Las Vegas- For a documentary, Fahrenheit 911 was getting an awful lot of ink, but Inside Deep Throat is coming pretty close as far as grabbing the whole ink bottle where the mainstream press is concerned. But not only is the documentary making the generally well-received rounds, the movie that it’s spawned from is having a second life breathed into it as well, says Arrow Productions’ Ray Pistol.

“Deep Throat, www.xxxdeepthroat.com seems to be doing very well, particularly in two cities Chicago and San Francisco,” he observes. “It’s tearing ’em up there. They’re giving it a regular run.” Which is more than the case in Los Angeles, in which, Pistol notes that Deep Throat continues to play in LA but as a midnight show.

And it has yet to play in Las Vegas, Pistol’s hometown. “Interestingly enough,” says Pistol, “Deep Throat’s success isn’t mirroring the results of the documentary. It’s taken a life of its own.” According to Pistol, an attempt will be made to have both shows played as a twin bill in New York in May during a Sex Expo which is scheduled for The Big Apple. “I’m looking at renting a theater and doing it myself so I can do it right,” Pistol says. “This is the right way to do it. We’re looking at a theater in the Village and giving discount tickets to everyone who goes to the convention.”

Even the japes against Inside Deep Throat are welcomed with open arms by Pistol who laughs about a three-page “excoriating-debilitating-purple prose” recent review of the docu on www.worldnetdaily.com. “To spend so much time on it, I didn’t know there were so many adjectives that were defamatory! They went on and on and on. The writer had a whole nest up his ass.”

Pistol has also enjoyed the interplay and exchanges between LA Times business writer Michael Hiltzik and the documentary’s directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato https://www.adultfyi.com/read.aspx?ID=8626 regarding Throat’s gross revenues. “He’s a journalist and he hit a question,” states Pistol who’s own belief is that Deep Throat has grossed more like a billion rather than the $600 milion figure that seems to have wormed its way into Hiltzik’s craw.

“Hiltzik finally called me and I told him I thought the figure was wrong, too. That figure was low. He forgets that it played for years 24/7 in multiple theaters. It was on Times Square even in the mid-Eighties.

“A few years ago we wanted to play it in Denver and we didn’t have a print handy,” Pistol recalls. “The theater said, don’t worry about it. We’ve got one here! Lord knows how many prints are dusted off and kicked out there from time to time without any real notice given to us. But that’s the way the game is played.”

Pistol reports that Deep Throat will begin playing in British theaters as well as Greece, Cypress, Italy, France and Spain in coming weeks. “And I’m in discussion with at least a dozen more countries,” he says. “I’ve just signed a deal with Montreal and Toronto. My eyes are crossing from reading contracts.” Pistol chuckles about the Italian contract, alone, reading like a novella. I ask Pistol where these people are coming from.

“They’re hunting me down like a rabid dog,” he replies, Pistol stating that the Deep Throat information is so conduited now that people are going through Universal and Inside Deep Throat, alone, to find him. “Universal’s distributor is now kind of unofficially working for us. He’s just happy to find a place to dump all the phone calls. I don’t think they ever figured they were actually going to be doing p.r. for me.” Pistol gets a kick out of all of this.

To date, Inside Deep Throat has grossed in the neighborhood of $500,000. Doesn’t sound like a lot. “But they’re only in very limited theaters,” Pistol explains. “Their problem is, is the same problem I have. By putting in that short segment of Linda doing her thing, that gave them an NC-17 rating. And there are a lot of theaters who have clauses that they can’t take anything beyond an R. So they have limited access to theaters, and that’s part of the problem. They’re doing sufficiently well, but they’re pushing back their DVD release date. That tells you they think they’re doing sufficient grosses in the theaters they’re in to continue rolling it out there. But they’re doing as well as any of the documentaries,” Pistol concludes.

“Their screen grosses seem to be pretty good. They’re just not on a lot of screens. You can’t really compare them against somebody who’s on 3,000 screens.”