Inside Deep Throat

Open wide: erious-minded Inside Deep Throat isn't too hard to swallow

By Jeannette Catsoulis

When, in 1972, hairdresser Gerard Damiano switched his blow-drier for a camera, he could have had no inkling that one day luminaries like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal would be called upon to comment on his magnum opus. Now 72, Damiano is slightly bored by all the fuss. "No, I don't think it's a good movie," he tells filmmakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato in Inside Deep Throat. "I wrote the script in a weekend."

Filmed in six days for $25,000, Deep Throat would have quietly gone the rounds of the grindhouses with every other porn flick had the Nixon White House not decided to make an example of it. The resulting moral crusade was inspired less by fear of porn itself than terror over the possibility that a woman's orgasm might not be located in her vagina. Though placing Linda Lovelace's clitoris--a word only interviewee Dr. Ruth seems capable of pronouncing correctly--in her throat was a masterstroke of male fantasy, it also negated decades of male-controlled sex education.

When the New York Times labelled the film "porn chic," calling it "the throat that had to be cut," Upper West Side matrons couldn't get there fast enough. Seeing Deep Throat became a gesture in support of the First Amendment, and Bailey and Barbato's documentary thrums with this sense of aggrandizement. "Deep Throat was less about the joys of oral sex than the freedom to speak out against shame and hypocrisy," intones narrator Dennis Hopper, convincing us of his expertise in both areas. Much more fun is Helen Gurley Brown, who tells us conspiratorially that "ejaculate is good for the complexion"--a beauty tip somewhat weakened by the close-up of her own, over-tucked face.

Inside Deep Throat is full of fascinating revelations: Wes Craven admitting he, along with many directors, began his career making porn movies; Damiano praising star Harry Reems' ability to get wood "at the sound of the camera motor." But by far the most memorable character is location manager Lenny Camp, all popping eyes and mad-scientist hair. "The movie was a piece of shit," he opines, "and the actors were all shit." Now that's a level of analysis any critic can aspire to.