Faith, Hope, and Charitable Deductions

A woman calling her blog A Capable Wife (which sounds too much like Subservient Chicken) and whose husband forwards his emails to her (what's wrong with "Hey, honey, come look at this"), but who seems nice enough in her own Christian, bible-reading way, posted a forwarded email from her husband sent by the American Family Association about taxpayers having to support liberal PBS programming. Here's the part that caught our attention:

Recently, at the request of Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling, PBS cancelled a program called Postcards From Buster. The program, aimed at small children, featured a lesbian couple.

In addition, PBS featured an extended interview with Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato discussing their documentary Inside Deep Throat which is about the porn movie Deep Throat. PBS officials thought that the porn movie was so important that they just had to give it great publicity on their network using our tax dollars.

Surprisingly, Addie (that's Capable Wife's name) was fine with that, God bless her.

So what if they are liberal - it's the world we live in! - Get a grip - If your feet are firmly planted in truth, you are more than able to use some biblical, God-given discernment and live with confidence in this liberal choas that surrounds us...

(Read it all)

Hirsch v. Grazer: It's Nudes to Us

Inside Deep Throat producer Brian Grazer made some remarks about the adult film industry the other day on Good Morning America. We didn't watch or TiVo it, but Steve Hirsch, CEO of Vivid Entertainment Group, one of the most powerful producers of adult product, Group did. And he fired off an open letter to one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood. The letter appeared in AVN.com.

Dear Brian:

Congratulations on the tremendous reception your documentary, Inside Deep Throat , has been receiving. Good buzz and the attention of the talk shows and papers should help build the audience you're looking for. I've always admired your work and applauded your championing the right of the people to see and read what they want without interference.

Therefore, I confess to being a bit confused and curious about some of your comments last Tuesday on "Good Morning America." If I heard you correctly, you called your movie a "cautionary tale" and said that adult films are not good for people in front of or behind the camera.

When World of Wonder producers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato started filming Porno Valley with Vivid, you got an inside look at a professionally run business that does not in any way exploit people - whether they are before or behind a camera, or are simply enjoying our entertainment products in the privacy of their homes.

There are good and bad apples in every barrel and every profession. Most of the 12,000 people who work in "Porno Valley" are responsible, mature citizens who work hard and enjoy their jobs and who rarely have any problems as result of their employment. Today we in the adult business mirror mainstream entertainment companies far more closely than the impression you left in your GMA appearance.

With all good wishes,

Steven Hirsch
Co-Chairman and Co-CEO
Vivid Entertainment Group

Have You Had Your Sprinkle Today?

Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D, porn actress turned sexologist, addresses the question of whether Linda Lovelace was, as she later claimed, being raped when she made Deep Throat.

"While I do believe that Linda Lovelace was in a co-dependant, sometimes abusive relationship with her husband Chuck, I believe she was not being 'raped' when swallowing Harry Reems' penis on the set of Deep Throat. I swallowed Harry Reems' penis several times, both on film sets and off, and while it was never a particularly sensitive, loving, caring experience, it certainly was never cruel - just sexy fun. Also having been very close to Gerard Damiano, I know that he doesn't have a mean bone in his body. If he sensed that Linda was being 'raped,' he never would have filmed her. She said she had a very rough night with her husband before the filming of Deep Throat. But to blame others for that, like Damiano and Reems, was cruel and hurtful to them. She abused them! If you watch Linda having sex in Deep Throat, you will see that in those moments, she is relatively happy. Still, she will always be my favorite porn star, because she seemed to enjoy having sex so much. I sure do wish Linda Lovelace was alive today."

