Looking Inside Deep Throat

Article posted Fri Mar 25 11:41:12 2005

Forget The Blair Witch Project, or even The Passion of the Christ. The most successful independent film of all time was a badly-acted but widely-watched little 1972 smut film called Deep Throat. The new documentary Inside Deep Throat takes us, well, inside the infamous film’s production. Pornographic films have been around since the 1800s, but Deep Throat proved that pornography could be immensely profitable. It may seem obvious today— when porn is a $10 billion business that makes more money than mainstream Hollywood films— but in 1972 it wasn’t clear that anyone could create the product for a mass market.

A parade of pornography pundits in varying stages of decrepitude offer their opinions on the film and its cultural impact, including Gore Vidal, Hugh Hefner, Erica Jong, Annie Sprinkle, Larry Flynt, Camille Paglia, Susan Brownmiller, and Helen Gurley Brown. Deep Throat’s stars, director, producer, and distributor share their experiences and recollections about making the film and enduring its aftermath.

It is easy to dismiss Deep Throat as a bad and cheesy porn film (though by all accounts it certainly is that). But it also imbued to porn a legitimacy that had never been seen before. As Inside Deep Throat shows, Deep Throat was very much a product of a specific social, cultural, and sexual climate. Flush with sexual liberation, women were for the first time asserting their right to view pornography if they so chose. As one of the interviewees points out, at the time acting in sex films was a form of rebellion, both against the government and against conservative cultural mores. Today it’s all done for the money. Given how schlocky Deep Throat is, it’s hard to really lament the loss of Art to greed and profit, but in a way that’s what happened, at least according to Inside Deep Throat.

Inside Deep Throat also reminds us that in the early 1970s pornographic films were to some degree legitimate productions, and served as a breeding ground for many mainstream Hollywood directors and producers. (Horror film vet Wes Craven, for example, candidly admits to having had a brief career in porn.) Instead of today’s glut of zero-budget, shot-on-video gonzo porn flicks which are cranked out by the truckload every week, Deep Throat and its ilk (such as Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones) were full-fledged productions. Inside Deep Throat is in some ways similar to Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, in the way it chronicles the changing era of a certain type of filmmaking. In the same way that huge film budgets and the rise of big film studios brought an end to one era of independent filmmaking, the development of the VCRs and easily available home movie cameras brought an end to a Golden Age of porn.

Inside Deep Throat shows how the film garnered more than just controversy—it also attracted investigations, federal charges, and arrests. There’s plenty of intrigue in how the Mafia took over the distribution of the film, and how the FBI infiltrated theaters in Florida to investigate it. Government prosecutors struggled to find reasons to shut Deep Throat down, and eventually settled on a remarkable (and, in retrospect, truly bizarre) claim as to the danger the film posed: That women who saw the film would believe they needed a clitoral orgasm to satisfy them, and deny the importance of a vaginal orgasm. At one point the film was banned in 23 states, and in July 1974, actor Harry Reems was arrested on obscenity charges, the first time in American history an actor had been charged under the century-old statute.

In addition to complications with the Mafia, the courts, and social conservatives, the film was also targeted by feminists, who claimed that pornography degraded women and would cause an increase in rapes. (Whether pornography degrades its actors is debatable, but the causal link between pornography and rape has since been disproven: Pornography is more available and consumed than ever before—8,500 adult films are produced each year (23 per day)—seen on cable TV, in hotels, and on DVD. At the same time, according to FBI statistics, the incidence of rape has decreased. According to FBI statistics, violent crime rates, including rape and sexual assault, are among the lowest since records began being kept in 1973—ironically, the year after Deep Throat was released. If a causal link existed between rape and pornography, studies should show a positive correlation over the past 30 years; instead exactly the opposite has occurred.)

Inside Deep Throatis also interesting (quite apart from the salacious content) as a look at how films are made. While not on par with, for example, Lost in La Mancha, it is fascinating to meet the participants and see what happened to them and why. (Star Linda Lovelace embraced the porn industry, then later joined with feminists to attack it, then returned to porn before being killed in a 2002 car crash; co-star Harry Reems, though acquitted on obscenity charges, was unable to move into mainstream acting and spent years in drug and alcohol rehab before becoming a born-again Christian and is now selling real estate in Utah.)

Though not explicitly an anti-censorship film, Inside Deep Throat does point out the hypocrisy of many anti-pornography crusaders, including Charles Keating, the corrupt savings and loan director who cost American taxpayers half a trillion dollars in a banking scandal likened to the Enron of the 1980s. Prosecutor Larry Parrish ends the film with a revealing lament that the dangers of pornography are being ignored by the Bush administration. If we could just get rid of these annoying terrorists, he says, our government could tackle the real threat to America: dirty films.

Inside Deep Throat could have used a little more probing and a little less slack-jawed admiration for its subject. The directors of course tackle the important (and obvious) First Amendment issues (a la The People Versus Larry Flynt), but didn’t really seem to investigate some of the sketchier elements to the story. For example, what, exactly was the Mob’s role in the film? Since everyone claims they never made a dime on the film, where did the reported $600 million profit go? Inside Deep Throat is an interesting look at a cultural climate that people of my generation never knew, a bridge between the eras of Hugh Hefner and Ron Jeremy.