E-Mail This Article to a Friend Oral history (continued)

Well, at least that’s $600 million that neither Hollywood nor the government got its hands on. Which suggests a different kind of money trail. Where has the money once spent on Deep Throat gone since such films have been banned from theaters? Who has cashed in the most since the courts cleared porn from public viewing?

The current porn industry — privately consumed on Web sites, on video and DVS, and on pay-per-view in respectable and expensive hotel rooms — takes in about $10 billion annually. Hollywood takes in somewhat less with its "legitimate" products.

So who’s getting that money? A new beneficiary is the Adelphia Broadcasting System, the cable company that previously was too prim to air the Spice channel. Since its brush with bankruptcy, it has recently added hard-core porn to its programming.

At least Adelphia is up-front about its porn profits. Last September, in a story called "Porn in the U.S.A.," 60 Minutes investigated the new face of the porn industry. According to the report, Comcast, the country’s largest cable company, pulls in $50 million a year from smut. Other corporate benefactors include EchoStar and DirecTV, owned by General Motors subsidiary Hughes Technology; their profits, according to one source, could approach a half-billion dollars. And then, of course, there are the hotel chains.

I’m sure these companies and corporations have contributed to a lot of politicians’ nest eggs, probably the same ones who will be voting on a bill to impose $500,000 fines for future wardrobe malfunctions on network television. And I wonder how Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem feel now that their efforts have helped spawn an industry that funnels money to those who crusade against abortion, gay marriage, and women’s rights.

Maybe a more significant question, though, is how much less Hollywood would be making had the Nixon court not made the irrevocable break between the public and private consumption of porn. Scholar and author Jon Lewis, briefly interviewed in Insider, argues in Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry that, throughout its history, Hollywood has turned attempts at repression — the McCarthyite investigations and the subsequent institution of the Black List, efforts at censorship resulting in self-regulating policies such as the ratings system — and transformed them into further consolidations of its power.

In 1972, the threat to Hollywood was not so much government censorship; it was the stunning popularity of hard-core films. By turning the censors against the real enemy, hard-core porn, Hollywood killed both birds with one stone. Could there have been some conscious collusion between Hollywood and the powers that be?

"Given the fact that Hollywood had signed off on self-regulation in ’68 with the ratings system," says Bailey, "the threat of hard-core films like Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door was very unwelcome, especially at a time when their own studio pictures were doing so badly. So in a way the Supreme Court ruling couldn’t have been better news. Jack Valenti swears up and down and will to the day he dies that the only reason the ratings system is in place is to protect children from seeing pornography. Jack Valenti is the consummate politician, so all I can say is if you believe that, you can believe anything."

"I definitely think there was a Washington and Hollywood connection that resulted in a decision that made certain that hard-core sex would not be part of the Hollywood studio system," adds Barbato. "I think it was absolutely political."

SO HOLLYWOOD, with a few exceptions, has stayed out of the hard-core game. And hard core has stayed out of public. An exception, though, is Inside Deep Throat itself. Released by Universal Studios, it’s their first NC-17 film since 1990’s Henry & June. It’s produced by Brian Grazer, who, for the first time, has invested his own money — a million bucks — to make the movie. No doubt Grazer has idealistic and artistic reasons for his actions. But I’m sure he expects to make that million back, and then some. Could the astonishing box-office success of the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 have factored into his calculations? (Grazer was unavailable for an interview before press time.) Undoubtedly Grazer’s film figured into the calculations of Arrow Productions, who are re-releasing Deep Throat in 10 cities to coincide with the documentary’s release. If Inside Deep Throat proves as lucrative as 9/11, or if the re-release of the original film makes only a fraction of the money it once did, might it not encourage both more documentaries and more films rated NC-17?

The filmmakers don’t have any such illusions. "To even release a film that’s NC-17, the restrictions are incredible," says Barbato. "Theaters won’t play it. You can’t do television advertising. It’s Hollywood’s design not to release these sorts of films. If you look in the New York Times today, there’s a full-page ad that is all print because the New York Times refused to allow the artwork, which is a pair of lips."

Maybe that’s why Arrow plans to edit half the re-release prints for an R rating, though I can’t imagine much of the 62-minute film surviving such a cut besides the six-minute opening-credit sequence of Lovelace driving around Miami.

Despite the restrictions, Fenton and Barbato insist that the NC-17 rating is unavoidable.

"You can’t make a film about Deep Throat and not show the thing that made the film so famous," says Bailey. "You can have all the archival footage in the world, all the voiceover interviews, but what it was really like in the ’70s to go to a movie house and watch that film, you can’t do better than to show the audience that scene. They get the same experience. And people feel incredibly uncomfortable, because sex has become so privatized. Hard core may be totally accessible to us, but only in a completely private way. So we feel very weird, comfortable, ashamed, whenever we’re witnessing anything sexual in public as an audience."

"In other words," concludes Barbato, "It’s a great date movie."

Peter Keough can be reached at pkeough[a]phx.com