"Inside Deep Throat"

This documentary about the ludicrously bad ur-porno film will test your gag reflex.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Feb 11, 2005 | In case you arrived too late for the 1970s -- or the '80s or, OK, the '90s -- here's a recap: Sex. It was invented or discovered at some point in those years, although those of us who were oh so sophisticated and had read snooty elitist books like "Ulysses" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and the Bible liked to claim that we knew about it all along. The discovery of sex in all its horrifying varieties has divided America into two bitterly warring camps: Those who believe we are bitterly divided over sex and those who don't.

No, I'm sorry, that's not right. Rather, the two camps are: 1) those who believe that all forms of sexuality, up to and including having your e-mail in box porked full of invitations to watch "barely legal BBW farm nnastyy f0kcng," are liberating to the human spirit and 2) those who believe that sex must be confined to the sanctity of the Christian marriage bed, with the shades drawn, the lights out, and the wife in chains (lingerie and stiletto heels for the husband optional).

If I'm being facetious, the degree of exaggeration is not high. And if a movie can be fascinating and tedious at the same time, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's "Inside Deep Throat" -- which more or less depicts the America I have just described -- is that movie. With its parade of semi-relevant celebrity talking heads, its freak-show interviews with the bitterly non-famous in their funny-looking clothes, and its assemblage of grainy, out-of-focus TV footage, "Inside Deep Throat" illuminates the cultural climate of the '70s while making it seem impossibly remote.

Like Bailey and Barbato's other films, which include "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and both the fictional and documentary versions of "Party Monster" (along with made-for-cable movies about Monica Lewinsky, Anna Nicole Smith and Adolf Hitler), this one tries to straddle the uncomfortable gap between cultural history and kitsch hog-wallow, with mixed success.

Is the story of the 1972 porn flick "Deep Throat," which Bailey and Barbato describe as "the most profitable film of all time" (a debatable point, at best), worth telling? Yeah, probably. But the significance of "Deep Throat" is not exactly inherent or obvious, as anyone who has seen that lamentable film will attest. (Even the few frames of male star Harry Reems' attempt at comic acting included herein made me screw my eyes tightly closed and start singing tunelessly to myself.) As the directors of "Inside Deep Throat" seem intermittently aware, Gerard Damiano's $25,000 fellatio flick was important only because of what it represented and what it unleashed. If "Deep Throat" hadn't sparked the porn revolution -- and the porn backlash -- some other movie would have.

"Deep Throat" didn't bring sex into pop culture, and it didn't ignite the sexual revolution. It did something cruder and simpler -- it brought pornography, if not quite into the mainstream, then right next door, whence it has never moved out. As various people in the film note, porn lost its innocence, and they're not kidding. Before "Deep Throat," pornography was a small-potatoes business closely linked to organized crime. People made porn for the transgressive thrill, or out of quaint notions of sexual liberation, or -- more often than not -- because they were low-end hustlers with few qualifications who were trying to get into the movie business. (Wes Craven says in the film that directing porn served as an informal apprenticeship for careers in Hollywood.)

Three decades later, the "adult video industry" has become the 800-pound gorilla of the entertainment business; as Bailey and Barbato point out, in 2002 Hollywood studios produced roughly 500 feature films, while the porn biz cranked out 11,000-plus new videos. The blow job technique that made "Deep Throat" star Linda Lovelace famous -- and that astonished porn-industry veterans like Damiano when they saw it in 1972 -- is now familiar, and probably boring, to any 12-year-old with a DSL connection. (Yes, gentle reader, you see Lovelace do her stuff in "Inside Deep Throat," albeit briefly; this film comes with an NC-17 rating.)

As Camille Paglia puts it in the movie, "Deep Throat," with its ludicrous male-fantasy story about a woman who can reach orgasm only by sucking cock, provided a kind of false climax (ha ha) to the sexual revolution. For reasons Bailey and Barbato can only partly explain, it became the porn movie that Johnny Carson and Bob Hope joked about on network TV, and the centerpiece of an article on "porn chic" by New York Times reporter Ralph Blumenthal. Manhattan socialites and Beverly Hills movie stars lined up to see it alongside ordinary citizens, and as John Waters jokes, this changed the codes of porn-watching behavior: You weren't as likely to pleasure yourself under your raincoat if Angela Lansbury was sitting next to you.

Next Page: Who became the Christian real estate agent? Who became a decency activist -- before returning to porn and dying tragically?

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