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)