Inside Out

Well, Inside Deep Throat premiered officially last night, if officially means there was a red carpet, blinding lights, and a phalanx of photographers outside the theater.  There was, there were, and there was.  The screening had moved, 11th-hour, from the ArcLight in Hollywood to its conjoined sister, the Cinerama Dome, to accommodate the huge number of RSVPs.  We spotted Boston Legal's Rene Auberjonois looking for his seat number and Desperate Housewives' S&M housewife Sharon Lawrence chatting with someone on the aisle.  We saw everyone from Helen Mirren with her husband, Oscar shoo-in-Ray director Taylor Hackford, to Warhol star Holly Woodlawn with the producer of her shoe-in biopic, A Low Life in High Heels.  And Imagine's Brian Grazer, of course.  And Deep Throat director, Gerard Damiano.  And the doc's directors, Bailey and Barbato, the new Maysles Brothers, if the Maysles Brothers had worked blue.
During the screening on a screen so massive it made Linda Lovelace's talent all the more impressive, there wasn't a dry seat in the house.  Afterward, seemingly everyone uncharacteristically stayed put for a lively panel discussion on porn moderated by Peter Bart and argued by Arianna Huffington, Richard Schickel, Dennis Prager, and Lawrence O'Donnell.  We won't go into it, but conservative Christian radio personality Prager was not loved by the audience, while political pundit Huffington and West Wing writer O'Donnell were mentally embraced.
At the reception that followed in the cavernous hangar of a place that partially encloses the ArcLight's postmodern courtyard, we're sure we saw Huffington and O'Donnell physically embraced as well.  There were many many loyal WOW staffers and editors in attendance (having already seen IDT any number of times before) and they tended to clump together at the bars, and not necessarily in the buffet lines, alcoholics that they are.  We talked to Lorna Luft, and schmoozed indiscriminately, but it was WOW's videotape operator Brent Benedetti who scored the prize of the night:  Jennifer Coolidge.  Yeah, he befriended Stifler's mom, all right, shared hors d'oeuvres with her, nibbling her cookies, and volunteering to rescue puppies with her in the near future.  While other guests thought they were clever swiping the movie posters on their way out, Benedetti got Coolidge to drive him home.    

Recording and photographic equipment were strictly forbidden, but we managed to squeeze off a few unprofessional shots.  Clockwise from top left:  Randy Barbato and Jennifer Coolidge;  producer Mona Card (obscured) and associate producer Ashley York, editors William Grayburn and Jeremy Simmons,  Barbato; Moye Ishimoto, Terrance Austin, and Alisa Charoen-Phol; WOW head of production David Schiff and Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano; Austin and WOW production manager Devon Schneider