Twice Told Tales

The critics at the Baltic Times found Inside Deep Throat so nice they reviewed it twice:

Inside Deep Throat
The porno film “Deep Throat” caused a great stir when released in 1972. A symbolic token of the sexual revolution, many American officials fought to shut down the movie and shut up the people behind it, taking them to court for their rebelliousness. This documentary draws a vivid picture of American society in the 1970s, a time of radical change that didn’t come easy. The doc also gives an in-depth account of how the lives of those involved with “Deep Throat” changed dramatically as a consequence of the film. Thorough research, a colorful visual style and good narrative structure make “Inside Deep Throat” intelligent and enthralling. The political and social issues portrayed correspond to our time in several ways, giving the doc plenty of weight.
***1/2 (Julie Vinten)

The 1972 porn film “Deep Throat” was made for $25,000 and went on to gross some $600 million, making it the most profitable film ever made. The movie was banned by the Nixon government, while its lead actor was imprisoned for his part. This brilliantly made HBO documentary looks at the people and issues surrounding the film, and the result is utterly absorbing. The likes of Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia, Erica Jong, Hugh Heffner and Alan Dershowitz ponder over the film’s social and political impact, while its cast and crew reminisce about the making of the film and the almost surreal drama it inspired in American society, which involved the mafia, the government, the Christian right and vast queues lining up outside movie theatres. Riveting and thought-provoking stuff.
**** (Tim Ochser)

A Throat by Any Other Name

The Telegraph has noticed that in all the excitement over the recent revelation of Deep Throat's identity, the origin of the code name is rarely mentioned. "But," says the article, "Deep Throat was a pornographic film of the time, and, as a new documentary to be released on Friday grippingly shows, a phenomenon that had profound effects on modern culture." Fenton Bailey is lavishly quoted in the article, which calls Inside Deep Throat "slick and glossy" with "a funky soundtrack," a documentary that "makes a striking contrast with the amateurish cack-handedness of the film that forms its subject."

Bailey argues that sex is simply a part of everyday life. He doesn't just point to the buffed bodies on every billboard in the Western world. He also mentions the mind-boggling volume of pornography churned out each year. You cannot ignore the statistics that end his documentary. In 2002, Hollywood made 467 movies. That same year, 11,303 adult films were released.

Deep Throat's Staying Power

Fenton Bailey was interviewed for a New York Times article today about how well or not Deep Throat fares in the rental stores. "It's an icon," he said. "It's an outlaw voice speaking out with a message about sex and sexuality - that there's no such thing as normal. Everybody has a unique sexual DNA, and Linda Lovelace represents that. She goes on this quest to find her sexual identity but also, by extension, her social and political identity."

Also, in an article on the Basque News and Information Channel, Fenton talks about Deep Throat's message, prior to Inside Deep Throat's opening in the UK, and just after the revelation of Watergate informant Deep Throat.

Bailey thinks the desire to censor 'Deep Throat', which was banned in 23 US states, has resonance for America today: 'People responded to its message, which was, you know, we're all unique. We all don't have a clitoris in the back of our throat, but we're all sexually unique in our own ways and there's now shame to that, instead explore, experiment and find our true identity. It's a very healthy message, one that today, it's just hard to imagine today. You know, we live in a climate of fear, and a culture of fear, so the whole idea of experimenting...it's not technically against the law, but it feels like it is.'

The Sun Shines on Deep Throat Inside Arena

Story in The Sun on Deep Throat's opening in the UK. The tabloid quaintly identifies Inside Deep Throat narrator Dennis Hopper by his apparent wizard name, Dennis Potter. And we thought The Sun was scrupulously fact-checked.

Inside Deep Throat, narrated by Dennis Potter, is an insight into the legacy of the outrageous movie that sent shockwaves through 1970s American society when first released.

Also, our Fenton Bailey has written an article on the "pornolization of the mainstream" for the July issue of Arena magazine.

In that same issue, Arena gives Inside Deep Throat three stars, using such words as "beautifully," "great," and "intelligent."

And the June 1 issue of London's TimeOut reviews Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst and Inside Deep Throat, "two new documentaries that take stock of 1970s America."

(Click on images to enlarge)

Reams on Reems

Sunday's London Observer had a long, iilluminating, and very readable story on Deep Throat's reluctant comeback star Harry Reems. "Porn-again Christian" by David Keeps is probably the most complete article on the recovering former porn star since Inside Deep Throat refocused attention on him.

This fellow, born Herbert Streicher in New York City in 1947, sitting here in his bucolic Park City, Utah, mountainside home in a plaid shirt and neatly pressed khakis, has the smile, the voice and the disposition of a breakfast DJ. It is easy to see the ghost of a cocksure rake, the role he played in silly skin flicks with such brio three decades ago, when Harry Reems was one of many noms de porn that stuck. It is even more apparent, however, that he is no longer the firebrand freedom-of-expression spokesperson - and, later, more sadly, the wasted sot - on display in Inside Deep Throat, the wildly entertaining new documentary about the most profitable porno film ever made. It is 15:01 on the celebrity clock for Harry Reems, or, as he puts it, 'I've had my 15 minutes of fame, now I would like my 15 years of retirement.'

Though the film casts him as a tragic hero, Harry isn't the least bit sucked in. 'Nobody under the age of 50,' he says with great joviality, 'even knows who I am.'

The Deep

Deep Throat, that seminal porn film, will finally be shown in mainstream British cinemas, not just the sex houses. Previously available only on video and DVD, it's now been given the proper certificate, and will be playing on the bill with Inside Deep Throat in some theaters.

The Duke of York's Picture House in Brighton has lined up late-night weekend screenings and a number of City Screen's cinemas, including those in Liverpool, Edinburgh and Cambridge, are hoping to show it. Jason Wood, a film programmer for the City Screen chain, said this would not start a trend for screening porn films. "Our Brighton cinema is a very on-the-edge, experimental cinema and we show a lot of outré films. We're not going to go down the route of continually playing hardcore films.

"I would say there is no artistic reason for us showing Deep Throat. It is really as a companion piece. Inside Deep Throat does have artistic value and explores some very interesting things, not so much the hardcore pornography but the fact that it later emerged that Linda Lovelace was in a 'slavery' situation."

(Contact Music, The Independent)


Time Out London has 180 free tickets to see a preview of Inside Deep Throat at the Vue West End on June 7. Click here for details.

Meanwhile, back in the States, Deep Throat and Inside Deep Throat are spurring debate on college campi. The little Hoff theater at the University of Maryland got surprised.

The movie was advertised by the Hoff as being shown for educational purposes, and we admit we were skeptical the showing and subsequent academic activities would turn out to be just a spectacle under the guise of academia.

But last night, we were proven mostly wrong when about 150 students attended and participated in a panel discussion with three female scholars who discussed the philosophy and morals of the porn industry after the audience watched a documentary, Inside Deep Throat, about the significance of the film. This was a far greater ratio of students than we expected to turn out for the academic side of the pornographic screening, especially considering the drastic disintegration of a panel last year with Porn Star Ron Jeremy and a feminist that quickly became a way for college guys to holler questions at Jeremy about how many women he had actually slept with or how well endowed he was.

(Diamondback Online)

April Is the Horniest Month

In the latest issue of Time, film critic Richard Corliss says that his last "That Old Feeling" column, When Porno Was Chic, for the magazine's online edition, was Time's most popular April read, receiving the most hits, and was the most downloaded and linked. "That's right," he says. "Porn beat the Pope —both of them."

