Former AVN gay editor Mike Szymanski identifies cable industry maven Marc Bruder as the president of Arrow in this following piece. Must come as a surprise to Ray Pistol.

LOS ANGELES — Banking on the success of the documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” producers kicked off a re-release of the original controversial film “Deep Throat”, www.xxxdeepthroat.com in Hollywood on Thursday night (Feb. 24).

“This is a 33-year-old film that still holds up today, and it’s credited with opening up the world of free speech and expression that we know of today,” says Marc Bruder, president of Arrow Productions, the national distributor for the movie’s re-release.

While watching the NC-17 documentary by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey at the Sundance Film Festival, Bruder says he heard two 60-year-old ladies asking each other if they had seen the original movie. “There’s an audience that is willing to go see this in a theater as it was originally shown,” Bruder tells Zap2it.com. “We arranged the re-release into theaters in less than a month.”

Digitally remastered, the film is also being re-released on DVD with bonus interviews, for those who’d rather watch their explicit material at home.

With lots of giggling and heckling, the premiere audience included Lexington Steele from Playboy’s “Lex in the City,” Seymour Butts and Bishop from Showtime’s “Family Business,” Laurie Holmes (widow of porn star John Holmes), Howard Stern regular Jesse Jane and porn stars Anita Cannibal, Max Hardcore, Layla Rivera and more. The film now comes across as a campy comedy about a frigid woman who visits a wacky doctor.

“This is the movie that changed everything,” says film critic and former porn performer Bill Margold, founder of the Free Speech Coalition lobby group. “When audiences demanded the right to see this movie, it moved porn into the mainstream.”

“Deep Throat” was originally banned in 23 states and screenings were shut down during the Nixon administration. Bruder says he has already heard about letter-writing campaigns planning protests for the re-release, and a publicly-owned theater in New York canceled the opening because of the controversy.

“It’s nice to know that we’re re-releasing this only a few miles from the Pussycat Theatre [in West Hollywood] where it was first shown,” Bruder says.

The film opens Friday (Feb. 25) and plans to expand to Philadelphia, Pasadena, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Boston.