Porn Valley- The actual birth date of Sharon Mitchell has been debated before www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=8329
So it was almost expected that some Adultfyi readers would pick up on Mitchell’s comments about the infamous Linda Lovelace dog film and question the legality of Mitchell’s being on the set.
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[According to a birth date given by IMDb, Mitchell would have been 15 years old at the time.]
The late Linda Lovelace apparently got some of her acting technique from cocker spaniels long before making her big splash in Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com which is set to be aired on Dutch public TV this month on February 23rd.
In the Legs McNeil- Jennifer Osborne book, The Other Side of Hollywood, several chapters are devoted to the making of the groundbreaking porno flick.
The late Butchie Peraino, who owned Arrow Productions and was behind the project, talks about making two other movies prior to Throat, one, a documentary called “Sex U.S.A.”; the other titled, “This Film is All About…”
According to Peraino, Sex U.S.A. cost him between $12,000 and $15,000 to make while grossing $600,000- a factor which lent impetus to making another film. Only Peranio didn’t want to make another documentary. He wanted to make a feature.
Hall of Fame director Fred Lincoln, who worked as an actor at the time, describes Peraino as a mobster’s son who wanted to be an auteur.
“He always wanted to make motion pictures,” says Lincoln who includes the fact that Linda Lovelace had appeared in the Sex U.S.A documentary along with Tina Russell and Harry Reems. Reems remembers it being shot in a West Side studio in New York City.
“Then we went- two by two- into six or seven cubilcles and there we stayed with our sexual partners while the narrator explained very pedagogically what we were doing.”
Reems goes on to describe Damiano as a grown-up Wizard of Oz, a short, jolly, jelly bean.
“He had a gray goatee and a funny little toupee,” Reems adds. “He was sort of the stereotype of the second-string Hollywood director. But Gerard Damiano has been called the Mike Nichols and Ingmar Bergman of porno films.”
Although they had agreed on him being paid $100 a day, Lincoln says Damiano ripped him off for 25 bucks during the Sex U.S.A. shoot.
“He tried to pay me seventy-five bucks,” says Lincoln. “I said no way. I said listen, don’t fuck with me. I’ll break your fuckin’ legs.” According to Lincoln, Peraino told Damiano to pay him the money.
Ray Pistol, who’s now the owner of Arrow Productions, recalled meeting Chuck Traynor and Linda Lovelace in Peraino’s office and that Traynor had a copy of Lovelace’s doggie loop and tried showing it to Butchie.
Peraino told Traynor he don’t don’t that shit and threw him out of the office. On the way out, Traynor and Lovelace met Damiano who was on the way in. Damiano recalls that Lovelace was wearing army boots, an army jacket and a wool hat pulled over her eyes.
Lovelace claims it was an outfit Traynor made her wear, that she wouldn’t have been caught dead in it, otherwise. Traynor describes Damiano as beiing a pretty easygoing guy with a little bit of an air because he was making feature films.
Pistol remembers Traynor and Lovelace hitting it off with Damiano and how they went to a swingers club with him that evening.
“That was the night that Damiano saw Linda’s talent [for deep throating],” recalls Pistol. “He came back the next day and hit Butchie up to completely change everything around.”
to be continued