Inside Deep Throat

Some of you may not know what Deep Throat is. Let's just say it has nothing to do with the computer that beat Gary Kasparov.

Deep Throat is the best porn film ever made, according to a group of men in sticky raincoats. It also happens to be the most financially successful film. Ever.

I'll let that sink in.

Not Titanic, not Schindler's List, not Gone With The Wind, but a rather silly movie that concerns a woman whose clitoris is located in her throat. You don't want to be around when she sucks on a lozenge, let me tell you.

Made for just $25,000, Deep Throat has grossed over $600million - a profit margin that makes Star Wars look like a financial disaster. Inside Deep Throat examines the phenomenon, why it was so successful and what happened to the players.

Deep Throat's director was Gerard Damiano, a former boutique owner, whose relationship with female clients lead him to realise that something was happening to female sexuality. This was in the early Seventies. The pill had revolutionised sexual behaviour. The Kinsey report had blown taboos out of the water and the hippy movement made free love a political statement.

"Thank God I was there," Damiano says. "And I had a camera."

He proudly became "a filmmaker", knocking out cheap sex films when he was introduced to girl next door Linda Lovelace. Linda had extraordinary talent and an admirable control of her gag reflex. "Cut the camera!" Damiano declared. "I knew I'd found a star."

Work began on the first ever film based on fellatio. It utilised the talents of Lovelace and production manager-turned-actor Harry Reems. "He could get an erection at the hum of a camera," one colleague comments with admiration.

It was a huge success in the porn world. Damiano's care in making a film with some semblance of a plot was a revelation. But there was more to it than that. Sex was rebellion in the Seventies. "It was liberating," says legendary Pope of Trash, John Waters. "Or it was terrible, depending on where you stood." Indeed, members of the moral majority weren't about to stand for it (pardon the pun).

The US government attempted to destroy the film by threatening Reems with imprisonment, which made it even more successful. Suddenly mainstream America wanted to know what the fuss was about. Johnny Carson did a monologue on it, The New York Times wrote about "Porn Chic," even Bob Hope was making Deep Throat jokes. For a brief moment, it seemed that Damiano's dream of uniting hardcore sex with mainstream movies might happen.

It didn't, of course. The dream turned sour when Lovelace revealed she had been raped, abused and manipulated by her boyfriend to appear in the film. The porn industry was put on trial by feminism. Worse, from Damiano's point of view, the home video boom cheapened porn still further. "There were no filmmakers any more," he sighs.

With contributions from Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Camille Paglia and Xaviera Hollander, amongst others, the directors attempt to clean up Deep Throat's reputation. In a post-Vagina Monologues sort of way, it tries to cast Deep Throat as an innocent expression of female sensuality. It's partly successful, although Deep Throat was definitely a film for men about male fantasies, based upon the idea that women love giving head as much as men enjoy receiving it.

"Guess what?" remarks Erica Jong, acidly.

It also glosses lightly over the abuse claims documented in Lovelace's book, Ordeal. It's this one-sided approach that flaws the film. Inside Deep Throat has an agenda of free speech versus government control, which anyone can agree with, but it's less sure-footed when discussing the exploitation of Lovelace, who is sadly no longer around to argue her point.

That said, it is a witty and intelligent documentary that comes over as a real life Boogie Nights. Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato may squeeze out the unpalatable aspects of the porn industry in order to push the idea of innocents exploring sexual expression, but when they illustrate how politicians exploit moral crusades in order to distract from their own immorality - from Watergate to Abu Ghraib - they couldn't be more relevant.