Classic Linda to Double-Bill with Doc

The new big news is that the original X-rated Deep Throat is being rereleased in theaters across the country to play on late-night double bills with the NC-17 Inside Deep Throat.  It's a marriage made in, um, you could say heaven.  Ray Pistol, who is the current owner / distributor of the original, says he's often had requests from theater owners for a print, but he never found it worthwhile to strike a print for just one theater.  Now, with the widespread interest in the new doc, striking the old film has suddenly become worth it.

Ray Pistol's Las Vegas based company, Arrow Film and Video, currently owns the rights to Deep Throat. Louis Peraino Sr., one of the producer's of Deep Throat, sold the rights to Pistol after many years of battling with law enforcement officials because of his involvement in the adult business. Peraino was convicted of obscenity charges in federal court in Memphis in 1976 and in Miami in 1981. While he was arrested again in 1995 for shipping obscene material from Las Vegas to California, all charges were dropped in March 1996. Peraino sold the rights to Pistol shortly thereafter in August 1996.

In an article in AVN, the Variety of the porn industry, Pistol doesn't talk about his negotiations allowing Brian Grazer to use footage from Deep Throat in Inside Deep Throat, but he says the double bills have nothing to do with Imagine Entertainment.  Rather, he's in cahoots with theater owners.

"Theater owners have called me up and said, 'Will  you give us a print?'  So this is the theater owners that are  putting this together, not Imagine and not me. I got a call out of the blue."  Arrow will be providing both R and XXX versions of the film,  and apparently very little actually had to be cut out to get  the less-restrictive MPAA rating. "If you think back," Pistol  explained, "there wasn't all that much sex back in the '70s  in movies, and so it winds up running 59 minutes. The X-rated  version is 61 to 65, depending on which version you get, and  we added footage to our Special Edition so it winds up being  90."