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

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.

Asked to amplify her film comments in a phone interview, Williams agrees that some feminists might have misinterpreted the film and misused Lovelace but minimizes feminists’ influence in gagging the movie. "That’s giving feminism a little too much credit," says Williams. "As for Lovelace, she was a victim of a patriarchal culture in which women are sex objects and don’t have a lot of career choices, especially uneducated women. If you read Ordeal, which I know she probably didn’t really write, it’s pretty clear that she was in a bad relationship, she didn’t have any self-respect or self-esteem, and she was doing a lot of sex acts for money, even before she was doing them before a camera. And I believe that she did something with a dog, although I haven’t seen that film. I think that Deep Throat was probably one of the few bright moments in a rather grim life. The idea of her being coerced on the set of that film seems to me rather outlandish."

IF FEMINISM can’t be blamed, how about Richard Nixon? In 1968, he inherited Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. When the commission concluded in 1970 that pornography had no harmful effects and that laws against it were a waste of time, Nixon rejected the findings. His efforts to gather "proof" of the deleterious effects of porn would not be realized until 1986, when the Reagan administration’s Meese Commission eschewed the scientific methods of its predecessor, employing mostly emotional anecdotal evidence (and boasting support from anti-porn feminists such as Andrea Dworkin). It concluded that porn and pathology (not to mention organized crime) were inextricably interlinked.

By that time, though, the sexual revolution had long since been lost. Prosecutors got Deep Throat banned in New York (one of their arguments being that the film endorsed the pernicious belief in the clitoral orgasm — feminists take note), resulting in the now legendary theater-marquee epitaph JUDGE CUTS THROAT. WORLD MOURNS. Twenty-three more states, according to Inside, followed suit.

After taking out the exhibitors of the film, the FBI and Department of Justice went after the filmmakers. In 1976, Lovelace’s co-star Harry Reems — who started on the film as a lighting technician and got $250 to fill in when the original actor was a no-show — was convicted on conspiracy and obscenity charges and sentenced to five years. (A cause célèbre led by Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty helped get him acquitted on appeal.)

The real turning point, though, came with a series of decisions by the Supreme Court, newly stuffed with right-wing Nixon appointees, in 1973. The most significant was Miller v. California, which effectively eliminated pornography from any public theatrical distribution. If Brian Grazer’s grandmother wanted to see a blue movie, there’d be no place for her to stand in line to do so.

Why did Nixon have such a hard-on for Deep Throat? After all, Agnew, his veep, apparently saw it and didn’t complain. Says Bailey, "I think the right wing is very vested in an idea of sexual normalcy and sexual abnormalcy. They need a division between the right and the wrong, but I don’t think that that position, that rigidity, is borne [out] by the facts of life or anything that’s real in life, and I tend to think that’s why they often invoke the divine to give their beliefs some kind of support or give it the kind credibility that they otherwise lack. This was the beginning of a huge shift in political power that is really very much still with us today. Right now everybody seems to be gearing up for some renewed attack on pornography."

Williams is less pessimistic. "We have these cycles," she says. "We’re in one of those cycles right now. On the other hand, there is so much more sex that everybody sees that people are very blasé about. And I don’t think it’s just hypocrisy. I think it is much more integrated into the fabric of what we watch on television and what we see at the movies, but also it’s integrated into our sex lives, because I think an awful lot of people now pretty regularly use pornography in the bedroom."

"On the private level, it’s limitless and it’s all-pervasive," agrees Bailey. "On the public level, it doesn’t exist. The renegade band of filmmakers who made Deep Throat were arguing that sex should be a part of the cinematic experience."

So much for that dream.

OF ALL the evils committed by the Nixon administration, its swipes at porn were probably not its most virulent. Nonetheless, the irony that Nixon, the nemesis of Deep Throat, was undone by Deep Throat, the still unidentified source for the Watergate scandal (who is now, rumor has it, nearing death), is not lost on Inside’s filmmakers.

"Deep Throat, the Watergate source," speculates Bailey, "was this outlaw voice, this almost forbidden voice speaking out against corruption. Deep Throat, the movie, was also a voice speaking out, an outrageous voice for sexual freedom, different strokes, do what you want, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else, it’s okay. So in a way, in fact, they’re more significantly joined than one would imagine."

Good point, but when I think of Deep Throat, the anonymous source, I think of Hal Holbrook in a garage in All the President’s Men telling Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman to follow the money. And that’s why, I think, Deep Throat got throttled, porno chic went out of style, and the sexual revolution was never televised. Too much money was being made — and by the wrong people.

What happened to the $600 million (according to FBI estimates) made by Deep Throat? Certainly Harry Reems, Linda Lovelace, and Gerry Damiano didn’t see any of it.

"Lots of it went into suitcases off to the Bahamas and no one knows where it is," says Inside co-director Randy Barbato. "It was spent. It was stolen. It was hidden."

By whom?

"By the family. By the Perainos [reputed mobster Lou Peraino was one of the film’s "producers"]. By distributors who were skimming off them. There were scams happening everywhere. The surviving Peraino family members who[m] we spoke to said they didn’t know where it went off to, and we got the impression that they were telling us the truth."