Board of Reviews

Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian says, "Watching Inside Deep Throat is like attending the ultimate Studio 54 cocktail party you were born too late for, or were just too granola at the time to get invited to."

LORD KNOWS THE  ability to suppress the gag reflex is something we all could use these days. But that particular talent will never again have the cultural impact it did in 1972, when Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat thrust hardcore porn out of back rooms and into the mainstream, at least for a while. Even presidential spunk on an intern's dress had just passing political significance; Deep Throat was the B.J. that truly shook the world.

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's new documentary, Inside Deep Throat, is a terrifically entertaining perspective on a phenomenon that looks weird even by Me Decade standards. Given our current standoff between prudery and prurience, it seems impossible that just a generation ago all barriers looked to be falling down for good; that porn and the Hollywood mainstream might couple, erasing the dividing line between them; that dropping trou and doing the deed for art's sake might someday result in somebody thanking the Academy for really, really liking them.

J Hoberman in the Village Voice compares Inside Deep Throat to a Preston Sturges movie: "The principals are wildly photogenic archetypes-Damiano the amiable satyr, Linda the frizzy-haired hippie goddess, Harry the unlucky Lucky Pierre. Beneath these cartoon floats marches a parade of greedy goodfellas, scheming exhibitors, idiot politicians, swanning celebs, and frothing religious fundamentalists."

A famous Andy Warhol movie consists solely of a man's face in close-up as he's fellated by an offscreen partner. The HBO documentary Inside Deep Throat doesn't have nearly that much conceptual elegance, but it too focuses on a reaction-namely the convulsions that shook the American body politic in the wake of the porn film Deep Throat. Call this doc, written and directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blowjob." Deep Throat was a media event, a battle in the culture wars, a show business landmark. Shot in a Miami motel for $22,000, it would eventually gross $600 million. Its originality is not difficult to fathom. Whereas Warhol's Blow Job was conceptual, Deep Throat was high-concept: A woman whose clitoris is somewhere near her tonsils seeks sexual gratification through (copious) oral sex.

"With all-American boys Ron Howard and Brian Grazer as its producers, the success of Inside Deep Throat at this year's Sundance film festival suggests that an end may be in sight for hardcore porn's 30-year-long march from the sticky-floored fleapit to near respectability," says John Patterson in the British Guardian. 

Among those who confessed to having seen Deep Throat were Gregory Peck, Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, Hugh Hefner, and no less august a figure than disgraced ex-veep Spiro Agnew, who was fortunate enough to catch it chez Frank Sinatra.  Thirty years later, as the film's cultural impact has faded and its legal precedents have become integrated into First Amendment law and lore, porn is a thriving mainstream industry whose financial returns dwarf those of the music and movie industries.