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Oral history
From Deep Throat to gag rule
BY PETER KEOUGH

THE ’70s WERE a time when men wore long sideburns and mustaches, and your grandmother could turn you on to the latest, hottest porn movie. That’s how young Brian Grazer, later to become the producer of such movies as Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, and Friday Night Lights, first heard about the subject of his NC-17-rated documentary Inside Deep Throat, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.

Grazer’s grandmother was just one of the film’s millions of unlikely viewers. The fellatio-glutted Deep Throat would become the most lucrative porn movie ever made (and maybe the most profitable film of all time: made for $25,000, it has to date grossed $600 million). And it had huge cultural cachet that crossed the usual political and social lines: after its opening in Times Square on June 12, 1972, among those who might be spotted waiting in line were Mike Nichols, Ed McMahon, Truman Capote, and Jack Benny. Spiro Agnew reportedly saw it at one of Frank Sinatra’s parties. Johnny Carson, Bob Hope, and Rowan and Martin joked about it on national TV. The New York Times declared an era of "porno chic."

Above all, it marked a seismic shift in American attitudes about sexuality. If in the 1950s Playboy magazine had revolutionized porn by turning it into a mass-market phenomenon geared to self-styled swingin’ young men, Deep Throat appealed across the demographic spectrum. Among Inside Deep Throat’s archival footage is a shot of a demure, elderly woman wearing pearls who avows her right to see a pornographic film if she so chooses. She may not have been Grazer’s grandmother, but undoubtedly she was someone’s.

"You could see a blowjob in a public theater," recalls John Waters, who, along with Dr. Ruth, Hugh Hefner, and Erica Jong, adds talking-head commentary. "It’s hard to imagine today how liberating that felt."

Hard to imagine now because of how far we’ve advanced — or retreated? It’s a difficult call, since while Deep Throat’s admirers were legion, so were the moral watchdogs who crusaded against everything it stood for. In a sense, the controversy surrounding the film was the opening shot in the culture wars to come. Today, the fight has grown ever more shrill. Never before has sex so saturated all facets of culture, especially marketing; seldom have government and moralists organized so effectively on behalf of censorship in the mass media. In three decades we’ve gone from "porn chic" to "wardrobe malfunction." What happened?

FEMINISM, OR SO Inside Deep Throat suggests, was one thing that happened. Interviewed in the film, novelist Erica Jong points out how Deep Throat’s premise — the heroine, played by Linda Lovelace, can get sexual satisfaction only through fellatio because her clitoris is in her throat — was merely a male fantasy. Of course, men would like to believe women get satisfaction from blowjobs, Jong insists, since they do.

Feminists Susan Brownmiller and Gloria Steinem also condemn the film as exploitative and repressive. When Lovelace (who died in an automobile accident in 2002) wrote a 1980 book about her experience called Ordeal, in which she claimed that she had been beaten, drugged, hypnotized, and otherwise coerced into making the film, Brownmiller and Steinem enlisted her in their cause.

"The Linda Lovelace story is part of the whole Deep Throat story," acknowledges Inside director Fenton Bailey. (Actually, for producer Brian Grazer, it was originally the whole story: a fictionalized bio-pic of Lovelace done with a big budget and a big star. "I want to trash up a really wholesome girl," he was quoted as saying.) "But it isn’t the whole story. Her own story is complicated and the true meaning is still slightly elusive. She was a mystery."

As Inside relates, Lovelace was born Linda Boreman in a conservative religious household. She sought escape and found it with her Svengali, Chuck Traynor, who introduced her to the world of film. Films with names like Fist and Foot and Dog 1. She had a rare oral talent, and Traynor introduced her to hairstylist and porn entrepreneur Gerry Damiano, who was looking for a star. Deep Throat was born ("I’m sure glad I didn’t call it The Sword Swallower," notes Damiano).

"She was clearly in a domestic-abuse relationship with Chuck Traynor," says Bailey of the new star. "But their relationship is separate from her role and her choices in doing the film itself. Damiano is very, very clear, and everyone backs him up on this, that Linda wasn’t forced by them to do the film and she was happy to do the film. There are stories that Chuck Traynor was beating her. But Damiano doesn’t want to be seen as the guy who held the gun to her head, you know. And he swears he didn’t, and we believe him, and everybody on the crew that we spoke to reinforces that."

Bailey suggests that Lovelace may have been a victim of the kind of instant celebrity commonplace today with reality TV and the like. "I think Linda was actually an early version of stardom in this world that we inhabit today. In reality shows, ordinary people [are] becoming huge celebrities, and Linda was a real pioneering example of that. I think she didn’t know what to make of it, and I don’t think anybody around her knew what to make of it. Today, if Linda was famous, she’d have perfumes, she’d have a book deal, she’d be on The Surreal Life. It would be accepted, it wouldn’t be seen as so outrageous that an ordinary person can become so hugely famous. Paris Hilton today is hugely famous, and she has less talents than Linda Lovelace."

Inside Deep Throat shows Steinem showcasing the reformed porn star Lovelace on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder to denounce Deep Throat and the porn industry. Bailey finds this ironic and misguided. "The feminist faction that split off from the sexual revolution is really significant," he says. "Before Deep Throat and before the sexual revolution there was a very repressive atmosphere in society, so people didn’t really talk about sex. And then the sexual revolution happens, and suddenly people are having a lot more sex and talking about it. And then suddenly women stand up and say, ‘Hang on a minute, this isn’t our fantasy, this is a male’s fantasy.’ And there’s validity to that. But previous to that, there wasn’t even a space for such a conversation to happen. It’s a consequence of the sexual revolution."

Did some feminists then betray a force for their own liberation by turning against Deep Throat? Berkeley professor and film scholar Linda Williams (author of Hard Core and the upcoming Watching Sex) suggests in a brief interview in Inside that some well-intended feminists might have overlooked the film’s revolutionary potential. After all, here was a woman seeking her own sexual satisfaction in her own way; it was a first not just for porn, but for film in general.

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Issue Date: February 11 - 17, 2005
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