Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

THURSDAY JUNE 26 2003

SAN FRANCISCO - We are shooting at the Institute of Advanced Study of Human
Sexuality, where Ted McKillvenna presides over an enormous collection of pornography (26 warehouses, 3 million items). We shoot an interview with him in the narrow corridors of his vast collection. He shows us beautiful erotic photos of an interracial couple that he believes were the prime motivation in the government case against a subscription erotic magazine called Eros. In one of the few genuinely successful prosecutions against obsenity, the editor, Ralf Ginzburg, ended up serving jail time.

Sexology seems a weird subject to have any academic status. But adult star Annie Sprinkle has a PHD in the subject from the Institute. We shoot an interview with her arranged on an array of cushions, used - in what seems like a throwback to the '70s - to teach the faculty.� Or maybe the '70s never ended here.

Annie's first job after leaving home was in the box office of a theater in Tucson where Deep Throat was playing. When the feds raided it, she received a subpoena to go on the witness stand. This otherwise unfortunate event had the benefit of introducing her to Gerard Damiano.

I'd just left home and I was a young hippie, 18 years old, and I looked in the newspaper for a job.� And there was a job working in a movie theater.� So, I went to the movie theater, got the job, and had really no idea that it was a hard-core porn film. I think the first time when I walked into the theater to watch the film that I was selling popcorn for, I looked up at the screen, and it was kind of an epiphany.� It was really truly an, a religious experience. To me it was a beautiful thing to watch people have sex on a big, giant screen - that screen was huge.� That blowjob, that penis was 1000 feet tall, and it was like church.

Deep Throat was a huge success.� There were lines around the block, and there was just money, money, money all over the place. I� couldn't sell tickets fast enough.�

Little did I know that seeing Deep Throat would impact the rest of my life.� I then spent 30 years in the sex industry and studying sex and making sex films.� So Deep Throat, I can honestly say, changed my life radically.

Several months later I get a subpoena to appear in court and I was absolutely amazed that I was going to have to testify in this trial, because I was just there selling the popcorn. Anyway, sitting in the witness room, waiting for my turn to testify, I met Gerard Damiano and flirted with him shamelessly, because of course to me it was like meeting Steven Spielberg. I was very attracted to him, he had a lovely grey goatee, and he was very Italian.� He made funny sex jokes.� My in with Jerry was like, "oh, could you teach me to do Deep Throat?" So, he did.�

For a change of pace we then drove up to Berkely to interview Linda Williams, the author of Hard Core, a seminal academic text on pornography.

On the way back, we heard that the Supreme Court had repealed the sodomy laws.