Is There a Doc in the House?

In a thoughtful article on the In These Times site, Pat Aufderheide talks about the continuing importance of documentaries amid the hubbub of Sundance, "still a place where independence of thought, difference of opinion, and innovation are prized."

(Full story)

Hard to Swallow

IMDb has some tasty little message boards in progress re Inside Deep Throat. 

In one of them, Sam41 wonders whether if he should take his son to the doc for his 13th birthday.  "My son recently turned 13 years old and I am 31. I promised him that for his birthday he could see any movie he wants in theaters no matter what the rating is.  He chose this movie and I need to know if it's appropriate for me to take him. What do you think?"  Naturally, others have opinions on that.

In the other, they respond to the awkward question "and we need to shown this because??????why?"  Someone who apparently speaks the same language replied, "this as much sense as having a documentry on the making of Godzilla. i saw deep throat again again and again.....for research and i never saw the shotgun that was alleged by mrs lovelace(incidently she passed away in 2002 so that was another reason why that did that because she couldn't sqwak".  Pithy.

First Time Ever I Saw Deep Throat

Linda Williams
Author, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible"

I saw Deep Throat when it came out.  My husband at the time and I drove with another couple to see it in Denver at one of those Pussycat theaters.  And it was an adventure.  It was definitely the sort of thing that one felt a little bit excited about doing. I remember almost nothing about the film.  I think I can remember the famous explosion, the bombs bursting, bells ringing scene. But as far as being in any way moved by it, my memory of that has been entirely displaced by other films that I saw at the time, a little bit later, that were more powerful.  They were more sexually arousing.  And that was an uncomfortable, interesting thing to feel in a movie theater.

Write and tell us about your first time.

Peter Meter

Peter Travers, the critic over at Rolling Stone who almost never gives a film a good review (just kidding!), was quite taken with Inside Deep Throat, saying, "Open up and say 'ah' to this wickedly probing documentary from Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster). It has a lot more on its mind than blow jobs."  And we can almost smell the newspaper blurb now:  "Has a lot more on its mind than blow jobs." 

And Joblo.com gave the doc 7.9 (out of 9) bags of popcorn on its Popcorn Meter.

The Real Linda Lovelaces

Anecdotes from women saddled with the porno icon's name

Linda Lovelace used to work at J.C. Penny and would frequently hear store patrons giggle when her name was announced over the PA. She once won a radio contest and when she went to claim the prize she had to present a photo ID to prove that her name was in fact Linda Lovelace. She remembers that when she was a little girl she innocently kissed the mailman, who then went home and told his wife who threatened divorce unless he proved he was joking.

This is not the real Linda Lovelace - the woman who attained mainstream stardom as a result of her role in the 1972 adult film, Deep Throat. Rather, this woman is one of many who live across the country and share the name Linda Lovelace. Being asked for their autographs and questioned about their sex lives is commonplace.

In Clyde, North Carolina, a Linda Lovelace went to the dentist who said that he couldn't wait to get home and tell his wife whose mouth he'd been in.

Another Linda, who owns a beauty shop in Gatesville, Texas, began running advertisements in the local newspaper. It wasn't long until she got repeated prank calls from men at a local military base asking what services she provided.

A woman in Pensacola, Florida, changed her name to Linda Lovelace when she married in 1963 (prior to the release of the film). Once the film started playing in her hometown, everybody started buzzing about her name. She once signed for a UPS package and the driver insisted she had given a false identity. She remembers another incident when a cashier at a grocery store asked, after carefully analyzing her check, if that was her real name. Linda laughed as always, and the woman said that if that were her name she would change it.

In Chino Hills, California, a Linda got engaged to a Lovelace six months after the film was released. Her mom was none too happy with the upcoming name change and wondered if her fiance could change his last name to hers. While in a grocery store, a bagger saw that her name was Linda Lovelace and asked for an autograph.

In April 2002, a Linda Lovelace in Deale, Maryland, was overwhelmed with phone calls when the news broke that Linda had died from injuries sustained in a car accident. "I've read her book and know her story, which is sad," she said. "I just wish she could have had as much fun with the name as I have."

Despite Linda's death, the jokes haven't stopped and the legacy obviously lives on.

- Ashley York, Inside Deep Throat associate producer

Press This

CNN.com opens its "Sex selling at Sundance" post with Inside Deep Throat, saying it's "among  the most talked-about early films of the festival," which, of course, we already know by now, but it's always nice to hear again how pretty we are.

A Self-Proclaimed "Good Girl's" POV

"I was glad to see in class today the trailer for Inside Deep Throat," says a coed in Canada. "This movie looks great, maybe I will make the trek down to TO to see it when it comes out early next month. Not too much to comment on regarding today's lecture, just the fact that I can truly see how the porn industry drives technology."  (More here and here)

First Time Ever I Saw Deep Throat

Helen Gurley Brown
Editor, Cosmo; author, Sex and the Single Girl

I'm not sure whether it was chic to see Deep Throat.  I barely do anything because it's chic.  It was educational, of course, for my work as a magazine editor; also, my husband is in the movie business, and he ought to see everything.  So I went because I was interested and because it was educational and it was the right thing to do.

I don't remember finding anything educational about it. It's not that I knew everything, but I think I knew quite a lot in the '70s.  I can't remember how old I was then - I must've been 50.  So I didn't learn a great deal that I didn't know before, I just found it interestingly presented. I thought it was very well done, that was one reaction; and second, I didn't think it was so naughty, or so low down, or so unmentionable, I just thought it was a well-done movie.  I enjoyed it.

John Waters
Filmmaker, Pink Flamingos

Deep Throat wasn't a joke.  People didn't go to Deep Throat for parody.  They went because they had never seen this before. It was a badge of the new freedom.  "Have you seen this movie?  Have you been through the experience of paying to see a woman give a blowjob in a porno theater in your community?" That was very, very new. No one had ever seen that.  And once they saw it, they went home and tried it, and it perked up some marriages maybe.  And then they knew what porn was.  Some went back, some didn't.  And the rest led to everybody having it in their homes.  The title, the title, the title, and the act.  The humor made it OK for women to sit through it.  The humor made you feel less guilty.  There were a couple of good jokes in it.  So you could say it was funny, too, rather than, you know.

Write and tell us about your first time.

Brian Grazer - Hot Even Before He Got There

"Brian Grazer and Universal production execs were rattled after the G-4 jet they flew into Park City for the Sundance Film Festival caught fire five minutes before landing," reports Variety.

Sex and the (Park) City

Hotter than hot, sultry and sweaty were the women of the Inside Deep Throat premiere party.  Imported directly from Jumbo's Clown room in LA, Lola and Gypsy added the heat and eye candy for the party's many horny attendees. And they were plenty horny after watching Linda and Harry and hearing about and seeing orgasms and climaxes in the documentary. So the girls were a perfect release of tension and libidos. They got tipped, photographed, and will be my desktop wallpaper for years to come.  A+

- Text and photos by WOW production manager Devon Schneider

Buzzing

Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune called the WOW doc "the most buzzed-about premiere of the Sundance Film Festival's opening weekend."   We knew that.

"Inside Deep Throat," which Universal is releasing next month, is part "Kinsey" (its view of the nation's former state of sexual repression), part "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" (the recounting of censorship/First Amendment battles, culminating in the criminal trial of leading man Harry Reems) and part "Boogie Nights" (immersion in the pre-video porn world, all set to a fab '70s soundtrack that includes "Spill the Wine"). With its graphic movie clips and the subject's frank treatment, "Inside Deep Throat" will become that very rare species: a major-studio NC-17 film (Universal's first since 1990's "Henry & June").

First Time Ever I Saw Deep Throat

Xaviera Hollander
Author, The Happy Hooker

I became aware of  Deep Throat the first time in Canada, in Toronto, where sex was still rather a taboo subject, at least in films.  There was a private showing of Deep Throat on a double bill with Boys in the Sand.  I went with two heterosexual boys, and we forgot Boys in the Sand was totally homosexual. You got into the theater for free if you would get undressed.  Of course, we all got undressed; otherwise, if you stayed dressed and were kind of prudish, you would have to pay the $15 entrance fee.  So, I said, Okay, boys, let's all go naked.  And before I knew what happened, there was like group sex happening left, right, and center. 

Hugh Hefner
You have to ask?

Well, I don't really remember the specific screening. But I remember the time frame and I do remember that we ran it in the living room for a select number of friends.  It's a comedy; one could suggest that it's a romantic comedy, a sexual comedy and it has a plot. I think one of the things that is unique about Deep Throat is that it broke that barrier. Porn films had existed in one form or another before, but Deep Throat was the one that really established a kind of porn chic and made it acceptable for men and women.

Write and tell us about your first time.

Little Bit Country

Another religious man rants against the Inside Deep Throat doc and the directors who made it on his site, which seems to be called Little Bit Tired, Little Bit Worn.   Then, in a comment, a reader writes, "Just wanted to remind you that you are a stuck up bible thump!"

First Time Ever I Saw Deep Throat

Wakefield Poole
Director, Boys in the Sand

I got the pre-publicity stuff on it and all the things and I thought well this I want to go see.  And I went like the second day it was running. Outside of the theater when I arrived there were quite a few people, I don't remember how many, but I know that there was quite a line.  In fact I was almost afraid I wouldn't get into the screening that I was standing in line for.  It was a lot of men and a few women, and basically they were in suits.  I went in the afternoon, so it consisted of people who got off from work. 

But it was very quiet in the line. I'd stood in line for many things, like for My Fair Lady when it first opened, and it was a party. But this wasn't a party.  Everyone was sort of, I think, a little uptight having to stand in a line.  And there were cameras all around, people with cameras and you didn't know whether they were professional cameras or private cameras. I think people were a little uptight about being photographed in the line, so a lot of people faced the wall of the theater, as opposed to facing the street.

