Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MONDAY APRIL 22 2002

NEW YORK - Linda Lovelace dies. Channel 4 UK call about us doing a fast turnaround documentary about her life. But we are up to our eyes in it with getting ready to shoot Party Monster, so there's no time to pull the pitch together.

But as it will turn out, her demise was the birth of this film. Brian Grazer had a script for a biopic, but her death throws the life-rights issue into confusion.

At the same time there were stories circulating about how, at the end of her life, Linda was going back to the adult world; posing for Legs Show magazine, and autographing copies of Deep Throat.

As we would later learn, she had watched the film only weeks before she died for the first time since making it and, according to her daughter, her response was "what's the big deal?"

That would be the big question.

Just what was the big deal?

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 1 2002

LOS ANGELES - Fascinating meeting with Brian Grazer about Linda Lovelace project. We were sure this would only be a quick 20-minute chat. After all, only the weekend before 8 Mile had had its spectacular opening. Surely he would have other things on his mind. As it turns out, though, that other thing is this.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

DECEMBER 2002

Start writing treatment for documentary and quickly realize that the biography we're doing is really more the biography of a movie.

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.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SUNDAY JANUARY 19th 2003

PARK CITY - Head up to Sundance for premiere of Party Monster in competition (but that's a whole other story).

Meet with Harry Reems at Deer Valley Ski Lodge. He's cautiously interested, though says he has been talking to HBO for some time about doing his life story. For him, the big story is the mafia involvement, and in particular he's keen to know where all the money went. He seems to think that somewhere there's a big stash of cash, with someone living very comfortably off of it!

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.�

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MARCH 2003

We started off optimistically sending out hundreds of letters, but then the stony silence that followed was disconcerting. Follow-up calls only yielded negatives.� New York Times poohbah Arthur Gelb wouldn't be interviewed - even though he led an entire editorial department from the paper to see the film when it opened. Gay Talese wouldn't be interviewed. He spent years writing Thy Neighbor's Wife, a completely un-put-downable account of the sexual experimentation of the era that was every bit the Ur-text of the period as Bonfire of Vanities was of the '80s. The judge in the New York trial won't be interviewed. Perhaps we can't be that surprised about that. His verdict banning the film in New York blew the film up into a nationwide phenomenon. In addition to being a huge mistake, his verdict was also born out of ignorance; he didn't even know what the missionary position was. Finally the manager of the theatre in New York that showed the film won't be interviewed. He might just have a valid excuse; he's still wary of the mob connection.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

FRIDAY 25th APRIL 2003

Meet Gerard Damiano Jr, whose dad directed Deep Throat. He's trying to determine our intentions to see whether he'll encourage his dad to participate in the film - since his father hasn't talked about the film in many, many years and is somewhat bitter about how he never really made any money from the film. We talk for almost three hours.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

FRIDAY MAY 16 2003

Gerard Damiano

As it turns out, our first interviews are in Phoenix, with Jeff Smith a reporter from the local paper who reviewed the film and followed the trial when it was raided by the feds. He lays the whole thing out for us.
�

It's not the conservatives who've taken the fun out of American society now, it's the liberals.� Because they've got money, they're driving Saabs and Volvos, they're sending their children to Montessori School.� The very people who were behind Hey let's get out and have a good time and sleep with everybody and we can find whether we know them by name or not and we'll take any drug we can and get drunk and raise hell and make nasty films.� Uh-uh, they're not like that anymore.�

We ain't the people we were when we were kids.� And we're not nearly as much fun as we used to be because we take ourselves too seriously. They've made a ton of money and they're locked away behind guarded gates.� They know what you can get into by way of mischief and fun and they don't want their kids to do it, and they don't want anybody else doing it, you know.�

Liberalism, the flower power, the whole thing, it's just, it's, it's been horribly corrupted. They've risen to positions of wealth and prominence and, and real tight-ass conservatism. It's very undemocratic, it's very tightly structured, and they're scared to death that their children are gonna start having the kind of fun that they had when they were their children's age.

Liberalism itself has changed. Liberalism doesn't mean anymore being independent and willing to embrace the new and willing to consider any point of view, no matter how outrageous or unpopular.�Today's liberalism is so rigidly conformist; you gotta buy the whole package.� You buy the lattes and Swedish cars and private schools and natural fiber clothing and the whole goddamn kit. You violate from that dogma and you'll be drummed out of the corps and called all sorts of nasty names at parties.� And that's what's happened to me.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SATURDAY MAY 17 2003

TUCSON - This was where the feds first prosecuted Deep Throat. It's as hot as can be. You could fry an egg on the sidewalk. Manage - after Ashley and Mona do a capital job persuading them - to get inside the courtroom to film at the weekend. The judge at the time was so contemptuous of the whole proceeding that when the film was screened he sat behind rather than in front of the screen that the film was being projected onto for the jury. According to John Jacobs, the theater manager at the time, one of the jurors became physically aroused during the screening! Linda Lovelace was also brought into town to testify as a witness for the prosecution, but when she was called to testify they couldn't find her.� Apparently, she was in her room at the hotel blow-drying her hair. Priorities, priorities!� In high dudgeon, the judge continued without her.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SUNDAY MAY 18 2003

LOS ANGELES - Clinch deal with BSkyB and Channel 4 UK to make a 13-part series called Porno Valley, a docusoap following the lives and loves of the contract players of Vivid, possibly the leading adult production company in the San Fernando Valley, aka Porno Valley aka the other Hollywood.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MONDAY MAY 19 2003

Harry Reems and Fenton Bailey

We are here to do our first interview with Harry Reems, Linda Lovelace's co-star in Deep Throat. The guy's a complete charmer. Get the feeling that Harry is a kind of local hero. We follow him to the country club and watch him play golf. Everybody in town knows Harry. He takes us to a house he's building on spec; his company is called Reems Real Estate. And his fan base stretches far and wide. He tells us about the HRAC, the Harry Reems Athletic Club.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

WEDNESDAY MAY 21 2003

BOSTON - Interview legendary attorney Alan Dershowitz. When Harry was convicted in Memphis, Dershowitz helped him on his appeal. He said the funny thing was that when Harry came to meet him at Harvard Law school, he was the one dressed as a porn star, with long hair, jeans, and sneakers, while harry was the one who looked like a lawyer, with short hair and in a suit. Alan said that Harry would have made a fine lawyer.

In the afternoon we go to Quincy House, where, in the 80s, a screening of Deep T hroat provoked a schism first between the feminists and chauvinists of the faculty, and then between the police and the entire student body. It's so amazing how much the times have changed. Within the space of eight years, Deep Throat and porn in general went from being something chic to something politically incorrect.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

THURSDAY MAY 22 2003

PRINCETON� - When Deep Throat came to this Ivy league town, the Governor put in a call to Bruce Schragger, who was then the local county prosecutor, asking him to shut it down. But he declined. Instead of shutting down the film, Bruce and his wife went to see it. The theater has since been demolished and replaced by a Pep Boys. Bruce gave us a tour!

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

FRIDAY MAY 23 2003

NEW YORK - Shooting in Times Square. Susan Brownmiller is our tour guide, reprising the role she played taking people on Women Against Pornography tours in and around the sex shops of Times Square for $5. But today Peepland and the rundown theaters are all gone, and in its place the razzle-dazzle of America's favorite brand names, from Disney to McDonalds. It's so different, and yet.� . .� "I don't know if we won anything," sighs Brownmiller, gazing up at the torso and crotch of a gorgeous black model hovering overhead like a UFO. Turning away from the stories-high billboard of a naked Jenna Jameson and running directly into a wide mouth fellating a popsicle, she looks down at the ground.

From Brownmiller to Al Goldstein.� Al Goldstein is a Rabelasian character, fat, foul-mouthed, and unapologetic. He uses free speech to spew politically incorrect invective. For example. . . .

