Porn Valley- In 1972, pornography briefly left the back alley and moved on up to Main Street with “Deep Throat,” a schlocky movie about a young woman in search of a personal sexual revolution.

Now, more than 30 years later, two filmmakers are examining “Deep Throat’s” legacy with a documentary, “Inside Deep Throat,”, www.xxxdeepthroat.com, which opened this weekend at Monterey’s Osio Cinemas.

“It seemed like blue movies were going to take over and go into the mainstream,” said Fenton Bailey, who wrote and directed the documentary with Randy Barbato. The filmmakers say the movie needed to be made in light of the country’s cultural climate.

“Our attitude about sex and sexuality is completely schizophrenic,” said Bailey.

They hope that it spurs a discussion about the place of sex in the national consciousness, maybe inching the country toward finding a consensus. That’s a tough task in a country with a commercial culture that uses sexual imagery to sell everything from shampoo to soda pop and a political culture that had a collective conniption over the baring of Janet Jackson’s breast in last year’s Super Bowl.

“We live in a sort of porno world, but it’s either selling a product or it’s on our computer and we’re getting off on it,” said Barbato. “There’s no middle ground.”

Whether “Inside Deep Throat” eases public attitudes toward sexual expression or encourages more dialogue about those issues, there’s one thing in the movie that is likely to get people talking: the directors decided to include the infamous scene that gave the original “Deep Throat” its name.

“There’s nothing in there that’s gratuitous,” said Barbato. “There was never a question for us that we needed to include it.”

But that explicit depiction of oral sex garnered the film an NC-17 rating, perhaps costing it widespread distribution and promotion. Barbato said it would be ludicrous to make a documentary about “Deep Throat” without including the scene.

“We’ve got to include the act,” he said. “To me, we’ve made a better film, and that’s the No. 1 consideration here.”

One of the aims of the film was to give the audience, especially younger adults, the experience of watching an explicit sex act in a public theater.

“It inspires a dialogue among people, particularly young people,” Barbato said.

While putting the original film in context with expert interviews from prosecutors, pundits and porn stars, the documentary also chronicles the making of the movie and the persecution and bad luck that befell many of the principal figures in its production. It’s a story that ends badly for many of those involved.

The original film’s director, Gerard Damiano, didn’t see much of “Deep Throat’s” $600 million in proceeds. He was forced out of the film’s distribution by the mob, according to the documentary.

Actor Harry Reems was prosecuted for his role in the film. While he was convicted, he never served jail time. But as he realized he would never find work in mainstream movies, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol. He’s now a born-again Christian and a real-estate broker.

Star Linda Lovelace, who was in an abusive relationship when “Deep Throat” was made, became an anti-pornography activist. Later in life, she was haunted by her role in the film and had difficulty keeping jobs when supervisors found out who she was. She died in a car accident in 2002.

It wasn’t the directors’ intent to turn their film into a morality tale to scare viewers away from pornography or to scold those involved in the movie. Rather, they wanted to show the consequences of society’s backlash against “Deep Throat.” To Barbato and Bailey, those who made the original movie were victims and those who prosecuted them were the villains.

“It’s not that these are bad people and they get what’s coming to them,” Bailey said.

A key scene in the documentary shows a clip of the McCarthyite moral policeman Roy Cohn attacking Harry Reems. Cohn, publicly a social conservative, was a closeted homosexual who later died of AIDS. It’s a commentary on the hypocrisy of cultural crusaders.

“It so often ends up that they themselves are hiding something,” said Barbato, who, with Bailey, has produced another documentary about gay Republicans. “They are attacking others because they are uncomfortable about the double lives they’re leading.”

Ultimately, though, the morals police won a partial victory, pushing sex out of the mainstream and into the backroom, where it thrives as a multibillion-dollar industry dishing DVDs and Internet pornography. The backlash against “Deep Throat” is the reason sex in feature films is not explicit, the directors said.

But, for a moment in 1972, things seemed like they would turn out differently.

And in the filmmakers’ eyes, maybe that would have been appropriate.

“Sex defines who we are,” Barbato said. “It’s part of our essence. It bleeds into all aspects of our life.”