I was very surprised by the film.  It wasn't at all what I expected.  It was much more fun and not as sensual as I thought it would be, for some reason.  But I went to see it and, as I said, I stood in line with the crowds and it was quite an experience. 

Erica Jong
Author, Fear of Flying

There was a screening in some psychoanalyst's apartment and everybody watched and smoked dope, yeah. I always thought it was ridiculous, if you want to know the truth.  I know the clitoris is not in the throat.  You know, I was not pre-med at Barnard.  I couldn't dissect the fetal pig.  I got a D in zoology and I became a writer. I thought it was quite absurd.  And I had nothing but contempt for Deep Throat.  You know, I was a kid who was reading the great novels of Tolstoy and people like that.  I was not really interested in this crap.

Write and tell us about your first time.

Jumping Off the 'Deep' End

NC-17, anyone? Sundance openers cut loose Utah's film festival floods its screens with nudity and explicit sex, with "Inside Deep Throat" a big feature screams The Oregonian's wordy headline, surely inviting the Christian right to have its say without even reading the article. 

Take, for instance, the film that was chosen to screen in the festival's biggest theater at the end of the first day: "Inside 'Deep Throat' " is a spry and engaging documentary about the making of the notorious 1972 porn film that became a rallying cry for both censors and free-speech advocates. Though directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato ("The Eyes of Tammy Faye") keep the film consistently amusing, it's inevitably filled with the very images that so polarized the chattering classes 33 years ago. It's being released later this year by Universal Pictures despite an NC-17 rating. It went over gangbusters with the audience.

Ones and O-o-o-ohs

That sweetheart Jonno over at Fleshbot, always thinking of us, sent a really curious thing to the WOW Report.  Deep ASCII is a full-length (55 minutes) conversion of the original porn film Deep Throat in soundless ASCII, which he presented on his blog last year.  Apparently, it made the rounds of the Euro film fests a while back.  But it's never been more apt than now.  ASCII, of course, stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, which assigns numerical values to the letters of the Roman alphabet, and it comes out here as lots of 1s and 0s.  Upshot:  It's really really hot and not at all safe for work.  Thanks Jonno.

And Thairin Lies the Answer

Stolen from The WOW Report

In a departure from his all-too-brief-so-far weekly recipe column, Thairin Smothers, who drove to Sundance in an RV, whines a bit about the Sundance experience and delivers, with Chris McKim an In / Out list that reads more like their personal journal than anything else.

IN / OUT                                                         
Harry Reems / Robert Redford                                      
RVs / condo crashing                                                      
Bringing a flask / Watered-down Utah drinks (fucking Utah!)                             
Brian Grazer / Harvey Weinstein                                        
Cadillac Escalades / free shuttle                                 
Bubble vests / bubble coats                                          
Jamie Bell / Parker Posey                                       
Goo Goo Bars / swag                                         
Pulling Paris Hilton's hair / kissing Paris Hilton's ass                        
Queer Lounge / Queer brunch                                        
Pretending it's a film festival / pretending it's Mardi Gras                 
Krumping / skiing                                              
Getting arrested / getting distribution

Picture Show

Here're some photos from the party after the screening of IDT at Sundance.  It's been said that the party almost lived up to the expectations fed by memories of the party that followed the Party Monster screening two years ago at Sundance. 

From top:  IDT editors Jeremy Simmons and William Grayburn, go-go dancer, Jim Galasso and Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato and actor Jamie Bell 

Photos courtesy phototopia

On the Other Side

Seems not everyone is a fan, but we think this has little to do with the movie, and more to do with fanatics.

I would not be surprised if Grazer is some homo-fanatic liberal. No accountability, no personal responsibility, just a continuous legitimation of sexual violence and dysfunction. Or maybe he is another Jeff Jarvis/Glenn Reynolds, et al, liberal homo-fanatic conservatives.

More at alessandrab.blogspot.com

Arts and Faith.com has a thread going which, while not particularly loving, isn't nearly as hating.

Keep It Comin'

The Hollywood Reporter

The docu turns out to be an often provocative and perceptive look at the history of the porn business in America, the cultural wars the movie fed into and the lives of some who worked on the film.



Since forces on the right are currently galvanized for a renewed attack on civil liberties and freedom of expression, "Inside Deep Throat" is making a timely appearance. The film, which Universal will release nationally Feb. 11, looks like another documentary boxoffice winner.

Seattle PI

Grazer had been contemplating a film about "Deep Throat" star Linda Lovelace, who died in a 2002 car crash, but found the focus too narrow.

"I was less interested in the story of Linda Lovelace and more on the movie's effect on popular culture," Grazer said.

Contact Music (site is really slow)

After Premiere Press

indieWIRE: Park City

Here's a crazy scenario... An aspiring Queens filmmaker, who works in his day job as a hairdresser, gets an idea for a movie that eventually goes into production costing $25,000 and turns into a cultural phenomenon grossing over $600 million in three decades. This seemingly pie-in-the-sky dream did in fact happen, and the director himself, Gerard Damiano, even admitted the film, "Deep Throat" wasn't very good. Nevertheless, the film, which opened in Times Square in June, 1972 became a pillar of the sexual revolution, unleashing a torrent of social upheaval as large segments of mainstream society embraced graphic – or realistic, depending on one's point-of-view – sex.

the-trades.com

At first I was wondering to myself: "Why does an NC-17 movie have a green band trailer? This is the kind of movie that would benefit from a red band!" However, after sitting through the actual footage I realized what the goal here is. Sell this explicit movie the same way the original was sold, get mainstream America to come examine what all the fuss is about.

Party Like It's 1972

Bruce Newman in his Sundance Journal in the Mercury News filed this report on last night's Inside Deep Throat after-party produced by Bryan Rabin and David Rodgers of RabinRodgers Inc:  

The "Inside Deep Throat" after-party almost lived up to expectations--no goodie bags were dispensed, which is probably just as well...who has time for sex toys when there are movies to be sold?--with lots of loud recorded music from the '70s, when "Deep Throat" was made. The diorama in the middle of the room was a pedestal, atop which two nearly topless (this is Utah, after all) go-go dancers gyrated spiritedly. The documentary, which had just premiered at Eccles--the festival's biggest venue--played on a giant screen in the background, but whether you were trying to talk, or just trying to drink contemplatively, it was almost impossible to take your eyes off those dancers. "Throat" star Harry Reams, shorn of his mustache and looking more like a retired golf pro than a legendary porn star, entered with filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, briefly upstaging the go-go dancers. Briefly.

(All photos courtesy David Poland)

After 'Deep Throat,' G-Rated Life

For when Harry Reems takes a poetic moment and says "What a ride this thing called life is," he is not being hyperbolic. As Linda Lovelace's costar in "Deep Throat," the most successful pornographic film ever made, he has gone from obscurity to celebrity to criminal notoriety to gutter-dwelling debauchery to born-again sobriety and success in one hectic lifetime.

Los Angeles Times calendarlive.com

Penetrating Questions and Inside-ful Answers from Directors Fenton Bail and Randy Barbato

QUESTION: Does the original film have a message?

FENTON BAILEY: On the face of it, Deep Throat would appear to be about how to suck cock. A very chauvinist message. You have this ordinary looking person Linda Lovelace who just wants to get off and have fun - very much the mantra of the '70s - and she goes on this quest, finding sexual satisfaction only when she discovers deep throating.  But the film's message is even simpler than that, yet far more radical, and one that transcends the battle of the sexes that so often defines debates about sexuality. 

Because Deep Throat isn't really about oral sex. The movie is really about one person on a quest for sexual satisfaction. There are notions in our society about what is acceptable sexually and romantically, a kind of moral concensus that keeps us all in line.  The whole point about Deep Throat is different strokes for different folks. The DNA of desire is encoded uniquely in each of us. And while her path might seem highly unusual, therein lies the film's very message: Linda's quest for satisfaction stands for every man and every woman's quest. Everybody's path to satisfaction, sexual or otherwise, is an individual path. And the right to pursue that path and those pleasures and freedoms is what life is all about - or should be. And Deep Throat is saying that there's nothing wrong with that,  that sex in all its infinite variety is not only okay but also glorious.  There's nothing to be ashamed of.

 
QUESTION: So what did you learn personally?

FENTON BAILEY: That Deep Throat the movie and Deep Throat the Watergate source are the same thing. At first we thought it was just a coincidence; but there was a deeper connection.  Deep Throat was a secret source, an outlaw voice speaking out against hypocrisy and corruption. And that's what Deep Throat the movie was. An outrageous voice speaking up not just for sexual freedom, but also freedom of expression as became really clear when the film was the subject of dozens of trials trying to silence its unique voice.

RANDY BARBATO:  We are living in an age where we have to be very careful about things like First Amendment rights. And I don't think we ever really thought about that before we started making the film. Now, we started this film over two years ago but once we did so many things happened that seemed to mirror things that happened back in 1972. They had Nixon, we have Bush, both re-elected for a second term. They had Vietnam, we have Iraq, two international quagmires. We learned that there is a very strong connection between 1972 and 2004. So once again we find ourselves at a similar kind of crossroads that society was at when Deep Throat first came out.

FENTON BAILEY: You know, sex and sexuality always get used as a weapon of distraction .These kinds of issues raise their heads when people want to distract us.  So, if you don't want people thinking about what the real issues at hand are, i.e. a war in the Middle East, well then, let's get everyone in a lather about Janet Jackson's nipple. It's a weapon of mass distraction.  But don't underestimate its power to hoodwink us into giving up vital freedoms.