To Susan Brownmiller:� "You moron, dimwitted turd.� You smelly little facsimile of a human being.� You moron.� First of all, some women have rape fantasies.� Secondly, I want nothing more from a woman than to be her slave.� I have told many women to own me.� Use my tongue.� Let me bring you off.� I'm going to stay between your legs not for an hour, for days.� I've taught her not to have one orgasm, but 20. . . ."� Etc.�

Many find him repugnant and he would probably agree with them.� He's just such a turn-off that in the end he doesn't end up in the film as much as he should have, considering that he said the most important and truest thing that anyone would say:� "Our sexual freedom, your sexual freedom, it's very fucking important.� And it's a war that's never won.� So we need people like me who are either half-crazy or half self-destructive to keep the fight going.� Because it's not going to stay won.� You need nutcases like me to fight it."�

Who said it had to be pretty?

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SATURDAY MAY 24 2003

BINGHAMTON - It was here that in the first of many trials against Deep Throat that a jury found that the film was not obscene.� James Barber, the defense attorney, shared with us some of the secrets of his strategy.

A) Bring in expert witnesss to testify about the film's socially redeeming value.

B) Practice saying key words - like clitoris - so there would be no sign of embarrassment or shame as the the case was made.

C) Pick an all-male jury.

And it worked. Which is why, when the film went on trial in New York, the prosecution figured out a way to avoid a jury trial.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

WEDNESDAY MAY 28 2003

MIAMI - The prosecutor and the defender.� First we interview Bill Kelly, the FBI agent who relentlessly pursued not only Deep Throat, but many pornography cases. Although today he's retired, he's still very active in the cause.� Bill loves the camera and has endless stories to tell.

Then we hook up with Herb Kassner, who defended Deep Throat in the infamous New York trial.� He lives in one of those retirement communities where all the houses have beige interiors and anonymous looking modern furniture. They call these places God's waiting rooms, though we're� not sure He would appreciate the decor. When we arrived Herb was out on the patio smoking a stogie. As far as he was concerned, much of the campaign against pornography was a politically motivated sham.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MONDAY MAY 29 2003

Interview Art and Terri Sommers. In his younger days, Art distributed Deep Throat in Florida, until he was shooed off by the mob - and that's why Terri is dead set against him speaking to us. They duke it out on camera and, although it gets quite heated, Art prevails. By the end of the interview we've all fallen in love with them. No question about it, they should have their own film, and by the time we've returned two more times to interview them, we probably have enough material to make it.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MONDAY JUNE 2 2003

MEMPHIS -� Famed for Elvis Presley and Martin Luther King's assassination. Otherwise, it just gives us a feeling of vast emptiness and a sense of being frozen in time - not unlike the grassy knoll in Dallas.

That morning we interview Larry Parrish, the prosecutor famous for the Memphis trial of Deep Throat. En route to his office, there is a downpour of biblical proportions.

Thinking we'd go in with righteous guns a-blazin', we instead found a sneaking admiration for the guy. Ultimately, his point was simply either to repeal the obscenity laws if you don't believe in them, or enforce the laws as they stand on the books. Significantly, the laws have not been changed since they were used against Deep Throat. When we ask him today if pornography has penetrated too far into the mainstream to make it possible to turn back the tide, he shakes his head. While it might be true that blue chip companies like AT&T and Time Warner are involved in the distribution of hardcore either via the web or cable, he reckons they would back off in a New York minute if, in just a couple of cases, senior executives were sent to jail for conspiracy to distribute obscene material over interstate lines.

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.

Marilyn Chambers

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.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MONDAY JUNE 30 2003

Legendary porn star interview #1:� Marilyn Chambers. Marilyn, of course, was not in Deep Throat, but in Behind The Green Door. And after Linda dumped husband / abuser / svengali Chuck Traynor, it was Marilyn who took up with him. By her account, she had a happy and mutually beneficial relationship. Chuck was the one who taught her to deep throat, using the same technique of hypnosis that he had supposedly acquired while a Marine in Vietnam.

So, er, how exactly do you do it?

There's a whole technique that's involved in it.� Chuck Trainer taught me how to do it.� He taught me through hypnosis that your mind controls your body.� And that, obviously, you have certain, uh, gagging reflexes that you can control.

OK, well, it's kind of the secrets of the trade.� How much are you paying me for this?� (Laughts, clears throat) There's a whole positioning involved, and when somebody. . . it's very difficult to explain, I mean, and I'm not an artist.� But if a man is like laying on the bed, okay, and his, now I'm going to get like embarrassed. (Laughs) I know that seems impossible.

There's a certain way to breath.� And, if you want to come over here, I'll show you.� (Laughs) No, I'm kidding.� Um, there's a certain way that you breath.� There's a certain angle that you have to be at.� Because it's kind of like being a sword swallower.

But, um. . . .� (Laughs) God, you lay, uh, the woman. . . .� (Laughs) Shit, now, I can't say it.� I'm turning red, so, which is really stupid, okay.� (Laughs) Start over.

And so that when, and, you know, the lip action is real important.� And, um, the breathing is, uh, it's really kind of easier to show than it is to explain.� But the breathing action is, um, is very important, because you don't want to choke, you don't want to gag. I mean, that's like really embarrassing when you choke, you don't want to do that.

I mean, your mind just gets into a whole thing where, uh, your throat does feel like a vagina.� I mean, it's like you, your, your whole, you get confused, it's like you go into a trance basically, of, to what you're doing.� And, it's really, um, I was going to say psychedelic, but that's kind of an old word.� (Laughs) Psychedelic.�

Before Chuck, Marilyn had been married to a bagpipe player.

That day we also interviewed Tony Bill. Call it the Oscar Factor, but there is something about interviewing people with the little gold statuette on their mantelpieces.� Tony Bill was one of the producers of The Sting who ended up being one of the very few witnesses allowed to testify for the defence in the Memphis Deep Throat trial. In a nutshell Harry Reems was charged, merely for acting in the film, for being a part of the conspiracy to distribute obscenity. Well, the defence and Hollywood had something to say about that. But the judge wouldn't let them - because if he had let people like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty it would have been quite clear that the actor had nothing to do with the film's distribution. So after Tony BIll, he decided not to hear any more witnesses.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

TUESDAY JULY 1 2003

Legendary porn star interview #2:� Georgina Spelvin. Georgina Spelvin - not her real name - was the star of Damianos second big hit, the classic Devil In Miss Jones.

Back in Shakespeare's time they tell me, whenever there was a part that was too small for an actor, and he didn't want his name on it, he'd use George Spelvin.� Or if they were picking up townies to fill in, they'd use the name George Spelvin on the programs which they'd print ahead of time.� So George Spelvin was kind of like the John Doe of the English theater.� And that's how I picked the name George Spelvin, feminizing it to Georgina, which I thought sounded real classy.

Apart from that, she has our hands-down favorite line of all time. . . .�� Let's face it.� There is no more sincere compliment in the world than an erection.�

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

THURSDAY JULY 3 2003

Driving along Santa Monica boulevard in the early morning sunshine to get some general views of the Pink Pussycat theatre where Deep Throat had played - now the all-male Tom Kat - it seemed like nothing could go wrong.�

But things immediately went awry at the interview with James Clancy, an elderly� anti-porn activist. Age has not dulled his enthusiasm for his crusade. He arrives at the office with stacks of papers, court transcripts, and speaks for a solid hour before we can so much as get in a question.� He pulls out his time motion studies that cover our conference room table, documenting stills from porn films on the vast sheets in front of him. His goal is to make the corporations accountable for the spread of pornography into hotel rooms. But then he talks about straight cops being brainwashed into masturbating each other by subliminal frames cut into the film, and how he fears we might be in league with the Kennedys, so it all becomes much less clear.

