Lozenge

We can't swear it's true, but Susan Michaels in her review of Inside Deep Throat for Film Stew.com, says it's the first NC-17 documentary.

What makes this documentary infinitely entertaining is the opportunity it affords to get reacquainted in '04 with guys who were at the top of their game back in '72. Once virile, screwing everything that moved, they're now in their late 60's and early 70's and hard to visualize as any sort of porn kings.

Barbato and Bailey have done a masterful job of sticking to the facts at hand without twisting or tainting them through creative editing.  Watching a documentary such as this makes you realize how much someone like Michael Moore has an agenda.

Inside Deep Throat is not to be missed. It's fun, factual, true and funny. Since opening on February 11th in 12 theaters and then gradually expanding each of its subsequent weeks, the NC-17-rated doc has so far grossed nearly $400,000.

A Program Note

Deep Throat's numbers just don't add up, but some people just can't count.

Last week a journalist at the LA Times questioned the validity of a statement we make in Inside Deep Throat regarding the gross profit of Deep Throat.  We have responded to his article and hope that it will be printed in the paper shortly.  If not, we will post our response here.

(Developing. . .)

Que Linda

When Linda Williams, professor of film studies at UC Berkeley, went to see Inside Deep Throat at an advance screening at the Act 1 Theater in Berkeley, she took a few graduate students along.

"They liked it. They really enjoyed watching it," she said. "When I teach courses on pornography, students are always there and are always interested in Deep Throat.  There are many better porn films of that era, but this was the one that everyone saw and that everyone remembers. I think it deserves the place it has been given by [Inside Deep Throat]."

Williams is the author of various books, including Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, which devotes an entire chapter to the impact of Deep Throat. "It was almost a rite of passage to be able to say you were there and watched and were willing to be seen as sexually interested. In other words, you don't go to a movie like that without letting the people around you know you are interested in sex."

Williams is currently writing a book about sex-watching in American culture. Inside Deep Throat is sure to get a mention.

About Last Night

Last night I bobbed nobs - I mean hobnobbed - with some of the porn industry's hottest stars.? Well, maybe they weren't the hottest stars in the biz; I don't know straight porn stars because I don't watch straight porn. I - as I had pointed out to me by Brandi "with an I not an IE or a Y" - am a "fruitcake."

Inside the Laemmle's Sunset-5 lobby, where the original Deep Throat was sneak-premiering prior to its limited rerelease, a man was giving out red roses to all the ladies, and copies of the Deep Throat DVD and posters to everyone else.? The man was not Gerard Damiano - the film's director was not in attendance. I pushed through the lobby full of silicon, Lycra, and high heels and headed for my seat. Three porn stars took seats next to mine.? (I learned later they were Eva Angelina, Tommy Gunn, and Sunny Lane.)? As the film started to play, the audience cheered, then broke into applause for Harry Reems' and Linda Lovelace's names when they appeared on the screen.? About midway through the film, I felt my seat sort of moving rhythmically.? Oh this is comfy, I thought.? When did they put in vibrating seats?? Then I realized it was sweet sweet Sunny Lane working over Tommy Gunn's weapon.? She jerked it for a while, but I don't think the scene of Linda enjoying Coca-Cola from her own vagina inspired Tommy to finish his performance.

After the movie, there were a couple of PSAs - one from Deep Throat's director Gerard Damiano - but everyone headed out to the lobby to sip bad champagne, chat up the porn stars, and tuck a few more DVDs and posters under their arms.? I talked to some of the porn stars for the WOW Report (watch the clip) then left laden with swag. This fruitcake's Christmas shopping is done and it's only February.

- Brent Benedetti

You Can Count on Him

Count Sepy Dobronyi, whose house in Florida was used in the film Deep Throat (see inset), has written to Bailey and Barbato requesting minor compensation for his participation in Inside Deep Throat.

John Waters

1.  Describe yourself as if you were writing a personals ad.
Like the movie "Boom"? Me too. Send nude photos. 

2.  If you had two tickets to paradise, where would you go and who would you take?
Back to Baltimore with my oldest friend Pat Moran.

3.  Who plays you in the movie?
Steve Buscemi.

4.  Who do you go to for advice?
Close friends, lawyers, and - in the past - a shrink.

5. What makes you cry? 
Douglas Sirk's deat

Is It In Yet?

Randy Barbato wanted Inside Deep Throat to be thought of as a family film so badly that the gods in the layout department at the LA Times butted the IDT ad with the ad for Are We There Yet? and made it seem as if IDT is the best family fun since the original Home Alone.  Which it actually is.

RuPaul Remembers the First Time Ever She Saw Deep Throat

saturday, i saw INSIDE DEEP THROAT. the film was fantastic!!! i can't believe they were able to use the shot of LINDA LOVELACE going down on HARRY REEMS and keep their NC-17 rating. that one shot keeps reverberating in my ...er, um head. it's so fucking hot! HARRY REEMS is so fucking sexy, even today.

i saw the original film at the PUSSYCAT THEATER in SAN DIEGO when i turned 18. the only thing i remembered of the film was her driving my favorite car ever made, a 1969 CADILLAC EL DORADO, and HARRY REEMS' juicy cock. oh, and yes, i remember feeling really self-conscious as i sat down in a triple X-rated theater, surrounded by six older dudes in trench coats.  (RuPaul.com)

Family Film Testimonials

What better way to bond with your family than to take in a porn movie together.  Crazy, you say?  Not so much.  Getting oral with your parents is a sure way to open a discussion that should have occurred years ago.  Unless you're Mormon.  Three tales from the World of Wonder follow.  (Do you have a story?)

Thanks to Randy and Fenton - and at the old age of 23 - I have finally broached the topic of oral sex and porn with my mom.  Even though I forced every single friend (and sister) to go see IDT in their local theaters, I never brought it up with my mom, only because that's gross, she's a prude, and that's just gross. How would I explain the film to someone who still tries to cover my eyes during a movie sex scene?

But my sister blew my cover and asked my mom if she had seen the documentary yet. So after yelling at me for not including her in my life, my mom saw it with a friend and absolutely loved it.  Which led to this really awkward conversation over dinner about how she remembers seeing Deep Throat at the Pussycat Theater in 1976 with my dad (GROSS) because "everyone was seeing it!" and all the other pornos of the time (Behind the Green Door? Jackie Kennedy? EVEN GROSSER).

But I guess it makes sense, since the film really is about her time. (She isn't THAT old; she's still in her early 50s.) Which I think is the best part about the entire documentary:  As crazy and liberating as [filming] the sex was, time still flew by and everyone still got old and wrinkly.  Porn stars retired and became grandmothers, mafia members got arthritis, and the thought of Damiano now as a wild swinger is more disturbing than enticing.

And this is where I say something incredibly profound about how nothing really matters in life, but I can't really think of anything right now.

- Moye Ishimoto

My dad and my sister came to the NYC premiere of Inside Deep Throat.  I was far too excited about the premiere to even think of the embarrassment factor until the lights went down and I looked across the aisle and there they were.  It suddenly occurred to me what we were about to watch.  Well, the thing is, my dad was laughing harder than anyone in the theater.  In fact, I quickly became more embarrassed by his piercing laughter than by watching hardcore porn in his presence.  And when it was over, he hugged me like only a proud dad can and I realized just how sophisticated my Italian Jersey family is!  Then again, there was an all-you-can-eat buffet afterwards, and my dad was the first in line!

- Randy Barbato

My parents went to go see IDT this past Saturday up in New Haven, Connecticut.  I was a little nervous to hear their response. I can't say I've ever had a conversation about porn with my folks. We had been talking a bit about the movie over the past year and a half, but more about the fact that Ron Howard's spikey-haired partner was producing it.  After the movie was over, I got a text message from my mom. "It was so good. Really funny."  Whew.  No awkward moment there. So I figured I'd dodged the embarrassing moment, and innocently wrote back, "Did you see my name in the credits?" to which she replied, "Yes. We were the last ones in the theater when it finally came on."  Nope, there it is.

- Jim Galasso

Win an IDT Mouse Pad!

We have the black, red, and white Inside Deep Throat logo printed on a generous-size rubber mouse pad.  It looks great and smells like a new car.  We want to keep it for ourselves, but we're a selfless bunch at WOW, so if you're the first person to tell us in what state the film Deep Throat was shot, we'll shoot this pad out to your pad in the next mail.  To repeat:  In what state was the film Deep Throat shot?  Include you mailing address with your answer.

The answer to the last giveaway question - What is Damiano's daughter's current occupation? - is fire dancer.

Hey Mickey, You're Not So Fine

Print production of porn films is a problem that producers haven't had to consider for nearly two decades, reports a recent article in Variety. While the occasional porn pic is still shot on film, they haven't been projected on a big screen for more than a decade, thanks to the VCR. "The one exception was  Blue Movie, but we sent the negatives to a lab in Italy and it was for theaters in Switzerland and Germany," says head of Wicked Pictures, Steven Vlottes.  "Wicked never made prints."   So although FotoKem and Technicolor both declined to produce a remastered print of Deep Throat for Arrow Productions head, Raymond Pistol, he eventually found a lab to make prints in time for their February 25 premiere, but he's not saying which lab that was.

For Technicolor, Pistol has nothing but disdain, noting that Disney is a major client and the lab may have feared offending the Mouse House. "Aren't they the one that had penises in children's films and don't they do the Touchstone films, which have plenty of nudity? I'm not the hypocrite." 

Opening weekend of "Deep Throat" will include latenight screenings at Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles (which is also running "Inside Deep Throat") and Laemmle's Colorado in Pasadena as well as engagements at Chicago's Music Box Theater, the Roxy Cinema in Philadelphia and a theater to be named in New York. The Roxy Theater in San Francisco will also screen "Deep Throat," but as a regular engagement.