RANDY BARBATO: Personally, I learned it's important to defend the very things that people feel uncomfortable about defending, like pornography. In the climate we live today, people might think something like that isn't so important.  But while they may be happy to let freedom of sexual expression go by the wayside, that really could be the beginning of the erosion of other more significant rights.

FENTON BAILEY: And it's already happening. In 1972, they put the first surveillance cameras in Times Square. And there was such an outcry that they had to take them down. Today, Times Square is the most surveilled place on the planet. Not only do we accept being surveilled, we expect to be surveilled!

RANDY BARBATO: In 1972 the culture war was about a hard-core pornographic movie.  Today its about things that aren't even hard core:  Janet Jackson's nipple, innuendo in a promotional stunt for Desperate Housewives, gay marriage.  So we've come a long way - in reverse!

FENTON BAILEY: What's scariest here is that people are acting in fear. Fear of an FCC fine. Fear of everything.  Bush owes his re-election to the fear factor, fear that we might be blown up at any moment by a bunch of terrorists. And with the perception that our way of life is under attack comes a feeling that our way of life really is morally superior, and therefore needs to appear to be as decent as can be. So no gay marriage, no nipples at half-time, and a lot less sexual freedom. During life in wartime these things are easy to characterize as inappropriate, possibly even un-American.  Of course once you arrive at a place where freedom is un-American you're in a right old pickle.

QUESTION:  And if you had to sum everything up in one sentence?

RANDY BARBATO: What's so funny about peace love and understanding.

Directors Journal

JUNE 2004

The dog days of editing. The dark ages. More than once we wondered if it would ever end.

Jeremy Simmons steps in and takes over from Will Grayburn, who heads back to London after a beyond-the-call-of-duty tour of duty. The switch actually works well for the film. Fresh pair of eyes may be a cliche, though that doesn't make it any the less true.

FRIDAY JULY 9TH
Brian calls and says he's screening the film for the brass at Universal. "I told them all how cool you guys were and so wondered if you could go by at the beginning of the film and just be yourselves. You know, be cool." So we went by and got blue curb parking which was exciting - because we were parked right outside the screening room. Inside there were maybe half a dozen people and we just chatted with them and tried to be cool without seeming like we were trying to be anything other than just our cool selves!

Good news is that even before the screening they had decided that they would distribute the film. Can see the headline DEEP THROAT TO OPEN WIDE.

TUESDAY JULY 27th
Had a Hollyweird screening of the film at Brian Grazer's house. Something seems to be bothering him about the film.

MONDAY AUGUST 2ND
Brian calls: What is this film about? These calls will become a drumbeat. No pressure!

MONDAY AUGUST 9TH
We are on the Australian Gold Coast at the Spaa conference, doing a sort of retrospective, and as part of that we showed a snippet of the intro to the film. When the numbers come up about how much the film had made the audience gasps audibly. That's when we first knew we really had something here.

But back in the States, general confidence in the film seems to be slumping.

There's a feeling that the merry band of renegade filmmakers who have the bright idea of shooting the film isn't playing and that we should cut it down. Count Sepy is removed from the cut. Mercifully this issue goes away with the first test screening when it plays uproariously well, and the swinger Count is restored to his rightful place in the film.

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 14TH
First test screening. As the lights go down lovely Wilmer Walderrama sneaks in.

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 29th
Second test screening. The test scores have hugely improved on their previous total.

The test screenings - and altogether we did three of them - are tremendously helpful in shaping the pace and tackling the ending of the film. Kevin Goetz who runs them is a master of the cross examination of a select group of the audience afterwards. His tour de force begins with him asking upwards of 20 people their names. Every time he returns to them he addresses them by name.

As editing grinds on, there's a concern that the film fails to connect with the present. The remedy for this is to shoot frat boys, teen girls, and seniors talking about oral sex, to try and show the shifting perspective from oral taboo to the no biggie it is today.

Although the material doesn't fit in the final film, shooting the guys at Brian Grazer's alma mater, University of Southern California, proves an interesting experience when campus officials swoop down. Although we have permission to film, once they get wind of the subject matter they decide to close down the shoot. They attempt to confiscate the tape we have recorded, and urge the students not to say something that they might regret. Perhaps the most shining example of the climate of fear pervading the culture today. It's okay to download porn in private - and all these kids do - but to have an intelligent open discussion about it is verboten. Odd for a university administration to be afraid of the exchange of ideas. Isn't that what establishments of further education are for?

One of the toughest things is to determine where the film should end and the audience reaction to it begin. We especially see-saw about the position to take vis-a-vis the modern porn industry. Sheila Nevins at HBO thinks we should cut out the whole idea of the pornolization of the mainstream, and the use of sex in advertising because it feels like a whole different topic, and the subject of an entirely different movie. On the other hand Brian Grazer feels we need to address this because today so many of the people who cheered on the sexual revolution now feel uncomfortable with their children doing the same things that they did in their younger days. They don't want their kids going to blow-job parties because it's not safe. But behind the convenience of the HIV shield lurks the real feeling that its just not seemly. Anyway, whatever the reason the liberals of yesterday are the naysayers of today. They haven't gone Republican - that would be going too far - but they do find themselves in an uncomfortable position. This ambivalence is the morning sickness of what eventually comes to term as institutionalized hypocrisy. It's the only way to get through the paradoxes and conflicts confronting us at every turn. Lie, cover it up, and in your wrongness claim righteousness and invoke God! The breakaway feminists who put the brakes on the sexual revolution by protesting the male rape and porn were the early adopters of this liberal dilemma that remains so desperately unresolved today.

Be all that as it may, how much of it should we put in the film and how much of it should we leave to the audience to discuss after they have seen the film? If we end the film prematurely the audience might feel that we avoid the issues, on the other hand if we get into it too much we'll probably come off as shrill and preachy.

This goes on for months, going back and forth, back and forth as we try every possible combination.

Don't worry, says Sheila, films have to get worse before they get better. But this seems to be getting nothing but worse and worse and worse.

Gotta dash - it's Brian on the line. "Hey guys, blah blah blah, so I was just thinking (on the jet, on the freeway, in New York / Rome / Paris, at home, just in a meeting with [insert name of a-list celebrity or world leader]), What is this film actually about?"

Where is the button on the Avid you can press that just auto-finishes the film?

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 13th
Brian calls. What is this film about? Brian's in New York on his cell phone, walking down 5th Avenue. Amazingly every passerby seems to know him and calls out "Hi Brian" or "Congratulations." We think this perhaps distracts him from actually getting the answer to his question, which we're still not sure that we've every really satisfactorily answered.

(To be continued)

The Premiere Party

So, while we are all putting together our screening scheduled, what about an all important party plan. A quick scan of Friday's event schedule includes celebrations for "Happy Endings" at the Village at the Lift, as well as parties hosted by TLA Releasing, the Austin Film Society, a soiree for doc competition film "Murderball," another for Sundance premiere "Layer Cake," a party for American Spectrum entry "Rize", and a late-night blowout for the premiere of "Inside Deep Throat." If the recent soiree for "Party Monster," the previous Sundance film by "Deep Throat" co-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is any indication, this one should be quite a debauch! So, leave your weak constitution and Red State sentiments back at the condo.

Welcome to Brand-Dance at indiewire.com

Test Your Smarts on the Indie Scene

Question: A new documentary, which makes its premiere at Sundance, pays tribute to the most profitable film of all time? What was that film?

Answer: The porn movie Deep Throat (1972), which was made in six days for $25,000 (U.S.) and went on to make $600,000 worldwide. The new documentary is Inside Deep Throat, by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster). Produced by Ron Howard's regular partner, Brian Glazer, with commentary from Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and John Waters, the film opens in limited release, including Toronto, on Feb. 11. After that, it will presumably "open wide."

Answer them all at The Globe and Mail

Do You Remember Your First Time?

Carl Bernstein is the investigative journalist who, with Bob Woodward, broke the story on the Watergate scandal that ultimately caused the downfall of Richard Nixon.  Their anonymous source for the story was named Deep Throat.  Bernstein remembers the first time he saw the movie:

The Nixon Reelection Committee had sent out subpoena servers to haul us into court to try to get at our sources.  So Woodward wasn't there that day.  And somebody knew that the subpoena server had arrived downstairs with these court papers with my name on them and said, Bernstein, get out of here, go disappear for a couple hours.  And so I went and watched the movie Deep Throat. I mean everybody was talking about. . . about this movie.  I had a couple hours to kill.  It was showing right down the street, on 15th Street. I was thinking more about the subpoena than I (laughs) was thinking about the movie.  The movie was pretty. . . .  Well, you didn't have to think a lot to watch the movie.  I could do both at once.

Do you have a story about the first time you saw Deep Throat? Send it to us at wowreport@worldofwonder.net

Tongue-tied

Stolen from The WOW Report

All seems to be going swimmingly, as they say, with the preps for the premiere of Inside Deep Throat tomorrow at Sundance. But the other night, Sugar Ray frontman Mark McGrath, moonlighting on his other gig as cohost of Extra, kind of got the title of the '70s porn flick caught in his throat as he was introducing the show's "exclusive" preview of the hot doc's trailer. What's up with that? Managed to say "Inside," but couldn't say the rest. "He was hot and all as a rock 'n' roll star," says Fenton Bailey, "and we don't hold it against him for becoming an infotainment gigolo, but to be incapable of saying the words 'deep throat'? He came over all coy and embarrassed. I call that being a girlie man."

Meanwhile, in news of another celebrity flaking, Inside Deep Throat's narrator, Dennis Hopper, abruptly pulled out of attending the Sundance premiere of the film because he, um, FORGOT that he had to go to the Inaugural Ball in Washington.

For an update see The Corsair, which oddly has more information on the subject than we do.