That afternoon we interviewed Rod McKuen, famous - among other things - for creating the slogan MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. He gave a committed interview as the first amendment champion of the rights of Harry Reems.

Along with local news anchor Chuck Ashman, he organized a benefit screening for Harry Reems at the Pink Pussycat, generously attended by Hollywood royalty. He was a little coy about the A-list stars who showed up to the event - respecting their retrospective right to privacy, and covering for the fact that many have subsequently regretted their public association with the movie. Still, great stuff!

But then at the end of the interview he wouldnt sign the release but said he'd have his representative look at it.

Next day, Chuck Ashman called, who we had also interviewed and who, it turns out, was also Rod's rep. And in return for a signed release he wanted a fee of several thousand dollars that we simply couldn't pay.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

MONDAY JULY 23 2003

NEW YORK - Funny moment with Ralph Blumenthal, the reporter from the New York Times who wrote the famous article "Porn Chic."� He was standing on a street corner in Times Square, showing us the site where the New Mature Theatre once stood. Except that he was on the wrong corner, on the wrong street.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SUNDAY JULY 25 2003

Interviewed Erica Jong, forever to be remembered to her chagrin as creator of "the zipless fuck." We said we'd only need half an hour, but she was a firebrand and everything out of her mouth was just so good.� But she saved the most mindblowing till last.

We were very naive.� We thought if everyone smoked hashish and marijuana there would be world peace. I mean, it was silly. Smoking dope did not bring about world peace.� Instead, Nixon got reelected after being declared politically dead.� And the forces of repression came in in a huge, huge way.� And the forces of repression have been in control ever since.

You'll probably cut all this out.� But that's the real history of our times. And now what do we have?� We have a right wing government.� We have a John Ashcroft trying to take back women's choice.� We have incredible censorship of the media that proceeds from the White House and from the five corporations that own all the networks. And they're down there in Washington even as we speak, trying to get the FCC rules lifted so we'll have even less choice.

I know that probably you'll want to censor all of this.� But that's the reality.� What the '60s did that brief six-year period, in which the sexual revolution went public, let's say, was to set up an excuse for the biggest backlash of all time.� And the backlash is in the White House now.� The truth of the matter is that they don't want you to see the context and the big picture. They want you to see everything as little bursts.� You know, like the sexual revolution happened, yay.� And then the sexual revolution diminished because women wanted to go back and have babies and be mothers and all. None of that is true.��

Then we sped downtown to our old East Village stomping ground to interview Lovelace fan and expert, Eric Danville, author of a basically authorized autobiography of Linda, The Complete Linda Lovelace.��

He didn't have room for us to shoot in his apartment, so we ended up shooting across from our old apartment on 9th Street between B and C.� We turned around and looked up to the window of the sixth-floor walkup we had lived in for five penniless years.� So close to the past - about 20 feet - and so far - about 20 years.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

WEDNESDAY JULY 28 2003

FLORIDA - In the afternoon, we did the legendary Count Sepy, whose house was used as a location for shooting the original film.� We arrived, DP Teo Maniaci already rolling as he came out to greet us in black leather shorts. He had designed and built his house in Coral Gables to resemble a bull. He points at the roof line as if it's self-explanatory, but we can't really tell if entering the front door we are entering through the tail or the horns. It felt a little of both.

Inside, the house was a sensurround aphrodisiac crammed with erotic primitive art, much of it from Borneo.� Overlooking the vast living room was a loft with the prow of a Viking boat that served as a bed,�and in which the count claimed to have been deep-throated by Linda Lovelace. Someone later referred to the boat as a canoe, but you refer to the count's prow as his canoe at your peril.

He took us to the wine cellar where the infamous glass dildo and Coca-Cola sequence was filmed (you'll have to watch the original film if you want to know anymore), and regaled us with stories about orgies in the '60s.� Just then, a pair of unbelievably and barely clad nubile babes arrived in an open-topped sports car to go "swimming." Time for us to go.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

TUESDAY JULY 29 2003

BOCA RATON - Drove up to Fort Lauderdale and interviewed Andrea True, Len Camp, and Wakefield Poole. We were in an all-but-shuttered Marriott hotel that was celebrating Christmas in August for handicapped children. We did Andrea in the closed restaurant, appropiate since she turned up with a box of donuts for the crew - which was very generous and kind of her. But unfortunately, this being Miami, everyone's on the Atkins diet, so poor Andrea has to eat them all herself, which she gamely does. Then again, she once said that the the only thing better than sex would be swimming in a pool of mashed potatoes and gravy.�

Then Wakefield Poole showed up. But before that, we were treated to an impromptu visit by Len Camp, the location manager for the movie. He seemed to have no intention of being interviewed, but also no intention of leaving, and arrived with stacks of nude photos he took during the Deep Throat days - and some unmentionable celebrities baring unmentionable things are part of the collection.

By now, Wakefield Poole had waited patiently for three hours. We were interviewing him because he arguably started the porn chic craze with Boys In The Sand, a gay hard-core porno that played in a regular theatre to rave reviews. He in turn had been inspired by Andy Warhol's Blow Job.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

JULY 30 2003

FORT MYERS - Interview Gerard Damiano and his son and daughter at their home in Fort Myers, Florida.

I was asked a question by Oui magazine what's better than sex? And a lot of people had given these flowery quotations of what they thought was better than sex.� And I said better than sex is a good bowel movement.� I always thought that sex was like water, water was all over the place and water is only important if you don't have it.� You die.� Uh, sex, if you don't have it, that's when people go bananas.� When you deny people the the ability to be sexually free, if you take that away, then it's dangerous.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

SUNDAY AUGUST 1 2003

MIAMI BEACH - We were curious to see if we were to remake Deep Throat today if anyone would turn up. And so we printed up a flyer with audition details and wandered up and down the beach handing them out. The next day we set up our cameras at the audition location, the idea being to interview anyone who showed up and ask them about their motivation for auditioning. But then no one shows up, which answered our question, sort of.

Inside Deep Throat Directors' Journal

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 4 2003

CAPE COD - Interviewed John Waters. The trouble with John Waters is that everything he says is smart, and he's such a consummate master of the interview genre.

He reminded us of two films we probably won't make mention of in the film.� Andy Warhol's Blow Job, filmed in 1964, showed a naked John Giorno from the waist up receiving a blow job from an unseeen worshipper.� Waters points out that it's a cinematic masterpiece. And it is.� He also mentioned Bill Orso's Mona The Virgin Nymph. This was a feature length sex comedy also about oral sex. The premise was that Mona, engaged to be married, could remain a virgin by blowing her fiance and - it becomes apparent - everyone else, even (in a remarkably risqu� scene you could never get away with today in any context) her own father.

Perhaps inspired by John Waters, we purchase a giant pink inflatable dinosaur for Randy's pool.

Directors' Journal

THURSDAY AUGUST 26, 2003

LONDON. We interview Xaviera Hollander, author of The Happy Hooker, now living in exile in Amsterdam. She remembers the time she met Linda Lovelace

She came to apply for a job as a prostitute in my establishment as The Happy Hooker. And Iurned her down for reasons that I found her too wholesome, too submissive, not really intelligent enough for the job. Because I was looking for more sophisticated girls. When she came to my house, she was just a very homely young, very naive girl, actually.

SEPTEMBER, 2003

We begin post production and hope to have a rough cut by Thanksgiving. Optimism itself!

Danny Bramson is to be the music tsar. He's a legend - although everyone in Hollywood's a legend. But in the flesh Danny supersizes that concept. It's not just that he is physically imposing, his aura is a supernovalike. He pounds the table, bangs his fist on the wall, and at one point actually gets down on the floor on his hands and knees, racking his brain for bitchin' tracks, dude, for a totally rocking monster soundtrack!!! Nervous glances fly around the room. This level of demonstrativeness is totally alien to the good people of Hollywood. Especially on a first meeting!

