This is the story of the most profitable film ever made. A film which incurred the wrath of the government, the religious right and the feminist movement, inspired the name of an FBI informer, and almost landed its lead actor in jail simply for appearing in it. The release of the infamous Deep Throat remains a seminal moment in the history of American cinema. It was the point where porn crossed over into the mainstream, it laid the foundations for the multi-billion dollar porn industry we have today, and it turned the simple act of buying a ticket into a political statement.
Inside Deep Throat, a slick new documentary from the makers of Party Monster, makes a fair stab at exploring the film’s murky background and the incredible impact it had on American society. The film offers an excellent range of interviewees - as well as most of the people involved in the shoot and the aftermath we also hear from Norman Mailer, John Waters, Hugh Hefner, Gore Vidal and Carl Bernstein - and it is put together with snappy editing and a hip (if occasionally too literal) soundtrack. But filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato lack the investigative edge required to really dig into some of the darker aspects of the story.
First, lets give a little background for Inside Deep Throat. Gerard Damiano was a ladies’ hairdresser who had the notion of making a film and the cheapest, easiest and most potentially profitable option was to make a porn film. Damiano managed to get the money together and went looking for his cast, which led to his meeting with a young actress named Linda Lovelace. He watched her in action and was stunned when he saw her technique for performing fellatio. Her ability to take a whole erect penis into her mouth and right down her throat inspired Damiano to create an entire film around her special gift. He came up with the name Deep Throat and wrote a script about a girl who could not achieve orgasm, because her clitoris was actually located at the back of her throat.
And the rest is history. The film was shot in less than a week for $25,000 and it went on to make, at a rough estimate, over $600 million. Inside Deep Throat, narrated in typically laid-back style by Dennis Hopper, presents Damiano’s film as a victory for freedom of expression. The Nixon administration went after Deep Throat as the main symbol of their clampdown on smut, but this only served to inflate the film’s reputation and increase those queues around the block. As one of the interviewees states: “Deep Throat succeeded because the government went after it“. Shortly after their assault on the film itself failed, a federal obscenity case was launched against lead actor Harry Reems and he was faced with serving five years in jail simply for daring to star in the film.
Bailey and Barbato handle all of this in nimble, informative fashion, and the first half of Inside Deep Throat flies by. But their grip on the narrative falters when dealing with the consequences of the film. In particular, their flippant dismissal of Lovelace’s claims that she was abused and forced into doing the film is a little hard to swallow (excuse the pun). The filmmakers have clearly set up the makers of Deep Throat as being on the side of all that is right and good, and Lovelace’s claims, and her subsequent move into feminism, are depicted as being nothing more than the behaviour of a woman unhappy at not getting a bigger piece of the financial pie. Also, the issue of organised crime members muscling in on Deep Throat’s profits is left frustratingly unexplored.
Inside Deep Throat finishes by comparing the sense of innocence and adventure the 70’s films were made in with the soulless porn industry of modern times. The filmmakers of the earlier era genuinely believed that they could make porn with some sort of artistic merit, but that has gone by the wayside as the modern producers simply knock out cheap porn for the masses. “It became a factory” notes Damiano, “and they didn’t need filmmakers anymore”.
Deep Throat remains a milestone in cinema history, and for the most part Inside Deep Throat does it justice. It’s a witty, intelligent and well-made film about a time in America when the topic nobody talked about became the topic everyone was talking about in the blink of an eye. “Thank God there was such a thing as sex” recalls Damiano. Everyone already knew that “sex sells”, but it took Deep Throat to show people just how true that was.