The column was inspired by a film and a book. Inside Deep Throat, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is a documentary on the making and impact of the 1972 porn comedy Deep Throat, which starred Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems and was written and directed by Gerard Damiano —porn icons all. The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia, is an expert weaving of testimony by porn actors, directors and producers, and of their nemeses-promoters in federal and local law enforcement. I wrapped reportage on the documentary and the book around my memories as a film critic and appraiser of early-70s triple-X movies.

(Continue reading)

Titillate Than Never

Here's a nice review of Inside Deep Throat that's as refreshing as a warm, sudsy shower after sex. (Smoke 'em if you got 'em.) Roger Moore (the?) in the Orlando Sentinel calls the doc "brilliant and deliriously entertaining."

The groundbreaking porn smash of 1972, an opening volley of "the culture wars," is showcased for the watershed event that it was in the brilliant and deliriously entertaining new documentary, Inside Deep Throat. It's a movie that is fascinating social criticism and a witty and relevant take on American sexual history.

And – get this – it's not the least bit titillating.

Deep Impact

Michael Fox (probably not the), writing on The Pitch, calls Inside Deep Throat "a snappily paced, ceaselessly entertaining, moderately schizophrenic immersion into the life and times of the most infamous and lucrative porn movie ever made."

A cynic might describe movies as the most depraved and fantastic system of exploitation ever devised. After all, they trade on the greed and hubris of the financiers, the beauty and allure of the stars, and the trust (or, if you prefer, gullibility) of the audience. With a bit of tweaking, this thesis fits documentaries and pornography even better. The nonfiction films of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, though, are exceptions. In empathetic portraits of tarred heroines (The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Monica in Black and White) and now, in the irreverent yet unexpectedly poignant Inside Deep Throat, the duo largely succeeds in avoiding bothcynicism and exploitation.

(Read more)

And the Red Vic, the worker-owned-and-operated movie house on Haight Street in San Francisco, has this blurb on its website.

Inside Deep Throat
Dir. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato US 2005
Bailey and Barbeto (Party Monster, The Eyes of Tammy Faye) are to tabloid filmmmaking as Ken Burns is to the historical documentary. Inside Deep Throat is an exploration into the cultural and political significance of the...er, seminal porn film Deep Throat. It was perhaps the most profitable film ever produced, and it started a long-lasting relationship between the mob and pornography. Opening in pre-Disney Manhattan in 1972, Deep Throat was one of the first X-rated films with at least a pretense of a story: a woman's clitoris is found in the back of her throat, thus allowing orgasm only by performing oral sex. Bailey and Barbeto track the rise of the films popularity -- it became a huge hit with the glitterati -- as well as its run-ins with the religious right, the legal system and the feminist movement. It also tells of the troubled lives of stars Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. Lastly, Inside Deep Throat can be seen as a cautionary tale about our current administration's attitude towards free speech. (92m)

Old Man and the Tee

Amy Bennett Williams has a nice story on Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano in the Fort Meyers, Florida, News-Press. She finds out he's not a dirty old man, but rather "a quintessential - if not entirely typical - Southwest Florida retiree. Great tan, golf-loving and quick with a joke, he could be the genial 76-year-old standing ahead of you in the supermarket line - the guy making the check-out girl giggle or the screaming baby smile."

Says Damiano: "I was just a nice guy, which is why I think I did pretty well. I mean, I'd meet an actress and have to say, 'Sit down, take your clothes off - I'm going to ask you to do some nasty things.' You have to be pretty nice."

(Read more)

Peep Throat

Thighs Wide Shut gets around to reviewing Inside Deep Throat, which it recommends for those who like BJs, O-faces, and John Stossel's 'stache. Which means, basically, everybody.

If you took Boogie Nights, presented it in style reminiscent of VH1's I Love The 70s, and threw on Time/Life's Ultimate 70s in the background, you'd purty much come out with Inside Deep Throat, the behind the scenes, after the orgasm look at the blue movie that started it all. And spankfully it got an NC-17 rating, so we're all free to see Linda Lovelace shove Harry Reems' sausage down her thrizz, while talking about the flick's social and political implications. I think some people would call that infotainment. I call it 'worth a peep'.

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."

(Full story)

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.

Aisle Say

Carly, the mistress of Pornblography took her time seeing Inside Deep Throat to avoid the hyped-up first-weekers. Later, braving a not-so-rare-these-days torrential rain, she walked with The Boy to Laemmle's Sunset 5 on Sunset Boulevard for a look.

I’ll be honest with you – I’ve never seen Deep Throat. I’ve also never seen Behind The Green Door. Aside from a few scant minutes of The Devil in Miss Jones and seeing Misty Beethoven in its entirety, I can’t say that I’ve seen any classic porn, really. Why? Because it doesn’t turn me on. Then again, neither does most of today’s porn either, but I won’t get into whining about that subject yet again.

Getting back on track. . . The theatre was. . . suitably packed. Obviously, despite my lack of classic porn knowledge, I was well aware of Deep Throat’s existence, but not so much its cultural significance or the controversy that brewed around it save for Linda Lovelace’s allegations of rape. There was no question that directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato had a huge task on their hands, because really, how do you encapsulate 30 years of history into a two-hour documentary? I think they did a pretty damn good job. (For more, got to Pornblography and scroll down until you see the shiny red lips)

Chris Vognar, reviewing IDT for the Tennessean.com website, seems impressed with the documentary:

There should be no question that Inside Deep Throat is a better film than its subject. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, known for delivering a camp sensibility in their work for the movies (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, narrative and doc versions of Party Monster) and TV (Brilliant But Canceled, Showbiz Moms & Dads), turn Inside into a feast of cultural commentary, graphics and vintage music.

In Pittsburgh, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Ed Blank seems positive:

Although there are no references to kiddie porno or snuff films, the documentary weighs in on First Amendment freedom of speech and the freedom to choose what one little old lady gleefully calls "dirty movies." "Inside Deep Throat" is never less than an interesting look behind the scenes of the most famous hard-core porno picture of all time, "Deep Throat" (1972).

The 'Deep' South

SouthFlorida.com gives Inside Deep Throat three-and-a-half stars and calls it "wildly, relentlessly entertaining." And not just because key scenes were shot there.

Watching Inside Deep Throat, you get the impression that it was a lot more fun to make a movie about making one of the most controversial, mainstream hardcore porn films in history than it was to make Deep Throat itself. . . . The documentary, made by controversy-addicts Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster, Monica in Black and White), may be educational, but it's also laden with helpful visual aids. If you've never seen Deep Throat, have no fear. (Or, maybe, have lots of fear.) Many of the 1972 film's most explicit elements, including the act of the title, are fully represented. (More)

FM in the PM 2

Randy and Fenton have been riding a wave of radio interviews lately. First, NPR's "Fresh Air" had Terry Gross grilling them. Today it was KCRW's "The Treatment" with Elvis Mitchell asking about Inside Deep Throat. (Listen)

First Love Is the Deepest

The people of Coconut Grove, Florida, are proud to claim that some of the scenes in the X-rated movie Deep Throat were filmed at the home of local Hungarian-born sculptor Sepy Dobronyi, reports nbc6.net. The jungle that Linda Lovelace walks through in the movie belongs to Dobronyi, and Dobronyi confesses that the wine cellar where Lovelace has a tabletop encounter has some "dainties" tucked into the shelves to protect the wine bottles (see pic). The living room served as "Doctor" Harry Reems' examining room.

Of course, Frank Sinatra would later shoot some mainstream films there, yawn, but nothing seems to thrill the locals more than remembering that Deep Throat was their first.

For a movie that excited so much controversy and so many libidos, Dobronyi said the filming itself was often boring to watch. "It was very tiresome."