Will Grayburn is editing, having done the same for 101 Rent Boys, Juror #5, our HBO film about the O J Simpson trial, and the episode all about video in Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization.

But just because we've started editing, doesn't mean we have a script. It takes a better part of a week just to read the transcripts. Paring them down for selects reults in five hundred pages of must-use material. We're drowning in it!

And just because we've started editing, doesn't mean we have stopped shooting, either.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 18th, 2003

LONDON: Party Monster opens in the UK. The reviews are in and they are universally negative. But when Boy George weighed in with a negative review in the Sunday Express, I finally some confidence in the film. I once predicted that Madonna would turn all holy with child, and I reckon Boy George will turn into an arch conservative. In the same way so many of the 60's liberal and sexual revolutionaries sold out there own ideology for the cash that came with the economic boom of the 80's and 90's. They - the wild things, the free love hippies - are the reason we live in such conservative times today. Its not so much a backlash as it is their own betrayal of themselves and their so-called ideology, much of which was simply self-indulgence posing as philosophy.

TUESDAY OCTOBER 21, 2003

LOS ANGELES: Peter Fonda gives us a very gnomic interview in the grounds of the Chateau Marmont

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 22, 2003

Interview Gore Vidal who mainly wants to talk about the boys in the war; its all completely fascinating.

I think Kinsey triggered it all by denying that there was anything except sexual degenerates, except among the occasional, uh, demented hair dresser, who would, you know, end up murdered somewhere. Uh, they idea that, uh, all American boys who had just won the Second World War were involved in this sort of activity, sometimes to the point of obsession, sometimes to the point of falling in love. Uh, the, this traumatized the whole country. Well, our boys were very busy winning the Second World War and also with one another. That was a fact. So now you have all of these people trying to erase Kinsey. They've tried to erase me for 55 years, since The City And The Pillar.

So, anybody that much younger than I, which practically everybody is, doesn't know what it's like to have had a free sex life.

Elliott Gould is rather wary of us when we interviewed him by the side of his pool.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 5, 2003

Interview with Hugh Hefner. It's hard not to become slightly excited at going to the fabled Playboy mansion. However, in the cold light of day few nightclubs look as magical as they should - there's always an unsettling aroma of congealment. On the other hand there was also something changeless about it, and the lack of renovated perfection that carpets all of Bel Air made the place feel almost homey. In time this place will be preserved as a National monument.

Reading back his transcript he was perhaps the only person we interviewed to speak in prefect sentences and complete paragraphs with no ums and ahs. Like this final thought, for example...

When the subject is sex, don't expect a lot of reason. It isn't rational. Most of our views, views and values in terms of sex are based on religious views. And those have to do with superstition. They're not rational. Sex is a good thing, not a bad thing. This would be a very poor world without it. If we reproduced in some other way, it would be a colder, less worthwhile world. And the reality is that you know it, it is sex more than religion that is the major civilizing force on this planet. It's the beginning of family and tribe and civilization itself. And it is the major motivating factor on this planet. I think on that note, I'm out of time

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 6, 2003

Have our photographs taken for an early article in the LA Times. Brian is insistent they feature all three of us together. At one point the photographer gets me and randy behind the couch, Brian in front. Quick as a flash Brian says 'wait; won't that mean I'll be in focus and they'll be blurry? I don't want that'. The photographer fires off a shot and sure enough that's the one that's used.

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 13, 2003

Interview with Charles Keating and Dolores Wells

Mona and ashley have tracked down Linda Lovelace's former secretary on the outskirts of Phoenix. A former playboy bunny, Hugh Hefner recommended her to Linda when she moved out to make it in Hollywood. Today she lives extremely modestly in what is almost a road side shack. But she's laid on an amazing spread. and the first thing she does after pouring us all champagne is show us her spread from Payboy. Miss June 1960. As she herself says "You don't even see a nipple or a pubic hair. Today it's sit down, spread those legs and pinch those titties"

She tells the infamous story about how Linda Lovelace taught Sammy Davis how to do deep throat because she was there in the room when it happened.

THURSDAY DECEMBER 11, 2003

NEW YORK: Interview Richard Dreyfuss

We talk for an hour and at one point he simply says...

You know, since you're not going to use this footage, could I?

The '60s was all about starting from an innocent point, And we can change the world, we can do the impossible, we can go back to Eden. We can, you know, put the, we can put violets in guns barrels and things. And, and commercialism, of course, I mean, it, it's a capitalist marketplace world, and someone went, well maybe, maybe we can make a pin about the, about the flower in the gun, and then we'll sell it for ten dollars. And, and then we get a T-shirt. And, and it inevitably became commercialized.

That's the responsibility of the worship of the business community. That's the right's culpability. The left's culpability is the celebration of individual rights to the point that it was madness.

We lost, we have lost all the institutions that, that pin us down and give us our moral character. Our Andy Hardy small town stuff, from which we can sin. If the church is gone and the schools are gone and the (STAMMERS) parenting is gone, and blah blah blah, and we're just an amorphous blob of, of being, of, of people who are manipulated by the media advertising, then, then, um, pornography seeps into advertising. And pornography seeps into the culture, in music and in every way. And it changes our atmosphere, and all of a sudden, am I blame, am I saying pornography is the evil? No. But is, are we responsible for the destruction of our institutions so that porn, you cannot defend pornography's affect anymore? Yes. It, it's not just a simple conservative, liberal thing.

So I, who, I will defend pornography's right to exist, and I will defend, you know, our culture's freedom of speech. At the same time, we have to take responsibility for the loss of permanence. The loss of knowing who we are to start off, to start with. And yeah, okay. The sexual revolution was a good thing up to a point, and then it was a bad thing. Like democracy is a good thing, up to a point, and then it's a bad thing.

2004

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 1, 2004

Janet Jackson flashes tit during Super Bowl. Miss this because I'm at Bea Arthurs one-woman show in Torrance.

Funnily enough Deep Throat the original movie was also filmed during Super Bowl weekend in 1972.

Overnight negotiations with a number of different cable outlets for the now-completed series of Porno Valley come to an abrupt end.

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2004

Speak with Ken Turan, the LA Times film critic. He wrote a book about adult cinema called Sinematic.

He reckons that we are primed for a severe backlash against licentiousness. He thinks that Britney / madonnas kiss and nipplegate are incidents fuelling public anger at the current pornolization of the mainstream, and he thinks that all it needs to light a match to this is a conservative and charismatic politician.

Show Brian the first assembly at his house. At the end his first comment is; wow when a documentary is long, its really long. Coming from anyone else it might have seemed negative, but from him it was just telling it like it is!

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 15, 2004

JAPAN: Heading to Tokyo for the last leg of the party monster express. Everyone has been saying 'Oh, the film will do well in Japan' thinking perhaps that we might not catch the slight insult that comes with that.

So we arrive in Tokyo. And Dai - the rep from the film company - is there to greet us. But it turns out that we must go to another gate to wait for Mac and Seth to arrive. In due course they do, sweeping past. We say a few hellos and follow them,trailed by a camera crew, to a stretch limo that they get into and drive off. It turns out that the rest of us will go with the luggage by van. After some time spent finding the van in the parking structure we then load the bags
"Do we have everything" asks Dai after we've loaded all the bags into the back of the van.
"Everything xxcept our dignity" says Randy
The very good news is that we are staying at the Grand Hyatt - better known as the Lost In Translation hotel. Sadly the ersatz cover band Sausolito are nowhere to be found.

