilization), not to mention a British reality series on the Californian porn industry, Bailey and Barbato are well-placed to provide an over-arching survey of the sexual landscape as narrated by Dennis Hopper. But, as with their Sundance hit The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, the small personal histories are more revealing than the wide-angle perspective.

Audiences at Sundance, where Inside Deep Throat received a high-profile premiere last night, will be amused to learn that Lovelace’s male co-star, a mustachioed lothario who went by the stage name of Harry Reems, is now living in their midst as Park City real estate agent. Not only that, but this reformed alcoholic has since found God – another detail only momentarily alluded to.

The most indelible portrait is that of Deep Throat’s indefatigable director Gerard Damiano (also known as Jerry Gerard). Now living ignominiously with his grown-up children, he is real-life equivalent to the Burt Reynold’s character in Boogie Nights, a filmmaker who rued the day that big business moved in porn and made it dirty. A former hairdresser, Damiano was of the old school that tried at least to make a picture, including cut-aways of rockets launching into space to suggest the female orgasm, rather than just a mindless succession of grind acts. And it is Damiano that surely holds one of the keys to Deep Throat’s success by insisting on changing the film’s original title from The Doctor Makes A Housecall. Nothing like a catchy movie name to capture the global imagination. Not that he saw much more than a dime from those hard-earned labours.

Prod co: Imagine Entertainment, HBO Documentary Films, World Of Wonder productions

Int’l sales: Summit Entertainment

US dist: Universal Pictures

Prods: Brian Grazer, Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato

Exec Prod: Kim Roth

Co-prod: Mona Card

Cine: David Kempner, Teodoro Maniaci

Eds: William Grayburn, Jeremy Simmons