Porn Valley- The documentary Inside Deep Throat contains a number of bonus features about court cases involving Deep Throat, www.arrowfreedom.com. One story tells about the time the movie played in the toney suburbs of Princeton, New Jersey. Bruce Schragger provides the commentary.
"The Princeton area is a wealthy area," notes Schragger, who was the Mercer County prosecutor in 1972 at the time Bill Kane was the governor.
"He was a Republican, obviously I was a Republican," Schragger continues. "When I became the prosecutor I really disappointed a couple of my detectives because their job was going from magazine stand to magazine stand collecting all these dirty books and magazines, coming back to the office, reading them and trying to convince the prosecutor that we should close down the newsstand. The first thing I did was take away their dirty magazines, telling them they had to go to work."
Schragger relates how he got a call from the governor advising him that he received a phone call from the Newark diocese complaining about the fact that Deep Throat was playing a mainstream movie theater and wasn't being closed down. For those who know the geography of New Jersey, how the Newark diocese would swing any weight in Mercer county is itself a good question. Nonetheless, Schragger was asked to close the movie down.
"I told the governor that it wasn't bothering anyone," said Schragger who made a public statement to the fact that he wasn't going to do so. That's when Schragger's wife made the suggestion they see it for themselves.
"She and I and my first assistant went to see the movie." A Pep Boys now stands where the theater did, but that doesn't stop the documentary crew from roaming the aisles in search of signs bearing automobile-sexual double entendres.Schragger's recollection of events that night was that none of the patrons were wearing raincoats.
"Everyone there looked like you and I and every other normal person in this world," he said. "After the movie we decided to go next door for a coup of coffee. Other people were coming- not that many I recall."
