Dennis Hopper Movie:

Editorial Review:
While Boogie Nights showed pornography's transition from sleazy cinemas to home-video dominance, Inside Deep Throat looks back to the film that introduced porn to a curious mainstream public. Released in 1972 and starring 23-year-old Linda Lovelace as sexpot whose oral sex skills (performed on well-endowed costar Harry Reems) gave the film its title (and, subsequently, the nickname of Watergate's secret informant), Deep Throat set a cultural milestone as a source of controversy, outrageous profit (mostly for its Colombo mob family financiers), and irrevocable social change. With equal parts nostalgia and historical hindsight, this briskly-paced documentary places Deep Throat in pivotal context, when Vietnam was an acknowledged disaster and American innocence was peeling away one layer at a time. Produced by Hollywood honcho Brian Grazer and catering to viewers who were too young to witness Deep Throat's impact firsthand, the film includes the legendary fellatio scene that made Lovelace an overnight sensation (hence the NC-17 rating), but it's the interviews with pop-culture VIP's like Norman Mailer, Dick Cavett, Hugh Hefner and (most amusingly) Helen Gurley Brown that add necessary perspective to what is, for better and worse, an engaging but somewhat shallow examination of a culture war that never really ended. --Jeff Shannon

Inside Deep Throat Reviews:
Inside Deep Throat
2008-09-17 - Its the story behind the making of Deep Throat the movie. It covers the actors, producers and the mob, who currently own and control the movie and the amount of money they made from it. It includes coverage of government intervention in an attempt to censor the movie and prosecute the actors and producers, leaving the mob alone, on what they think people should not be allowed to see. The movie is on the investigative news style digging up facts and embellishing them to make their point. It was a good movie on those involved and its history.

I remember it all...
2008-09-16 - Among it's other social accomplishments, "Deep Throat" is the one that finally admitted that women enjoy sex as much as men. Certainly, the film is not well made, and is essentially a parody of itself. Some of the one-liners have become legend (Mind if I smoke while...). What's interesting about this documentary is the effect it had on 1st amendment rights and censorship. Released in 1972, I saw it in '75 in a screening at UW~Madison, complete with self-righteous protestors, lotsa cops, etc. The print was lousy, but no one cared. We were watching history! By today's standards, the whole fuss seems silly, but the amazing uproar that followed the initial showings are well documented. Harry Reems almost went to prison. Especially sad is the effect it had on Ms. Lovelace's children, especially her daughter. Not to blab anything away, in case you don't already know, this doc is worth watching, if for no other reason than to see how much (if at all) we've advanced as a society regarding control over our viewing habits. If certain "artists" can get away using feces and blood and body parts in their paintings, I find no fault with "Deep Throat", which, to me, approaches art more than that. Certainly, it was only harmless fun.

The days of blue films for the big screen
2008-01-20 - A documentary filled with interviews with the makers of Deep throat, a movie which was considered porno chic at its time. A movie made famous because it became a target of the Nixon administration because of being an easy target for the state to prosecute against pornography. Before the advent of the VCR, people saw porno in porn theatres which were meant for such films. But it was not clearly defined as legal or illegal, run by mafia, it ran against the arm of law at times. The movie was targetted by the government and thus garnered a lot of publicity. More people wanted to see what the hype was all about and that too before it got banned. It had a semblance of a story and some witty dialogue for a hard core feature.The state prosecuted the male actor in the movie, as the director and the rest had imunity as per law .He was given a 5 year jail sentence which got overturned by another court when the Nixon adminstration went away and the democrats came into power.It might have changed the whole adult industry business had the actor been sent to jail.

Those days are so far away now with the advent of DVD and internet porn sites. They even have an oscar or golden globe like awards in the industry called AVN awards. The porn stars are like supermodels and pop stars being most sought after for making endorsement for adult products, magazines etc. Being the recepient of 6 or 7 figure contracts, they have their own websites and a large fan base. Now people grow with an ambition to becomming pornstars. Its fast money. But it is not easy money like some will consider. Inside deep throat is an interesting documentary.

regards, Vikram

A wasted opportunity
2007-08-03 - The subject of Deep Throat should be perfect documentary material. Above and beyond the sexual angle, there's a story here about the cultural wars in America that were and still are tearing that country apart. Yet Inside Deep Throat is such a poorly made documentary that only the vaguest hints of any of this shine through. Instead we are treated with stale cliches about how Deep Throat practically invented oral sex and gee-aren't-Americans-ignorant-in-their sexual-repression type soundbites. Stylistically, it's yet another pretentious modern outing with meaningless images appearing throughout in soft focus in a quasi-MTV style which I found thoroughly distracting and totally out of touch with the era it was supposed to be portraying.