Hey Mickey, You're Not So Fine

Print production of porn films is a problem that producers haven't had to consider for nearly two decades, reports a recent article in Variety. While the occasional porn pic is still shot on film, they haven't been projected on a big screen for more than a decade, thanks to the VCR. "The one exception was  Blue Movie, but we sent the negatives to a lab in Italy and it was for theaters in Switzerland and Germany," says head of Wicked Pictures, Steven Vlottes.  "Wicked never made prints."   So although FotoKem and Technicolor both declined to produce a remastered print of Deep Throat for Arrow Productions head, Raymond Pistol, he eventually found a lab to make prints in time for their February 25 premiere, but he's not saying which lab that was.

For Technicolor, Pistol has nothing but disdain, noting that Disney is a major client and the lab may have feared offending the Mouse House. "Aren't they the one that had penises in children's films and don't they do the Touchstone films, which have plenty of nudity? I'm not the hypocrite." 

Opening weekend of "Deep Throat" will include latenight screenings at Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles (which is also running "Inside Deep Throat") and Laemmle's Colorado in Pasadena as well as engagements at Chicago's Music Box Theater, the Roxy Cinema in Philadelphia and a theater to be named in New York. The Roxy Theater in San Francisco will also screen "Deep Throat," but as a regular engagement.

Deep Thread

Remember the thread that started a short while ago on IMDb?  The one about the man who asked if he should take his son to see Inside Deep Throat for his 13th birthday?  The thread is quite long now, rife with opinions.  (Check it out)

Culture Wars

Fenton Bailey finds Frank Rich's essay, "The Year of Living Indecently," in this Sunday's New York Times "good atmospheric food for thought and timely for next Friday's release of Inside Deep Throat."  We couldn't agree more.  Here's a sample:

This repressive cultural environment was officially ratified on Nov. 2, when Ms. Jackson's breast pulled off its greatest coup of all: the re-election of President Bush. Or so it was decreed by the media horde that retroactively declared "moral values" the campaign's decisive issue and the Super Bowl the blue states' Waterloo. The political bosses of "family" organizations, well aware that TV's collective wisdom becomes reality whether true or not, have been emboldened ever since. They are spending their political capital like drunken sailors, redoubling their demands that the Bush administration marginalize gay people, stamp out sex education and turn pop culture into a continuous loop of "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

With Sunday's Super Bowl, their crusade has scored a touchdown. MTV has been replaced as halftime producer by Don Mischer, the go-to guy for a guaranteed snoozefest; his credits include the Tony Awards, the Kennedy Center Honors and the 2004 Democratic National Convention at which the balloons failed to drop. (His subsequent cursing was heard on CNN, but escaped government sanction because no Republicans were watching.) Fox Sports Net has changed the title of its signature program "Best Damn Sports Show Period" to "Best Darn Super Bowl Road Show Period." The commercials, too, will "be careful" and in "good taste," according to the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch. Fox, which recently pixilated the bottom of a cartoon toddler in a rerun of the series "Family Guy," now has someone on full-time rear-end alert: it rejected a comic spot for Airborne, a cold remedy, showing the backside of the 84-year-old Mickey Rooney as he leaves a sauna.

Culture Wars

In an article called "Members Only" in the Salt Lake Weekly, Scott Renshaw calls Sundance 2005 "The Year of the Penis."  He says the male organ was either visible in the festival's films, as in, say, 9 Songs and the "insightful documentary Inside Deep Throat and some others, or suggested in scenes concerning fellatio and masturbation, as in Pretty Persuasion and Thumbsucker and some others.    

And then there was Crispin Glover's What Is It?, which featured not only manual stimulation of a handicapped man (by a naked woman in an animal mask, no less), but oral sex involving someone with Down syndrome, salted snails, a minstrel in blackface, the most racist song I have ever heard and Shirley Temple juxtaposed with swastikas. This wasn't just pushing the envelope; this was shoving the entire freaking Postal Service off the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Is There a Doc in the House?

In a thoughtful article on the In These Times site, Pat Aufderheide talks about the continuing importance of documentaries amid the hubbub of Sundance, "still a place where independence of thought, difference of opinion, and innovation are prized."

(Full story)