Pistol Aims for Thursday

Ray Pistol, the current owner of Deep Throat, told us about the difficulties he's had striking prints for the rerelease of the X-rated phenom, but it appears he's finally prevailed.  He has plans to roll out a limited release starting this weekend.  Thursday night he'll be doing a sneak premiere screening in Westwood, where he's going to give a red rose to all the women who attend.  He says he wants to make the experience "romantic" for them.  Pistol is a real pistol that way.

Superficial Throat

Now that we know the throat can be an erogenous zone inside and out, perhaps it should be kept covered until active.  Daily Candy today has unveiled just the ticket - scarflets and necklaces from Virgin Threads.  (Could Richard Branson be behind this?)  Great accessory when seeing Inside Deep Throat on a chilly winter night.

Books Used in Research for Inside Deep Throat

Gay Talese - Thy Neighbor's Wife
Kenneth Turan - Sinematic
Jon Lewis - Hardcore vs Hollywood
Linda Williams - Hard Core:  Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"
Alan Dershowitz - The Best Defense
Edward Degrazia & Roger Newman - Banned Films
Eric Schlosser - Reefer Madness
David Allyn - Make Love, Not War
Marc Eliot - Down 42nd Street
Eric Danville - The Complete Linda Lovelace
David Flint - Babylon Blue
Edited by Jeffrey Escoffier - Sexual Revolution
Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris -  Grindhouse:  The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema
Linda Lovelace - Ordeal
D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover 
Alfred C. Kinsey - Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, et. al.
William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson - Human Sexual Response
Final report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography

Reems Reads Reams of IDT Press

I have been following the film's path these past two weeks, focusing mostly on the reviews. I am delighted that almost all the press has been favorable. Randy and Fenton deserve all the accolades they are getting. Bravo!
 
Without question, the best description of our boys comes from "down under" film critic, Gary Maddox, who met them at the Berlin Film Festival and describes our heroes as dressed "in natty black suits and ties, resembling gay undertakers." Ah! The freedom of the press. You go, girls!!

- Harry Reems

Lab Mice

We told you on February 16 that the labs intending to make prints of the original Deep Throat pulled out, as it were, in fear of being squashed by the long, three-fingered hands of Disney.  Now, Fleshbot alerts us to the full story in the adult film industry's bible, AVN. 

"I just got thrown out of another lab," Interlandi said  Friday. "Somebody, a vice-president, found out that they were  working on the show, pulled the film, had it on his desk, and  told me to come get it; said that they have an agreement with Disney, and that Disney prohibits anybody from working on  anything NC-17 or above [i.e., XXX]. Just to verify that they  had the right to throw us out, they actually called the MPAA  to check our rating, and I guess it was rated X by them way  back when. So The Mouse fucked me. And, you know, that's  funny, coming from a company that's mostly staffed by gay  people."

Deep Six

Garry Maddox at smh.com in Australia, where Inside Deep Throat is scheduled to open midyear, says the documentary he saw at the Berllin Film Festival is "a lively, often-comic account" of how "a director who was a hairdresser until he learnt about the sexual revolution from women visiting his salon" made an explicit porn film that took in millions.

Behind the documentary are two filmmakers who, this week in Berlin, in natty black suits and ties, resembled gay undertakers. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have made films and television shows on Tammy Faye Bakker, Monica Lewinsky, RuPaul, Andy Warhol, rent boys, a gay high school in Texas, gay republicans, the history of pornography, Hitler's rumoured homosexuality and even cuddly toy fetishists.

Directors' Journal

THURSDAY AUGUST 26, 2003

LONDON. We interview Xaviera Hollander, author of The Happy Hooker, now living in exile in Amsterdam. She remembers the time she met Linda Lovelace

She came to apply for a job as a prostitute in my establishment as The Happy Hooker. And Iurned her down for reasons that I found her too wholesome, too submissive, not really intelligent enough for the job. Because I was looking for more sophisticated girls. When she came to my house, she was just a very homely young, very naive girl, actually.

SEPTEMBER, 2003

We begin post production and hope to have a rough cut by Thanksgiving. Optimism itself!

Danny Bramson is to be the music tsar. He's a legend - although everyone in Hollywood's a legend. But in the flesh Danny supersizes that concept. It's not just that he is physically imposing, his aura is a supernovalike. He pounds the table, bangs his fist on the wall, and at one point actually gets down on the floor on his hands and knees, racking his brain for bitchin' tracks, dude, for a totally rocking monster soundtrack!!! Nervous glances fly around the room. This level of demonstrativeness is totally alien to the good people of Hollywood. Especially on a first meeting!

Will Grayburn is editing, having done the same for 101 Rent Boys, Juror #5, our HBO film about the O J Simpson trial, and the episode all about video in Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization.

But just because we've started editing, doesn't mean we have a script. It takes a better part of a week just to read the transcripts. Paring them down for selects reults in five hundred pages of must-use material. We're drowning in it!

And just because we've started editing, doesn't mean we have stopped shooting, either.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 18th, 2003

LONDON: Party Monster opens in the UK. The reviews are in and they are universally negative. But when Boy George weighed in with a negative review in the Sunday Express, I finally some confidence in the film. I once predicted that Madonna would turn all holy with child, and I reckon Boy George will turn into an arch conservative. In the same way so many of the 60's liberal and sexual revolutionaries sold out there own ideology for the cash that came with the economic boom of the 80's and 90's. They - the wild things, the free love hippies - are the reason we live in such conservative times today. Its not so much a backlash as it is their own betrayal of themselves and their so-called ideology, much of which was simply self-indulgence posing as philosophy.

TUESDAY OCTOBER 21, 2003

LOS ANGELES: Peter Fonda gives us a very gnomic interview in the grounds of the Chateau Marmont

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 22, 2003

Interview Gore Vidal who mainly wants to talk about the boys in the war; its all completely fascinating.

I think Kinsey triggered it all by denying that there was anything except sexual degenerates, except among the occasional, uh, demented hair dresser, who would, you know, end up murdered somewhere. Uh, they idea that, uh, all American boys who had just won the Second World War were involved in this sort of activity, sometimes to the point of obsession, sometimes to the point of falling in love. Uh, the, this traumatized the whole country. Well, our boys were very busy winning the Second World War and also with one another. That was a fact. So now you have all of these people trying to erase Kinsey. They've tried to erase me for 55 years, since The City And The Pillar.

So, anybody that much younger than I, which practically everybody is, doesn't know what it's like to have had a free sex life.

Elliott Gould is rather wary of us when we interviewed him by the side of his pool.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 5, 2003

Interview with Hugh Hefner. It's hard not to become slightly excited at going to the fabled Playboy mansion. However, in the cold light of day few nightclubs look as magical as they should - there's always an unsettling aroma of congealment. On the other hand there was also something changeless about it, and the lack of renovated perfection that carpets all of Bel Air made the place feel almost homey. In time this place will be preserved as a National monument.

Reading back his transcript he was perhaps the only person we interviewed to speak in prefect sentences and complete paragraphs with no ums and ahs. Like this final thought, for example...

When the subject is sex, don't expect a lot of reason. It isn't rational. Most of our views, views and values in terms of sex are based on religious views. And those have to do with superstition. They're not rational. Sex is a good thing, not a bad thing. This would be a very poor world without it. If we reproduced in some other way, it would be a colder, less worthwhile world. And the reality is that you know it, it is sex more than religion that is the major civilizing force on this planet. It's the beginning of family and tribe and civilization itself. And it is the major motivating factor on this planet. I think on that note, I'm out of time

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 6, 2003

Have our photographs taken for an early article in the LA Times. Brian is insistent they feature all three of us together. At one point the photographer gets me and randy behind the couch, Brian in front. Quick as a flash Brian says 'wait; won't that mean I'll be in focus and they'll be blurry? I don't want that'. The photographer fires off a shot and sure enough that's the one that's used.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 13, 2003

Interview with Charles Keating and Dolores Wells

Mona and ashley have tracked down Linda Lovelace's former secretary on the outskirts of Phoenix. A former playboy bunny, Hugh Hefner recommended her to Linda when she moved out to make it in Hollywood. Today she lives extremely modestly in what is almost a road side shack. But she's laid on an amazing spread. and the first thing she does after pouring us all champagne is show us her spread from Payboy. Miss June 1960. As she herself says "You don't even see a nipple or a pubic hair. Today it's sit down, spread those legs and pinch those titties"

She tells the infamous story about how Linda Lovelace taught Sammy Davis how to do deep throat because she was there in the room when it happened.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 11, 2003

NEW YORK: Interview Richard Dreyfuss

We talk for an hour and at one point he simply says...

You know, since you're not going to use this footage, could I?

The '60s was all about starting from an innocent point, And we can change the world, we can do the impossible, we can go back to Eden. We can, you know, put the, we can put violets in guns barrels and things. And, and commercialism, of course, I mean, it, it's a capitalist marketplace world, and someone went, well maybe, maybe we can make a pin about the, about the flower in the gun, and then we'll sell it for ten dollars. And, and then we get a T-shirt. And, and it inevitably became commercialized.

That's the responsibility of the worship of the business community. That's the right's culpability. The left's culpability is the celebration of individual rights to the point that it was madness.

We lost, we have lost all the institutions that, that pin us down and give us our moral character. Our Andy Hardy small town stuff, from which we can sin. If the church is gone and the schools are gone and the (STAMMERS) parenting is gone, and blah blah blah, and we're just an amorphous blob of, of being, of, of people who are manipulated by the media advertising, then, then, um, pornography seeps into advertising. And pornography seeps into the culture, in music and in every way. And it changes our atmosphere, and all of a sudden, am I blame, am I saying pornography is the evil? No. But is, are we responsible for the destruction of our institutions so that porn, you cannot defend pornography's affect anymore? Yes. It, it's not just a simple conservative, liberal thing.