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2004

BANGKOK: We thought it would be neat on the way back from the premiere of Party Monster in Japan to interview David Winters. He took up with Linda after Chuck Traynor and tried to turn her into a superstar. http://www.davidwinters.net/

We arrive around midnite. The hotel faces onto a street with a rail line built overhead it. Electrical cords hang low in tangled bunches. Shanty stalls line the narrow sidewalk beneath selling bootlegged dvds, pungent foods, faux louis vuitton, and black velvet paintings. It's 2:00am and very crowded, the traffic bumper to bumper (mainly taxis) and the air as thick as a gamey soup.

The next day we interview David Winters. He was an early Malcolm Mcaleren types, roving between hollywood and rock (he directed one of Alice Cooper's concert films) in Sergeant Pepper drag (frock coats and lace sort of thing). This might explain whey he said that he felt he was born 200 years too late. My favorite detail was that the only car he would drive was a Rolls Royce ("cos it's good for my voice"). When in London he hired two; one for her with the numberplate WOMB and one for him with the numberplate PEN15 (er that would be PENIS).

The one film he made with her was Linda Lovelace For President, in which Linda ran for president. But perhaps it's a law of pet rock science that lightning doesn't strike twice. That's not to preclude the power of marketting skills, but, But if something is going to take off with the public, there still needs to be some element of charm, of chance, of innocence. And the public somehow have an intuitive and unfailing feel for this. On paper there was nothing wrong with the idea of Linda Lovelace For President, just as there was nothing wrong either with the idea of William Hung recording an entire album. But...

Bangkok is amazing. Seems that in the Far East entire cities have themes; in China there is Sock city and Underwear city. Bangkok, tho', would have to be Sex-for-sale city. But i limit my purchases to a bootlegged copy of Party Monster for $1.

WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 25, 2004

Bizarro day shooting first Larry Flynt and then Jack Valenti. Quite the contrast. Larry was completely clear while Jack Valenti danced about with the nimbleness of a politician.

When I invented the ratings system, I did not trademark the X. It's a letter, I didn't know how you'd trademark a letter. I guess we could have had a logo or symbol, but we didn't. And as a result, the pornographer came in and said double X, triple X, quadruple X. And they used the X as an enticement to people who wanted to see that kind of movie

Valenti's rating system was a masterstroke of both managing to separate hard core from Hollywood and marginalizing it too. Yet for all his evasiveness, I don't think he intended to be this direct...

Well, I don't think anybody in America's public figure is pro-pornography, or an advocate for it. I don't know of anybody that was. I'm certainly not. And I don't think Mr. Nixon was either. I don't think any president, or any senator, any congressman was going around saying we got to have more pornography.

Pornography maybe an impossible cause. But freedom of speech is vulnerable if it isn't defended.

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 27, 2004

All hope of having the film finished in times for Cannes is slipping away.

The film is entering the difficult teens. There's a feeling that there are too many old people in the film. We are being asked where are the Paris Hiltons and the Jenna Jamesons? It's not that we feel precious that we are making a documentary as opposed to putting on the tits (ok, we do feel a bit precious), but what would they have to say?

We see ourselves as striking a blow for the oldies. The tyranny of the 18-34 demographic is so boring. It's truly amazing to see a 60, 70 or 80 year old talk frankly about sex, and talk about it in a way that the 18-34s are just too freaked out to even touch.

"Yes, well, we understand that, but do they all have to have silver hair?"

"There may be snow on the rooftop, but there's fire in the furnace below".

After that there's no more talk of interviewing Paris Hilton.

FRIDAY MARCH 19 2004

We all have the 'whyisntthisfilmanygoodandwhenwilliteverend' blahs.

Tammy Faye calls us and tells us she has that she has inoperable cancer and wants us to have lunch with her to discuss filming the process. It's great to see her, and she - the one who should be crying - cheers us up. We talk about the film and all fall about laughing deciding that it should be called 'The Demise Of Tammy Faye'.

SATURDAY MARCH 20, 2004

NEW YORK: Take the jet to New York with Brian Grazer to show Sheila Nevins and John Hoffman the cut at HBO...

'Take the jet' - sounds very blase but actually our little hearts were beating pit a patter. Yes, it's the little things.

Now, if you are a jaded jetrosexual you will already know this. But for us this was our first private jet experience, and found the learning curve of Jetiquette as steep as the angle of take off.

The first dilemma is where do you sit. That is connected to the equally important question of when to arrive. Never be late. You don't want to keep a jet packed with tip-top execs waiting on the tarmac. But then you can be too premature. Because once you get on the jet, where do you sit? You can't really settle in and make yourself comfortable until your host arrives and picks their perch. Do not be fooled: all the seats may look the same, but they are not the same! So we arrrive early, plonk ourselves down and wonder why everyone else is standing round? The other thing to remember is that when the lovely food spread is laid out, you should only pick at it nonchalently instead of devouring everything as if you were a starving kitten. It's funny how it's the little things can derail a career (while no one notices the big things).

The screening was ok. Flew home by regular plane, which was like going cold turkey. Jets are the new crack.

FRIDAY MARCH 26, 2004

LOS ANGELES: Interview Lilli Zanuck who says the smartest things. She has a clipping from the New York Post challenging us to tell the difference between porn stars and high society hotties.

so many things that are fashion statements today, fake nails, fake tans, Brazilian wax, fake breasts, a certain kind of hair, artificial big lips, these are all a kind of iconography that comes from pornography . It's everywhere - whether it's a cardio strip club, or pole dancing and belly dancing classes. These are images and fashion statements and trends that come from pornography. Women are working really hard to look like a porn sta

In the next few months the world goes porno... Timothy Greenfield-Sanders publishes a book of portraits of porno stars Thinking XXX, and has an HBO special to go with. Larry Sultan publishes a book of photos taken on porno sets called The Valley. Jenna Jameson releases her autobiography How To Make Love Like A Porn Star, and Vh1 does a Jenna special that rates like christmas. They also follow this with When X Ruled The World, with its usual chef salad approach (cut everything into tiny pieces and toss with graphics). Despite all this still no takers for Porno Valley, however.

MONDAY MARCH 29, 2004

Interview with Peter Bart at Variety. Completely candid and charming and funny.

You say let's go on a date, let's go to dinner, you said let's get high or let's get stoned or let's drop acid or something. So added to this was Deep Throat. You get stoned, you see a porn movie. I mean and then you quote experiment. And it was a shock to those of us who were products of the '50s. You know all of a sudden you're going out with a girl and the girl would say, you know, I'm really into oral sex aren't you? Boy things aren't that colorful today are they?

WEDNESAY MARCH 31, 2004

Interview with Jon Lewis author of fascinating book Hollywood Vs Hard Core, which tells the story of how Hollywood survived the censors by foreswearing sex and thrived instead by embracing a pornography of violence.

When Nixon became president he appreciated his promise to the south, which made him president. And he understood that the south had very socially conservative views, and viewed porn asthe product of a kind of eastern establishment and a west coast silliness. He also was convinced, and he was right about it, that there was a silent majority in America. That, while the press, who was paying so much attention to a sexual revolution, was paying so much attention to Deep Throat, that the majority of Americans were leaning in a very different direction.

TUESDAY APRIL 6, 2004

CAPE COD: Norman Mailer finally said yes to an interview. He said he would give us half an hour of his time. Thirty minutes. Total. Only problem was that we had pretty much finished filming. and we were on the West Coast, he was on the East.

Are we sure we really want to do this? Do we need to do this? It's a long way to go for half an hour.... but then we also figured that if we went all that way, it shouldn't be too hard to keep him talking; he's bound to give us at least an hour, right?

Red eye to boston, four hour drive up to Cape Cod. Practically next door to where we had interviewed John Waters six months earlier. Set up the interview, in he walks and everything out of his mouth is solid gold.