Recent Press

Entertainment Weekly

Rotten Tomatoes

Newsday

Penetrating Questions and Inside-ful Answers from Directors Fenton Bail and Randy Barbato

(Continued from January 19th)

QUESTION:  Talk about the mob.

FENTON BAILEY:  Well, the mob produced and owned Deep Throat.  But Lou Peraino Sr., the producer, was so much more than a mobster.  He had a vision. With the money he made from Deep Throat he set up Bryanston Pictures, a legitimate distribution and production company and quickly scored with a succession of genre hits:  Enter The Dragon, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, John Carpenter's Dark Star, and Andy Warhol's Dracula and Frankenstein. Martial arts, horror, science fiction, and art house - they had all the genres covered.  It was a sort of a prequel to Miramax. People said they exploited their actors, screwed their partners, and threatened their associates. Just another day in Hollywood, and certainly nothing that would be of interest to the FBI - unless your last name happens to be Peraino.  Ultimately, Bryanston went bankrupt. Whatever you may think of the Perainos, they simply weren't able to run Byranston and defend themselves in Memphis in addition to many other multiple cases all across the states. It must have been very draining.  Sadly, none of this is in the film because no one - not one single person - would tell us any of it on camera.  All of those who worked at Bryanston who still work in Hollywood today (and there are many) either don't want to be reminded of the connection or are too frightened to talk. And even Lou's surviving relatives don't particularly want to be identified either.  

RANDY BARBATO: But Deep Throat really is the quintessential independent film. Not just because it was made outside of the studio system but also because it was independently distributed. Potentially illegal indie film couldn't officially be distributed by any recognized distribution system.  Instead the Perainos built their own distribution network from scratch, a truly remarkable system of checkers and sweepers who would fly all over the country and hand-deliver prints to theaters, as well as collect the box-office take on a daily basis.

FENTON BAILEY: But it was all completely underground. The FBI for one didn't recognize the legitimacy of this entrepreneurial activity; they called it money-laundering. You can be sure proper tax returns weren't being filed!  And because everything in this unofficial distribution system was in cash, everybody was skimming, taking a bit here and taking a bit there. So in the end the money just evaporated.  Still, in a way, the success of Deep Throat is the quintessence of the American dream and embodies the entrepreneurial spirit.

QUESTION: So where did all the money go? 

Well it certainly didn't go into Damiano's pocket, and it didn't go into Harry Ream's or Linda Lovelace's pocket.  Even many of the mobsters died penniless. It all just disappeared. Fatal subtraction - another Hollywoodism!

QUESTION:  Did these guys know what they were doing?

RANDY BARBATO:  No.  Add it all together and you've got the gang that couldn't shoot straight. They were all nuts, though I say that filled with love and admiration, because they were doing something they genuinely believed in.

FENTON BAILEY: The craziest amongst us are really the best, because they don't care what people think, and they are just going to do their thing. And when they do, everything changes.  And had they been more sensible, they might not have made this film.  They would have seen the risks and wouldn't have wanted to stick their necks out and risk their lives and livelihoods to do it. So if they had been more sensible, it simply wouldn't have happened. 

QUESTION:  So what did you learn?

RANDY BARBATO: We learned a lot about liberal ideology.  I think that the liberals that existed in the late '60s and the early '70s are very hard to find today. They're still alive, but they've changed their stripes and wear more conservative colors.  The same people who pioneered the sexual revolution have very conflicted feelings about sex and sexuality today.

FENTON BAILEY: We learned a lot more than we thought we would.  Everybody knew Deep Throat, everybody heard of Linda Lovelace, but the real story remained completely hidden from view. Although plenty of books have been written about the '60s and '70s, this aspect of the culture hasn't really been documented. So for us it was like digging up the bones of some dinosaur, or excavating an ancient civilization - even though it was just 30 years ago instead of thousands of years ago.

RANDY BARBATO: It felt like we were investigating not so much a conspiracy but an entire episode that the culture just wanted covered by the sands of time. A lot of people are reluctant for us to go digging that up again. Sure, there was the whole mob aspect, and people were still very frightened of their power and influence. But above all and most perplexingly, there was a sense that the freedom and the experimentation of the '60s and '70s was something people were ashamed and embarrassed about, and would just as soon not talk about. For example, a lot of Hollywood filmmakers got their start making adult films, but they did not want that documented.

FENTON BAILEY: And, you know, we couldn't really hide that this was a film about Deep Throat. You had to sort of come out with it sooner or later. And there was always a slight, let's call it a bump, I guess, that people had to get over. And some people never did get over it, alas. Because the one thing Deep Throat is saying is that there's nothing to be ashamed of, and I think in making our film we ran into people who were ashamed. And that was sad.

RANDY BARBATO: And intriguing. It might us wonder why.

QUESTION:  So tell me. Why?

RANDY BARBATO: We think it was the commercial success of Deep Throat. It changed everything. Before it, people thought and acted ideologically; they were pioneers, campaigning for freedom. After it, people began to be swayed by the potential of how they could profit from it. When they saw how much money there was to be made, ideology was passed over in favor of the bottom line.

FENTON BAILEY: Deep Throat was a turning point in terms of the commodification and objectification of our bodies and sexuality that's just become the norm today.

RANDY BARBATO: There was a fork in the road: Go with the money or stick with the ideology. And basically they all went with the money. And so that's where we are today, in this completely consumer capitalist society. It's more than ironic that Deep Throat, a film that has all these subversive ideas in it, would instead end up seeding this multi-billion-dollar adult porn industry. It's not what that film set out to do. But that's the effect it had.  Like so many of the creative endeavors of the '60s and '70s that ended up losing their ideology and just becoming hugely commercial instead.

FENTON BAILEY: The film's message was to do your thing and find yourself. But you can't watch any of the 12,000 adult titles released last year and find in any of them any trace of that ideology. So porn today is a very different experience to the porn of yesterday.

RANDY BARBATO: And today many of those hippies and sexual revolutionaries are all grown up, extremely rich, and have teenage kids. They are all for freedom of speech and freedom of sexual expression. But they also feel very conflicted about the sexually charged and saturated world that we live in today. It's a hard thing for them to stand up and cheer for because it feels divorced from intimacy and love. So it presents a dilemma for people. That's where we end up, with this contemporary moral dilemma we're all faced with.

FENTON BAILEY: Erica Jong says that the release of the '60s and '70s has created the biggest backlash ever. And their true legacy is shame, embarrassment, and the crazy fervor of today's moral crusades.  We thought perhaps she was being a bit overdramatic when we heard it, butŠ

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Outfest

INSIDE DEEP THROAT will screen at OUTFEST in Hollywood on Wednesday, February 2 at the Egyptian Theatre.  7:30 PM.

DIRS: Fenton Bailey  Randy Barbato, 2004, USA, 35mm, 90 min.



Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, A BEAUTIFUL MIND, 8 MILE) teams with acclaimed directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (PARTY MONSTER, THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE) on a new motion-picture documentary. INSIDE DEEP THROAT examines the unanticipated lasting cultural impact generated by DEEP THROAT, a sexually explicit film first shown in a midtown Manhattan adult theater in June 1972 that quickly became the flashpoint for an unprecedented social and political firestorm. Generally considered the most profitable film of all time (produced for less than $25,000), DEEP THROAT unexpectedly became a cultural phenomenon at the moment when the nation's movements of sexual liberation, equal rights and questioning authority demanded a combustible focus. The barely one-hour long adult title became compulsory viewing for millions of Americans. More than 30 years later, INSIDE DEEP THROAT examines the chasm between the modest intentions of the filmmakers behind DEEP THROAT and the unforeseen impact and legacy that their film left on society.



(Warning: Explicit Sex) Print Courtesy of: Universal Pictures

Penetrating Questions and Inside-ful Answers from Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

(Continued from January 18th)

QUESTION: Let's talk about some of the key players in the film. What are we to make of Linda Lovelace?

RANDY BARBATO: Linda Lovelace is an enigma. She was an ordinary girl with ordinary dreams, who found herself in extraordinary circumstances, and her life was transformed.  Not necessarily because of her ability to deep throat, but from stepping in that world of fame, from becoming a celebrity. And I think she kind of became addicted to celebrity, and that shaped much of the rest of her life. And the moment she became a celebrity, any chances of ever knowing who she was were killed. 

QUESTION:  What happened to her?

FENTON BAILEY: Linda Lovelace became famous both for her very ordinariness and for her ability to do this extraordinary thing! So she was ordinary, but in a very charismatic way.  1972, the year Deep Throat was released, was also the year that the Loud family was on television.  It was the very beginning of ordinary people becoming stars, and she was one the first reality stars.  

RANDY BARBATO: I think of Linda Lovelace as someone who never had the opportunity to find herself.  Before she could find herself, others found her and were able to manipulate her.  Chuck Traynor manipulated her, and then to some extent the feminists manipulated her.  She was trying to please all these people but she just didn't know how to please herself. She was like a deer caught in the headlights.

FENTON BAILEY: Once she was famous she continued to be famous for being famous. The kind of sublebrity you would expect to see today on The Surreal Life. But at the time people didn't know how to treat her and she didn't quite know what to do with herself either. She couldn't really act. Hollywood producer David Winters saw the potential of the brand and tried to mentor her, but Linda didn't really get it and was deluded by a misplaced sense of entitlement derived from her stardom.

FENTON BAILEY:  After Deep Throat, Linda did in fact appear in her own vehicle, called Linda Lovelace For President, which was supposed to be her mainstream breakthrough as a movie star. But it didn't succeed in making her a Hollywood star.  And there were just no other opportunities for her. So she disappeared for a while before making a comeback in the age of Oprah as a pioneering star of the confessional, and emerged as a voice against pornography, telling her own really truly harrowing story.

QUESTION:  Do you believe her story that she was forced to do what she did?