So I, who, I will defend pornography's right to exist, and I will defend, you know, our culture's freedom of speech. At the same time, we have to take responsibility for the loss of permanence. The loss of knowing who we are to start off, to start with. And yeah, okay. The sexual revolution was a good thing up to a point, and then it was a bad thing. Like democracy is a good thing, up to a point, and then it's a bad thing.

2004

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 1, 2004

Janet Jackson flashes tit during Super Bowl. Miss this because I'm at Bea Arthurs one-woman show in Torrance.

Funnily enough Deep Throat the original movie was also filmed during Super Bowl weekend in 1972.

Overnight negotiations with a number of different cable outlets for the now-completed series of Porno Valley come to an abrupt end.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2004

Speak with Ken Turan, the LA Times film critic. He wrote a book about adult cinema called Sinematic.

He reckons that we are primed for a severe backlash against licentiousness. He thinks that Britney / madonnas kiss and nipplegate are incidents fuelling public anger at the current pornolization of the mainstream, and he thinks that all it needs to light a match to this is a conservative and charismatic politician.

Show Brian the first assembly at his house. At the end his first comment is; wow when a documentary is long, its really long. Coming from anyone else it might have seemed negative, but from him it was just telling it like it is!

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 15, 2004

JAPAN: Heading to Tokyo for the last leg of the party monster express. Everyone has been saying 'Oh, the film will do well in Japan' thinking perhaps that we might not catch the slight insult that comes with that.

So we arrive in Tokyo. And Dai - the rep from the film company - is there to greet us. But it turns out that we must go to another gate to wait for Mac and Seth to arrive. In due course they do, sweeping past. We say a few hellos and follow them,trailed by a camera crew, to a stretch limo that they get into and drive off. It turns out that the rest of us will go with the luggage by van. After some time spent finding the van in the parking structure we then load the bags
"Do we have everything" asks Dai after we've loaded all the bags into the back of the van.
"Everything xxcept our dignity" says Randy
The very good news is that we are staying at the Grand Hyatt - better known as the Lost In Translation hotel. Sadly the ersatz cover band Sausolito are nowhere to be found.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2004

BANGKOK: We thought it would be neat on the way back from the premiere of Party Monster in Japan to interview David Winters. He took up with Linda after Chuck Traynor and tried to turn her into a superstar. http://www.davidwinters.net/

We arrive around midnite. The hotel faces onto a street with a rail line built overhead it. Electrical cords hang low in tangled bunches. Shanty stalls line the narrow sidewalk beneath selling bootlegged dvds, pungent foods, faux louis vuitton, and black velvet paintings. It's 2:00am and very crowded, the traffic bumper to bumper (mainly taxis) and the air as thick as a gamey soup.

The next day we interview David Winters. He was an early Malcolm Mcaleren types, roving between hollywood and rock (he directed one of Alice Cooper's concert films) in Sergeant Pepper drag (frock coats and lace sort of thing). This might explain whey he said that he felt he was born 200 years too late. My favorite detail was that the only car he would drive was a Rolls Royce ("cos it's good for my voice"). When in London he hired two; one for her with the numberplate WOMB and one for him with the numberplate PEN15 (er that would be PENIS).

The one film he made with her was Linda Lovelace For President, in which Linda ran for president. But perhaps it's a law of pet rock science that lightning doesn't strike twice. That's not to preclude the power of marketting skills, but, But if something is going to take off with the public, there still needs to be some element of charm, of chance, of innocence. And the public somehow have an intuitive and unfailing feel for this. On paper there was nothing wrong with the idea of Linda Lovelace For President, just as there was nothing wrong either with the idea of William Hung recording an entire album. But...

Bangkok is amazing. Seems that in the Far East entire cities have themes; in China there is Sock city and Underwear city. Bangkok, tho', would have to be Sex-for-sale city. But i limit my purchases to a bootlegged copy of Party Monster for $1.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 25, 2004

Bizarro day shooting first Larry Flynt and then Jack Valenti. Quite the contrast. Larry was completely clear while Jack Valenti danced about with the nimbleness of a politician.

When I invented the ratings system, I did not trademark the X. It's a letter, I didn't know how you'd trademark a letter. I guess we could have had a logo or symbol, but we didn't. And as a result, the pornographer came in and said double X, triple X, quadruple X. And they used the X as an enticement to people who wanted to see that kind of movie

Valenti's rating system was a masterstroke of both managing to separate hard core from Hollywood and marginalizing it too. Yet for all his evasiveness, I don't think he intended to be this direct...

Well, I don't think anybody in America's public figure is pro-pornography, or an advocate for it. I don't know of anybody that was. I'm certainly not. And I don't think Mr. Nixon was either. I don't think any president, or any senator, any congressman was going around saying we got to have more pornography.

Pornography maybe an impossible cause. But freedom of speech is vulnerable if it isn't defended.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 27, 2004

All hope of having the film finished in times for Cannes is slipping away.

The film is entering the difficult teens. There's a feeling that there are too many old people in the film. We are being asked where are the Paris Hiltons and the Jenna Jamesons? It's not that we feel precious that we are making a documentary as opposed to putting on the tits (ok, we do feel a bit precious), but what would they have to say?

We see ourselves as striking a blow for the oldies. The tyranny of the 18-34 demographic is so boring. It's truly amazing to see a 60, 70 or 80 year old talk frankly about sex, and talk about it in a way that the 18-34s are just too freaked out to even touch.

"Yes, well, we understand that, but do they all have to have silver hair?"

"There may be snow on the rooftop, but there's fire in the furnace below".

After that there's no more talk of interviewing Paris Hilton.

FRIDAY MARCH 19 2004

We all have the 'whyisntthisfilmanygoodandwhenwilliteverend' blahs.

Tammy Faye calls us and tells us she has that she has inoperable cancer and wants us to have lunch with her to discuss filming the process. It's great to see her, and she - the one who should be crying - cheers us up. We talk about the film and all fall about laughing deciding that it should be called 'The Demise Of Tammy Faye'.

SATURDAY MARCH 20, 2004

NEW YORK: Take the jet to New York with Brian Grazer to show Sheila Nevins and John Hoffman the cut at HBO...

'Take the jet' - sounds very blase but actually our little hearts were beating pit a patter. Yes, it's the little things.

Now, if you are a jaded jetrosexual you will already know this. But for us this was our first private jet experience, and found the learning curve of Jetiquette as steep as the angle of take off.

The first dilemma is where do you sit. That is connected to the equally important question of when to arrive. Never be late. You don't want to keep a jet packed with tip-top execs waiting on the tarmac. But then you can be too premature. Because once you get on the jet, where do you sit? You can't really settle in and make yourself comfortable until your host arrives and picks their perch. Do not be fooled: all the seats may look the same, but they are not the same! So we arrrive early, plonk ourselves down and wonder why everyone else is standing round? The other thing to remember is that when the lovely food spread is laid out, you should only pick at it nonchalently instead of devouring everything as if you were a starving kitten. It's funny how it's the little things can derail a career (while no one notices the big things).

The screening was ok. Flew home by regular plane, which was like going cold turkey. Jets are the new crack.

FRIDAY MARCH 26, 2004

LOS ANGELES: Interview Lilli Zanuck who says the smartest things. She has a clipping from the New York Post challenging us to tell the difference between porn stars and high society hotties.

so many things that are fashion statements today, fake nails, fake tans, Brazilian wax, fake breasts, a certain kind of hair, artificial big lips, these are all a kind of iconography that comes from pornography . It's everywhere - whether it's a cardio strip club, or pole dancing and belly dancing classes. These are images and fashion statements and trends that come from pornography. Women are working really hard to look like a porn sta

In the next few months the world goes porno... Timothy Greenfield-Sanders publishes a book of portraits of porno stars Thinking XXX, and has an HBO special to go with. Larry Sultan publishes a book of photos taken on porno sets called The Valley. Jenna Jameson releases her autobiography How To Make Love Like A Porn Star, and Vh1 does a Jenna special that rates like christmas. They also follow this with When X Ruled The World, with its usual chef salad approach (cut everything into tiny pieces and toss with graphics). Despite all this still no takers for Porno Valley, however.

MONDAY MARCH 29, 2004

Interview with Peter Bart at Variety. Completely candid and charming and funny.

You say let's go on a date, let's go to dinner, you said let's get high or let's get stoned or let's drop acid or something. So added to this was Deep Throat. You get stoned, you see a porn movie. I mean and then you quote experiment. And it was a shock to those of us who were products of the '50s. You know all of a sudden you're going out with a girl and the girl would say, you know, I'm really into oral sex aren't you? Boy things aren't that colorful today are they?

WEDNESAY MARCH 31, 2004

Interview with Jon Lewis author of fascinating book Hollywood Vs Hard Core, which tells the story of how Hollywood survived the censors by foreswearing sex and thrived instead by embracing a pornography of violence.

When Nixon became president he appreciated his promise to the south, which made him president. And he understood that the south had very socially conservative views, and viewed porn asthe product of a kind of eastern establishment and a west coast silliness. He also was convinced, and he was right about it, that there was a silent majority in America. That, while the press, who was paying so much attention to a sexual revolution, was paying so much attention to Deep Throat, that the majority of Americans were leaning in a very different direction.

TUESDAY APRIL 6, 2004

CAPE COD: Norman Mailer finally said yes to an interview. He said he would give us half an hour of his time. Thirty minutes. Total. Only problem was that we had pretty much finished filming. and we were on the West Coast, he was on the East.

Are we sure we really want to do this? Do we need to do this? It's a long way to go for half an hour.... but then we also figured that if we went all that way, it shouldn't be too hard to keep him talking; he's bound to give us at least an hour, right?

