Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

FEBRUARY 2003

In the course of doing research for the film, one of the big mysteries we come across is why the golden age of porn was so brief. The immediate and most quoted answer is that the advent of video took away the need for people to go to xxx movie houses and watch porn in public with an audience.� With that the need to tell a story and appeal to a broad audience disappeared, since sitting at home alone with the remote in one hand it was possible to seek out specific scenes.� But that doesn't explain why porn went from being chic to creep, and why it suddenly wasn't okay to be into it...

Thinking about this, we were reminded of an interview we did with Camille Paglia for Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization.

There was a kind of synergistic hybrid at that moment between the intellectual world and the pornographic world that for some reason fell apart.� It's one of the victims of the failure of the '60s in general through the self-destruction of my generation through drugs.� There was a tremendous intensification of creativity and then a collapse in so many areas in the graduate schools, in the art world, in the film world, and also in the pornographic world.� Something was about to happen.� The final emergence of pornography as a major art form has not been sustained.

The women, the ballsy chicks of my generation, the really truly radical women of my generation were interested in pornography and used also four-letter words and all kinds of barnyard epithets that respectable women had never used since we all lived on the land and farmed.� And� just all of a sudden feminism itself took a wrong turn, you see.� Germaine Greer came sweeping through America in 1971 as this incredible figure of free love and believing in balling as many men as she could and so on.� And all of a sudden five years later she had, she was anti-sex, anti-men.�

The culture took some strange turn in the 1970s that I don't think has ever been explained yet.� We may need like another hundred years to get perspective on it.� But it was a general collapse of the '60s in so many ways, including in rock music.� And I can't explain it.� The culture took a reactionary turn after what seemed like we were heading toward a climax of the sexual revolution that we never actually attained.