Porn Valley- Arrow’s Ray Pistol was pretty much confirming the fact that Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com, will now be playing in mainstream theaters and that it was a sonofabitch to get prints stuck for that purpose, with the company finally going out of California to get the job done https://www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=8414
Pistol says because LA labs raped, pillaged and plundered the company in what was basically an extortion attempt, the job was done in Oregon and Seattle. And more prints may be struck now that requests for them are coming in from Canada and England. Pistol, who has yet to see the Inside Deep Throat documentary, is also quoted in the Legs McNeil book, The Other Hollywood. “They interviewed me a little,” he says. “Basically they wanted to know old time stories but I don’t go back before 1980. I’m second generation, I guess.”
With an LA Times article raising its own brand of sarcasm by questioning the authenticity of the Deep Throat revenues, https://www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=8426, I ask Pistol what he made of that. To which Pistol adheres to the guess Bill Margold and I’ve arrived at, that Throat may have earned more like one billion since its release, not the $600 million the Times article found so hard to swallow.
The article bases its thesis on a $2.69 price of admission in 1980. Pistol remembers paying something like $5 to see the movie at the Pussycat Theater in the Eighties, and my own recollection is that movie theaters charged twice the going-rate for adult fare.
Another source of revenue that was apparently overlooked in the article, says Pistol was the 8mm receipts. “They sold so much 8mm,” says Pistol. “They [Arrow] were the number one producer of 8mm in the world. Lou Peraino had the facilities to do it.” Pistol remembers Deep Throat 8mm prints selling for $100 a piece. Not too overlook the fact, says Pistol, of all the bootlegged copies of the film all over the world. “It’s probably been bootlegged more than Star Wars.”