Red eye to boston, four hour drive up to Cape Cod. Practically next door to where we had interviewed John Waters six months earlier. Set up the interview, in he walks and everything out of his mouth is solid gold.

Things are going marvellously, and I'm half way through a question when he says "I said i'd give you half an hour, but i'll let you finish this question since you've flown all this way to see me' I mangled the question but he gave a very generous and gracious reply.

sex is the last of the great mysteries. That and maybe war is another one the mysteries. These elements are not to be abused, ideologically, intellectually, rationally speaking. You don't want them to make you comfortable. When you have every kind of sex there is, what do you do with your soul? And that, for me, is an open question to this day.... I'd say you really enter the mystery at that point.

And then we flew back to LA.

Please no more interviews!!!

MONDAY APRIL 19, 2004

Interview Bill Maher.

In a 150 years when we are getting around by jetpacks and eating tablets. I would hate to think that we are still hung up on that. But. I'm sure Bush's great great great grandson will be trying to make hay on that one, and making sure that people in Utah were not getting porn because it could lead to masturbation and then they wouldn't have the energy to churn butter.

Really, no more interviews!!!!

THURSDAY MAY 27, 2004

Go see Madonna on her Reinvention tour. Madonnas spirituality is obviously something she can afford to indulge in. Though she has renounced her Material Girl ways make no mistake she could not have got where she is today if the road were not paved with skulls. She had to claw her way to the top, or stay perpetually on the bottom. Wonder if this is the same problem for all those sexual revolution liberals who, when they had nothing, preached free love and and down with corporate greed. Now that they have plenty, they have so much more to lose. Morality then becomes a necessary construct to protect what they have. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But we should just recognize it as the institutional hypocrisy that it is. The only constant is selfishness.

SATURDAY JUNE 5, 2004

Ronald Reagan dies.

Pornology

A Timeline on Pornography in the United States (continued)

August 1977 - All charges against Harry Reems are dropped. This comes after he is granted a new trial.

Jan. 8, 1978 - The Devil in Miss Jones trial set to begin in Memphis, Tenn.

June 1978 - Women Against Pornography, a New York based group, moves into its Times Square office. The group argues that there are good, humanitarian reasons to be against pornography, and conducts tours of the local peep shows and porn stores. It also presents slide shows to visitors illustrating the brutal and violent nature of pornography

1979 - 800,000 US homes have  VCRs

April 1979 - The New York Times reports that 50 times the number of adult videos are sold than any other prerecorded tape. Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, and Behind the Green Door are top sellers. It is estimated that more than 100 titles are available.

June 1979 - In Minneapolis, a drive-in theater operator is convicted of exhibiting an obscene film.

July 18, 1979 - Susan Brownmiller, co-founder of Women Against Pornography, appears on the Phil Donahue Show.

Oct. 20, 1979 - Women Against Pornography lead march on Times Square. Thousands attend

Oct. 26, 1979 - Linda takes a polygraph test, which Lyle Stuart (publisher) demands she do prior to releasing her book, Ordeal

1980 - VCRs hit a million units sold in the United States. The number of adult film theaters estimated at 1,500, which will fall to 700 in 1985 and then to 250 in 1989.

Jan. 31, 1980 - Linda appears on the Phil Donahue Show to promote her book, Ordeal, where she claims that she was coerced into performing in the film Deep Throat

Feb. 14, 1980 - At noon, 400 FBI agents sweep into porno movie theaters, warehouses, retail stores, and offices in 13 major US cities, arresting many of the biggest names in porn on federal obscenity and racketeering charges. Known as the MIPORN (for Miami pornography) seizure. Among the 58 persons arrested (33 from California) are brothers Louis and Joseph C Peraino. They are charged with interstate shipment of obscenity in the form of hardcore videos titled Candy Stripers, Liquid Lips, His Master's Touch, and Hollywood Cowboy

April 1980 - Quincy House, a resident college at Harvard, shows the film Animal House at the Science Center.  During the screening someone throws a beer bottle at the screen, which damages it.  The film society decides to host a fundraiser to pay for the $400 screen repair

May 1980 - Quincy House members plan to show Deep Throat to raise money for the $400-worth of damage

May 9, 1980 - Deep Throat scheduled to play at 10 PM, but a meeting between film society officials and four women results in the cancelation of the screening on the grounds that it is "offensive to community standards"

May 11, 1980 - Quincy House Committee votes 35-14 to permit the showing, but also decide to poll House residents on whether the film should be shown

May 14 & 15, 1980 - The poll shows that three-quarters of House residents are in favor of the showing, but also that women in the house oppose the screening by 49 percent. It is decided they will show the film.  Feminists against the screening  meet to plan an organized opposition to the film

May 16, 1980 - Superior Court Judge Charles R Alverti responds to a complaint filed by two women in the Quincy House. He views the film and refuses to ban the showing. The film plays at 8 PM, after which two students, Carl Stork and Nathan Hagan (co-president's of the films society), are arrested for disseminating obscene literature

May 27, 1980 - Linda and Gloria Steinem appear on the Today show with Tom Snyder

May 31, 1980 - Women Against Pornography hold press conference with Linda in Times Square

July 4, 1980 - Linda gives birth to her second child, Lindsay
 
Aug. 7, 1980 - All charges dropped against Stork and Hagen for showing Deep Throat on Harvard's campus

April 4, 1981 - Linda appears on Saturday Night at the Mill

Dec. 6, 1981 - A federal jury finds five men guilty in the FBIs MIPORN investigation into the distribution of sexually explicit films in southern Florida

Joseph and Louis Peraino Sr., brothers from New York City and Michael Balsamo and Vince DiStephano of Los Angeles are found guilty on one count of conspiracy to transport obscene films across state lines and six counts of interstate shipments of pornography by common carrier

Dec. 12, 1981 - Deep Throat closes after its 10th year of playing at the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. The picture is taking in $11,000 a week during peak season and $7,000 weekly on average. Variety says that for longevity it was impossible to come up with a film to match it

March 22, 1982 - Lou Peraino Sr. enters the Allenwood Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Pa, to begin serving a six-month sentence for his conviction in the Memphis Deep Throat trial

Aug. 2, 1982 - Time magazine does a cover story on herpes, titled "The New Scarlet Letter"

Sept. 30, 1982 - Harry Reems puts his handprints in cement at the TomKat Theater on Santa Monica Boulevard

Dec. 12, 1983 - Linda appears before the Minneapolis City Council in support of a proposed ordinance that would provide civil remedies for pornography, which would hold distributors, producers, and consumers of sexually explicit material liable for prosecution in regard to any crime committed by someone under the influence. The legislation is drafted by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin

1984 - Ronald Reagan announces his intention to set up a commission to study pornography. The goal is said to obtain results more acceptable than those produced by the 1968 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography

1985 - Number of adult theaters falls to 700

Spring 1985 - Attorney General Edwin Meese appointed to a panel comprised of 11 individuals to study pornography

1986 - 13 million VCRs sold in the United States. The sale and rental of X-rated videos is said to consume 20 to 25 percent of home video business

March 13, 1987 - Linda has a liver transplant
    
July 9, 1986 - The Meese Commission releases its findings. In news reports, Meese is shown holding the Commission's two-volume, 1,960-page report standing in front of the Spirit of Justice statue, a half-clothed female figure

1987 - Harry Reems moves to Park City, Utah

1987 - For their conviction in the MIPORN case, Lou and Joey Peraino receive five years probation and are ordered to not be involved with any hardcore pornography

1988 - 52 percent of U.S. homes have a VCR. By the spring of 1988, it is estimated that 65 percent own them. 1,250 new adult titles released on video, compared to 510 theatrical releases

June 13, 1989 - Arrow spokesperson Leonard Weinstein tells the Los Angeles Times that at least 75 foreign countries had paid as much as $20,000 for seven-  to nine-year contracts.

July 1, 1989 - Harry Reems' sobriety date

1989 - The number of adult film theaters falls to just 250

1990 - Linda moves to Denver after husband Larry's drywall business collapses

Nov. 10, 1990 - Harry Reems marries Jeannie.  The Peraino's company, Arrow Film and Video, began shipping porn films to a Nevada company that was a front for an undercover FBI agent.

1992 - Lou Peraino Sr. arrested in Los Angeles. Joseph Peraino arrested in New York for violating their probation set as a result of their conviction in the MIPORN case. A year later, their probation is revoked and they surrender themselves  to serve prison sentences

Feb. 26, 1993 - Entertainment Weekly celebrates the 20th anniversary of the NY trial and Tyler's decision. When asked if he would do anything different after viewing the film today, he tells the magazine that given the same situation, he probably wouldn't have ruled that way

1994 - Rentals from Deep Throat  total $20 million

1994 - Damiano's last movie, Naked Goddess 2

1995 - Louis and Joseph are arrested as a result of shipping obscene material from California to Las Vegas

Aug. 1, 1996 - Lou Peraino Sr. sells Arrow Films to Raymond Pistol

August 1996 - Linda and Larry divorce after 22 years of marriage

September 1996 - Anthony Peraino dies in Los Angeles

Aug. 31, 1997 - Linda's daughter, Lindsay, gives birth to her first son, AJ

1999 - Lou Peraino Sr. dies in New York

Spring 2001 - Eric Danville publishes The Complete Linda Lovelace. He first approaches her about the book and she blows him off. Once he is nearing completion of the book, in 1999, he approaches her again. Linda requests that Eric and she meet face to face, after which he flies to Denver

April 22, 2002 - Linda dies at the Denver Health Medical Center after a car crash on April 3

- Ashley York

Xaviera Hollander

1.  Describe yourself as if you were writing a personals ad.
Xaviera Hollander of Happy Hooker fame has come a long way since
1971. From Happy Hooker to Happy Cooker to Happy Booker, she wrote 18 books about eroticism  with great success. She has also produced English theatre plays in Holland for the last 10 years - in particular, the expats love her. After a 35-year career as sex-advice columnist for Penthouse magazine ("Call Me Madam" column), she is presently on the lookout for a new (syndicated) column about lifestyle and human relationships. Move over Ann Landers!! Xaviera is also interested in producing and hosting her own TV talk show with interesting international guests.