FENTON BAILEY:  I do believe her story. She was under the influence of this Svengali.  It's a classic case of domestic abuse, but happening at a time when - again - the rhetoric and resources of this weren't familiar to people. But after being the toast of the talk show circuit with her book, people lost interest once again.

RANDY BARBATO: In the end, the girl next door did find some contentment as the grandma next door; spending time with her grandchildren, her cats, and decorating for Halloween and Christmas.

FENTON BAILEY: I think she was kind of blindsided by the fame that was thrust upon her and didn't understand it the way we understand it now. If it happened today, we'd say, Oh sure, porn star crossing over.   Jenna Jamieson.  Write a book, do some movies, launch a fragrance, star in your own reality show. Or think of Paris Hilton. Today everybody is familiar with these processes.  

QUESTION: And  Harry Reems?

FENTON BAILEY:  Harry Reems' best performance was arguably not in Deep Throat, but in the role he played subsequently, defending himself against an unprecedented government assault on his constitutional rights. It was the first and only time that an actor has been charged and convicted for merely playing a part.

QUESTION:  Convicted of what?

RANDY BARBATO:  Conspiracy to distribute obscene materials across state lines.

QUESTION:  But he was only an actor in the film!

RANDY BARBATO:  Exactly. He had no control over how it was distributed and no backend participation - so he didn't profit in any way from the film's distribution. All very unfortunate, since he wasn't even supposed to have been in the film. He was hired as a production assistant.

QUESTION:  And why did Harry suffer most of the brunt of the legal action?  It seems so arbitrary.

RANDY BARBATO:  Well, there were many trials against Deep Throat, and their scope and scale is breathtaking.  They started on the city level and moved to the state, and ultimately ended up in federal court in Memphis in a huge conspiracy trial with over a hundred people charged, from the projectionist to - most notably - the film's star, Harry Reems.

FENTON BAILEY:  They arrested Gerard Damiano very early on, and made him cop a plea. So he - reluctantly - became a cooperating witness, and this also meant that in return he got immunity. So they couldn't prosecute him, much as they would have liked to.  They did the same with Linda Lovelace, although there was also a feeling in the South that it was unseemly to prosecute a woman. So that just left Harry Reems. The strategy was quite deliberate: Harry Reems was a high-profile actor so if you make an example out of him and send him to jail that's going to discourage other young people from following in his footsteps.  

RANDY BARBATO: But they underestimated Harry Reems, who turned his conviction into a cause celebre.  Hollywood spoke out in defense of Deep Throat because there were other trials threatened against more mainstream films. They thought, Gee, I might not be in Deep Throat, but what are they going to think about Carnal Knowledge?  What are they going to think of some other project that someone might misinterpret as pornographic? I might be the next person to go to jail.

FENTON BAILEY: The extent of the government's desire to stop not just Deep Throat but also all pornography was so blatantly an attempt to curb freedom of expression. Because pornography was the one thing that most people are least likely to defend. No matter how liberal you are, pornography is at the bottom of the list when it comes to freedom of expression.  So it's the best thing to attack.  No politician wants to stand up and say, "I'm for pornography."  So it was a great political move, and it was a political move that went from the city straight to Washington.

RANDY BARBATO: And you can trace today's culture wars and that bitter divisiveness to Deep Throat. The federal trial in Memphis was one of the first times that the red states flexed their political muscle. It was the beginning of America feeling the political power of the Southern bible belt, and feeling the impact of what that could mean in terms of dictating and policing culture.

QUESTION: So Harry got off.

FENTON BAILEY:  Yes, eventually. All charges against him were dropped about five years after his nightmare began.

RANDY BARBATO: Harry, whose ambition was to be a Shakespearean actor, thought that he could parlay his notoriety into a mainstream legitimate career.  And he even got offered the part of the high school coach in Grease. But the studio withdrew the invitation before filming began.  I think many people thought that when porn became chic it was a stepping stone to legitimacy.  There were lots of incredibly talented people who were attracted to that world, not because they wanted to have sex or because they were looking to make lots of money, but because they were ideologically motivated. Pornography was a frontier of expression, a place for people to boldly go.  And, believe it or not, a lot of people who are successful in Hollywood and the media today were part of that scene then - though not that many of them are prepared to talk about it.

FENTON BAILEY:  Anyway, following the trauma of the trial and his failure to cross over into the mainstream, Harry became an alcoholic, ending up in Park City. Today he's sober, happily married, and a real estate agent.  He's never changed his name - it's Harry Reems Real Estate.  Because while he is now a committed Christian, he says he's not ashamed of his past, and isn't trying to deny it.

QUESTION: What about Gerard Damiano?

FENTON BAILEY: He saw himself as the next Spielberg and hoped that by getting the money for his films that he would be able to ramp up his productions and make bigger and better films.  Deep Throat was made for $25,000, which was not very much money (and even less given the complete absence of any kind of independent film business). So while technically it's easy to criticize, in many other ways it was a remarkable achievement. But because he never got any of the money his films made, he wasn't able to realize his dream of becoming a mainstream filmmaker.

RANDY BARBATO:  Though he did make one of the most significant hard-core films of all time, Deep Throat,  as well as The Devil And Miss Jones, which he made right afterwards.  But he never made any money.  He ended up being a caddie in Palm Springs, without a penny to his name.

FENTON BAILEY:  Damiano saw himself as an auteur filmmaker, and the outlaw medium of sex was the way for him to express himself.  Because there was no independent film business to speak of at the time, and Hollywood was a closed shop.  Deep Throat really is a keystone of the independent film business, because it was made for this tiny amount of money by this moonlighting crew and it showed people, perhaps for the first time, that there was a way to make movies that made money outside of the studio system. It just so happened to be controlled by the Mafia and it would be a while before things like Sundance and today's indie film biz emerged.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Directors Journal

(Continued)

MONDAY NOVEMBER 2ND
The final screening held at CAA.

One of the last things that we did on the film was add the beginning of Supertramp's "Crime Of The Century" to the very beginning of the film, where all the power logos are parading by.

A last gasp of pomp rock in the Seventies before punk ruined everything, the lyrics of the song - featured time-appropiately at the end of the Memphis trial in June '76 - are just so uncannily perfect...

Now they're planning the crime of the century
Well what will it be?
Read all about their schemes and adventuring
I'm sure it's well worth the fee

The crime of the century can be seen as either the creators of the hard core movie and the mob who controlled and distributed it, or the government that went after it - determined to exile sex not only from the cinematic experience but also from any adult consideration in the culture. That's what makes the second verse so perfect - although there was no way to fit it in...

Who are these men of lust greed and glory?
Rip off the mask, and let's see!
But that's not right - oh no, what's the story?
But there's you, and there's me

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 3RD
Election day.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 4TH
Bush wins, analysis begins.

First out of the gate is the old chestnut about moral values.

But before we believe that Nixon's silent majority and Reagan's moral majority and Bush's bully majority really do have a high moral agenda for the country, it's worth pointing out that the red states consume pornography as voraciously as the blue states, maybe more so. And all that porn is distributed to them by some of America's most conservative, most blue-chip corporations. Clearly then, the issue is hypocrisy versus honesty. The open "live and let live" stance of the Democrats just ain't gonna cut it in an environment where people are committed to having a public face versus a private life. This was evidenced in an under-reported scandal in which longtime Republican and anti-gay supporter xxxx xxxxx was trapped leaving a lewd message over the phone for a gay hook up. The fact that no one really wanted to touch the story was most revealing, as if people in glass houses shouldnt throw stones. And the story illustrates the strange thrill of the closet; not just the gay closet but the closet at large. Because sex in america is back in the closet.

Some people think Michael Moore might have lost the election, his "documentary" stoking Republican ire. The idea of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a colossal miscalculation is intriguing. Perhaps the way for the democrats to beat the Republicans is not to try and beat them at their own bully game, because if Monicagate taught anyone anything it's that they have might, right, and (if you believe them) God on their side. They're just too darn good at it. Meanwhile Michael Moore, like that hippo in a tutu from Fantasia, skates on thin ice; it's only a matter of time before his champagne socialism and sheer greed is exposed by the Republican machine.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 5TH 2004
Still not completely finished!

Randy flies off to Florida for one last interview with Art and Terri Sommers. We really think that they are the stars of the film and it would be so good to resolve their story. The only thing is that Terri keeps on changing her mind about whether or not she wants to go on camera again. After umpteen telephone calls, Ashley manages to persuade her to agree - and stay persuaded till we get there with a camera.

Also while in Florida, Randy hooks up with Andrea True to record the vocals of "Hot Christmas."

This year for our Christmas card we plan to dredge up an old Pop Tarts pop song, "Hot Christmas." Without boasting, it's a catchy ditty - in a completely toxic kind of way - with the chorus "I'm dreaming of a hot Christmas, c'mmon baby let's [beat] this christmas." It's suggestive in an innocent way. Mild double entendre, that kind of thing. So we think who better to sing this song than Shane Klingensmith who sang "Hot Hot Hot" in Showbiz Moms and Dads? Everything is going just fine until the manager intervenes:

I'm pretty sure it implies having sex, but I think instead of putting the
single beat in there (where the word would be) it should be changed to
something like "let's kiss this Christmas" or "let's light a fire this
Christmas." Hopefully you understand what I'm saying

We reply:

We can't change the words of the song because that's the whole idea: KLet's blank this Christmas. Because it's just a beat, because no rude words are actually said, it's all up to people's imagination. And because no one is saying any rude words, it's really very innocent.

Doesn't make any difference. Everyone's afraid - even of innuendo.

We are stumped for a bit. But then Randy comes up with the brilliant idea of Andrea True!