Dobronyi said the crew was a happy one, even Lovelace, who later complained that she had been forced to perform in porn. "It's not true -- she was very happy, running around naked," Dobronyi said.

(Read, see more)

Lust on the List

Inside Deep Throat makes No. 3 on Entertainment Weekly's current Must List (and btw, Owen Gleiberman gave it an A):

A strange but thoroughly engaging documentary that untangles the knotty story of a naughty film that went from grind house to art house to courthouse.

'Throat' Gets Cut, Directors Perform Surgery

Ten days ago, Michael Hiltzik wrote a column in the LA Times Business section accusing Inside Deep Throat directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato of deeply sketchy math in coming up with the figure of $600 million to estimate the eventual gross of the little culture-upheaving porno film Deep Throat. Actually, he came right out and called the claim "baloney." And then went on and on in great detail, as if the $600 million was the subject of the documentary.

Leaving aside that "Deep Throat" was financed by mobsters and that therefore any figures are suspect, logic and arithmetic alone are enough to tell you that its box-office gross could not remotely have approached $600 million.

We're talking about a movie that was released in 1972, banned in half the country and generally exhibited in one theater at a time even in the biggest cities, such as New York and Los Angeles. (Full story)

Today, in "Letters," the Times has printed Bailey and Barbato's response to Hiltzik's attack. We understand that the Times will edit the rebuttal, so we give you the complete story here.

Michael Hiltzik's reluctance to believe that this little film could generate $600 million is understandable.

But like the Deep Throat of Watergate said, "follow the money," and we did. Sadly we didn't find the $600 million stashed in bags anywhere, but what we did find - having spent more than two years speaking to hundreds of people, sifting through thousands of pages of trial transcripts, and rummaging through dozens of boxes of FBI files - is a wealth of evidence to suggest that this figure is about as close to the truth as we are likely to get.

Inexplicably, Mr. Hiltzik decides to leave aside the fact that the film was financed and controlled by mobsters, seeming to doubt that they could preside over a $600 million operation. Odd, because the mob's ability to generate and deal in vast - albeit shadowy - sums of cash is perhaps one of the most well-documented and oft-repeated things about it. If anything, the stated figures are likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

Starting with the tip of the iceberg, some things to consider:

DOMESTIC BOX OFFICE

While Mr. Hiltzik is correct to say that the film was ultimately banned in close to half of the states in the United States, that was not before it was shown in every single state with the exception of Mississippi (Sinema, by Kenneth Turan and Stephen F. Zito). And banning a film didn't mean that theaters didn't show it, or that people didn't go to see it. Quite the reverse; they flocked to the theaters in droves.

Mr. Hiltzik thinks we should compare this to Star Wars. But Deep Throat, less than an hour long, could pack in twice as many screenings as the intergalactic caper that was more than twice the length.

While punters going to see Star Wars paid the average ticket price of about $2, that wasn't the price of admission to see Deep Throat. Because it was banned, because it was a hot ticket, theater owners across the country (Denver, Houston, Milwaukee are just three examples) charged $5 - more than double the average ticket price (generously a theater in Chicago only charged $4 for a matinee). On special occasions, after a police raid in Atlanta, for example, ticket prices soared to $10.

The high-ticket prices were reflected in swollen box-office numbers; an FBI field report (obtained by us under the Freedom Of Information Act) details the Perainos, the producers of the film, talking about two theaters that generated a gross of $100,000 per week.

While Variety tracked Deep Throat's domestic grosses during the first few years of its release, the box office chart was determined by a sample of select theater markets. At any given time, no more than five theaters were listed. However, various sources, including the New York Times, claim that it played in more than 70 U.S. cities within six months of its release. The actual number is likely to be even higher; an FBI source referenced a search warrant that showed the film having played at more than 300 theaters simultaneously.

So while Variety estimated Deep Throat grossing $4.6 million in 1973, it would be reasonable to multiply that by a factor of 10. OK, so Deep Throat didn't earn $46 million every year in release until the Memphis trial in 1976, but this would put its domestic box office way beyond the $30-50 million that Mr. Hiltzik claims based on something called "the most commonly cited estimates of ticket sales."

So with twice the screenings, four times the ticket price, and at least 10 times the number of screens, we feel that $100 million is a conservative estimate of Deep Throat's domestic box office take since its release. This was the number quoted by one of the Peraino's attorneys, who wished to remain anonymous, in an LA Times article. He also said that it was a gross underestimate. He should know. So let's add $10 million, then - a modest adjustment.

But wait, there's more.

Unlike Star Wars, the number of Deep Throat prints in release was not tightly controlled. Even the mob themselves had a hard time controlling the number of bootleg prints that were in circulation.

So effectively was the film bootlegged in Florida by one brave guy that they made him the official distributor and fired the other guy, Arthur Sommer. In Hollywood, bootleg prints were so commonly available that even the judge in the Beverly Hills trial managed to procure his own copy when the jury wanted to take a second look at the film (and that's another thing: Mr. Hiltzik claims that more than the entire population of the United States would have had to have seen Deep Throat, though he doesn't take into account the number of people who saw it more than once - something not limited to juries).

But still there's more.

All the box-office takes were in cash, collected by a purpose-built manual distribution system of checkers and sweepers, and sent back to their Fort Lauderdale HQ.

This all-cash system was ingenious but also porous and subject to skimming at every stage; the guy in the box office would stuff money down his trousers, then the checker would peel off a few bills and finally the sweeper took his cut.

Finally the money arrived back at party central where they counted it, right? Wrong. They weighed it. There was too much money to count. Too much money even to get around the room. Bags of money went off to the Bahamas, bags of money went off to Hollywood to underwrite the Peraino's legitimate operation, Bryanston Pictures. You can be sure that bags of money fell off the truck en route as well.

So let's add 15% for "shrinkage." $16.5 million.

Overseas, our research showed that Deep Throat was licensed to at least 75 foreign territories for theatrical release. The grosses in these individual territories ranged from the high end of $5 million in Sweden to $4 million in Germany to $400,000, with most records leaning toward the higher number. Even if we were to take a conservative figure of just over $1 million per territory, that's $80 million.

Let's add another 15% or $12 million for skimming, shenanigans, and lapses of accounting. That's $218.5 million

VIDEO AND DVD

We know that by 1995 more than three million VHS cassettes of Deep Throat had been sold. Mr. Hiltzik is right that VHS players were very expensive in the late '70s and early '80s, but that didn't deter people from buying them. By the mid-'80s, 23 million homes had a VCR. By the mid-'90s, VCR penetration had reached nearly 80 percent.

And it wasn't just VCRs that were expensive, tapes were expensive too. When it was first released on video in 1977, the average price was around $180. Arrow Productions, the current distributor of the film, estimates that half the copies sold at this premium price (for a total of $270 million). If this seems excessive, there is evidence that cassettes of Deep Throat sold for as high as $350 a pop prior to 1978.

In 1979, Deep Throat videos were advertised for $99.50 (films like The Graduate sold for $59.95). Thereafter, the price drifted down to the $60 mark, which is the average retail price Arrow calculated for the sale of the other 1.5 million units (for a total of $90 million), creating total video revenues of $360 million until 1995.

So these numbers are high, but Deep Throat - along with the few other adult titles available on video in the late '70s - was initially the killer application for the VCR, selling, according to one retailer at the time, 50 times the number of tapes as any other pre-recorded tape.

Then we must also take into account rental income. Variety reported that by 1994, VHS rentals from Deep Throat had made $20 million.

So that's $380 million, counting nothing for the last 10 years in DVD/video sales and rentals. Currently, Arrow Productions sells on average about 15,000 Deep Throat DVD units a year, generating almost $5 million over the last 10 years.