2.  What's the title of your autobiography?
The latest documentary that has just been produced is called Xaviera, The Happy Hooker.

3.  Who plays you in the movie?
Lynn Redgrave

4.  Who do you go to for advice?
My sponsor in a 12-step self-help group to shed weight. So far I have managed to get rid of 12 kilos in three weeks time.

5.  What makes you cry?
Sensitive inter human situations, films about the holocaust, beautiful music, seeing victims of  world disasters like the tsunami or 9/11, physical pain if it becomes near-unbearable, tears that sometimes roll down your cheeks after  a great laughing attack. Crying for happiness after making love to who you think is the love of your life.

Deep Thread

Remember the thread that started a short while ago on IMDb?  The one about the man who asked if he should take his son to see Inside Deep Throat for his 13th birthday?  The thread is quite long now, rife with opinions.  (Check it out)

Gonzales Seeks to Reinstate Obscenity Case

By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -  The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter.

Billed as the government's first big obscenity case in a decade, the 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates Inc. and its owners, Robert Zicari, and his wife, Janet Romano, both of Northridge, Calif., was dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster of Pittsburgh.

Lancaster ruled prosecutors overstepped their bounds while trying to block the company's hard-core movies from children and from adults who did not want to see such material.

The Justice Department (news - web sites) said it will appeal the ruling to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Philadelphia. While acknowledging the importance of the constitutional guarantee of free speech, Gonzales said selling or distributing obscene materials does not fall within First Amendment protections.

"The Department of Justice (news - web sites) remains strongly committed to the investigation and prosecution of adult obscenity cases," said Gonzales, who pledged during his confirmation hearing to pursue obscenity cases.

If allowed to stand, Lancaster's ruling would undermine obscenity laws as well as other statutes based on shared views of public morality, including laws against prostitution, bestiality and bigamy, the department said in a statement.

Zicari said he was not surprised by the decision to appeal. "They touted my case for almost a year and a half about this being an important step in kind of stamping out the adult product as we know it," he said in a telephone interview. "You'd think our government has a lot more things to worry about with the war in Iraq (news - web sites)."

Prosecutors charged Zacari and Romano and their company with distributing videos to Pittsburgh through the mail and over the Internet. Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, has said the case was not about banning all sexually explicit materials, just reining in obscenity. Extreme Associates' productions depict rape and murder, Buchanan said.

When she announced the indictment in August 2003, Buchanan said the lack of
enforcement of obscenity laws during the mid- to late-1990s "led to a proliferation of obscenity throughout the United States."

In his opinion, Lancaster said the company can market and distribute its materials because people have a right to view them in the privacy of their own homes.

Lancaster relied in part on the Supreme Court's June 2003 ruling that struck down Texas' ban on gay sex, which it called an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

No Hair

The Linda Lovelace doll.  Or, legally, the Love Linda Deep Throat Doll (No Hair).  But we jumped to conclusions.     

First and Second Time Ever He Saw Deep Throat

As evidenced from Gerard Damiano Jr's following account of seeing his father's movie for the first time in a theater when he was 14, and then viewing it recently as an adult at home with his dad, Deep Throat could qualify as a "family film." 

The first time I saw Deep Throat, I was 14 years old. My best friend Damion and I jumped the turnstile in Queens and rode the subway into "the City," back when Times Square was still Times Square.  There was a theater which had been running Deep Throat (on a double bill with The Devil in Miss Jones) for years. Shows were every hour on the hour, and you could see both pictures for 5 bucks. The guy at the ticket booth barely even looked down at us kids, he just said "Fi' dollas," and we were in.

In the opening scene of Deep Throat, Linda is actually driving my father's old blue Cadillac Eldorado. Seeing our family car up on the big screen was almost as exciting as watching sex for the first time. Even though I knew that my parents would be furious, I couldn't resist telling my dad that I had seen two of his movies when I saw him that night.

A few days before Fenton, Randy, and crew showed up in Florida to film my father's interview for Inside Deep Throat, I suggested that we watch the film to refresh his memory. He had not seen it in many years, and we had never seen it together. He was very critical, and a little embarrassed at the quality of it. He called out every mismatched cut, every glitch in the soundtrack and everything that he might have done differently. It was literally watching the film with a (live) director's commentary track.

One of the first scenes has a dolly shot of Linda walking. "You know how we got that shot without a dolly?" my father asked. "We mounted the camera to the hood of my car (the blue Eldorado) and Harry Reems was behind pushing it."

- Gerard Damiano Jr

T-Shirt Giveaway!

We have another luxurious Inside Deep Throat T-shirt to give to the first person to answer a question about the film.  The answer to the previous question - What did a friend of Damiano's suggest as a name for his Deep Throat film? - was The Sword Swallower.

This week's question:  What is Gerard Damiano's daughter's current occupation?

Include your mailing address with your answer.  The answer can be found near the end of the documentary.  Good luck.

Wide Open

Perez Hilton reviews the doc quite favorably on his website Page Six Six Six,  saying it captures "the true spirit of tittytainment."  Refreshing.

Inside Deep Throat is a documentary like none you will ever see on PBS. The film goes WIDE this weekend, expanding to 25 theaters, where we hope some Page SixSixSix readers will go down on someone, you know, like the Alanis song.

Featuring lots of tits and wit, ass and sass, Inside Deep Throat is yet another production by fagalicious filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the duo behind The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the fanfuckingtastic WOW Report, and Showbiz Moms & Dads, our favorite reality show of last year, featuring cute little Emily and the crazy ass Nutter family.

A Strong Constitution

Kevin Federline's on the cover, but Brian Grazer gets a full-page, ahem, spread in the latest Details mag.  He answers a few questions about pornography in re Inside Deep Throat.  At one point he says, "I reread our 27 amendments, and I literally started crying at the Malibu Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf." 

Daniel Pares asks, "You had a copy of the Constitution with you?" 

"I have it on my BlackBerry, yeah," says Grazer. "If you reread the Bill of Rights, our first 10 amendments - our freedoms are so vast it's almost unbelievable.  You just go, 'Oh, my god.'   That's what differentiates us from every other place in the world.  My eyes were all wet and I was crying and I couldn't contain myself, because I hadn't read the first 10 amendments since I was in grade school."

Rock Me Linda Lovelace

Sarah Rowland, in her Montreal Mirror cover story on the "fantastic fuckumentary" Inside Deep Throat and its directors, says 1972's Deep Throat "can still get it up long enough to incite a little controversy."

Predictably, Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey have come under fire from blowhard feminists, including Katherine McKinnon, for, among other things, promoting rape, dismissing the tragedy of Lovelace and dissing the women's movement. Add to that, we're talking just minutes after they've read Manohla Dargis' New York Times review, which accuses them of "historical reductionism," and you have two bitchy filmmakers.

"It's just a muddle-headed wrong review," says Bailey. "It's so frustrating that the lens through which some people are looking at this film is so distorted by prejudice, they're not really seeing the film that's actually been made."

Narrated by everyone's favourite perv Dennis Hopper, the movie that has actually been made is an earnest and ambitious, albeit MTV-paced, attempt at addressing all these contentious issues in a very limited period of time. It should be noted that most reviews have either been rave or at worst, slightly banal criticisms of the campy whiplash editing.

If You Know the Name of the Movie You Want to See

This from Boi from Troy today: 

Well, if you want to pine for the good-old days when every block in Van Nuys might bring a revealing surprise, do not fret. "Inside Deep Throat" is now in theaters, documenting the industry in its nacent phases, examining the very issues of freedom of speech, censorship, sex and politics. Plus, they have a blog!

Amherst, MA: Academy of Music, Northampton, MA
Ann Arbor: State
Austin: Arbor
Denver: Landmark Mayan
LA Valley: Laemmle Fallbrook, Canoga Park; Playhouse, Pasadena
Madison: Marcus Westgate
Minneapolis: Landmark Lagoon
Montreal:  Cinema du Parc
New Haven:  ArcAngel Criterion
Philadelphia: Posell Ritz
Portland: Fox Tower
San Diego: Landmark Hillcrest
San Jose: Century Cine Arts Santana Row
Vancouver: Famous 5th Avenu

The Critics Rave

"Besides fresh and funny insights from the likes of Norman Mailer and John Waters, it shows how little censorship politics have changed from Nixon to Bush."
- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"Two Thumbs Up"
- Roeper & Ebert

   "Things get fresher, funnier and, inevitably, more poignant when we meet the people involved in the making of the movie."
- Ella Taylor, LA Weekly

"Colorfully entertaining."
- Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Daily News

"A giddy prance through the minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics."
- Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times
 
"It's extremely entertaining."
- David Edelstein, Slate

"Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening.  A."
- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

 "The salient point here is that Deep Throat can be seen as one of the first battles of the culture wars that still divide this nation."
- Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

"Makes a diverting case for Deep Throat as more than just a shadowy cinematic footnote."
- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
 
"A thorough but highly entertaining documentary."
- Lou Lumenick, New York Post

'Deep' Thoughts

We've pulled some quotes from Peter Keough's lengthy article, "Oral History," in the Portland Phoenix.  Subtitled "From Deep Throat to gag rule," it examines the sexual politics of porn while reviewing Inside Deep Throat. 

ON THE FEMINIST DEBATE OVER DEEP THROAT Did some feminists then betray a force for their own liberation by turning against Deep Throat? Berkeley professor and film scholar Linda Williams (author of Hard Core and the upcoming Watching Sex) suggests in a brief interview in Inside that some well-intended feminists might have overlooked the film's revolutionary potential. After all, here was a woman seeking her own sexual satisfaction in her own way; it was a first not just for porn, but for film in general. 

