from www.nytimes.com – If it wasn’t for the Las Vegas International Lingerie Show, David Bertolino might never have gone from king of Spooky World to impresario of “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal,” which opened Sunday at the Bleecker Street Theater.

But there was Mr. Bertolino, a jovial costume salesman and Halloween fright park developer, manning a booth in 2007 at the adults-only trade show, which bills itself as the largest intimate apparel convention in the nation, when ….

Let him tell it.

“Here’s where worlds collide,” he said. “I’m showing all these sexy costumes: cheerleader, nurse, flight attendant. Across from us was Arrow Productions, www.xxxdeepthroat.com. They own the rights to all the classic adult movies. The salesman there sees my nurse costume and asks me, ‘Can you print ‘Linda Lovelace’ on that?’ ”

“‘I can’t,’ I told him. ‘We’ll both be sued.’ ”

“ ‘No,’ he says, ‘my boss owns the rights.’ ”

And that, Mr. Bertolino said, was how he met Arrow’s owner, Raymond Pistol, and decided to write a play about the most famous sex movie of all time and the First Amendment — in particular, the story of Harry Reems, an ill-fated star of the film who in 1974 was marked for prison by the Nixon administration.

Over the last three years Mr. Bertolino, a Boston-born newcomer to theater but not theatrics, went through 14 drafts, assembled a professional cast willing to bare all, and mobilized 24 backers who put up close to $700,000 for the show, which began previews Off Broadway on Sept. 17.

This 56-year-old showman is the latest to exploit what has become a fable of our time: how a mob-sponsored, hourlong skin flick about a randy doctor and his obliging nurse, shot with energetic unknowns in a Miami motel and having its premiere in Times Square in 1972, reaped a publicity bonanza from the city’s drive on XXX businesses and went national, generating what Entertainment Weekly put at more than $600 million on a $25,000 investment, bringing porno chic to Main Street, and changing the way Americans think about oral sex.

“Deep Throat” spawned a sequel, gave its name to The Washington Post’s secretive Watergate source and inspired a 2005 documentary, “Inside Deep Throat.”

Now Arrow Productions has authorized a forthcoming biopic on Ms. Lovelace, “Inferno,” with Lindsay Lohan. Ms. Lovelace, who later in her life maintained that she had been raped and coerced into performing, died at 53 in 2002 from injuries suffered in a car accident.

Summarizing the movie’s plot for the United States Supreme Court in 1974, the solicitor general, Robert H. Bork, said it portrayed “a young female in quest of sexual fulfillment, which has eluded her because her clitoris is lodged in her throat.”

Its making was rife with intrigue. The director, Gerard Damiano, a hairdresser in Queens bankrolled by the Colombo Mafia family and associates, principally Louis Peraino, known as Butchie, was soon muscled out of the profits.

But “The Deep Throat Sex Scandal” focuses on Mr. Reems and his legal battles, interspersing flashbacks of the film shoot with courtroom scenes. Charged with conspiracy to distribute obscenity based on interstate transport of “Deep Throat,” he stood trial in Memphis with 11 co-defendants in 1976 and was convicted, along with Mr. Peraino and Mr. Damiano. Mr. Reems alone (represented by Alan Dershowitz) won exoneration after Mr. Bork unexpectedly confessed a government error: The actor had been convicted under a stricter 1973 high court definition of obscenity that had not yet been the law of the land at the time of the alleged offense.

Mr. Bertolino took an unlikely path to Off Broadway. He grew up in Boston, where his father ran a joke shop, trafficking in hand-buzzers and whoopee cushions. He never went to college, sold Halloween costumes out of the shop, then went to work for Rubie’s Costume Company, an industry giant. He met his wife, Linda, at a costume convention in San Antonio. They have a son, now 17.

Intrigued by a haunted hayride he saw in New Jersey in 1990, he bought a farm in Berlin, Mass., at a bank sale and turned it into a Halloween attraction he called Spooky World, with 6 haunted houses and 22 outdoor stage sets. It drew 50,000 visitors the first October. He outgrew the site, took on partners and moved the park to Foxboro, Mass., in 1999. It was sold in 2005 and moved to New Hampshire.

Not long afterward he found himself at the lingerie show in the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas and met Mr. Pistol of Arrow Productions.

Mr. Pistol, 62, said in a telephone interview that he liked Mr. Bertolino from the start. “I said, ‘Maybe this isn’t a wannabe,’ ” Mr. Pistol recalled. “Maybe he’s got something. He’s a go-getter. I cut him a favorable deal.” For less than $5,000, he said, he gave Mr. Bertolino the rights to “Deep Throat” material, including a two-minute film clip that is shown on a monitor onstage.

Mr. Reems’s cooperation proved more elusive. Mr. Bertolino said the actor, now 63, ailing and living in Utah, ignored 11 of his calls before finally granting interviews. But later Mr. Reems threatened to sue.

“My story has been ripped off, told and retold so many times without me gaining a thing except for ‘Inside Deep Throat,’ and I’m getting tired of it,” he said in a telephone interview this month. He said Mr. Bertolino would not even pay his way to New York.

Mr. Bertolino said Mr. Reems had willingly cooperated and had refused his offers for airfare and hotel in New York, along with an appearance fee. Bill Margold, a veteran porn star who knows both men, backed Mr. Bertolino’s account. “Harry was not victimized by David in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Margold said. He said the play “humanitized and martyrized” Mr. Reems.

Mr. Margold helped polish Mr. Bertolino’s script, as did Jerry Douglas, the show’s director and a longtime maker of sex films and publisher. “My biggest job was to make it playable,” said Mr. Douglas, 74. “The necklace was there, but I had to string the beads.”

As the opening neared, the showman in Mr. Bertolino was gearing up for a publicity blitz. He hired actors in doctor and nurse outfits to give out tongue depressors in Times Square. He prepared goody bags of provocative T-shirts and coffee mugs, toy parrots spewing swear-word vocabularies and key fobs that emitted orgasmic moans.

But he was thwarted in one stunt — parading around the deepest throat of all. “We didn’t get the permit for the giraffe,” he said.