So by adding our box office total of $218.5 million to our DVD and video sales of $385 million, we get a grand total of more than $600 million, a total that excludes all the hotel pay-per-view delivery that is currently the lifeblood of the adult business.

So it's quite possible that $600 million is indeed baloney because the true figure is even greater than that.

Certainly it's an estimation. The mob's accounting systems are rarely audited, and the shame of porn has meant that hard and fast figures - just as much today as then - are difficult to come by. Is the adult business today really the $11-billion monster everyone says it is?

And while we could argue about it till the cows come home, what can't be argued is the fact that, given its modest budget, Deep Throat is the most profitable movie of all time. Even if Star Wars outgrossed Deep Throat (and we clearly don't believe it did), its budget of $11 million was 440 times that of Deep Throat. And that's no exaggeration.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

People are still writing reviews of Inside Deep Throat. Here's another one, from Gay.com.

Gay filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato -- who brought their playful, peppy, "Entertainment Tonight" style to documentaries about Ellen DeGeneres, Tammy Faye Bakker and "Party Monster" Michael Alig -- tackle the notorious 1972 porn film "Deep Throat" in this jagged but wildly entertaining documentary. The filmmakers are working with a lot here -- "Deep Throat" came to represent many things in the mid-1970s. (More)

There's this one from The Tufts Daily:

First there was "Kinsey," and now there's "Inside Deep Throat" - the latest movie to address America's obsession with sexual morality, and expose a hypocrisy that became evident in the '70s, yet has continued to thrive , safely delivered from the Nixon administration right through to the Bush era. Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato of "Party Monster" fame, "Inside Deep Throat" is a vastly entertaining documentary about the low-budget '70s porn movie "Deep Throat." Fast-paced and hard-hitting, the documentary comes across as an illicit history lesson that is at times hilarious and at others somewhat difficult to, um, swallow. (More)

And this from the student newspaper at Fairfield University:

The commentaries are unavoidably interspersed with graphic clips from the original film, which merits the NC-17 rating. Still, the film's producers would have you believe that "Inside Deep Throat" is pure family fun. I'm not sure what your families are like, but let's just say this isn't a Disney movie. Despite all this, co-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato and producer Brian Grazer (the Oscar-winning filmmaker of "A Beautiful Mind") do an excellent job at legitimatizing this film as a true documentary. It's abundantly clear, at least, that they did their research. The film features a depth and breadth of commentaries and sources you simply wouldn't expect. Indeed, the film references a variety of research, from D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Love" to the final report of the Attorney General's Commission on pornography. (More)

Lozenge

We can't swear it's true, but Susan Michaels in her review of Inside Deep Throat for Film Stew.com, says it's the first NC-17 documentary.

What makes this documentary infinitely entertaining is the opportunity it affords to get reacquainted in '04 with guys who were at the top of their game back in '72. Once virile, screwing everything that moved, they're now in their late 60's and early 70's and hard to visualize as any sort of porn kings.

Barbato and Bailey have done a masterful job of sticking to the facts at hand without twisting or tainting them through creative editing.  Watching a documentary such as this makes you realize how much someone like Michael Moore has an agenda.

Inside Deep Throat is not to be missed. It's fun, factual, true and funny. Since opening on February 11th in 12 theaters and then gradually expanding each of its subsequent weeks, the NC-17-rated doc has so far grossed nearly $400,000.

(More)

Is It In Yet?

Randy Barbato wanted Inside Deep Throat to be thought of as a family film so badly that the gods in the layout department at the LA Times butted the IDT ad with the ad for Are We There Yet? and made it seem as if IDT is the best family fun since the original Home Alone.  Which it actually is.

Deep Six

Garry Maddox at smh.com in Australia, where Inside Deep Throat is scheduled to open midyear, says the documentary he saw at the Berllin Film Festival is "a lively, often-comic account" of how "a director who was a hairdresser until he learnt about the sexual revolution from women visiting his salon" made an explicit porn film that took in millions.

Behind the documentary are two filmmakers who, this week in Berlin, in natty black suits and ties, resembled gay undertakers. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have made films and television shows on Tammy Faye Bakker, Monica Lewinsky, RuPaul, Andy Warhol, rent boys, a gay high school in Texas, gay republicans, the history of pornography, Hitler's rumoured homosexuality and even cuddly toy fetishists.

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Gonzales Seeks to Reinstate Obscenity Case

By MARK SHERMAN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON -  The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter.

Billed as the government's first big obscenity case in a decade, the 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates Inc. and its owners, Robert Zicari, and his wife, Janet Romano, both of Northridge, Calif., was dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster of Pittsburgh.

Lancaster ruled prosecutors overstepped their bounds while trying to block the company's hard-core movies from children and from adults who did not want to see such material.

The Justice Department (news - web sites) said it will appeal the ruling to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Philadelphia. While acknowledging the importance of the constitutional guarantee of free speech, Gonzales said selling or distributing obscene materials does not fall within First Amendment protections.

"The Department of Justice (news - web sites) remains strongly committed to the investigation and prosecution of adult obscenity cases," said Gonzales, who pledged during his confirmation hearing to pursue obscenity cases.

If allowed to stand, Lancaster's ruling would undermine obscenity laws as well as other statutes based on shared views of public morality, including laws against prostitution, bestiality and bigamy, the department said in a statement.

Zicari said he was not surprised by the decision to appeal. "They touted my case for almost a year and a half about this being an important step in kind of stamping out the adult product as we know it," he said in a telephone interview. "You'd think our government has a lot more things to worry about with the war in Iraq (news - web sites)."

Prosecutors charged Zacari and Romano and their company with distributing videos to Pittsburgh through the mail and over the Internet. Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, has said the case was not about banning all sexually explicit materials, just reining in obscenity. Extreme Associates' productions depict rape and murder, Buchanan said.

When she announced the indictment in August 2003, Buchanan said the lack of
enforcement of obscenity laws during the mid- to late-1990s "led to a proliferation of obscenity throughout the United States."

In his opinion, Lancaster said the company can market and distribute its materials because people have a right to view them in the privacy of their own homes.

Lancaster relied in part on the Supreme Court's June 2003 ruling that struck down Texas' ban on gay sex, which it called an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

Wide Open

Perez Hilton reviews the doc quite favorably on his website Page Six Six Six,  saying it captures "the true spirit of tittytainment."  Refreshing.

Inside Deep Throat is a documentary like none you will ever see on PBS. The film goes WIDE this weekend, expanding to 25 theaters, where we hope some Page SixSixSix readers will go down on someone, you know, like the Alanis song.

Featuring lots of tits and wit, ass and sass, Inside Deep Throat is yet another production by fagalicious filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the duo behind The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the fanfuckingtastic WOW Report, and Showbiz Moms & Dads, our favorite reality show of last year, featuring cute little Emily and the crazy ass Nutter family.

A Strong Constitution

Kevin Federline's on the cover, but Brian Grazer gets a full-page, ahem, spread in the latest Details mag.  He answers a few questions about pornography in re Inside Deep Throat.  At one point he says, "I reread our 27 amendments, and I literally started crying at the Malibu Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf." 

Daniel Pares asks, "You had a copy of the Constitution with you?" 

"I have it on my BlackBerry, yeah," says Grazer. "If you reread the Bill of Rights, our first 10 amendments - our freedoms are so vast it's almost unbelievable.  You just go, 'Oh, my god.'   That's what differentiates us from every other place in the world.  My eyes were all wet and I was crying and I couldn't contain myself, because I hadn't read the first 10 amendments since I was in grade school."

