Sort of Inside Deep Throat, but not all the way in

Inside Deep Throat isn’t a fair and balanced documentary, but it’s entertaining. Borrowing liberally from the faux-retro stylebook created by The Kid Stays in the Picture, IDT combines 70’s-style graphics and stock footage with the only soundtrack ever to feature Supertramp (and a Gary Glitter song that isn’t “Rock And Roll Part One” for once).

Deep Throat opened in Times Square in June, 1972. A departure from the “educational” adult film and the traditional stag film in that it had a narrative (Linda Lovelace searches for an orgasm in Florida, hampered by her hard-to-reach clitoris), it became the first “event” porn film and eventually grossed $600 million, making it the most profitable film of all time. It featured in U.S. Obscenity Law, the feminist movement, and became a cash cow, the film suggests, for the Mafia.

How the film suggests is less its narration (Dennis Hopper has become the Voice of the Early Seventies) than its avoidance in interview segments of shutting off the camera. While no one in the doc says Throat Director Gerard Damiano was mobbed up, for example, the tape runs to record his awkward silence when the subject is introduced.

This is a trick Errol Morris employs in his own documentaries, but Inside Deep Throat uses this tactic irresponsibly. We are a culture that seeks to fill silences, and silences are always awkward because of this. That IDT exploits these silences to imply guilt (or make someone look foolish) mars an otherwise competent historical document.

Producers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have taken a crash course in Porn Valley. Their company, World of Wonder, put together Wired for Sex in 2003, sending teams to various establishments in the adult industry (including Ponante-era AVN) to illustrate the porn world’s bleeding-edge role in recreational technology. Their product is always entertaining and well-researched, dealing mostly in three fields: porn, the mainstream entertainment industry, and Gay America.

Even as the documentary draws a distinction between today’s desensitized society and the sociopolitical turmoil that followed Deep Throat wherever it played, I was struck by certain themes common to the modern skin trade and its 70’s counterpart.

Throat’s corny doctor, Harry Reems, had dreams of becoming a legitimate star. Instead, though his legal woes had the sympathy of liberal Hollywood, he couldn’t get cast in a mainstream movie (he was up for Sid Caesar’s part in Grease and I bet he would have been pretty good). Linda Lovelace renounced porn, blaming her participation on an abusive suitcase pimp, then returned for a spread in Legshow at age 50. Everybody complained of not making any money from the picture. No one seemed to judge Throat on its own merits, but instead called it either art or trash.

The documentary lets a few people skewer themselves (prosecutor Larry Parrish, anti-porn crusader/embezzler Charles Keating) and some folks come off looking good (is it that Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt don’t have offices north of Ventura Blvd. that they seem so much more urbane than anyone who does?) Harry Reems, now a Christian and a real estate broker in Park City seems, Ringo Starr-like, to be taking his accidental celebrity in stride with good will and humor. IDT also provides the quintessential Porn Doofus in Throat‘s production manager, Ron Wertheim. Wertheim doesn’t need sneaky camera tricks to look like a bonehead.

Porn Valley’s drama queens are forever clucking about mainstream media’s conniving and exploitive tactics re: the adult industry. They say that mainstream descends on the Valley during Sweeps to get titillating copy, which it then derides. So? Show us you’re worth being taken seriously. Put out something that the ordinary American would watch more than five minutes (without being paid to review it) and maybe the indignance would be justified.

Inside Deep Throat paints the picture of a fun little film (made for $25K) that achieved what today’s industry pretends to: relevance.