WWW- In the era of the Internet, hardcore porn to suit every fetish is just a mouse click away.

For that, we may have a skin flick called “Deep Throat”, www.xxxdeepthroat.com to thank–or curse. It’s the, ahem, seminal film that took porno out of seedy downtown cinemas and made it safe for suburbia.

By today’s ultra-explicit standards, “Deep Throat” seems downright mild. But upon its release 33 years ago, it caused all hell to break loose.

In their documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato offer a detailed and often amusing account of how this seemingly insignificant film helped reshape American society, which was still coming to terms with the upheaval of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and early ’70s.

“Deep Throat” might have escaped the notice of all but the raincoat brigade if it had not been targeted by the U.S. government, which was intent on stamping out smut. The film was banned in 23 states, and federal prosecutors went after its male star, Harry Reems, who was eventually convicted of obscenity-related charges.

The crusade, however, backfired. Mainstream voices rose to the defense of the film, which quickly began attracting patrons who previously wouldn’t have been caught dead at an X-rated film.

Gerard Damiano, who directed “Deep Throat” and appears in the documentary, recalled the phenomenon in an interview in Tokyo.

“Although it was the most popular, ‘Deep Throat’ was not, in my opinion, the best film I ever made,” the 77-year-old said. “The only reason it was such a success is because the Nixon administration decided to stop it. If it wasn’t for them, ‘Deep Throat’ would have come and gone away in two or three weeks.”

The New York Times responded to the controversy with an article titled “Porno Chic,” while the film became staple fodder for jokes by the hosts of late-night talk shows. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used the film’s title to refer to their anonymous source when the Watergate scandal broke.

The film’s plot–back then, porn flicks had plots–is simple. A frigid young woman (the late Linda Lovelace) finds the key to sexual pleasure upon seeing a doctor (Reems), who discovers that a key part of her anatomy is located not where it should be, but in her throat. This discovery, of course, leads to lots and lots of oral sex, which is obscured in part by mosaics in the DVD version of “Deep Throat,” available this month in Japan.

Damiano wrote the script in three days after meeting Lovelace, whose real-life sexual skills are said to have inspired the film. The movie was shot in just six days. Never did the director think it would cause such a sensation.

“I knew the topic was going to be very exciting and very entertaining because of Linda, but I never thought what happened to it would happen to it,” he recalled.

“Inside Deep Throat” shows the timing was perfect for his film to cause a commotion. Up until then, Damiano claims, no theatrically released film had ever featured oral sex, let alone shown a woman enjoying sex.

“It was the idea that women were not supposed to enjoy sex,” Damiano said. “But they should. I wanted a man and woman making love to be enjoyable, not to be something that only one person would enjoy.”

While many women may agree with that proposition, not all took kindly to the way Damiano presented it. The feminists who protested the film’s depiction of women were joined on the picket line by some strange bedfellows: social conservatives who branded the film immoral.

Meanwhile, men and women were eagerly lining up to see the film. Made on a budget of just $25,000, “Deep Throat” earned $600 million, making it one of the most profitable independent films in history.

Nevertheless, the documentary shows how most of that money never made it into the pockets of Damiano and his crew but instead flowed to the mobsters who had control over the film. “Inside Deep Throat” also reveals how the film changed the lives of the people involved in its making, including Reems and Lovelace.

Its artistic merits are debatable, but there’s no denying that “Deep Throat” changed society. Most of all, it enhanced freedom of expression, no matter how offensive the medium might be for some.

“If you hide the cookies, you make them mysterious. As long as you hide it, people will want to see it,” Damiano says. “If you put them on the table, they would just leave them alone.”

When asked what “Deep Throat” meant to him after all these years, Damiano smiles and says, “I am very gratified by the fact that it became such a big sensation. It made me like a pioneer.”