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 9TH 2004
Go see Angelina Jollie camping it up in Alexander. She really deserves to get a shot at playing Linda Lovelace. It could be her Monster. (Ditto after also seeing her equally campy performance as a one-eyed British commandertrix in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.) There is no scenery she can't chew!

MONDAY NOVEMBER 22ND 2004
It's Oprah's favorite-things show. We aren't in the audience, alas, but we get our own Thanksgiving gift: We're going to Sundance. Premiere slot.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 7TH
Tape EPK interview in the basement of the office. Feels very grown up; they have three cameras!

FRIDAY DECEMBER 17TH
Finally become an American citizen, along with 8,000 others down at the old convention center. Too late for the election, alas!

MONDAY DECEMBER 20TH
Record voiceover with Dennis Hopper, who is of course a complete pro and certainly not the man you read about in Easy Riders Raging Bulls.

Perhaps it's no surprise to learn that one of the wildest children of the Sixties is now a Rrepublican. We are so used to the idea of Republicans as bible-bashing hate-mongering greed-obsessed trolls that we (airy wave of the hand to include all Hollywood) can hardly conceive of someone sane and intelligent being a Republican.

Instead, he drinks Earl Gray tea, is a joy to work with, and plans on attending the Inauguration in DC next month.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 21ST
Conference call with Universal to discuss the premiere at Sundance.

"We're here today to talk about how to eventize the event but..." Love that!

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 31ST
Frantic call: The credits on the film have to be changed. Again.

Extra

Tonight at 7PM on NBC, Extra will debut the Inside Deep Throat trailer, although, of course, visitors to this blog have already seen it.

Penetrating Questions and Inside-ful Answers from Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

(Continued from January 17th)

QUESTION: What was it about Deep Throat that appealed to you as documentarians?

RANDY BARBATO: On the one hand we live in a sexually saturated atmosphere, and sex is used to sell just about everything. But it's still something that makes people feel awkward and anxious. It's still taboo and people easily wig out about it. So sex and sexuality is this big elephant in the room and I think that was intriguing to us - why is it this big elephant in the room?  And by looking at this film that crossed over into mainstream in a way that no other work of pornography did, we thought we might be able to find some answers.

FENTON BAILEY: As we were starting out someone disparagingly said Deep Throat wasn't very important, that it was the Pet Rock of porno. Just a fad. But of course it wasn't the rock itself that was the thing, it was all the people who went out and bought it. Why were they buying Pet Rocks? So it's not the film itself, but why and how it connected with the audience on such a huge scale.

RANDY BARBATO: I think it was the blowjob, really. As a society, America is obsessed with blowjobs. To an OCD degree. After making Monica Lewinsky In Black And White it seemed to us that sex is such a divisive, problematic force in our society today. It was the furor surrounding a blowjob that all but destroyed a president and brought the government to a virtual standstill at a time when attention was so much needed elsewhere, as the events of September 11th made tragically clear..

FENTON BAILEY: In some respects we were born to make this film. While a student at Oxford, I edited ISIS, the university magazine, and my first issue was seized by the police for a feature spread examining the porn business in Britain. Charges were eventually dropped. But pornography has always been interesting to us. We produced for Channel 4 in the UK a six-hour series called Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization showing how pornography is a vital cultural force as old as civilization itself. And far from being the marginal and corrupting force it is often demonized as, it's a very vital force - especially in terms of new media. Every new medium that comes along - whether it's print, photography, film, video, the internet - the killer application is often porn. It's the way they become assimilated into the mainstream. 

RANDY BARBATO: We've also produced a 13-part docusoap called Porno Valley, for Sky and Channel 4 UK, which is a look at the lives and loves of the girls of Vivid, the premiere adult production company.  It shows that porn stars are people too, and perhaps only different from us in that they have sex for a living. It's incredibly warm, funny, and innocent - sort of. Perhaps that's why it's unlikely ever to be shown here where porn stars can only be portrayed during sweeps weeks as doomed pathetic characters heading straight to hell  - if they aren't halfway there already.

FENTON BAILEY:  We love to tell the stories of people or things that the mainstream considers unfit, or dismisses as marginal. And we love to do that because we've always had a keen sense of our own marginality and felt the sting of that judgment. I'm talking about the gay thing, here. So whether it's rent boys, Tammy Faye, Monica Lewinsky, or club kids, we love to show just how mainstream the marginal is, how critical to the fabric of our lives.  And everybody involved in this film paid a very, very high price.

RANDY BARBATO: It's the curse of Deep Throat: So many of the people involved have such unhappy histories with it. 

FENTON BAILEY:  Now whether you say it was their immorality or their foolishness, or whether you say it was their bravery and courage, either way everyone - even the mobsters - paid a really high price. And for that reason theirs is a story that we wanted to tell, because we felt it deserved to be told. 

QUESTION:  Who went to see Deep Throat?

RANDY BARBATO: Everyone. The film played in New York, LA, and urban cities, but it also played in Princeton, New Jersey, and countless mainstream suburban theaters. It played in the blue states and it played in the red states. It played in small towns and college towns. Everyone went to seep Deep Throat.  It was when porn made the big jump from X-rated theaters to completely mainstream theaters in suburban communities. Previously, pornography had been for dirty old men only. But with Deep Throat hard core jumped species. Ordinary middle-class men and women who wouldn't be seen dead in a porn theatre, and many of whom had never seen hard core, openly went to see Deep Throat. It was chic.

FENTON BAILEY: But it was more than chic; it was actually a virus. Once infected, people wanted more.

RANDY BARBATO: It was the adult equivalent of Love Story.  Love Story was a dating movie, couples went to see it, and this was exactly the same. Guys got laid after taking their dates to see Love Story, and after taking their girls to see Deep Throat, guys got something else.

QUESTION:  What was the secret of the film's success?

FENTON BAILEY: Deep Throat was a kind of perfect storm. No different from any other box office blockbuster, it was made by the happy coincidence of many different factors. Although the film is a hard-core film, first and foremost it was a comedy. A comedy about sex. 

RANDY BARBATO: hard core + humor = box office!  Because when you combine sex and comedy it makes it easier to watch. Actually, the comedy gives people permission not only to go see this hard-core film publicly, but also to talk about it - something people were aching to do. The swinging '60s had happened, but in terms of trickling down to Main Street, that sexual revolution hadn't yet penetrated suburbia. People were just beginning to talk about sex and open up to sex, when along comes Deep Throat, this weird sex comedy. The comedy element gives people permission to see it and talk about something they've been curious about for so long. And, yes, it's dirty but it's also very funny - and everybody is going to see it anyway. So you're not necessarily a smutty old thing in a raincoat, you're a social observer of the Zeitgeist, you've got an ironic distance that makes you cool and chic. So these were some of the things that helped create a huge audience for Deep Throat.

FENTON BAILEY: It was an ice-breaker. It gave people a way to start talking about fellatio and other sexual practices, that was really timely.

RANDY BARBATO: And - hello - it did not hurt that it was called Deep Throat. Calling it Deep Throat was the icing on the cake that took it over the top.

FENTON BAILEY: But, perhaps above all, the government's attempt to shut down Deep Throat made it a hit, because it turned the film into a must-see event. When it opened, Times Square was the focus of a big cleanup campaign. The film already had a high profile thanks to reviews in Screw and Variety - which gave it a mantle of legitimacy that it wouldn't have otherwise had - and word of mouth only further fueled that. So right away it was impossible for the authorities to ignore it. They were almost forced to shut it down.

RANDY BARBATO: The government's stamp of disapproval drove people to rush out and catch the movie before it was banned.

FENTON BAILEY: The more they tried to shut it down, the more attention it generated. And because audiences were continuing to see this film week after week, the theater could afford to fight. So whereas most obscenity trials were open-and-shut cases, this time the theater managers mounted a spirited defense and brought in expert witnesses. This was so unusual that the New York Times covered the trial. And so it continued to escalate. Finally the judge's verdict shut the film down in New York, but simply spurred other theaters across the country to run itŠ and so it went, on and on.  So those are just some of the factors combined to create this perfect storm for the movie.

QUESTION:  What was the state of pornography before this movie came along in 1972?

RANDY BARBATO:  Pornography has existed since the beginning of mankind; it's on the cave walls in Pompeii. In America in the '40s and '50s you had the stag films shown in men's club - they called them smokers. These films were rites of passage for men that also served as a rudimentary kind of sex education. In the '60s you started seeing them in theaters disguised and dressed up as educational films.

FENTON BAILEY: Those were also known as white-coaters. Necessarily dry affairs, they featured a doctor in a white coat pointing to diagrams explaining the mechanics of intercourse, cutting away from time to time to a couple actually having sex - not out of wanton lust, but purely to educate by example!  These films coincided also with scientific studies - Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, and Shere Hite - and the emerging science of "Sexology."  The idea was that sexual pleasure could be scientifically perfected and that within these medical confines, sexual exploration was permissible.

RANDY BARBATO: This doctors and nurses thing is one of the oldest of devices: Kids exploring their sexuality often use this very device. By role-playing as a doctor or nurse, they have permission to view and touch what's normally off-limits. Deep Throat came along and parodied all of that mercilessly. 

FENTON BAILEY:  There were hard-core feature films before Deep Throat - and even one about oral sex.  Mona The Virgin Nymph, which Bill Oscar directed, tells the story of this "virgin" who is engaged to be married but who goes around having sex with everybody. The way she does it and remains a virgin is that she gives everybody blowjobs.  So it's a feature-length film about oral sex.  But it didn't have Deep Throat's catchy title or its outrageous, off-color, compelling, and surreal concept - the idea of a clitoris in the back of your throat.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Directors Journal

(Continued)

SUNDAY JANUARY 2ND
MASS SUICIDE. That's the banner headline on the leaflet some guy gives me as I stand in line at the sunny Sunday morning food market waiting for an order of pot stickers.

