Old School and New School

There's a very long, chatty, and good-natured column in Time, the magazine, by Richard Corliss, its film critic, on the good old days when porno was chic. The column is "rated NC17 for explicit nostalgia. And of course the release of Inside Deep Throat might have been what got him thinking about those days.

That was also the belief of Deep Throat's writer-director, Gerard Damiano, who said in 1973: "If it's left alone, within a year sex will just blend itself into film. It's inevitable."

To anyone who wasn't around in the early 70s, this statement must sound utopian, if not delusional. Well (and I know I've written this before, but this time, children, it's true), things really were different then. You get a sense of those old New Days in Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's Inside Deep Throat, a snazzy documentary now playing in theaters and coming soon to HBO, and a more synoptic view in the new book The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia. Diving into the nearly 600 pages of unmediated testimony from the actors, directors and producers, and the cops who kept track of them and tried to bring them down, a reader gets an inside look at a time when porn —the entire cultural life —was different, bolder, weirder, better.

But don't take my word for it. Listen to the Inside Deep Throat testimony of Damiano —now 76 and a Florida retiree, his trousers pulled nearly up to his tits, old-man style. "You had to be there," he says. "You had to be there. I'm thrilled that I was there. And I thank God I had a camera."

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Also, in the College Heights Herald, the newspaper of Western Kentucky University, humor writer Amber North "pulls a Seinfeld" and writes about "nothing" in her column, Just Sayin'.

While we're on the glorious subject of sex, I saw the greatest documentary in the history of life over break: "Inside Deep Throat." Just by the title you can see that the movie was genius. It's a look inside 1972's porno flick, "Deep Throat," which grossed $600 million, more than any independent film. . . . It was just a 97-minute joy ride of brilliance and awakenings. Dennis Hopper narrated.