Things are going marvellously, and I'm half way through a question when he says "I said i'd give you half an hour, but i'll let you finish this question since you've flown all this way to see me' I mangled the question but he gave a very generous and gracious reply.

sex is the last of the great mysteries. That and maybe war is another one the mysteries. These elements are not to be abused, ideologically, intellectually, rationally speaking. You don't want them to make you comfortable. When you have every kind of sex there is, what do you do with your soul? And that, for me, is an open question to this day.... I'd say you really enter the mystery at that point.

And then we flew back to LA.

Please no more interviews!!!

MONDAY APRIL 19, 2004

Interview Bill Maher.

In a 150 years when we are getting around by jetpacks and eating tablets. I would hate to think that we are still hung up on that. But. I'm sure Bush's great great great grandson will be trying to make hay on that one, and making sure that people in Utah were not getting porn because it could lead to masturbation and then they wouldn't have the energy to churn butter.

Really, no more interviews!!!!

THURSDAY MAY 27, 2004

Go see Madonna on her Reinvention tour. Madonnas spirituality is obviously something she can afford to indulge in. Though she has renounced her Material Girl ways make no mistake she could not have got where she is today if the road were not paved with skulls. She had to claw her way to the top, or stay perpetually on the bottom. Wonder if this is the same problem for all those sexual revolution liberals who, when they had nothing, preached free love and and down with corporate greed. Now that they have plenty, they have so much more to lose. Morality then becomes a necessary construct to protect what they have. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But we should just recognize it as the institutional hypocrisy that it is. The only constant is selfishness.

SATURDAY JUNE 5, 2004

Ronald Reagan dies.

Directors Journal

JUNE 2004

The dog days of editing. The dark ages. More than once we wondered if it would ever end.

Jeremy Simmons steps in and takes over from Will Grayburn, who heads back to London after a beyond-the-call-of-duty tour of duty. The switch actually works well for the film. Fresh pair of eyes may be a cliche, though that doesn't make it any the less true.

FRIDAY JULY 9TH
Brian calls and says he's screening the film for the brass at Universal. "I told them all how cool you guys were and so wondered if you could go by at the beginning of the film and just be yourselves. You know, be cool." So we went by and got blue curb parking which was exciting - because we were parked right outside the screening room. Inside there were maybe half a dozen people and we just chatted with them and tried to be cool without seeming like we were trying to be anything other than just our cool selves!

Good news is that even before the screening they had decided that they would distribute the film. Can see the headline DEEP THROAT TO OPEN WIDE.

TUESDAY JULY 27th
Had a Hollyweird screening of the film at Brian Grazer's house. Something seems to be bothering him about the film.

MONDAY AUGUST 2ND
Brian calls: What is this film about? These calls will become a drumbeat. No pressure!

MONDAY AUGUST 9TH
We are on the Australian Gold Coast at the Spaa conference, doing a sort of retrospective, and as part of that we showed a snippet of the intro to the film. When the numbers come up about how much the film had made the audience gasps audibly. That's when we first knew we really had something here.

But back in the States, general confidence in the film seems to be slumping.

There's a feeling that the merry band of renegade filmmakers who have the bright idea of shooting the film isn't playing and that we should cut it down. Count Sepy is removed from the cut. Mercifully this issue goes away with the first test screening when it plays uproariously well, and the swinger Count is restored to his rightful place in the film.

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 14TH
First test screening. As the lights go down lovely Wilmer Walderrama sneaks in.

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 29th
Second test screening. The test scores have hugely improved on their previous total.

The test screenings - and altogether we did three of them - are tremendously helpful in shaping the pace and tackling the ending of the film. Kevin Goetz who runs them is a master of the cross examination of a select group of the audience afterwards. His tour de force begins with him asking upwards of 20 people their names. Every time he returns to them he addresses them by name.

As editing grinds on, there's a concern that the film fails to connect with the present. The remedy for this is to shoot frat boys, teen girls, and seniors talking about oral sex, to try and show the shifting perspective from oral taboo to the no biggie it is today.

Although the material doesn't fit in the final film, shooting the guys at Brian Grazer's alma mater, University of Southern California, proves an interesting experience when campus officials swoop down. Although we have permission to film, once they get wind of the subject matter they decide to close down the shoot. They attempt to confiscate the tape we have recorded, and urge the students not to say something that they might regret. Perhaps the most shining example of the climate of fear pervading the culture today. It's okay to download porn in private - and all these kids do - but to have an intelligent open discussion about it is verboten. Odd for a university administration to be afraid of the exchange of ideas. Isn't that what establishments of further education are for?

One of the toughest things is to determine where the film should end and the audience reaction to it begin. We especially see-saw about the position to take vis-a-vis the modern porn industry. Sheila Nevins at HBO thinks we should cut out the whole idea of the pornolization of the mainstream, and the use of sex in advertising because it feels like a whole different topic, and the subject of an entirely different movie. On the other hand Brian Grazer feels we need to address this because today so many of the people who cheered on the sexual revolution now feel uncomfortable with their children doing the same things that they did in their younger days. They don't want their kids going to blow-job parties because it's not safe. But behind the convenience of the HIV shield lurks the real feeling that its just not seemly. Anyway, whatever the reason the liberals of yesterday are the naysayers of today. They haven't gone Republican - that would be going too far - but they do find themselves in an uncomfortable position. This ambivalence is the morning sickness of what eventually comes to term as institutionalized hypocrisy. It's the only way to get through the paradoxes and conflicts confronting us at every turn. Lie, cover it up, and in your wrongness claim righteousness and invoke God! The breakaway feminists who put the brakes on the sexual revolution by protesting the male rape and porn were the early adopters of this liberal dilemma that remains so desperately unresolved today.

Be all that as it may, how much of it should we put in the film and how much of it should we leave to the audience to discuss after they have seen the film? If we end the film prematurely the audience might feel that we avoid the issues, on the other hand if we get into it too much we'll probably come off as shrill and preachy.

This goes on for months, going back and forth, back and forth as we try every possible combination.

Don't worry, says Sheila, films have to get worse before they get better. But this seems to be getting nothing but worse and worse and worse.

Gotta dash - it's Brian on the line. "Hey guys, blah blah blah, so I was just thinking (on the jet, on the freeway, in New York / Rome / Paris, at home, just in a meeting with [insert name of a-list celebrity or world leader]), What is this film actually about?"

Where is the button on the Avid you can press that just auto-finishes the film?

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 13th
Brian calls. What is this film about? Brian's in New York on his cell phone, walking down 5th Avenue. Amazingly every passerby seems to know him and calls out "Hi Brian" or "Congratulations." We think this perhaps distracts him from actually getting the answer to his question, which we're still not sure that we've every really satisfactorily answered.

(To be continued)

Directors Journal

(Continued)

MONDAY NOVEMBER 2ND
The final screening held at CAA.

One of the last things that we did on the film was add the beginning of Supertramp's "Crime Of The Century" to the very beginning of the film, where all the power logos are parading by.

A last gasp of pomp rock in the Seventies before punk ruined everything, the lyrics of the song - featured time-appropiately at the end of the Memphis trial in June '76 - are just so uncannily perfect...

Now they're planning the crime of the century
Well what will it be?
Read all about their schemes and adventuring
I'm sure it's well worth the fee

The crime of the century can be seen as either the creators of the hard core movie and the mob who controlled and distributed it, or the government that went after it - determined to exile sex not only from the cinematic experience but also from any adult consideration in the culture. That's what makes the second verse so perfect - although there was no way to fit it in...

Who are these men of lust greed and glory?
Rip off the mask, and let's see!
But that's not right - oh no, what's the story?
But there's you, and there's me

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 3RD
Election day.

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 4TH
Bush wins, analysis begins.

First out of the gate is the old chestnut about moral values.