To see a succesful modern take on where America was at politically and spiritually in the 60's/70's, I'd recommend a documentary called The Weather Underground instead. It is about the revolutionary Weathermen organisation and it's a film that really places you in that time and gives an ultra-realistic idea of what it must have been like to have been there, the mark of a true period documentary. None of this is present in Inside Deep Throat which is bland, pedestrian and ultimately predictable and utterly lacking in imagination.

Ah, the glorious excess of the seventies.
2007-07-10 - Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Bailey, 2005)

Here I was thinking this was a doco about the Watergate scandal. Well, it kind of is, if you turn your head and squint right; Richard Nixon is at the heart and soul of Inside Deep Throat making as much of a fool of himself as he did with the Watergate scandal a few years later. That said, it's pretty obvious that Nixon, fool he may have been, definitely had his heart in the right place when you compare him to the Neanderthals who've come after. But I get ahead of myself.

This is the story of the life and times of what the movie calls, repeatedly, the most profitable film in history (I can't think of a metric where that would hold true--Titanic would certainly have it beaten many times over on gross receipts, the '68 Night of the Living Dead on ROI, and while I'm not 100% sure on this one, with its longevity, I can't imagine The Rocky Horror Picture Show hasn't surpassed it in gross per screen--but there you have it.), Gerard Damiano's infamous Deep Throat. Now, I will admit that I'm one of the seven or eight people alive today who was also alive in 1972 that hasn't seen the movie itself. (And I'm only admitting it because Dick Cavett did in the documentary.) I had some basic ideas about the movie, and I was certainly aware that what it started is still falling out throughout the entertainment industry. But I had no real sense of perspective, and that's what I got out of this.

There's been some blustering that the movie is "dishonest" for its portrayal of the mavericks of the porn industry as heroes and its simultaneous castigation of those who would use the laws against them. I fail to see how that is dishonest in any way, since one of the main goals of the sexual revolution was the overturning of those laws (which, unfortunately, hasn't happened yet in most cases). Just because one company loses a battle early in a still-ongoing war, that doesn't mean you can't portray that side's cannon fodder as heroes. It doesn't mean they can't be heroes. It only means that they came up against a foe they couldn't best. (The obvious parallel here is to "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Who'd have ever thought there'd be a valid comparison between Tennyson and Harry Reems?) But perhaps a more important question--are there still people who believe the "anti-obscenity" side has merit? If so, for the love of motorcycles, why?

I find it doubly amusing, and more valid a criticism (for those who want to criticize this), that the movie's take on the porn industry unleashed by Deep Throat is just as cynical as the industry it portrays. I'm not saying it's not accurate, I'm just saying it's amusing. Bailey and co. are correct; who was the last real porn auteur, Annaud (in The Lover) fifteen years ago? (And, of course, Annaud is French, not American.) Akita (in Lost Paradise) in 1990? (Akita, of course, is also not American, but Lost Paradise is more a porn film than The Lover is.) It's a depressing thought, and to some extent, Bailey's hypothesis-by-juxtaposition that the American porn industry itself has done far more to undermine the ideals held by Damiano, Reems, et al. than the Justice Department did has far more merit now that I'm looking at it in the cold light of day than it did while I was actually watching Inside Deep Throat.

All that said, the real crime here has nothing to do with the human body--it's the obscenity that a movie grossed six hundred million dollars (as of the filming of the documentary) and its cast and crew got what amounts to squat. A lot of interviewees blame this on the mob. And maybe they're right. But ask anyone who's gotten into the entertainment industry in the past twenty years or so, especially the music and book industries. I said I was alive when Deep Throat came out. I neglected to mention I was four years old, and thus the complexities of economics and those of entertainment law were a bit beyond me at the time. (Though, now that I'm older, I realize just how little sarcasm there really is in that "a bit.") To me, and to a lot of us, it's just another day at the office. ****