It's one of those hell-in-a-handbasket leaflets. People will believe the craziest shit, I think, stuffing it in my back pocket. A few days later the heavens would open.

MONDAY JANUARY 3RD
The film is finished but the credits aren't. Without doubt the most important piece of real estate in all LA is not a compound in Beverly Hills but a single square of 35mm film. It's the contractual obligations and their correct interpretation to the letter that is perhaps more complicated than trying to learn Tamarind. To credit one person something can trigger all sorts of other contractual credits guaranteed by a network of alliances and deals that have the inmpenetrable complexity of medieval treaties.

To say nothing of the egos involved. And that's exactly what we're going to do - say nothing!

TUESDAY JANUARY 4TH
Show film to Harry Reems who has flown in with Jeanne, his wife, especially. He's extremely magnanimous, and essentially happy with the film.

FRIDAY JANUARY 7TH
Dennis Hopper comes back into the studio to read a few more lines. He's very gracious about it, considering he had to come straight from the dentist where he went straight after getting off the plane from England.

FRIDAY JANAURY 14TH
We are with Tammy Faye at the TCA for WE's (Women's Entertainment) announcement of our film Tammy Faye: Death Defying.

This sequel to The Eyes of Tammy Faye was going to be called The Demise of Tammy Faye, since Tammy had called us to ask us to follow her battle with inoperable cancer. But Tammmy has made a miraculous recovery and here she is answering questions from the press like

"Tammy Faye are you going to Hell?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Well you've lived in a house with Ron Jeremy, and got into bed with the people sitting beside you who have just made a film called Inside Deep Throat."

"I don't get into bed with anyone"

"But as a Christian, how do you avoid judging these people?"

(We are reminded of that classic line of hers "We're all made out of the same dirt and God doesn't make any junk." Except television critics!)

"I don't judge people because God doesn't judge people. God is God"

SUNDAY JANUARY 9TH
Biblical rains have been falling now for almost five days, dumping something like 17 inches. Randy has a waterfall in his backyard, and an underground spring has "overflowed" and flooded his basement knocking out his water heater. And phone. Too late to build an ark.

MONDAY JANUARY 10TH
Mixing the film all week with Lance Brown at Widget. We worked with Lance before when he mixed Party Monster, but it was seeing Riding Giants and its sonic vastness of thundering waves, a film he both mixed and sound designed, that made us realize we had to convince him to do the same thing for us. The especially great thing about Lance is that he is incredibly gentle, quiet, and capable of dealing with a bunch of frazzled filmmakers who've been working on this film for just too darn long!

THURSDAY JANUARY 13TH
The billboard is up on Sunset Boulevard. Inordinately thrilled.

Billboards in LA are the business cards of the rich and famous. They're also giant vanity license plates. They let everyone else in this town know what you are doing.

MONDAY JANUARY 17TH
As we are shooting, many people comment on the soundtrack – the catchy instrumental theme tune and the raunchy Deep Throat song with its nonsense lyrics ("deep throat, go row a boat, don't get your goat, that's all she wrote" - that sort of thing). So it seemed that we could do worse than make sure that Inside Deep Throat also had a killer soundtrack.

And Bill Coleman our music supervisor has done just that, artfully mixing dialogue, David Steinberg's emotional score, and classic hits of the period that deliver an overdose of memory pain.

A personal favorite is "Elected." I remember that song haunting me when I was 12. It was so screamingly cynical about the ghastly corrupt ballyhoo of politics, a fabulously prescient song about the forthcoming collapse of the process with Watergate. And then covering it when we were the Pop Tarts 15 years later, and here it is again another 15 years later. Scary, frankly.

Making an encore appearance after it's use in Party Monster is "Obscene Dirty." Perhaps to some that track's just another disco stomper, but to us it's the quintessence of sex and perfectly captures the mechanical madness that is modern porn.

Bill Coleman has been working away compiling ingenious running orders of the soundtrack. He's secured a deal with Koch Records - famous as the home of American Idol reject William Hung - and we're scrambling to get it all sorted in time for Sundance.

SUNDAY JANUARY 16TH
More credit drama... it only happens on public holidays or weekends.

"My life will not be worth living if we can't change it."

But this time. changing the fifth and final reel of the film means that we are cutting it to the wire in terms of delivering a print in time for the premiere at Sundance.

Just like Dale Carnegie said, "There's nothing sweeter to man (or a woman) than the sound of his (or her) own name."

(To be continued)

NY Post Recommends

Lou Lemenick at the NY Post recommends four films premiering at Sundance.  Inside Deep Throat, natch, is one of them.  And he reminds us that it's the first major studio-released NC-17 film since Showgirls.

Marilyn Chambers

One of the people you'll meet in Inside Deep Throat

From The WOW Report

1. Describe yourself as if you were writing a personals ad.
Former Ivory soap box mom looking for funny (not looking though!), articulate, pleasant-looking man who can take my breath away! Must love animals and children and be compassionate to those less fortunate than he. Baggage is okay, as long as he leaves it at the curb.

2. What's the title of your autobiography?
Confessions Of America's Most Famous Porn Queen.

3. Who plays you in the movie?
Reese Witherspoon

4. Who do you go to for advice?
My big sis, Jann.

5. What makes you cry?
When my teenage daughter tells me how much she loves me and how happy she is that I'm her mom.

Early Sign

From The WOW Report

Could there be a better location for the Inside Deep Throat billboard than the corner of Sunset and Horn in Los Angeles? OK, maybe Doheny and Swallow would be better, but you can't beat the gorgeous yin-yang of the NC-17 film being back-ended by the PG Shrek 2. (Inside Deep Throat premieres at Sundance January 21, and opens in theaters beginning February 11.)

Photos: Jim Galasso

Sundance Tickets

In just under five hours bidding stops on eBay for two tix to the premiere Sundance screening of Inside Deep Throat.  You win, and the seller will either mail them to you or slip 'em to you at the festival like a drug deal gone right.

Sundancing

World of Wonder not only has Inside Deep Throat  premiering at this year's Sundance festival, it's also being referenced in two other Sundance premiere films.  The WOW logo is featured on a TV set in a scene in Greg Araki's new film Mysterious Skin, and there is a mention of  Showdogs Moms & Dads in the fabulous new film from Don Roos, Happy Endings, which opens the festival and features one of Bailey and Barbato's favorite actresses, Lisa Kudrow.
 
The Inside Deep Throat after-premiere party, at The Shop, the site of the legendary Party Monster party two years ago, promises the Sundancers a real mind job after seeing that blowjob.  Brian Rabin, the party's co-planner (with partner David Rodgers) says the theme will be about the First Amendment and women's rights - against the glamour and glitz of the '70s disco scene.  All white with hot pink accents.  "The only real color," he says, "will be from the American Flags."  Guests can expect to find a copy of the Bill of Rights in their swag bags.

The monster party for Party Monster

And stay tuned for news of Bailey and Barbato's sex-and-the-movies panel discussion with John Cameron Mitchell.

Penetrating Questions and Inside-ful Answers from Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

QUESTION:  What did Deep Throat mean to you?

RANDY BARBATO: It was very much a time where you didn't talk about pornography, or you didn't talk about sex, and I lived in a very suburban neighborhood in New Jersey. I don't think I knew what Deep Throat  meant, other than it made my mother and her friends blush and giggle.

FENTON BAILEY: As as a kid I had a vague idea that there was some kind of movie out there called Deep Throat. But I didn't know what it actually meant. It was kind of like a code word, and if you didn't know the code, you were shut out of this secret world.

QUESTION:  When was the first time you saw Deep Throat?

FENTON BAILEY: We didn't actually see the movie until we started to make the documentary. It was Christmas, some friends were over and we thought, let's put it on. The holiday spirit just evaporated. It was kind of icky-making and uncomfortable to watch. Lots of it is out of focus, sort of out of sync, it's not very well edited and the acting is, er, not so good. Like the director Jerry Damiano said, it's not a good film.  And it's also from a time when the notion of what makes a person attractive on film has changed considerably.  There was a lack of grooming, I suppose. In the end we had to stop and turn it off and play a Christmas party game instead.

RANDY BARBATO:. We were all very embarrassed, even though our friends are pretty hard to shock. Which is interesting because back then in the '70s middle-aged middle-class people actually went to movie theaters and watched this film in public.  Today of course, if anybody wants to watch pornography, they do it in secret.

FENTON BAILEY: The privatization of sex and the fact that people look at it on their computer screens alone, it's kind of a shame. I'm not advocating public orgies or anything like that. But you have to admit that the degree of shame attached to sex today is a great regret. And it clearly was so different then. And "then" wasn't so very long ago. And so it seemed worth asking, What happened?

QUESTION: How did you come to make this Inside Deep Throat?

RANDY BARBATO: Fortunately we were chosen. By Brian Grazer.

FENTON BAILEY: We had made a film called The Eyes Of Tammy Faye that did okay at Sundance, and there we met one of the nicest people in the business, Kim Roth.

RANDY BARBATO: In fact, she's so nice you wonder what she's doing in the business.

FENTON BAILEY: So we had heard that Brian Grazer was planning on making a biopic about Linda Lovelace. And Angelina Jolie, tearing a page out of Madonna's book, was campaigning to play the part. So we did our own Joliefication and suggested we should direct the film.

RANDY BARBATO: Except that we thought Mariah Carey should play Linda Lovelace.

FENTON BAILEY: And Kim was gracious enough to indulge us with a meet-and-greet.

RANDY BARBATO: And then nothing happened.

FENTON BAILEY: As you would expect it to.

RANDY BARBATO: But then Linda Lovelace died.  And I think Brian felt that when Linda died, doing a film about her life was problematic because there isn't a very satisfying cinematic arc to her story. 

