Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SATURDAY JANUARY 11th 2003

LAS VEGAS - We fly to Vegas to cover the porn oscars, officially known as the Adult Video News Awards.

This is really the start of The Awards Season. It's truly mind-boggling how vast the awards have become. Several ballrooms at the Venetian are joined to form a vast audience. The Golden Globes seem kind of modest in comparison. And nothing can beat someone thanking God for their award for Best Anal Performance. Filming on the red carpet - which stretches for perhaps a quarter of a mile, snaking all the way through the lobby of the Venetian - it was surprising how few of today's porn stars knew who Linda Lovelace was or had actually seen Deep Throat.

So different to the previous night when we attended the Legends of Erotica awards, where Linda was remembered posthumously. It's a small crowd - maybe 50 people - of porn diehards (and one really drunk person) in one of Raymond Pistol's adult stores, located far from the glittery part of the Strip. The cinder-block building and overhead strip lighting doesn't really lend much in the way of glamour. Bill Margold hosts and Eric Edwards presents the award.� It's a poignant moment. Touching that she should be remembered at all, but sad also that it should be on such a modest scale, compared to the previous night's bash.

The next day we go to the adult trade show and talk with several legends of the business: Nina Hartley, Ron Jeremy, Candida Royale, and Ron Sullivan.

Ron Sullivan: Deep Throat impacted America because it finally challenged, for the first time in our history, First Amendment rights and privileges.� It was finally put to an ultimate test.� And ever since then pornography has been taking one step at a time towards being decriminalized and legalized.

Nina Hartley: The whole idea that women finally were able to have sex for their own purposes and not just to keep a man or to get pregnant.� Revolutionary.� Revolutionary.� People don't understand that.� I'm a product of the '70s.� I couldn't be here, happy and healthy and sane, had it had not been for the '70s.� So Deep Throat really opened up everything.� The good and the bad. It opened up a Pandora's Box.� And so along with a sense of freedom comes sexual excess.� And response to excess is conservatism. But the genie's out of the bottle.� People want their sexual entertainment.