Porn Valley- Although 1 Night in Paris debuts today, Paris Hilton, Rick Salomon and the Hilton hotel chain will have to go to Paris, France to beat the adult industry's box office champ, Deep Throat.
Being the most watched, most written about and most purchased adult film in history, whether "Throat" can be considered good erotic craftsmanship or merely a cultural fluke that grabbed the lightning in the bottle of its day, the facts of the dispute hardly matter at this point.
Because nothing, even the loveliness of Paris, can adequately convey the experience or possibly the shock - for many, including Sammy Davis Jr.- of watching a woman of modest physical attributes, immodestly consuming cock full bore in her gullet. Was Linda Lovelace doing something never done before? Well, discounting a robust Saturday night in Tijuana, at least to the extent that Lovelace became part and parcel of the mythic Sammy entourage, she did. Sammy, who got in as many as five licks and more a day, knew a good blowjob when he felt one.
And so profound Linda's impact in other arenas, the film's cultural terminology was the undoing wraith that subsequently haunted Nixon out of the White House. While Deep Throat, the movie itself, would be the ghost to eventually haunt Lovelace until her tragic death in an automobile accident.
Such also was the film's legacy that at least for amusement purposes, the same question about where you were when Kennedy got shot, is as applicable to your first experience with Deep Throat. Except the prevalent answer would generate something like a glint in your father's eye response for today's porn generation.
But for those who can still summon the era despite the drugs, Deep Throat was apparent from mainstream movie houses to army barracks. And I should know because I first saw the movie in the dubious circumstances of a mess tent in 1970. For bragging purposes, I wish I could say the experience was accompanied by a Purple Heart, but the reality was more the purplish haze of a Phillies cigar playing off the smoky light of Bell & Howell projector.
With little in the way of comparative hardcore to bounce the idea off of, then and now, Linda Lovelace didn't and doesn't exactly bowl me over. I was accustomed to better stock parading naked in softcore fare passing for adult entertainment at the time.
And I think if you were to hold a non-rigged beauty contest for Deep Throat's female participants, Carol Connors as Harry Reems' nurse [Reems's character could have been practicing medicine in a Marx Bros. movie] wins in a landslide. Except, men succumb to the fantasy of having their shafts mulched to the root. And Lovelace, with her mouthful of toothy girl next door bravado and plot-driven medical condition to advise prolonged fellatio, was the girl who appeared to get the job done.
And, for measure, no sense of Linda's being a spoiled scion of wealth is obvious to make any of those ideas implausible. [Though it would be something to see Paris, similarly, bite enough bishop to make her eyes switch religious denomination.]
Deep Throat, available from Arrow Productions, www.xxxdeepthroat.com also includes some interesting ponts of reference from Eric Edwards who is, interestingly, not in the movie http://adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=3807 also along with some archived free speech commentary from director Gerard Damiano, non-specific to Deep Throat, but the point being obvious.
