Las Vegas – Movie producer Brian Grazer’s people will be back in Las Vegas this week shooting additional footage for a Deep Throat Documentary which so far has been at least a year in the making.

Grazer has often said that it was his grandmother Sonia who first turned him on to the movie, and, since then, Grazer has fostered a singular obsession with the cultural significances of the porn film.

Grazer’s documentary is being produced in collaboration with documentarians Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato and is called Inside Deep Throat. It goes into detail about how a $22,000 film, “financed by two men regarded in law enforcement circles as organized crime figures,” peaked the nation’s sexual curiosity and became the highest grossing picture in Los Angeles during the 1972-73 season. The documentary, which has a reported budget in the $2 M range, will have a theatrical release before it airs on HBO next year.

During the past year Barbato and Bailey have filmed interviews of scores of people- porn actors, cultural commentators, prosecutors and directors including Deep Throat’s helmsman, Gerard Damiano. Another individual who’s been interviewed for the project, and for obvious reasons, is Arrow Film’s Ray Pistol, Pistol being the owner of Deep Throat. Pistol and Grazer’s company have been in negotiations for rights to take anything they wanted out of four of the Deep Throat movies. Pistol gave them a dollar figure for rights to stock footage. And that’s pretty much where that stands as to whether clips from the actual film will be used. One suspects the meeting Wednesday will cover some of those issues.

“Otherwise, they’ve got some wonderful footage,” says Pistol. “They’ve talked to Damiano, they’ve talked to Harry Reems and everybody who was left, including some movie personalities who were emerging in the Seventies. They talk about what impact the movie had on them. At the time we first talked, I told them the real key is not even the movie. The real key is its social impact. On the one hand you had Nixon and the FBI absolutely rabid on this thing as to keeping it out of public circulation. And yet, by the same token, the White House requested a copy of it so that Nixon could take a look at it. Sinatra was asking for a copy of it. [Not to mention Sammy Davis Jr.’s preoccupation with Lovelace.]

“And the FBI went in, seized it and prosecuted it,” Pistol continued. “So you had the forces of government and the forces of, basically, Hollywood with its fund raiser for Harry Reems with [the late] Lou Peraino and the Arrow staff all fighting for it. And everybody thought that God was on their side and that they were doing God’s work. In the meantime, people were lining up in theaters all across America to see what God wrought.”

This is also where Pistol’s national search for a new Linda Lovelace ties in. “They want me to shoot a Deep Throat 7,” says Pistol, “so that they can record that and make it the in-play on the documentary. We’ll re-shoot with a new Linda Lovelace. I would go back and do a re-make and just up date, ever so slightly, to make it more contemporary. That’s what they want me to do.”

Pistol said he wasn’t concerned in finding a Lovelace lookalike so much as finding a woman who’d come equipped with the social/mental give and take to handle the attendant publicity swarm. But finding her isn’t necessarily make or break as far as the needs of the documentary’s concerned, Pistol says. “If I find someone, it will be serendipity footage. It would make a nice ending for them if I could do that.”