But before we believe that Nixon's silent majority and Reagan's moral majority and Bush's bully majority really do have a high moral agenda for the country, it's worth pointing out that the red states consume pornography as voraciously as the blue states, maybe more so. And all that porn is distributed to them by some of America's most conservative, most blue-chip corporations. Clearly then, the issue is hypocrisy versus honesty. The open "live and let live" stance of the Democrats just ain't gonna cut it in an environment where people are committed to having a public face versus a private life. This was evidenced in an under-reported scandal in which longtime Republican and anti-gay supporter xxxx xxxxx was trapped leaving a lewd message over the phone for a gay hook up. The fact that no one really wanted to touch the story was most revealing, as if people in glass houses shouldnt throw stones. And the story illustrates the strange thrill of the closet; not just the gay closet but the closet at large. Because sex in america is back in the closet.

Some people think Michael Moore might have lost the election, his "documentary" stoking Republican ire. The idea of Fahrenheit 9/11 as a colossal miscalculation is intriguing. Perhaps the way for the democrats to beat the Republicans is not to try and beat them at their own bully game, because if Monicagate taught anyone anything it's that they have might, right, and (if you believe them) God on their side. They're just too darn good at it. Meanwhile Michael Moore, like that hippo in a tutu from Fantasia, skates on thin ice; it's only a matter of time before his champagne socialism and sheer greed is exposed by the Republican machine.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 5TH 2004
Still not completely finished!

Randy flies off to Florida for one last interview with Art and Terri Sommers. We really think that they are the stars of the film and it would be so good to resolve their story. The only thing is that Terri keeps on changing her mind about whether or not she wants to go on camera again. After umpteen telephone calls, Ashley manages to persuade her to agree - and stay persuaded till we get there with a camera.

Also while in Florida, Randy hooks up with Andrea True to record the vocals of "Hot Christmas."

This year for our Christmas card we plan to dredge up an old Pop Tarts pop song, "Hot Christmas." Without boasting, it's a catchy ditty - in a completely toxic kind of way - with the chorus "I'm dreaming of a hot Christmas, c'mmon baby let's [beat] this christmas." It's suggestive in an innocent way. Mild double entendre, that kind of thing. So we think who better to sing this song than Shane Klingensmith who sang "Hot Hot Hot" in Showbiz Moms and Dads? Everything is going just fine until the manager intervenes:

I'm pretty sure it implies having sex, but I think instead of putting the
single beat in there (where the word would be) it should be changed to
something like "let's kiss this Christmas" or "let's light a fire this
Christmas." Hopefully you understand what I'm saying

We reply:

We can't change the words of the song because that's the whole idea: KLet's blank this Christmas. Because it's just a beat, because no rude words are actually said, it's all up to people's imagination. And because no one is saying any rude words, it's really very innocent.

Doesn't make any difference. Everyone's afraid - even of innuendo.

We are stumped for a bit. But then Randy comes up with the brilliant idea of Andrea True!

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 9TH 2004
Go see Angelina Jollie camping it up in Alexander. She really deserves to get a shot at playing Linda Lovelace. It could be her Monster. (Ditto after also seeing her equally campy performance as a one-eyed British commandertrix in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.) There is no scenery she can't chew!

MONDAY NOVEMBER 22ND 2004
It's Oprah's favorite-things show. We aren't in the audience, alas, but we get our own Thanksgiving gift: We're going to Sundance. Premiere slot.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 7TH
Tape EPK interview in the basement of the office. Feels very grown up; they have three cameras!

FRIDAY DECEMBER 17TH
Finally become an American citizen, along with 8,000 others down at the old convention center. Too late for the election, alas!

MONDAY DECEMBER 20TH
Record voiceover with Dennis Hopper, who is of course a complete pro and certainly not the man you read about in Easy Riders Raging Bulls.

Perhaps it's no surprise to learn that one of the wildest children of the Sixties is now a Rrepublican. We are so used to the idea of Republicans as bible-bashing hate-mongering greed-obsessed trolls that we (airy wave of the hand to include all Hollywood) can hardly conceive of someone sane and intelligent being a Republican.

Instead, he drinks Earl Gray tea, is a joy to work with, and plans on attending the Inauguration in DC next month.

TUESDAY DECEMBER 21ST
Conference call with Universal to discuss the premiere at Sundance.

"We're here today to talk about how to eventize the event but..." Love that!

WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 31ST
Frantic call: The credits on the film have to be changed. Again.

Directors Journal

(Continued)

SUNDAY JANUARY 2ND
MASS SUICIDE. That's the banner headline on the leaflet some guy gives me as I stand in line at the sunny Sunday morning food market waiting for an order of pot stickers.

It's one of those hell-in-a-handbasket leaflets. People will believe the craziest shit, I think, stuffing it in my back pocket. A few days later the heavens would open.

MONDAY JANUARY 3RD
The film is finished but the credits aren't. Without doubt the most important piece of real estate in all LA is not a compound in Beverly Hills but a single square of 35mm film. It's the contractual obligations and their correct interpretation to the letter that is perhaps more complicated than trying to learn Tamarind. To credit one person something can trigger all sorts of other contractual credits guaranteed by a network of alliances and deals that have the inmpenetrable complexity of medieval treaties.

To say nothing of the egos involved. And that's exactly what we're going to do - say nothing!

TUESDAY JANUARY 4TH
Show film to Harry Reems who has flown in with Jeanne, his wife, especially. He's extremely magnanimous, and essentially happy with the film.

FRIDAY JANUARY 7TH
Dennis Hopper comes back into the studio to read a few more lines. He's very gracious about it, considering he had to come straight from the dentist where he went straight after getting off the plane from England.

FRIDAY JANAURY 14TH
We are with Tammy Faye at the TCA for WE's (Women's Entertainment) announcement of our film Tammy Faye: Death Defying.

This sequel to The Eyes of Tammy Faye was going to be called The Demise of Tammy Faye, since Tammy had called us to ask us to follow her battle with inoperable cancer. But Tammmy has made a miraculous recovery and here she is answering questions from the press like

"Tammy Faye are you going to Hell?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Well you've lived in a house with Ron Jeremy, and got into bed with the people sitting beside you who have just made a film called Inside Deep Throat."

"I don't get into bed with anyone"

"But as a Christian, how do you avoid judging these people?"

(We are reminded of that classic line of hers "We're all made out of the same dirt and God doesn't make any junk." Except television critics!)

"I don't judge people because God doesn't judge people. God is God"

SUNDAY JANUARY 9TH
Biblical rains have been falling now for almost five days, dumping something like 17 inches. Randy has a waterfall in his backyard, and an underground spring has "overflowed" and flooded his basement knocking out his water heater. And phone. Too late to build an ark.

MONDAY JANUARY 10TH
Mixing the film all week with Lance Brown at Widget. We worked with Lance before when he mixed Party Monster, but it was seeing Riding Giants and its sonic vastness of thundering waves, a film he both mixed and sound designed, that made us realize we had to convince him to do the same thing for us. The especially great thing about Lance is that he is incredibly gentle, quiet, and capable of dealing with a bunch of frazzled filmmakers who've been working on this film for just too darn long!

THURSDAY JANUARY 13TH
The billboard is up on Sunset Boulevard. Inordinately thrilled.

Billboards in LA are the business cards of the rich and famous. They're also giant vanity license plates. They let everyone else in this town know what you are doing.

MONDAY JANUARY 17TH
As we are shooting, many people comment on the soundtrack – the catchy instrumental theme tune and the raunchy Deep Throat song with its nonsense lyrics ("deep throat, go row a boat, don't get your goat, that's all she wrote" - that sort of thing). So it seemed that we could do worse than make sure that Inside Deep Throat also had a killer soundtrack.

And Bill Coleman our music supervisor has done just that, artfully mixing dialogue, David Steinberg's emotional score, and classic hits of the period that deliver an overdose of memory pain.