ON ANOTHER POINT OVERLOOKED BY MANY FEMINISTS Deep Throat's identification of the clitoris as the center of woman's sexuality defied the then-dominant patriarchal belief in the vaginal orgasm. 

ON LINDA LOVELACE "As for Lovelace, she was a victim of a patriarchal culture in which women are sex objects and don't have a lot of career choices, especially uneducated women. If you read Ordeal, which I know she probably didn't really write, it's pretty clear that she was in a bad relationship, she didn't have any self-respect or self-esteem, and she was doing a lot of sex acts for money, even before she was doing them before a camera. And I believe that she did something with a dog, although I haven't seen that film. I think that Deep Throat was probably one of the few bright moments in a rather grim life. The idea of her being coerced on the set of that film seems to me rather outlandish."  - Linda Williams

Pope Culture

We find it delighfully teasing that although it ultimately gave the film an O rating, the Catholic New Service found Inside Deep Throat "serious-minded," "slickly edited," and "more sociocultural than salacious in tone."  That's practically a guarded rave.  Any film would be proud to have any one of those quotes splashed across its newspaper ad:
 

"SLICKLY EDITED!!" - Catholic News Service

Schnapp!

Inside Deep Throat producer Mona Card and producer Johnni Javier from the WOW London office enjoy the effects of schnapps at the party following the screening of IDT at the Berlin Film Festival

No Prince Yet

Seems it's not so easy getting those prints of the original  Deep Throat made to coincide with the expanded run of the documentary about it.  No lab wants to get involved; so far, they've all refused to make prints of it, whining "What if Disney finds out?!"  You know, like Deep Throat will rub some of its porn onto prints of The Princess Diaries.  Julie Andrews is already known for her talented throat.

Inside Berlin's Deep Throat

I first experienced Berlin (East & West) in 1984, during that whole "student Eurail backpacker travelling on a shoestring budget?" phase of my life. Thank God that phase didn?t last long... budget travel is a bitch! What did last though was the impression Berlin left upon me.  Of course in ?84 the wall was still up and going into East Berlin was like stepping back in time.

I returned to Berlin in 1996, sans backpack but equipped with Louis Vuitton?s finest. Just a few short years after the tumble of the wall, it was hard to shake the feeling that you were in the middle of a construction site (with no Village People no less!)  And so typical of me to have left my sensible shoes at home.  Persevering, I managed to find a couple of interesting clubs, but found the serious German façade a little hard to read - you know when you?re getting those intense stares but just can?t figure out whether they want to beat the crap out of you or have hot sex.  Fortunately I found the latter to be the case so all in all that was a pretty successful trip.

So, you can imagine how excited I was when WOW?s very own feature doc Inside Deep Throat was to have it?s European premiere at the prestigious Berlinale Film Festival!  What a perfect excuse to head over for some popcorn and to catch up with some of my naughty Berlin mates. 

Upon landing back in Berlin, I immediately felt a little tingle. Granted, it was mainly in my feet - there just wasn?t enough room in my Taiga luggage for those damn sensible shoes again.  And let me tell you now, open toe Manolos during a snowy Berlin winter is just not practical!  With my first glance at East Berlin in almost a decade I could already tell so much had changed. It all seemed so hip and gorgeous. A city where the very old meets the very new somehow works - you know, a bit like Madonna and Britney. 

I won?t bore you with all the intimate details of exactly what I personally got up to during my stay (although you can call my premium line at $1.50 per minute), but the screening and after-party were the hottest ticket of the festival. And those well-heeled Berliners sure know how to party! The crowd went mad for the film and it seems that the who's-who of German film and TV were lining up to get Inside Deep Throat.

The after-party was sheer hysteria, with wall-to-Berlin-wall beautiful people.  Held at the very fashionable Soprano?s in West Berlin, partygoers fought their way through a blizzard of snow and paparazzi to the crammed chic venue owned by German film producer Oliver Berben. We found ourselves partying with the German elite, the likes of sexy Marie Baeumer, Veronika Ferres, Alexandra Kamp and Christian Ulmen to name but a few.  Yes, it was all German to me too, but the locals were very impressed. With enough vodka and (biblical bratwurst) consumed to sink the Bismark, the evening was a blazing success.

All in all, Inside Deep Throat came and conquered, and I didn?t do so bad either.

- Johnni Javier

Pornology

A Timeline on Pornography in the United States (continued)

Sept. 18, 1975 - Patty Hearst arrested by the FBI, ending a 19-month search.

Nov. 3, 1975 - In a reorganization of his cabinet, President Ford announces that George Bush will succeed William Colby as CIA director

December 1975 - A motel manager in Pasadena pleads guilty to showing Deep Throat over closed circuit TV

Dec. 16, 1975 - Louis Peraino Sr. slaps NY Post writer Dick Brass with a 40K lawsuit for linking him to the Mafia in two articles dated Oct 13 & 14, 1975

1976 - Linda marries Larry Marchiano

1976 - Top TV shows for the 74-75 season were All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Chico and the Man, The Jeffersons, and M*A*S*H

1976 - Deep Throat opens in Danbury, Conn

1976 - The Hite Report on Female Sexuality is published. Written by Shere Hite, the book demonstrates that most women need clitoral or exterior stimulation for orgasm; that orgasm is easy and strong for women, given the right stimulation; and that most women have orgasms most easily during masturbation or clitoral stimulation by hand. The book is published in 17 languages

January 1976 - Deep Throat finally arrives in Greece, resulting in riots when theater patrons realize they have been given Deep Throat II

March 1, 1976 - Memphis trial begins. Judge Harry Wellford presides. The prosecutor is Larry Parrish, who was affectionately known as "Mr. Clean." The indictment charges 117 persons (including four corporations) with 77 "overt acts" in a nationwide conspiracy to create an obscene film and to distribute it throughout the United States.  Defendents include Hary Reems, Louis Peraino Sr., Anthony Joseph Peraino, Michael Cherubino, Joseph Peraino, Mel Friedman, Ronald Kay, Carl R Carter, Anthony Arnone, Anthony Battista, Robert DeSalvo, Mario DeSalvo, Bryanston Distributors, Gerard Damiano Film Productions, AMMA Corporation, and Plymouth Distributors.

March 2, 1976 - During opening statements, Parrish comments that he will "take them on a journey" to show them how the allegedly obscene movie Deep Throat was developed and distributed across the country"

March 3, 1976 - Ron Wertheim, Deep Throat's production manager, testifies. Gerard Damiano testifies the next day that the movie is "artistic"

March 13, 1976 - Andrea True's "More, More, More" debuts on the Billboard charts at #98. The song stays on the charts for 25 weeks

April 1976 - A Danbury, Conn, theater owner sentenced on two obscenity charges for showing Deep Throat

April 20, 1976 - Linda gives birth to her first biological son, Dominic

April 26, 1976 - Defense attorneys rest their case in Memphis after the judge bars testimony from four Academy Award-winning actors. Tony Bill is allowed to testify

April 30, 1976 - The Memphis jury, eight women and four men, deliberate a total of five hours and 25 minutes before convicting 16 defendants (including Reems) of conspiring to nationally distribute Deep Throat. Parrish presented 76 government witnesses and the defense presented 16. The trial lasts nine weeks

May 1976 - Harry Reems meets First Amendment attorney, Alan Dershowitz, for the first time in a Harvard parking lot to discuss his appeal

June 1, 1976 - Chuck Ashman and Rod McKuen host a benefit for Reems at the Swiss Connetion on Wilshire Boulevard. The event is held to raise money for Reems' legal defense fund. Among the 400 people to show are Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Gregory Peck.

June 29, 1976 - An invitation-only fundraiser for Reems is held at Ted Hook's Backstage Café. It is hosted by Coleen Dewhurst, Ben Gazzara, Mike Nichols, and Stephen Sondheim

July 4, 1976 - America's 200th birthday

July 12, 1976 - Insisting it can't measure pre-Miller conduct by post-Miller standards, the Department of Justice asks the Supreme Court to order a new trial for an exhibitor convicted of showing Deep Throat in Newport, Ky. This ultimately helps to reverse convictions in the Memphis trial

July 19, 1976 - Another benefit hosted for Harry Reems in Chicago. Approximately 200 people attend, including Christine Hefner.

Aug. 23, 1976 - The word ME fills the front cover of New York magazine for Tom Wolfe's influential article, "The Me Decade"

Sept. 3, 1976 - Reems appears on the Phil Donahue show in Chicago.

Oct. 9, 1976 - Justice Department urges the Supreme Court to order a new trial for theater owners convicted of showing Deep Throat in Newport on the grounds that the defendants are victims of a shift in court standards on obscenity

Oct. 20, 1976 - Walnut Film Society hold a benefit for Reems in Philadelphia

Oct. 21, 1976 - Julie Newmar hosts fundraiser for Reems in San Francisco

Nov. 2, 1976 - In the Newport, Ky, trial, Judge Bork argues that the district trial court judge and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals made errors that denied the defendants their constitutional rights. Bork asks the Supreme Court to overturn the convictions

Nov. 15, 1976 - Reems fundraiser at Elaine's in New York sponsored by Dick Cavett and George Plimpton

Nov. 18, 1976 - Reems fundraiser at Together Disco in Boston. Scheduled to attend with Reems and Dershowitz are Richard Dreyfuss and State Representative Barney Frank

Dec. 6, 1976 - Shirley MacLaine hosts benefit for Reems at Sergio's Le Club in Beverly Hills. Kathleen Nolan and WGA president David Rintels also host

Dec. 8, 1976 - Reems speaks at Harvard Law School about his case

Dec. 13, 1976 - Firing Line with Reems and Dershowitz airs, hosted by William Buckley.

