Porn Valley- Randy Barbato and Fenton Baily, the men credited with directing the documentary Inside Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com which premieres this week at Sundance did a recent Q & A on the World of Wonder website.
Growing up in the Deep Throat era, Barbato said for him it was a time where you didn’t talk about pornography. “Or you didn’t talk about sex,” he says. “I lived in a very suburban neighborhood in New Jersey. I don’t think I knew what Deep Throat meant, other than it made my mother and her friends blush and giggle.”
Bailey said as a kid he had a vague idea that “there was some kind of movie out there called Deep Throat”.
“But I didn’t know what it actually meant,” he said. “It was kind of like a code word, and if you didn’t know the code, you were shut out of this secret world.”
When was the first time you saw Deep Throat?
FENTON BAILEY: We didn’t actually see the movie until we started to make the documentary. It was Christmas, some friends were over and we thought, let’s put it on. The holiday spirit just evaporated. It was kind of icky-making and uncomfortable to watch. Lots of it is out of focus, sort of out of sync, it’s not very well edited and the acting is, er, not so good. Like the director Jerry Damiano said, it’s not a good film. And it’s also from a time when the notion of what makes a person attractive on film has changed considerably. There was a lack of grooming, I suppose. In the end we had to stop and turn it off and play a Christmas party game instead.
RANDY BARBATO:. We were all very embarrassed, even though our friends are pretty hard to shock. Which is interesting because back then in the ’70s middle-aged middle-class people actually went to movie theaters and watched this film in public. Today of course, if anybody wants to watch pornography, they do it in secret.
FENTON BAILEY: The privatization of sex and the fact that people look at it on their computer screens alone, it’s kind of a shame. I’m not advocating public orgies or anything like that. But you have to admit that the degree of shame attached to sex today is a great regret. And it clearly was so different then. And “then” wasn’t so very long ago. And so it seemed worth asking, What happened?
How did you come to make this Inside Deep Throat?
RANDY BARBATO: Fortunately we were chosen. By Brian Grazer.
FENTON BAILEY: We had made a film called The Eyes Of Tammy Faye that did okay at Sundance, and there we met one of the nicest people in the business, Kim Roth.
RANDY BARBATO: In fact, she’s so nice you wonder what she’s doing in the business.
FENTON BAILEY: So we had heard that Brian Grazer was planning on making a biopic about Linda Lovelace. And Angelina Jolie, tearing a page out of Madonna’s book, was campaigning to play the part. So we did our own Joliefication and suggested we should direct the film.
RANDY BARBATO: Except that we thought Mariah Carey should play Linda Lovelace.
FENTON BAILEY: And Kim was gracious enough to indulge us with a meet-and-greet.
RANDY BARBATO: And then nothing happened.
FENTON BAILEY: As you would expect it to.
RANDY BARBATO: But then Linda Lovelace died. And I think Brian felt that when Linda died, doing a film about her life was problematic because there isn’t a very satisfying cinematic arc to her story.
FENTON BAILEY: So he had the idea to make a documentary instead of a feature. And then he had a beauty contest of highly-noted documentarians, and fortunately we seemed to win that particular pageant.
What was it like working with one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers?
FENTON BAILEY: Well Hollywood moguls have a reputation for making the people around them crawl around in fear. But he makes it very easy to be yourself around him. There were no mogul antics to dish about!
RANDY BARBATO: There were some mogul-y touches. It was cool to watch the cut in his screening room; the screen is vast. It was cool to fly on the jet. Making documentaries doesn’t call for much in the way of travel by private jet, sadly.
FENTON BAILEY: Normally when making documentaries you’re carrying all the equipment and figuring out where to park the van. And it’s just been great to be able to do this on a scale, thanks to him, where you can really think about the film and not worry about the van.
RANDY BARBATO: And throughout the process he was just so interested and engaged. This wasn’t something he was just going to put his name on, and walk away from. And he was always challenging us
FENTON BAILEY: I lost count of the number of times he called us up and said, “No really guys, what is this film about?” We were just tearing our hair out. He was right, of course, because for the longest time we had no idea.
RANDY BARBATO: We knew it was an important moment, and we knew that it had significant cultural impact. But we didn’t know much more than that. He gave us an extraordinary amount of room in terms of figuring out what this film was.