Rock Me Linda Lovelace

Sarah Rowland, in her Montreal Mirror cover story on the "fantastic fuckumentary" Inside Deep Throat and its directors, says 1972's Deep Throat "can still get it up long enough to incite a little controversy."

Predictably, Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey have come under fire from blowhard feminists, including Katherine McKinnon, for, among other things, promoting rape, dismissing the tragedy of Lovelace and dissing the women's movement. Add to that, we're talking just minutes after they've read Manohla Dargis' New York Times review, which accuses them of "historical reductionism," and you have two bitchy filmmakers.

"It's just a muddle-headed wrong review," says Bailey. "It's so frustrating that the lens through which some people are looking at this film is so distorted by prejudice, they're not really seeing the film that's actually been made."

Narrated by everyone's favourite perv Dennis Hopper, the movie that has actually been made is an earnest and ambitious, albeit MTV-paced, attempt at addressing all these contentious issues in a very limited period of time. It should be noted that most reviews have either been rave or at worst, slightly banal criticisms of the campy whiplash editing.

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The Critics Rave

"Besides fresh and funny insights from the likes of Norman Mailer and John Waters, it shows how little censorship politics have changed from Nixon to Bush."
- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

"Two Thumbs Up"
- Roeper & Ebert

   "Things get fresher, funnier and, inevitably, more poignant when we meet the people involved in the making of the movie."
- Ella Taylor, LA Weekly

"Colorfully entertaining."
- Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Daily News

"A giddy prance through the minefield of the last three decades of American sex and politics."
- Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times
 
"It's extremely entertaining."
- David Edelstein, Slate

"Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening.  A."
- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

 "The salient point here is that Deep Throat can be seen as one of the first battles of the culture wars that still divide this nation."
- Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

"Makes a diverting case for Deep Throat as more than just a shadowy cinematic footnote."
- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
 
"A thorough but highly entertaining documentary."
- Lou Lumenick, New York Post

Pope Culture

We find it delighfully teasing that although it ultimately gave the film an O rating, the Catholic New Service found Inside Deep Throat "serious-minded," "slickly edited," and "more sociocultural than salacious in tone."  That's practically a guarded rave.  Any film would be proud to have any one of those quotes splashed across its newspaper ad:
 

"SLICKLY EDITED!!" - Catholic News Service

   So we don't blame them for ending the review with "Because of this and recurring graphic sexual images, the USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is O -- morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is NC-17 -- no one 17 or under admitted."  In fact, we wouldn't have it any other way.  (Read the review

Board of Reviews

Richard C Walls, in Detroit's Metro Times, says Inside Deep Throat is "fast-paced and hugely entertaining" but that it doesn't entirely explain "the appeal of fellatio as a male fantasy that quells performance anxiety."  Well, if you have to ask. . . . 

But within [its] narrow focus, the film is about as thorough as one would wish. It offers a heady look back at a time when porn could actually be viewed as something liberating rather than desensitizing; an amateur's craft (or hustle, with the mafia lurking in the background), rather than a billion-dollar industry riding formulas as woefully predictable as TV sitcoms. It has a comic cast of retired hustlers, professional bozos, one borderline insane evangelical and iconic talking heads like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. It also has about 10 seconds of graphic footage from the original film, hence the NC-17 rating.

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If you just can't get enough of Inside Deep Throat and don't mind rereading  "$25,000" and "$600 million," there is this recent story on CNN.com. 

Showing the notorious sex act was necessary for the documentary, said "Inside Deep Throat" directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the filmmakers behind such acclaimed documentaries as "Party Monster" and "The Eyes of Tammy Faye."  "There was no way we were going to make a film called 'Inside Deep Throat' without including the act," Barbato said. "Our film is not salacious or gratuitous. That scene needed to be in there."

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Four-time Pulitzer Prize honorable-mention winner, Richard Cohen (who looks a bit like Gerard Damiano, don't you think?), chimes in on Inside Deep Throat in his NY Daily News column.

I know "Deep Throat" was porn and I know "Inside Deep Throat" is about the cultural importance of that film, but to me it's just a sad story about the lure of fame - more boxers on the way to Palookaville, more actors mistaking the actual end of their careers for the beginning.

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Throaty 'Voice'

Michael Musto, of course, was at Inside Deep Throat's New York premiere and after-party and filed a report in his current "La Dolce Musto" column in the Village Voice. 

At the after-bash at Brasserie 8 1/2, as it were, Deep Throat co-star HARRY REEMS-now a real estate agent in Utah-told me, "There were no guns pointed at anyone's head. There was no hypnosis. I was there! And Linda ended up going back to nudity!" More impishly, the documentary's co-director, Fenton Bailey, cracked to me, "I've been hypnotized and I still can't do it."

Ich Bin Eine Pornographer

Inside Deep Throat made a big splash, so to speak, at the Berlin Film Festival, where last year's winning film caused a controversy when it was discovered its actress had worked in hardcore.  What a difference a year makes.

Journalists, film buyers and the public crowded into a theater Sunday to see a documentary, "Inside Deep Throat," about a history-making 1972 U.S. film featuring what has been described as "extreme fellatio" that made porn mainstream. . . .  The documentary "Inside Deep Throat," which cost $1 million to make, was one of the most coveted tickets at the festival. Journalists and buyers lined up for hours for a seat to its late night screening yet there were still inelegant battles at the entrance as the crowd rushed forward when the doors opened.

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Watergate to Nipplegate

Todd Gilchrist assigns four out of a possible five stars to Inside Deep Throat at Film Force, and calls the movie a captivating portrait of a culture in crisis, both then and now.

[Bailey and Barbato's] latest documentary paints a portrait as much of modern mores as it does of those in the 1970s: then, it was a woman who would go to any length (feature-length, in fact) to untangle her tingle; now, it's a wardrobe malfunction milliseconds long that stops a celebration of violence in its tracks. Without even directly acknowledging that current (and curiously ongoing) controversy, Fenton and Barber draw explicit throughlines from the censorship and close-mindedness of earlier generations to those of today; that they arouse the same incensed responses speaks to just how little we seem to have learned about ourselves.

Sock It to Me

Ken Tucker in New York magazine calls IDT a "delightful, insightful documentary," and says that Deep Throat was "Laugh-In with a hard-on."

Inside Deep Throat is more than a giggle-it's a valuable document of a cultural shift. The vintage shot of Reems flanked by new pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty alone says more about the nascent nexus of showbiz and sex than a million Howard Stern-Jenna Jameson chatfests.

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Pornopedia

Inside Deep Throat is now included in Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.  It's just the facts, man, no editorializing.   Come look us up.  Meanwhile, we're waiting for Funk & Wagnall's to call.

And speaking of editorializing, IDT has its first full-out, balls-to-the-wall negative review.  Whew, finally, the other shoe has dropped.  And it's no Blahnik.  A piece in the online journal The Trades takes the doc to task, calling it "a disaster on a number of accounts" and then goes on to a-count them.

[B]y the end of the movie I found myself more sympathetic to the Religious Right and censorship laws. The moment that solidified my stance happened somewhere between Linda Lovelace (the film's infamous star) comparing porn censorship in the US to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany and Harry Reems, the film's male lead, hailing "Deep Throat" as a film which exemplified a courageous and revolutionary feat. Since when is a woman giving a guy a blow job progressive or "courageous" for that matter? Isn't this all just oxymoronical.

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Will the Chic Hit the Fans?

"Porn docs often play at film festivals and nowhere else," says Owen Gleiberman in the latest Entertainment Weekly, "but Inside Deep Throat could turn out to be a one-shot porno-chic revival."  He gives the doc an A.