A personal favorite is "Elected." I remember that song haunting me when I was 12. It was so screamingly cynical about the ghastly corrupt ballyhoo of politics, a fabulously prescient song about the forthcoming collapse of the process with Watergate. And then covering it when we were the Pop Tarts 15 years later, and here it is again another 15 years later. Scary, frankly.

Making an encore appearance after it's use in Party Monster is "Obscene Dirty." Perhaps to some that track's just another disco stomper, but to us it's the quintessence of sex and perfectly captures the mechanical madness that is modern porn.

Bill Coleman has been working away compiling ingenious running orders of the soundtrack. He's secured a deal with Koch Records - famous as the home of American Idol reject William Hung - and we're scrambling to get it all sorted in time for Sundance.

SUNDAY JANUARY 16TH
More credit drama... it only happens on public holidays or weekends.

"My life will not be worth living if we can't change it."

But this time. changing the fifth and final reel of the film means that we are cutting it to the wire in terms of delivering a print in time for the premiere at Sundance.

Just like Dale Carnegie said, "There's nothing sweeter to man (or a woman) than the sound of his (or her) own name."

(To be continued)

Directors Journal

(continued)

FRIDAY JANUARY 21ST

Finally the big day is here. The world premiere of the film at Sundance.

Have a pre-screening dinner at Zoom in the upstairs room. Harry arrives with his posse. Our team from WOW is there: Mona, Jeremy, Will, Ashley, Thairin, Chris, and Mary Anne (they drove up in an RV all the way from LA). The Imagine people are there, and then the HBO crew arrive.

Maybe it's just because its tense but everyone sticks to their groups. Theres not much in the way of mingling.

Earlier in the day, Brian had flown in by jet. As they were approaching the runway, the cabin filled with smoke - something caught on fire. Brian was amazingly unrattled and didn't even seem to want to talk about it. Instead dinner was spent talking about the intricacies of oral sex. I'm so looking forward to the day when I never have to think or talk about this subject ever again!

Then we all pile into a cavalcade of black Escalades and proceed to the theatre where we expect to walk a red carpet clamoring with press. En route we pull over to re-group. Randy and I get out - we're in the front vehicle - and walk towards the back of the caravan because there seems to be some sort of commotion. It's Brian's car. Turns out he can't get his seat to adjust and everyone's trying to fix it.

The two-minute ride comes to an end at the theater and we all pile out to do the red carpet. But instead of a clutch of media there's maybe two camera crews and a handful of still photographers. But hey, it's more than the solitary camera at the Edinburgh film festival.

Now we're waiting to go on and it's still being negotiated how we're all going to be introduced. The final final - and it's seconds before we walk out onto the stage - is that Geoff Gilmore will introduce us and then as we are walking up to the stage he will also introduce Brian who will immediately follow, so that we all arrive at the podium at the same time.

We get Brian to tell his story about his grandmother, and it's on with the show.

The Q&A afterwards is kind of funny. Harry is there and we bring him up. The first question is whether we would now do a feature film, the way we did Party Monster the doc and then the movie. Brian answers that doing the Linda Lovelace story had been his original idea, but that instead he wanted to tell the story of the film's cultural impact. And then - I chimed in at the end, "But, hey, we might do a musical version. In 3-D." It breaks the ice and the rest of the Q&A zips by.

From the Eccles its up to the Schoolhouse and the afterparty, in the exact same location as the party for Party Monster two years ago. Brian Rabin and David Rodgers have outdone themselves, producing a party that's even better than the last one. Though some things remained almost the same: instead of go-go boys we have go-go girls working it on a raised platform in the center of the room. Instead of doughnuts we have phallocentric foods like corn dogs. Instead of Felix Da Housecat we have Bill Coleman spinning an amazing set.

Oh, and it is nice to see Billy Elliot all grown up.

SATURDAY JANUARY 22ND

Press day.

In the afternoon, we are on the way to shoot our appearance on American Shootout.

Azlin, our designated driver, has a pitch for a show. He says it's based on his life and is about a guy who basically loves but mistreats women, and everyone around him hates him because he's such a fool. He wants to call it The Arsehole Bachelor. He reckons that in the end, around series three, he might get the message and shape up. And that's it.

The Shootout piece is taped in a spectacular house that seems to lean all Lemony-Snickety over the canyon. Peter Bart and Peter Guber do a masterful job at making it seem like we're just all chatting.

Then it's back into town to tape the Jay Mohr Sundance Dailies, produced by old friend Jerry Kupfur and Mark Katz. We arrive and people are talking in hushed tones. Turns out everyone's worried that Jay's bawdy humor might upset co-guest Michael Winterbottom, who's here promoting 9 Songs, so, er, can we try and steer it away from the gutter?

Jay is not a man to be trifled with. A hot and instant flirt, he knows just which buttons to press to make us all just sufficiently uncomfortable to be putty in his hands.

Fenton, you fascinate me

Oh, how so?

Don't say anything, just go with it

Shit, now that I'm Jay's bitch how can I rescue La Winterbottom, who's just walked in, his silent intensity arriving before him? No wonder everyone seems to be rushing around in a frenzy of second-guessing. Personally,
I always wanted to meet him, not just because Party Monster was so often compared to 24 Hour Party People, but also because the guy just keeps making films - one, sometimes two, a year. But not now, in my pink Superman T-shirt and wiggling like a worm on the hook of Jay's perverse charm.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the interview segment goes off, at least at first, a little awkwardly. Randy saves the day with a combination of the pithy and the flirty that is the match for Jay's unflappable command of The Uncomfortable Encounter.

MONDAY JANUARY 24TH

Sex Stays In The Picture panel at Sundance.

Our point - one that we don't get to make - is that sex and sexuality (in frank and explicit detail) has been exiled from the cinematic experience.

And the reason we don't get to make it is that one of the magician guys from Penn and Teller is in full-on bully mode, hectoring everyone. His point is that there's plenty of sex in cinema and this is all a load of liberal hand-wringing by the navel-gazing chatterati.

It's a frustrating experience. There are too many panelists and a lack of focus on what the actual issue is. Any attempt to discuss sex seems destined to flail around until it can latch onto a familiar issue that everyone can have a go at.

Nine times out of 10 it's the role of women and the abuse of women. Penn brings this on by saying that there's nothing wrong with people wanting to watch cutting up women (how could you possibly agree), that there's no difference between porn and art (agree) and that the female panelist who raises her voice at him is hot when she gets angry (ugh!). Obviously it's all calculated baiting but it's kind of tiresome.

Made us think that the culture war isn't really between the red states and blue, its between the ascendant bully culture versus the curious culture.

Think back to Clinton's convention remark that the Republicans need a divided nation, whereas the Democrats don't. Underlying the partisan remark is a fundamental truth that in the bully culture there has to be a right and a wrong, a victor and a victim. But reducing complex issues to simple dualities and then taking a sabre-rattling side might have worked in the past, but aren't we ready for a third way?

But it isn't really possible to get a word in.

At the end, a woman sitting next to Werner Herzog stands up and says that the danger today is failing to take the current administration seriously enough. She reminds us that no one took Hitler and the Nazis seriously.

TUESDAY JANUARY 25TH

Despite feeling the onset of Sundance fatigue, big blow-out party day.

The Sundance Channel party, legendary previous home for fat bags of swag, is only handing out hats with headphones built into them. Nevertheless the place is jammed to the gills.

Although the Variety party is up at the Stein Ericksen lodge, the crowds are not deterred by the hike. Variety reporter Dana Harris clings to the walls of the vestibule and sums it all up with her headline, Party Monster Besets Fest.

The IFP party looks like a bomb has hit it at the Turning Leaf lounge, and people lay around in catatonic film fatigue. But there are still two big ticket parties to go: Tartans featuring the Dandy Warhols and the TLA sponsored gig of the Scissor Sisters.

Leave town before dawn the very next day. Not a moment too soon.

(To be continued)