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)