Alberta, Canada- Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com isn’t just the most profitable porn movie of all time, but the most profitable movie, ever. The infamous 1972 film was made for a scant $25 000 and went on to gross over $600 million US.
Much of its success is attributable to the shitstorm of controversy it kicked up upon its release; no single porn film has ever been so vilified by the American moral right.
The new documentary Inside Deep Throat examines the film and its impact, and the result is a fascinating look into the cultural climate of the early ’70s.
Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato begin their film with the story of Deep Throat’s creation. Though not dissimilar to any of the countless other blue movies being produced at the time (its main hook was star Linda Lovelace’s titular oral abilities), Deep Throat nonetheless transcended the limited exposure typically granted to its pornographic brethren and became a cultural phenomenon.
Fantastic word-of-mouth advertising-buoyed by a New York Times article declaring the film to be the harbinger of a new “porno chic”-led to the film’s increased cultural prominence, which in turn brought about vitriol from the morally self-righteous Nixon administration.
Republican objections to the film’s encouragement of “deviant sexuality” (blow jobs) led to its banishment from 23 states.
Though derided colourfully by one judge as “a feast of carrion and squalor,” Bailey and Barbato make it clear that Deep Throat was standard ’70s cheese-porn, akin to the style documented in movies like Boogie Nights.
Inside Deep Throat features interview footage with much of the film’s cast and crew, including hairdresser-turned-director Gerard Damiano and male lead Harry Reems (apparently his real name). The most notable omission is lead actress Linda Lovelace, who died in a 2002 car crash.
In addition to those associated directly with Deep Throat, Bailey and Barbato trot out an assortment of interview subjects, including Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, John Waters, Norman Mailer and Dr Ruth Westheimer. Some of them provide amusing sound bites, while others, in their attempts to contextualize the movie and its impact, merely spout hot air.
By today’s standards, Deep Throat seems relatively tame. Your average piece of spam e-mail promises far more illicit thrills.
Bailey and Barbato make the film’s harmlessness apparent, and do so entertainingly, with brief clips of the film itself and colourful commentary from Damiano and his aged pornographer cronies. The directors’ attempts to characterize the film as a champion of First Amendment rights, however, are less convincing.
It’s quite apparent that Deep Throat’s makers had no intention of subverting American society’s puritanical sexual norms; they just wanted to make a movie with this chick they found who gave great head.
Given that the porn industry now cranks out more than 11 000 films a year, it’s hard to imagine a single one rising above the pack and inciting the amount of controversy (or financial profitability) that Deep Throat generated, and for that reason, the film deserves to be memorialized.
Inside Deep Throat does so in a consistently entertaining fashion, despite its misguided attempts to characterize the film as a champion of free speech.