1977 - Deep Throat becomes available on video, selling more than 300,000 copies by 1982.  Retails at $100 each

1977 - Looking for Mr. Goodbar is argued to be one of the films that exploits the vulnerabilities and anxieties of the sexual revolution for young women. Diane Keaton plays a repressed young schoolteacher who hits the singles bars, sleeps with a few guys, and finds herself reborn as a sought-after disco babe

Feb. 10, 1977 - The Continental Baths closes. Re-opens as Plato's Retreat

March 1, 1977 - The U.S. Supreme Court overturns the conviction of five defendents in the Newport, Ky, Deep Throat case. The high court rules that the standards established in the 1973 Supreme Court ruling - Miller v California - should not have been used in the Deep Throat case. This decision ultimately leads to the overturning of Harry Reems' conviction in the Memphis trial

May 1, 1977 - Federal District Judge Harry W. Wellford sentences eight men - to prison terms ranging from three months to one year - who were convicted in the Deep Throat obscenity trial. Fines up to $10,000 are also imposed. Harry Reems' conviction is overturned, but Michael Cherubino, Anthony Novello, Joseph and Louis Peraino Sr., Carl Carter, and Mario DeSalvo are sentenced. Plymouth Distributors are fined $10,000

- Ashley York

(To be continued)

Board of Reviews

Richard C Walls, in Detroit's Metro Times, says Inside Deep Throat is "fast-paced and hugely entertaining" but that it doesn't entirely explain "the appeal of fellatio as a male fantasy that quells performance anxiety."  Well, if you have to ask. . . . 

But within [its] narrow focus, the film is about as thorough as one would wish. It offers a heady look back at a time when porn could actually be viewed as something liberating rather than desensitizing; an amateur's craft (or hustle, with the mafia lurking in the background), rather than a billion-dollar industry riding formulas as woefully predictable as TV sitcoms. It has a comic cast of retired hustlers, professional bozos, one borderline insane evangelical and iconic talking heads like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. It also has about 10 seconds of graphic footage from the original film, hence the NC-17 rating.

If you just can't get enough of Inside Deep Throat and don't mind rereading  "$25,000" and "$600 million," there is this recent story on CNN.com. 

Showing the notorious sex act was necessary for the documentary, said "Inside Deep Throat" directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the filmmakers behind such acclaimed documentaries as "Party Monster" and "The Eyes of Tammy Faye."  "There was no way we were going to make a film called 'Inside Deep Throat' without including the act," Barbato said. "Our film is not salacious or gratuitous. That scene needed to be in there."

Four-time Pulitzer Prize honorable-mention winner, Richard Cohen (who looks a bit like Gerard Damiano, don't you think?), chimes in on Inside Deep Throat in his NY Daily News column.

I know "Deep Throat" was porn and I know "Inside Deep Throat" is about the cultural importance of that film, but to me it's just a sad story about the lure of fame - more boxers on the way to Palookaville, more actors mistaking the actual end of their careers for the beginning.

Throaty 'Voice'

Michael Musto, of course, was at Inside Deep Throat's New York premiere and after-party and filed a report in his current "La Dolce Musto" column in the Village Voice. 

At the after-bash at Brasserie 8 1/2, as it were, Deep Throat co-star HARRY REEMS-now a real estate agent in Utah-told me, "There were no guns pointed at anyone's head. There was no hypnosis. I was there! And Linda ended up going back to nudity!" More impishly, the documentary's co-director, Fenton Bailey, cracked to me, "I've been hypnotized and I still can't do it."

Our Boys In Berlin

A little bitte charm goes a long way. Barbato (left) and Bailey talk dirty to the audience at the Berlin Film Festival after the screening of their Inside Deep Throat documentary. 

Ich Bin Eine Pornographer

Inside Deep Throat made a big splash, so to speak, at the Berlin Film Festival, where last year's winning film caused a controversy when it was discovered its actress had worked in hardcore.  What a difference a year makes.

Journalists, film buyers and the public crowded into a theater Sunday to see a documentary, "Inside Deep Throat," about a history-making 1972 U.S. film featuring what has been described as "extreme fellatio" that made porn mainstream. . . .  The documentary "Inside Deep Throat," which cost $1 million to make, was one of the most coveted tickets at the festival. Journalists and buyers lined up for hours for a seat to its late night screening yet there were still inelegant battles at the entrance as the crowd rushed forward when the doors opened.

Watergate to Nipplegate

Todd Gilchrist assigns four out of a possible five stars to Inside Deep Throat at Film Force, and calls the movie a captivating portrait of a culture in crisis, both then and now.

[Bailey and Barbato's] latest documentary paints a portrait as much of modern mores as it does of those in the 1970s: then, it was a woman who would go to any length (feature-length, in fact) to untangle her tingle; now, it's a wardrobe malfunction milliseconds long that stops a celebration of violence in its tracks. Without even directly acknowledging that current (and curiously ongoing) controversy, Fenton and Barber draw explicit throughlines from the censorship and close-mindedness of earlier generations to those of today; that they arouse the same incensed responses speaks to just how little we seem to have learned about ourselves.

Pornology

A Timeline on Pornography in the United States (continued)

Oct. 17, 1973 - OPEC begins its oil embargo against the West

Oct. 18, 1973 - Judge Wolf declares mistrial in the Deep Throat case in Beverly Hills trial after jury deliberates for four full days. The jury says it is "hopelessly deadlocked"

Oct. 19, 1973 - In Beverly Hills, Judge Wolf refuses to dismiss the case and sets a new trial date of Jan. 21.  In Newport, Ky, a jury in a US District Court in Covington convicted all five defendants in Deep Throat obscenity trial

Oct. 29, 1973 - After three hours of deliberation, a Denver jury finds Deep Throat obscene. The movie had played since February 1973 when an estimated 80,000 people saw it

November 1973 - Deep Throat opens in Lincoln, Neb. Erica Jong's book, Fear of Flying, sells more than six million copies

Nov. 14, 1973 - Linda scheduled to testify as a government witness in the Tucson trial, but she is doing her hair and the judge would not wait 

Damiano testifies there are about 100,000 copies of the film and calls it the "most bootlegged film in the world."  An attorney argued that in its seven-month run it had been seen by 54,000 people in Tucson, a statistic very indicative of the community standards in Tucson

Nov. 15, 1973 - Tucson jury finds John Jacobs guilty of transporting an obscene film.  Jacobs faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $5K fine 

December 1973 - In Riverside, Calif, theater employees plead guilty to conspiracy to commit an act injurious to public morals by showing the film

Dec. 6, 1973 - Gerard Ford becomes the first unelected vice president of the United States

Dec. 17, 1973 - National General Pictures and 20th Century Fox executive, Ira Teller, named vice president of advertising/publicity of Bryanston Pictures

Dec. 21, 1973 - Linda puts her hands in cement outside the Pussycat Theater on Santa Monica Blvd

Dec. 26, 1973 - The National Tour of Pajama Tops, starring Linda Lovelace, debuts in Philalelphia

1974 - Emmanuelle, the first soft-core "free love" European film, is banned. Bryanston Pictures releases The Last Porno Flick. Joe Semas starts the Harry Reems Athletic Club. He, along with three friends, have been passing out membership cards ever since. The club has more than 40,000 members

The book, Open Marriage, by Nena and George O'Neil, explores the idea that there are alternatives to traditional marriage

January 1974 - Carl Bernstein testifies before the grand jury

Jan. 15, 1974 - During the on-going Watergate hearings, court-appointed experts announce that the 18.5 minutes of missing audio on the Watergate tapes was erased

Jan. 31, 1974 - Linda Lovelace and her boyfriend, David Winters, are arrested at the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas and charged with two counts of possessing cocaine

Feb. 22, 1974 - Linda Susan Boreman slips into LA Superior Court to change her name officially to Linda Lovelace

Feb. 28, 1974 - Deep Throat opens at the Studio One Theater in Sioux Falls, SD

March 18, 1974 - The OPEC oil embargo against the United States ends

April 15, 1974 - The Patty Hearst bank robbery

May 1974 - Deep Throat opens in Sacramento

May 22, 1974 - Linda Lovelace and David Winters arrive at Heathrow Airport as part of a European tour

June 11, 1974 - Linda and David attend the Royal Ascot races

July 7, 1974 - Harry Reems arrested in New York when FBI agents wake him with a warrant requiring his presence in Memphis, Tenn. He is indicted (with 116 others named as unindicted co-conspirators) by a federal jury

July 16, 1974 - Gerard Damiano and Georgina Spelvin arrested by the FBI

July 25, 1974 - Drug charges against Linda Lovelace are thrown out as a result of the search warrant not being invalid. Frank Sinatra's lawyer helps prove it was a set-up

July 29, 1974 - A judge upholds the banning of an edited version of Deep Throat

Aug. 14, 1974 - Deep Throat seized from a downtown theater in Los Angeles

Sept. 5, 1974  - Harry Reems and Gerard Damiano report to Memphis for booking

October 1974 - Deep Throat opens at the Strand Theatre in Akron, Ohio

Oct. 30, 1974 - Variety lists six Bryanston projects: Deep Throat Part II with rentals of 500K, Chinese Hercules with rentals of $640K.  Upcoming releases are: Andy Warhol's Dracula, Devil's Rain (financed by Bryanston), Sidney Beckerman's Tomb (co-produced by Bryanston), The Last Castle (which turned into Echoes of Summer)

November 1974 - Deep Throat opens in Baltimore

Dec. 24, 1974 - Variety reports the following films are in production for Peregrine Film Productions, a LA unit of Bryanston: The Devil's Rain, The Human Factor, and Lord Shango

1974 - Top TV shows of 73-74 season were All in the Family, The Waltons, Sanford and Son, M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O, and Kung Fu

Jan. 1, 1975 - Nixon henchmen HR Halderman, John Erlichman, John Mitchel,l and Roger Mardian are convicted in the Watergate conspiracy

Jan. 6, 1975 -  Additional project being sought by Peregrine Productions is the praised festival film, Dark Star, which was produced and directed by John Carpenter.

