Porn valley- Among Brian Grazer’s fondest memories of his grandmother is the time she went to see Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com by herself.
She quite liked it, too. He remembers Grandma Grazer telling him about it. She went out to a matinee in broad daylight and stood in a line that wound out of the theater’s box office and spilled onto the sidewalk – this was probably in 1972.
It could have been later; those early ’70s blurred together, and the legendary porn film, released in ’72, played for so long it became a semipermanent staple of some theater marquees – respectable theater marquees, in nice towns. It cost a piddling $25,000 to make, and over the years it took in more than $600 million. It still stands as the most successful independent movie ever produced.
Grazer – the powerful studio producer, who recently bankrolled and masterminded a documentary about the picture, Inside Deep Throat (Universal, $27.98), new on video – remembers it was inescapable way back then. “The phrase was in the ether, the knowledge of the film was cocktail party conversation. It was a dominant curiosity for everybody, for like three years.”
Everybody?
“Everybody. My grandmother was this relatively conservative upper-middle class woman. She lived in Beverly Hills, in Los Angeles. But she stood in line and cars drove by and she was not embarrassed. She thought she had that right. She told me this, and I remember thinking, ‘OK, grandmother. Deep Throat, huh?’ I didn’t see it until years later, when I was still a law clerk and Betamax was getting huge.”
Grazer is not pasty or chubby. When I spoke to him – on the roof of a sushi bar in Park City, Utah, last January during the Sundance Film Festival – it was even hard to believe Grazer was out of elementary school in the mid-1970s. At 54 years old, he looks about 34. His trademark is his electric hair, which stands on end, though it’s thinned to the point you can count the individual strands. He’s tanned and trim in a bony way that reveals his long obsession with surfing.
He also looks slightly embarrassed discussing Deep Throat, but, like the documentary, he views it entirely in a spectrum of free speech and film lore. “I remember thinking, the first time I saw it, the picture was erotic. Watching it now, it’s not a good movie. But that’s not what interests me. What does is how anything could become so pervasive in a culture – to the point where it affects every art form and makes pornography more acceptable to ordinary people. The documentary is not about pornography but how a tiny ember can become this forest fire.”
Inside Deep Throat accomplishes this, it should be said, with not exactly the most pervasive results. Narrator Dennis Hopper says at the start the movie was always less about the joy of sex than “the freedom to speak out against shame and hypocrisy.” Well, maybe in hindsight. The documentary, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, jumps through hoops to connect it with modern First Amendment issues, although it works best as a straightforward history of the scruffy 1970s porn industry.
It also works as a curiosity.
For instance, the most shocking thing about Inside Deep Throat is not the film at all, but the moment the Universal logo appears in the opening credits.
“Well, I needed a distributor,” Grazer said, “and they were brave and cool enough to see it went beyond the prurient view.”
That, and Grazer made lots of money for Universal over the years. Best known for his 20-year-plus business relationship with director Ron Howard, Grazer’s producing credits read like a brief history of mainstream Hollywood since the mid-1980s, starting with Splash (1984) and including (take a deep breath): A Beautiful Mind, 8 Mile, The Nutty Professor, Apollo 13, Kindergarten Cop, The Doors, Cinderella Man – even the new Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan.
If he didn’t sound especially concerned about Inside Deep Throat, it could be because he’s saving his controversy flak jacket for his next picture with Howard, The Da Vinci Code. It’s a jacket he doesn’t pull out often. Over the years, he said, he’s been pressured to get more sexually graphic with his films but (along with Howard, who was not involved with the making of Inside Deep Throat), he tends to resist.
“I see Inside Deep Throat as being about our right to choose what we see. But you are right, for 20 years I have chosen not to show anything like that. Sometimes a studio or a filmmaker wants to include more sex. I’m of two minds: It should be our right to experience those images but it’s nothing I want my kids to experience, or myself for that matter. I guess that makes this picture kind of a counterpoint.”
It came about after he bought the rights to the biography of Linda Lovelace – the most infamous star of Deep Throat. Grazer eventually decided her story was too narrow.
“When I get involved with something, I think it’s mostly to celebrate a world or a language specific to a few people. For example, I wanted to make a movie about hip hop since 1985, about how it works upward from the smallest places. I met Eminem before he was a star and I think 8 Mile brought that language of hip hop to people who were never interested in it before. My interest is always in subculture.”
Note: He didn’t say counterculture. Or an underground culture.
Grazer is like any smart producer: At heart he’s an opportunist, from top to bottom. Take the documentary medium itself. He only became a fan in the last five or six years. “Documentaries are more mainstream now, less turgid. They’ve crossed barriers. And that’s why I thought it would be wonderful if I got to do one.”
Documentaries also wade into the real world – a place Grazer’s films tend to connect with only tangentially. “I have never been worried about censorship myself, never with a movie that concerned me specifically. Yet I always want the right to say something, to take a political point of view, even if it’s a mild one. I don’t make polemics, you know. I don’t want my films too right or too left. I want them to wrestle it out. That’s the beauty.
“Everything in moderation.”