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