Jan. 8, 1975 - Watergate figures John Dean, Herbert Kalmbach, and Jeb Magruder released from prison

Jan. 16, 1975 - Women's Wear Daily reports that the Peraino family, tired of questionable patron counting, develops a prototype turnstile, complete with computer interface to keep track of the number of people that pass into movie houses.  Ticket Security Systems is a company Joseph Peraino lists as owning

Jan. 31, 1975 - Linda introduces Kiss at a concert at Nassau Coliseum

March 1975 - A Concord NH trial ends in acquittal for mother-and-son theater operators. The film opens in Bethlehem, N.H. at the Colonial Theatre.

March 10, 1975 - Bryanston has breakfast at ShowWest '75 and announces its projects: A Man Called Horse, Echoes of Summer, Power (produced by Sidney Beckerman), Tilt (with Jeff Bridges and MacKenzie Phillips), and The Great Scout and Cat House Thursday (with Lee Martin and Racquel Welch)

March 27, 1975 - Linda introduces Led Zeppelin at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, Calif

May 30, 1975 -Bryanston hosts huge bash at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel

June 13,1975 - Indictment filed in Deep Throat Memphis trial. Twelve individuals and four corporations are charged with the conspiracy to transport an obscene film

July 31, 1975 - Jimmy Hoffa, former president of the Teamsters, is reported missing in Detroit

(To be continued)

Snap!

The documentary opens in San Francisco.  (Photo:  Chris McKim)

Sock It to Me

Ken Tucker in New York magazine calls IDT a "delightful, insightful documentary," and says that Deep Throat was "Laugh-In with a hard-on."

Inside Deep Throat is more than a giggle-it's a valuable document of a cultural shift. The vintage shot of Reems flanked by new pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty alone says more about the nascent nexus of showbiz and sex than a million Howard Stern-Jenna Jameson chatfests.

(More)

Not Exactly Jackie Kennedy, but She Did Once Date JFK Jr

A report at Live Journal says that Daryl Hannah went to see IDT over the weekend. "Who Talked to Daryll Hannah Tonight?  Oh...that would be me. :) She came into the theater tonight to see INSIDE DEEP THROAT and she needed a light."  (More)

Pornopedia

Inside Deep Throat is now included in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.  It's just the facts, man, no editorializing.   Come look us up.  Meanwhile, we're waiting for Funk & Wagnall's to call.

And speaking of editorializing, IDT has its first full-out, balls-to-the-wall negative review.  Whew, finally, the other shoe has dropped.  And it's no Blahnik.  A piece in the online journal The Trades takes the doc to task, calling it "a disaster on a number of accounts" and then goes on to a-count them.

[B]y the end of the movie I found myself more sympathetic to the Religious Right and censorship laws. The moment that solidified my stance happened somewhere between Linda Lovelace (the film's infamous star) comparing porn censorship in the US to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Harry Reems, the film's male lead, hailing "Deep Throat" as a film which exemplified a courageous and revolutionary feat. Since when is a woman giving a guy a blow job progressive or "courageous" for that matter? Isn't this all just oxymoronical.

Will the Chic Hit the Fans?

"Porn docs often play at film festivals and nowhere else," says Owen Gleiberman in the latest Entertainment Weekly, "but Inside Deep Throat could turn out to be a one-shot porno-chic revival."  He gives the doc an A.

The codirectors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), work in their rigorous yet playful informational style, and the producer, veteran Hollywood player Brian Grazer, has ensured that the filmmakers got all the freedom they needed. Inside Deep Throat packs in the entire porno-puritan American circus: the lines around the block in the early '70s; the winking wisecracks on late-night TV as Deep Throat entered the national bloodstream; the anxiety that still lingers over the Mob's dominance of the burgeoning triple-X industry of the early '70s; the shutting down of theaters as the nation's prosecutors and censors went to work - helping, of course, to publicize the very phenomenon they wanted to crush.

Photo: Harry Reems by Kai Regan

Inside on a Rainy Day

On the MTV website, Kurt Loder says Inside Deep Throat is "a funny and saddening new documentary."

"Deep Throat" dragged hardcore pornography out of the scum-swamps in which it had traditionally festered and pushed it into the everyday world. So successful was the movie in doing this that, today, not only is porn of every sort available instantly to all who seek it, it's also available - suddenly, startlingly, right there on a computer screen - to those who don't. In this regard, the modern porn industry is as evangelical, in its way, as the religious groups that understandably revile it.

The Earthtimes reviewer left the screening with a heavy heart.

It's all told in a romping those-were-the-days style, and it could have been an entertaining film - except for a shadow so dark, it overpowers any lightness.

Porn Yesterday

Harry Reems, the accidental star of Deep Throat and the purposeful hero of Inside Deep Throat is the subject of a profile in New York magazine. 

Since 1990, Reems has been married to a woman he fell in love with through his twelve-step meetings. . . .  Jeannie is not especially fond of Deep Throat ("It's amusing and dumb"), but she is a fan of Inside Deep Throat, even though it shows Linda Lovelace and her husband engaged in the act that gave the film its name. "In some ways, I wish they had toned it down a little bit," she says, "but I suppose you have to show people what you're talking about. It's just so odd to see."

TRIVIA QUESTION

(Answer correctly and win a T-shirt)

In the documentary Inside Deep Throat, what does Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano say someone suggested to him as a title for the film? 

Board of Reviews 2

Inside Deep Throat opens today at a theater near you if you reside in a major city and live near a theater that's showing the movie.  That said, here is a flurry of reviews, compiled by rottentomatoes.   

"Moves like a bullet, running through its subjects with punch-drunk glee and stitching it all together with a pounding K-Tel Super Hits of the Seventies soundtrack" - Chris Barsanti,FILMCRITIC.COM

 "Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening." - Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

What Can Brown Do for You?

In yesterday's Washington Post, the venerable Tina Brown waxed on the screening of and distinguished-panel discussion after Inside Deep Throat at its premiere at the Paris Theatre in New York.

"Inside Deep Throat" appears headed for success, too, albeit on a smaller scale and with HBO substituting for the mob. The current FCC fatwa against any kind of network naughtiness adds the touch of lefty moralism needed to give the new documentary a chic marketing angle. Plus there's a good red-state redemption story: Harry Reems, whose "Deep Throat" fame sputtered out in a booze- and drug-addled stupor that left him panhandling on Sunset Strip, is now a born-again Christian selling real estate in Park City, Utah. He was in attendance at Monday's screening. His acting skills were always wooden and his hair is nearly white, but he looked craggy and spry.

Pornology

A Timeline on Pornography in the United States (continued)

Feb. 26, 1973 - Carl Bernstein, co-author of All The President's Men, goes to see Deep Throat in an attempt to avoid a subpoena.

February 1973 - A special agent from Louisville, Ky, and a US Magistrate preside at an adversary hearing, deem Deep Throat to be obscene and issue a search warrant

Feb. 27, 1973 - Federal agents seize the film Deep Throat at the Cinema X Theater in Newport, Ky

March 1973 - Deep Throat opens in Toledo, Ohio, where a theater manager is charged with presenting an obscene film. Also opens in Chicago at the Towne Theater

March 1, 1973 - Deep Throat is found obscene in NYC by Judge Joel Tyler. Following the decision, handed down at 11 a.m., police enter the World Theater and seize a print of Deep Throat. Judge Tyler declares Deep Throat to be "indisputably obscene by any measure"

March 23, 1973 - Deep Throat opens in Tucson, Ariz, at the Cine Plaza Theater.  John A Jacobs is hired as projectionist and is promoted to manager four days later after the current manager quits

March 30, 1973 - Federal grand jury returns one indictment and hears testimony related to Deep Throat in Newport, Ky, trial

April 1973 - Dallas federal judge declares Deep Throat obscene. In Memphis, Variety reports that Deep Throat is playing to full houses daily at the PussyCat Theatre in midtown.

April 28, 1973 - In Newport, Ky, defendants Harry V Mohney, Stanley Marks, and Guy Weir are convicted by a federal court jury for showing Deep Throat and Swing High in addition to previews for five other films. All the films are judged to be obscene.

April 30, 1973 - Nixon henchmen H.R. Haldeman, John D. Ehrlichman, and Attorney General Kleindienst resign while Nixon fires John Dean as White House counsel

May 1973 - Washington Post wins a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate coverup

May 11, 1973 - FBI Agents swarm into the Cine Plaza Theater in Tucson shortly after 5PM.  John Jacobs asks for his files and is told they are not going to confiscate the film or close the theater.  But is ordered not to alter the film or ship it anywhere. They confiscate pads of paper, shipping boxes, air freight tags, and Deep Throat posters

May 17, 1973 - Senator Sam Ervin's Watergate hearings begin

May 31, 1973 - John J Monaghan interviews Harry Reems at his apartment, located at 433 W 23rd St, in Greenwich Village

June 1973 - Deep Throat opens at the Capitol Theater in St. Paul, Minn

Summer 1973 - The Devil in Miss Jones, directed by Gerard Damiano, opens. The movie centers around a virgin who takes her own life, only to have the Devil send her back to live her life again, this time around consumed by lust

June 1, 1973 - Three-hour Tucson preliminary hearings before US Magistrate Raymond T Terlizzi. The defense calls Methodist minister Rev Robert T McIlvenna, chairman of the National Sex Forum and member of the President's Commission on Obscenity