FENTON BAILEY: So he had the idea to make a documentary instead of a feature. And then he had a beauty contest of highly-noted documentarians, and fortunately we seemed to win that particular pageant. 

QUESTION: What was it like working with one of Hollywood's most powerful producers?

FENTON BAILEY: Well Hollywood moguls have a reputation for making the people around them crawl around in fear. But he makes it very easy to be yourself around him.  There were no mogul antics to dish about!

RANDY BARBATO:  There were some mogul-y touches.  It was cool to watch the cut in his screening room; the screen is vast. It was cool to fly on the jet.  Making documentaries doesn't call for much in the way of travel by private jet, sadly.

FENTON BAILEY: Normally when making documentaries you're carrying all the equipment and figuring out where to park the van. And it's just been great to be able to do this on a scale, thanks to him, where you can really think about the film and not worry about the van.

RANDY BARBATO: And  throughout the process he was just so interested and engaged. This wasn't something he was just going to put his name on, and walk away from.  And he was always challenging us

FENTON BAILEY: I lost count of the number of times he called us up and said, "No really guys, what is this film about?"  We were just tearing our hair out. He was right, of course, because for the longest time we had no idea.

RANDY BARBATO:  We knew it was an important moment, and we knew that it had significant cultural impact. But we didn't know much more than that. He gave us an extraordinary amount of room in terms of figuring out what this film was.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Directors Journal

(continued)

FRIDAY JANUARY 21ST

Finally the big day is here. The world premiere of the film at Sundance.

Have a pre-screening dinner at Zoom in the upstairs room. Harry arrives with his posse. Our team from WOW is there: Mona, Jeremy, Will, Ashley, Thairin, Chris, and Mary Anne (they drove up in an RV all the way from LA). The Imagine people are there, and then the HBO crew arrive.

Maybe it's just because its tense but everyone sticks to their groups. Theres not much in the way of mingling.

Earlier in the day, Brian had flown in by jet. As they were approaching the runway, the cabin filled with smoke - something caught on fire. Brian was amazingly unrattled and didn't even seem to want to talk about it. Instead dinner was spent talking about the intricacies of oral sex. I'm so looking forward to the day when I never have to think or talk about this subject ever again!

Then we all pile into a cavalcade of black Escalades and proceed to the theatre where we expect to walk a red carpet clamoring with press. En route we pull over to re-group. Randy and I get out - we're in the front vehicle - and walk towards the back of the caravan because there seems to be some sort of commotion. It's Brian's car. Turns out he can't get his seat to adjust and everyone's trying to fix it.

The two-minute ride comes to an end at the theater and we all pile out to do the red carpet. But instead of a clutch of media there's maybe two camera crews and a handful of still photographers. But hey, it's more than the solitary camera at the Edinburgh film festival.

Now we're waiting to go on and it's still being negotiated how we're all going to be introduced. The final final - and it's seconds before we walk out onto the stage - is that Geoff Gilmore will introduce us and then as we are walking up to the stage he will also introduce Brian who will immediately follow, so that we all arrive at the podium at the same time.

We get Brian to tell his story about his grandmother, and it's on with the show.

The Q&A afterwards is kind of funny. Harry is there and we bring him up. The first question is whether we would now do a feature film, the way we did Party Monster the doc and then the movie. Brian answers that doing the Linda Lovelace story had been his original idea, but that instead he wanted to tell the story of the film's cultural impact. And then - I chimed in at the end, "But, hey, we might do a musical version. In 3-D." It breaks the ice and the rest of the Q&A zips by.

From the Eccles its up to the Schoolhouse and the afterparty, in the exact same location as the party for Party Monster two years ago. Brian Rabin and David Rodgers have outdone themselves, producing a party that's even better than the last one. Though some things remained almost the same: instead of go-go boys we have go-go girls working it on a raised platform in the center of the room. Instead of doughnuts we have phallocentric foods like corn dogs. Instead of Felix Da Housecat we have Bill Coleman spinning an amazing set.

Oh, and it is nice to see Billy Elliot all grown up.

SATURDAY JANUARY 22ND

Press day.

In the afternoon, we are on the way to shoot our appearance on American Shootout.

Azlin, our designated driver, has a pitch for a show. He says it's based on his life and is about a guy who basically loves but mistreats women, and everyone around him hates him because he's such a fool. He wants to call it The Arsehole Bachelor. He reckons that in the end, around series three, he might get the message and shape up. And that's it.

The Shootout piece is taped in a spectacular house that seems to lean all Lemony-Snickety over the canyon. Peter Bart and Peter Guber do a masterful job at making it seem like we're just all chatting.

Then it's back into town to tape the Jay Mohr Sundance Dailies, produced by old friend Jerry Kupfur and Mark Katz. We arrive and people are talking in hushed tones. Turns out everyone's worried that Jay's bawdy humor might upset co-guest Michael Winterbottom, who's here promoting 9 Songs, so, er, can we try and steer it away from the gutter?

Jay is not a man to be trifled with. A hot and instant flirt, he knows just which buttons to press to make us all just sufficiently uncomfortable to be putty in his hands.

Fenton, you fascinate me

Oh, how so?

Don't say anything, just go with it

Shit, now that I'm Jay's bitch how can I rescue La Winterbottom, who's just walked in, his silent intensity arriving before him? No wonder everyone seems to be rushing around in a frenzy of second-guessing. Personally,
I always wanted to meet him, not just because Party Monster was so often compared to 24 Hour Party People, but also because the guy just keeps making films - one, sometimes two, a year. But not now, in my pink Superman T-shirt and wiggling like a worm on the hook of Jay's perverse charm.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the interview segment goes off, at least at first, a little awkwardly. Randy saves the day with a combination of the pithy and the flirty that is the match for Jay's unflappable command of The Uncomfortable Encounter.

MONDAY JANUARY 24TH

Sex Stays In The Picture panel at Sundance.

Our point - one that we don't get to make - is that sex and sexuality (in frank and explicit detail) has been exiled from the cinematic experience.

And the reason we don't get to make it is that one of the magician guys from Penn and Teller is in full-on bully mode, hectoring everyone. His point is that there's plenty of sex in cinema and this is all a load of liberal hand-wringing by the navel-gazing chatterati.

It's a frustrating experience. There are too many panelists and a lack of focus on what the actual issue is. Any attempt to discuss sex seems destined to flail around until it can latch onto a familiar issue that everyone can have a go at.

Nine times out of 10 it's the role of women and the abuse of women. Penn brings this on by saying that there's nothing wrong with people wanting to watch cutting up women (how could you possibly agree), that there's no difference between porn and art (agree) and that the female panelist who raises her voice at him is hot when she gets angry (ugh!). Obviously it's all calculated baiting but it's kind of tiresome.

Made us think that the culture war isn't really between the red states and blue, its between the ascendant bully culture versus the curious culture.

Think back to Clinton's convention remark that the Republicans need a divided nation, whereas the Democrats don't. Underlying the partisan remark is a fundamental truth that in the bully culture there has to be a right and a wrong, a victor and a victim. But reducing complex issues to simple dualities and then taking a sabre-rattling side might have worked in the past, but aren't we ready for a third way?

But it isn't really possible to get a word in.

At the end, a woman sitting next to Werner Herzog stands up and says that the danger today is failing to take the current administration seriously enough. She reminds us that no one took Hitler and the Nazis seriously.

TUESDAY JANUARY 25TH

Despite feeling the onset of Sundance fatigue, big blow-out party day.

The Sundance Channel party, legendary previous home for fat bags of swag, is only handing out hats with headphones built into them. Nevertheless the place is jammed to the gills.

Although the Variety party is up at the Stein Ericksen lodge, the crowds are not deterred by the hike. Variety reporter Dana Harris clings to the walls of the vestibule and sums it all up with her headline, Party Monster Besets Fest.

The IFP party looks like a bomb has hit it at the Turning Leaf lounge, and people lay around in catatonic film fatigue. But there are still two big ticket parties to go: Tartans featuring the Dandy Warhols and the TLA sponsored gig of the Scissor Sisters.

Leave town before dawn the very next day. Not a moment too soon.

(To be continued)

The Credit Roll

If your name isn't on this list, it could be the only one that isn't.

NARRATION BY

Dennis Hopper

PRODUCED BY

Brian Grazer

DIRECTED, PRODUCED BY

Fenton Bailey & Randy Barbato

CO-PRODUCER

Mona Card

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Kim Roth

EDITED BY

William Grayburn

Jeremy Simmons

ORIGINAL MUSIC BY

David Benjamin Steinberg

DIRECTORS OF PHOTOGRAPHY

David Kempner

Teodoro Maniaci

MUSIC SUPERVISOR

Bill Coleman

ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS

Ashley York

Sarah Bowen

THANKS TO

John Hoffman

SPECIAL THANKS TO

Sheila Nevins

Deep Throat footage courtesy of Arrow Productions

Post Production Supervisor

BEAU J. GENOT

Music Consultant

DANNY BRAMSON

First Assistant Editor

NICOLE WEST

Titles and graphics

BILL GEORGIOU
RICK MORRIS

Archivist

IAN MALLAHAN

Assistant Camera

LONN BAILY (Memphis)
MARK BRAUN (Tucson)
FORREST BURGESS (Los Angeles)
OLIVER CARY (New York City)
PAT KELLY (Boston)
ILYA LYUDMIRSKY (Los Angeles)
KATIE STRAND (Los Angeles)
CURT WALLIN (Park City)

Sound Recordists

ALBEE GORDON JAYME ROY

Additional Photography

HARRY FRITH
ALLAN PALMER

Additional Sound

MARK ROY (New York City)
MICHAEL BERGMAN (Binghamton)
STEVE BORES (Boston)