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." 

My father may have been called The king of Porn, but he was pretty straight-laced when it came to family matters. For half of my childhood I was aware of the film Deep Throat , but was never allowed to see it. My sister and I might  have spent a lot of time around the film sets, but we were always quickly ushered off when it came time to shoot the "nitty gritty."

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