The codirectors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), work in their rigorous yet playful informational style, and the producer, veteran Hollywood player Brian Grazer, has ensured that the filmmakers got all the freedom they needed. Inside Deep Throat packs in the entire porno-puritan American circus: the lines around the block in the early '70s; the winking wisecracks on late-night TV as Deep Throat entered the national bloodstream; the anxiety that still lingers over the Mob's dominance of the burgeoning triple-X industry of the early '70s; the shutting down of theaters as the nation's prosecutors and censors went to work - helping, of course, to publicize the very phenomenon they wanted to crush.

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Photo: Harry Reems by Kai Regan

Inside on a Rainy Day

On the MTV website, Kurt Loder says Inside Deep Throat is "a funny and saddening new documentary."

"Deep Throat" dragged hardcore pornography out of the scum-swamps in which it had traditionally festered and pushed it into the everyday world. So successful was the movie in doing this that, today, not only is porn of every sort available instantly to all who seek it, it's also available - suddenly, startlingly, right there on a computer screen - to those who don't. In this regard, the modern porn industry is as evangelical, in its way, as the religious groups that understandably revile it.

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The Earthtimes reviewer left the screening with a heavy heart.

It's all told in a romping those-were-the-days style, and it could have been an entertaining film - except for a shadow so dark, it overpowers any lightness.

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Porn Yesterday

Harry Reems, the accidental star of Deep Throat and the purposeful hero of Inside Deep Throat is the subject of a profile in New York magazine. 

Since 1990, Reems has been married to a woman he fell in love with through his twelve-step meetings. . . .  Jeannie is not especially fond of Deep Throat ("It's amusing and dumb"), but she is a fan of Inside Deep Throat, even though it shows Linda Lovelace and her husband engaged in the act that gave the film its name. "In some ways, I wish they had toned it down a little bit," she says, "but I suppose you have to show people what you're talking about. It's just so odd to see."

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Board of Reviews 2

Inside Deep Throat opens today at a theater near you if you reside in a major city and live near a theater that's showing the movie.  That said, here is a flurry of reviews, compiled by rottentomatoes.   

"Moves like a bullet, running through its subjects with punch-drunk glee and stitching it all together with a pounding K-Tel Super Hits of the Seventies soundtrack" - Chris Barsanti,FILMCRITIC.COM

 "Nimble, engrossing, and journalistically eye-opening." - Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

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What Can Brown Do for You?

In yesterday's Washington Post, the venerable Tina Brown waxed on the screening of and distinguished-panel discussion after Inside Deep Throat at its premiere at the Paris Theatre in New York.

"Inside Deep Throat" appears headed for success, too, albeit on a smaller scale and with HBO substituting for the mob. The current FCC fatwa against any kind of network naughtiness adds the touch of lefty moralism needed to give the new documentary a chic marketing angle. Plus there's a good red-state redemption story: Harry Reems, whose "Deep Throat" fame sputtered out in a booze- and drug-addled stupor that left him panhandling on Sunset Strip, is now a born-again Christian selling real estate in Park City, Utah. He was in attendance at Monday's screening. His acting skills were always wooden and his hair is nearly white, but he looked craggy and spry.

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Loose Lips

"Oral history:  From Deep Throat to gag rule" by Peter Keough is a compelling, if somewhat lengthy, article in the Boston Phoenix that talks about Deep Throat and Inside Deep Throat and everything in between.  (Good read here)

Also, this was one of the first heterosexual porn movies that focused on fellatio, an act which, it may be argued, confers more power on the person performing it than on the one receiving it. Finally, Deep Throat's identification of the clitoris as the center of woman's sexuality defied the then-dominant patriarchal belief in the vaginal orgasm.

Citizen Linda?

Richard Knight Jr, in the Windy City Times, turns on, tunes in, and drops trou for Inside Deep Throat, calling it the documentary equivalent of Citizen Kane.  And we're right back at him. 
 

But with Inside Deep Throat, their new film, the duo may have made their own documentary equivalent of Citizen Kane, so perfectly does the subject matter match up with the particular gifts of this talented duo. This movie about how America's covert dual passion and repulsion for pornography temporarily broke into the mainstream and ignited a culture war via the extraordinary success of the first "legitimate" adult film is thoroughly unsettling, thought-provoking, funny, and immensely entertaining.

And he was really listening. 

Also, because it's a Barbato-Bailey doc, in addition to the heavy doses of humor (is it prejudicial of me to point out their unerring gay sensibility in this area?) the film has a soundtrack that's ramped up to underscore narrative points often made through musical montages. The movie's use of '70s pop and disco songs like Melanie's "Brand New Key" is distinctly reminiscent of the fictional Boogie Nights. Unlike the ironic, mixed message of that terrific film's oddly affecting theme of creating family where you find it, however, Inside Deep Throat instead traces how the movie's huge financial success simultaneously kick started both the moral backlash and the adult film industry into high gear and left no one unsullied along the way. Both ends of the spectrum cut a very wide swath.

(Here, read it yourself)

Variety Is the Spice of Life

On the panel after the Hollywood screening of Inside Deep Throat, Arianna Huffington explained to the audience how Brian Grazer saw Deep Throat the first time, then pleaded for us to seriously consider putting  the sex back into oral sex.  (Watch the clip here, courtesy of Variety.com)

Variety has a story about the rerelease of Deep Throat in relation to Inside Deep Throat's debut.  Prints of Deep Throat won't be ready for theaters until around Feb.18, the date IDT opens wider. Film labs started work on Monday producing 10 new prints. Five will be the original 1972 release; the other five will be edited to earn an R rating.

Laemmle Theaters president Greg Laemmle confirmed that he's in early discussions about screening the pic in his theaters. In addition to midnight screenings, he's also considering the possibility of giving the film primetime screen space.

The Landmark chain is also releasing "Inside Deep Throat," but VP of marketing Ray Price said it would not screen the triple-X "Deep Throat." Although Landmark has handled X-rated films in the past such as "Flesh Gordon" and 3-D title "The Stewardesses," Price said unspooling "Deep Throat" would be a step too far.  

Also, related to our post yesterday on the NY and the LA Times different opinions on how the IDT ad should look, both papers gave statements to Variety. 

Both emphasized the papers' willingness to run ads for NC-17 rated movies. The New York Times added the disclaimer that the ads be "in acceptable taste." The L.A. Times pointed out that it did not accept ads for X-rated or adult pics, and that, in the case of "Inside Deep Throat," the pic "went through the normal review process and was considered a legitimate documentary. We ran the ad as submitted."

Deep Shot

We're going to go out on a limb and say that Inside Deep Throat has been (so far) reviewed and chewed over more times and by more people than The Aviator and Sideways combined.  Ken Tucker in New York magazine joins the fray.

Inside Deep Throat's flaws are few. It alludes only briefly to underworld connections to porn profits, but only the FBI plus Superman could penetrate that deadly thicket. It spends too much time milking laughs out of a retired Florida movie distributor and his wife, who squabble riotously over their misgivings about screening the movie. But mostly, Inside Deep Throat is more than a giggle-it's a valuable document of a cultural shift. The vintage shot of Reems flanked by new pals Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty alone says more about the nascent nexus of showbiz and sex than a million Howard Stern-Jenna Jameson chatfests.

Mmm, Oh Yeah, Baby. . .  Double-Billing

Barbato, Bailey, camera

News of the reissue of Deep Throat, to be shown in some theaters on a double bill with the documentary Inside Deep Throat, has reached the United Kingdom with some speed.  It's a horny group of isles, the UK, so it's not surprising they would be on top of a story concerning a double dose of fellatio for the price of one.  And as yet there are no dates set for a London release.  Also, the Guardian has taken note of the disparity between the ads for the doc in US newspapers. 

