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 inside deep throat interview
Director Fenton Bailey on the film that turned America on to porn. Manhattan, June 1972. A low-budget film opens in one midtown cinema. It garners mainstream press, provides numerous TV talk show gags, attracts celebrity-laden audiences. Feted by counter-culture iconoclasts and vilified by conservative politicians, it goes nationwide to become perhaps the most profitable movie of all time (cost: $22,000; estimated revenue: $600 million) and even inspires the cover name for Watergate’s whistle-blower. Yes, for a cheap hardcore sex comedy, Deep Throat, er, went down big time.“It was a perfect storm,” opines Fenton Bailey, co-director of the new documentary, Inside Deep Throat, which examines the film and the phenomenon. “It was very specific to a time and place. Sex had not been discussed openly and although there was a pornography industry it was a complete underground subculture. When this film came along, because it was a comedy and had this outrageous idea, people got into it. It gave them permission to go and see it.”  Deep Throat’s outlandish conceit, conceived around the specific skills of star Linda Lovelace, was a woman with let’s say certain oral talents. Rough, ready and funny (often deliberately), before embarking on their own film, directors Bailey and Randy Barbato first had to re-acquaint themselves with the original. “Watching it 30 years later, it didn't feel so much dated as that we didn't really get it,” Bailey confides. “We watched it with some friends at Christmas and we were all rather embarrassed. Subsequently we came to realise - we’re so used to pornography as something we consume completely privately, that the idea of sitting around with other people and watching it is anathema.”  Nevertheless, that’s how audiences at the time consumed it, sparking a national cause célèbre. Inside Deep Throat plunges into the film’s mob funding (hence the shady box-office figures); the federal cases that indicted director Gerard Damiano and co-star Harry Reems for conspiracy to distribute obscenity; the tragic story of sweet-natured, easily influenced ingénue Lovelace, who died in 2002; and the resulting cultural fallout, with an impressive roster of commentators from Erica Jong to Hugh Hefner. “We really came to appreciate the ideas that are in this film,” says an adamant Bailey. “You can say, oh, it’s not very well shot and the sound is bad, but I think as an early example of independent cinema it's fantastically rich and actually a lot better than many independent films that you’ll see in art cinemas today.”
Leigh Singer
Inside Deep Throat, on selected release 10 June 05.
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