'Deep' look at a porn landmark

To hear the talking heads of Inside Deep Throat tell it, the breakout porn flick of 1972 called Deep Throat singlehandedly spawned the sexual revolution, made fellatio fashionable, and gave birth to the booming "adult" film industry.

Although the $25,000 sex pic starring a freckle-faced girl-next-door named Linda Lovelace did not, apparently, cure cancer, it did, per Cosmopolitan nabob Helen Gurley Brown, promote the male ejaculate as a dermatological wonder drug. It also earned an eventual $600 million (according to the documentary), making it the most profitable movie of all time.

Apart from spreading the hyperbole a bit thick, and relying on a posse of pundits and culture critics who gas on predictably (worst offenders: Camille Paglia, Norman Mailer, and the insufferably smug Dick Cavett), Inside Deep Throat offers a diverting tale of erstwhile indie filmmaking and the power of porn to generate change - both at the box office and in the bedroom.

Totally ignoring the other seminal skin flicks of the early '70s (Marilyn Chambers' Behind the Green Door, for one), the documentarian duo of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato detail the making, marketing and mobsterizing of the explicit comedy about a young woman with a special gift. Gerard Damiano, the Queens hairdresser who made Deep Throat, is on hand, wearing high-waisted pants and a dashing toupee, to recount how he discovered Lovelace (nee Boreman); cast his assistant cameraman, Harry Reems, in the male lead; and marshaled a crew in Miami. Damiano then somewhat gingerly describes how the rights to his movie were signed away to gentlemen with Italian surnames and FBI dossiers.

Lovelace, who died in a car crash in 2002 at age 53, comes off as something of an innocent: a young woman under the sway of a domineering manager-husband who then, a decade later, became a poster girl for women's rights when she claimed she was coerced into making the film. Cut to the late 1990s, and Lovelace was back posing for porn magazines, trying to make a buck. (She was paid all of $1,200 for her work in Deep Throat.) The star's sister and a school friend are on camera discussing how they were shocked and saddened by the discovery of Linda's newfound notoriety on movie screens.

Pornography has changed in the 30-odd years since Deep Throat was released: Triple X performers have books on the best-seller lists (Jenna Jameson), celebrities have sex tapes for all to see (Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson), and, in some ways, the business has been corporatized just like pop music and the movies. If the major porn producers out of L.A. weren't trading in hard-core sex, you can be sure their kabillion-dollar businesses would have been gobbled up by the global media conglomerates. (See Dan DeLuca's "In the Mix" column, Page 3.)

One of the points Inside Deep Throat makes is that the furor Damiano's little picture set off, pitting advocates of sexual freedom and First Amendment rights against government censors and the religious right, is a furor that has never gone away. Even as pornography has become pervasive in our society, the same arguments are being flown, with passion and pretense, in both camps of the culture war.

One of the true legacies of Deep Throat is that people are still talking about sex in the movies, whether they're paying to see it or are scandalized by its very presence.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea

at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.

Inside Deep Throat

*** (out of four stars)

Produced by Brian Grazer, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato; written and directed by Bailey and Barbato; distributed by Universal Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 32 mins.

With Gerard Damiano, Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, Carl Bernstein, Camille Paglia and others.

Parent's guide: NC-17 (explicit sex, profanity, adult themes)

Playing at: Ritz East