Variety today finds interest in the conduct of US newspapers in carrying advertising for the new documentary. It notes that the LA Times ran a full page colour ad featuring "a pair of glossy lips", while the New York Times ran a simple text-only "teaser ad". The LA Times said the ad went through "the normal review process and was considered a legitimate documentary."

Guardian

Board of Reviews

Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian says, "Watching Inside Deep Throat is like attending the ultimate Studio 54 cocktail party you were born too late for, or were just too granola at the time to get invited to."

LORD KNOWS THE  ability to suppress the gag reflex is something we all could use these days. But that particular talent will never again have the cultural impact it did in 1972, when Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat thrust hardcore porn out of back rooms and into the mainstream, at least for a while. Even presidential spunk on an intern's dress had just passing political significance; Deep Throat was the B.J. that truly shook the world.

Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's new documentary, Inside Deep Throat, is a terrifically entertaining perspective on a phenomenon that looks weird even by Me Decade standards. Given our current standoff between prudery and prurience, it seems impossible that just a generation ago all barriers looked to be falling down for good; that porn and the Hollywood mainstream might couple, erasing the dividing line between them; that dropping trou and doing the deed for art's sake might someday result in somebody thanking the Academy for really, really liking them.

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J Hoberman in the Village Voice compares Inside Deep Throat to a Preston Sturges movie: "The principals are wildly photogenic archetypes-Damiano the amiable satyr, Linda the frizzy-haired hippie goddess, Harry the unlucky Lucky Pierre. Beneath these cartoon floats marches a parade of greedy goodfellas, scheming exhibitors, idiot politicians, swanning celebs, and frothing religious fundamentalists."

A famous Andy Warhol movie consists solely of a man's face in close-up as he's fellated by an offscreen partner. The HBO documentary Inside Deep Throat doesn't have nearly that much conceptual elegance, but it too focuses on a reaction-namely the convulsions that shook the American body politic in the wake of the porn film Deep Throat. Call this doc, written and directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blowjob." Deep Throat was a media event, a battle in the culture wars, a show business landmark. Shot in a Miami motel for $22,000, it would eventually gross $600 million. Its originality is not difficult to fathom. Whereas Warhol's Blow Job was conceptual, Deep Throat was high-concept: A woman whose clitoris is somewhere near her tonsils seeks sexual gratification through (copious) oral sex.

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"With all-American boys Ron Howard and Brian Grazer as its producers, the success of Inside Deep Throat at this year's Sundance film festival suggests that an end may be in sight for hardcore porn's 30-year-long march from the sticky-floored fleapit to near respectability," says John Patterson in the British Guardian. 

Among those who confessed to having seen Deep Throat were Gregory Peck, Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, Hugh Hefner, and no less august a figure than disgraced ex-veep Spiro Agnew, who was fortunate enough to catch it chez Frank Sinatra.  Thirty years later, as the film's cultural impact has faded and its legal precedents have become integrated into First Amendment law and lore, porn is a thriving mainstream industry whose financial returns dwarf those of the music and movie industries.

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AVN Hearts IDT

Not surprisingly, Adult Video News, the porn industry's trade paper, loves Inside Deep Throat, saying that there is a "wealth of information and amusement to be found in this  excellent documentary, which should be required viewing for  all involved in the adult industry. It runs a very fast 92 minutes, is rated NC-17 - hey, they had to show  Linda actually deep-throating Harry for about 30 seconds . . ."

[I]f Inside Deep Throat had only concentrated on  the adult industry participants in the making and marketing  of the original film, it likely would not have been nearly as  interesting, nor received the acclaim it will undoubtedly garner in reviews leading up to the film's official opening  on Feb. 11. Instead, Bailey and Barbato searched out some of  the more famous mainstream folks, now all senior citizens, who'd been touched by Deep Throat since its Jan. 12,  1972 theatrical debut. These included Lovelace's mother,  sister and best friend . . .

Mirror Mirror

As we've said before, we like to hear how pretty we are.  So it made us go all funny inside when we got mentioned by Owen Gleiberman in his Sundance wrapup in the latest ish of Entertainment Weekly.  He said: 

There are moments when all you require from a documentary is that it serve a great subject well.  Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a nimble investigative workout that leaves you with the exhilerated sensation of, at last, understanding the defining financial scandal of the virtual era.  Inside Deep Throat does an exuberant and savvy job of packing 30 years of the porn business into 90 eye-opening minutes, and The Devil and Daniel Johnson explores the most eccentric figure in indie rock: a mentally ill troubadour who became an icon to the Cobain generation, even though he demonstrates about as much talent as Chauncey Gardiner.

My My

In the review "The Many Hypocrisies of Robert Redford & Sundance," Govindini Murty writes,

Hysterical warnings of impending censorship were renewed in Brian Grazer's 'Inside Deep Throat,' an apologia for the infamous '70s porn film (which left its coerced star Linda Lovelace scarred for life). Variety declared in its review that studying "Deep Throat" was more timely now than ever "since forces on the right are currently galvanized for a renewed attack on civil liberties and freedom of expression.If only these so-called forces onthe right really were as galvanized as liberals fear.

(More of this review can be found at Libertas, "a forum for conservative thought on film.")

A Little Variety

Liz Smith, the gossip smith at the New York Post, has writ a bit about this coming Monday's Inside Deep Throat screening at the Paris Theatre in New York City -  and the esteemed panel convened to discuss it after.  First item of the day, bless her.  (Here it is)

It should be noted that the Inside Deep Throat soundtrack is killer, laced with pounding hits from the '70s.  As Daily Variety pointed out in its January 24th issue, "Production values are colorfully showy, and a vibrant, imaginative score by David Steinberg gooses things along."  Gooses.  It goes on to say, "Nudity and graphic language are abundant, with hardcore footage limited to a few close-up moments of Lovelace incontrovertibly demonstrating her capacities for the technique she made forever infamous."  Those few close-up moments, however, are incontrovertibly delightful.

Popbytes Swallows IDT Whole

Nice review of doc this morning on Popbytes.com after the TV Hipster saw the film last night at the Egyptian.

i highly suspect that this will be the next documentary making the rounds at more theaters than most docs might (it's due to hit big cities on feb 11th) - i so do love a good fun documentary - rated NC-17 - it's a little explicit but i'm sure most people can handle it - inside deep throat doesn't disappoint - you can check out their cool blog about the film and a bunch of related stuff at worldofwonder.net/insidedeepthroat/

We love a guy who does our linking for us.  (Read the complete review)

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.

(Full story)

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)

Hard to Swallow

IMDb has some tasty little message boards in progress re Inside Deep Throat. 

In one of them, Sam41 wonders whether if he should take his son to the doc for his 13th birthday.  "My son recently turned 13 years old and I am 31. I promised him that for his birthday he could see any movie he wants in theaters no matter what the rating is.  He chose this movie and I need to know if it's appropriate for me to take him. What do you think?"  Naturally, others have opinions on that.

In the other, they respond to the awkward question "and we need to shown this because??????why?"  Someone who apparently speaks the same language replied, "this as much sense as having a documentry on the making of Godzilla. i saw deep throat again again and again.....for research and i never saw the shotgun that was alleged by mrs lovelace(incidently she passed away in 2002 so that was another reason why that did that because she couldn't sqwak".  Pithy.

Peter Meter

Peter Travers, the critic over at Rolling Stone who almost never gives a film a good review (just kidding!), was quite taken with Inside Deep Throat, saying, "Open up and say 'ah' to this wickedly probing documentary from Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster). It has a lot more on its mind than blow jobs."  And we can almost smell the newspaper blurb now:  "Has a lot more on its mind than blow jobs." 

And Joblo.com gave the doc 7.9 (out of 9) bags of popcorn on its Popcorn Meter.

Press This

CNN.com opens its "Sex selling at Sundance" post with Inside Deep Throat, saying it's "among  the most talked-about early films of the festival," which, of course, we already know by now, but it's always nice to hear again how pretty we are.

Brian Grazer - Hot Even Before He Got There

"Brian Grazer and Universal production execs were rattled after the G-4 jet they flew into Park City for the Sundance Film Festival caught fire five minutes before landing," reports Variety.

Buzzing

Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune called the WOW doc "the most buzzed-about premiere of the Sundance Film Festival's opening weekend."   We knew that.

"Inside Deep Throat," which Universal is releasing next month, is part "Kinsey" (its view of the nation's former state of sexual repression), part "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" (the recounting of censorship/First Amendment battles, culminating in the criminal trial of leading man Harry Reems) and part "Boogie Nights" (immersion in the pre-video porn world, all set to a fab '70s soundtrack that includes "Spill the Wine"). With its graphic movie clips and the subject's frank treatment, "Inside Deep Throat" will become that very rare species: a major-studio NC-17 film (Universal's first since 1990's "Henry & June").

(Full story)

Little Bit Country

Another religious man rants against the Inside Deep Throat doc and the directors who made it on his site, which seems to be called Little Bit Tired, Little Bit Worn.   Then, in a comment, a reader writes, "Just wanted to remind you that you are a stuck up bible thump!"

Jumping Off the 'Deep' End

NC-17, anyone? Sundance openers cut loose Utah's film festival floods its screens with nudity and explicit sex, with "Inside Deep Throat" a big feature screams The Oregonian's wordy headline, surely inviting the Christian right to have its say without even reading the article. 

Take, for instance, the film that was chosen to screen in the festival's biggest theater at the end of the first day: "Inside 'Deep Throat' " is a spry and engaging documentary about the making of the notorious 1972 porn film that became a rallying cry for both censors and free-speech advocates. Though directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato ("The Eyes of Tammy Faye") keep the film consistently amusing, it's inevitably filled with the very images that so polarized the chattering classes 33 years ago. It's being released later this year by Universal Pictures despite an NC-17 rating. It went over gangbusters with the audience.

  (Full story)

On the Other Side

Seems not everyone is a fan, but we think this has little to do with the movie, and more to do with fanatics.

I would not be surprised if Grazer is some homo-fanatic liberal. No accountability, no personal responsibility, just a continuous legitimation of sexual violence and dysfunction. Or maybe he is another Jeff Jarvis/Glenn Reynolds, et al, liberal homo-fanatic conservatives.

More at alessandrab.blogspot.com

Arts and Faith.com has a thread going which, while not particularly loving, isn't nearly as hating.

Keep It Comin'

The Hollywood Reporter

The docu turns out to be an often provocative and perceptive look at the history of the porn business in America, the cultural wars the movie fed into and the lives of some who worked on the film.



Since forces on the right are currently galvanized for a renewed attack on civil liberties and freedom of expression, "Inside Deep Throat" is making a timely appearance. The film, which Universal will release nationally Feb. 11, looks like another documentary boxoffice winner.

Seattle PI

Grazer had been contemplating a film about "Deep Throat" star Linda Lovelace, who died in a 2002 car crash, but found the focus too narrow.

"I was less interested in the story of Linda Lovelace and more on the movie's effect on popular culture," Grazer said.

Contact Music (site is really slow)

After Premiere Press

indieWIRE: Park City

Here's a crazy scenario... An aspiring Queens filmmaker, who works in his day job as a hairdresser, gets an idea for a movie that eventually goes into production costing $25,000 and turns into a cultural phenomenon grossing over $600 million in three decades. This seemingly pie-in-the-sky dream did in fact happen, and the director himself, Gerard Damiano, even admitted the film, "Deep Throat" wasn't very good. Nevertheless, the film, which opened in Times Square in June, 1972 became a pillar of the sexual revolution, unleashing a torrent of social upheaval as large segments of mainstream society embraced graphic – or realistic, depending on one's point-of-view – sex.

the-trades.com

At first I was wondering to myself: "Why does an NC-17 movie have a green band trailer? This is the kind of movie that would benefit from a red band!" However, after sitting through the actual footage I realized what the goal here is. Sell this explicit movie the same way the original was sold, get mainstream America to come examine what all the fuss is about.

After 'Deep Throat,' G-Rated Life

For when Harry Reems takes a poetic moment and says "What a ride this thing called life is," he is not being hyperbolic. As Linda Lovelace's costar in "Deep Throat," the most successful pornographic film ever made, he has gone from obscurity to celebrity to criminal notoriety to gutter-dwelling debauchery to born-again sobriety and success in one hectic lifetime.

Los Angeles Times calendarlive.com

The Premiere Party

So, while we are all putting together our screening scheduled, what about an all important party plan. A quick scan of Friday's event schedule includes celebrations for "Happy Endings" at the Village at the Lift, as well as parties hosted by TLA Releasing, the Austin Film Society, a soiree for doc competition film "Murderball," another for Sundance premiere "Layer Cake," a party for American Spectrum entry "Rize", and a late-night blowout for the premiere of "Inside Deep Throat." If the recent soiree for "Party Monster," the previous Sundance film by "Deep Throat" co-directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, is any indication, this one should be quite a debauch! So, leave your weak constitution and Red State sentiments back at the condo.

Welcome to Brand-Dance at indiewire.com

Test Your Smarts on the Indie Scene

Question: A new documentary, which makes its premiere at Sundance, pays tribute to the most profitable film of all time? What was that film?

Answer: The porn movie Deep Throat (1972), which was made in six days for $25,000 (U.S.) and went on to make $600,000 worldwide. The new documentary is Inside Deep Throat, by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (Party Monster). Produced by Ron Howard's regular partner, Brian Glazer, with commentary from Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and John Waters, the film opens in limited release, including Toronto, on Feb. 11. After that, it will presumably "open wide."

Answer them all at The Globe and Mail

Recent Press

Entertainment Weekly

Rotten Tomatoes

Newsday

Extra

Tonight at 7PM on NBC, Extra will debut the Inside Deep Throat trailer, although, of course, visitors to this blog have already seen it.

NY Post Recommends

Lou Lemenick at the NY Post recommends four films premiering at Sundance.  Inside Deep Throat, natch, is one of them.  And he reminds us that it's the first major studio-released NC-17 film since Showgirls.

Some Recent Press

The Chicago Tribune

Aintitcool.com

Variety.com

Local Hero

Park City, Utah, realtor Harry Reems is a "a self-proclaimed homebody who lives at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac," says the town's paper, The Park Record. But the quiet cul-de-sac might not be so quiet when the Sundance film festival starts up later this month and it's discovered that the homebody realtor is THAT Harry Reems, the one who starred with Linda Lovelace in the porn flick Deep Throat. Reems will be seen with Helen Gurley Brown, Norman Mailer, John Waters, and scores of other luminaries reliving the controversy surrounding that, um, seminal film when the documentary Inside Deep Throat from World of Wonder and Imagine makes a splash at Sundance on the 21st. Reems is not dreading being back in the spotlight; after nearly two decades of staying away from the press, the former Herb Stryker, is ready to tell his story.

[Deep Throat] was banned in many towns across the country and sparked a Scopes-like court case testing the country’s obscenity laws. According to Inside Deep Throat’s filmmakers, Reems was the star defendant during the ensuing trial in Memphis. “He is really the hero of the story. Harry Reems was charged with distributing obscene material. He is the only actor ever charged that way. . . ,” said Barbato.

(Read more)