LOS ANGELES- TO hear Brian Grazer tell it, “Deep Throat” , wwwdeepthroat.com, did wonders for his sex life.
It was 1976 and Mr. Grazer, who was then a struggling producer trying to make it in Hollywood, had been invited to the home of a wealthy real estate lawyer for a screening of the X-rated film about a woman seeking physical gratification through oral sex. “I remember going there and feeling kind of out of place,” Mr. Grazer recalled in a recent interview at his hillside home in Pacific Palisades. “There was a barbecue. It was up in the hills of Beverly Hills and I remember feeling just like, God, out of place because everyone was older and cooler, fancier and richer and I was just figuring it out.” But when the lights went down, Mr. Grazer said, an energy gripped the partygoers, making not only the women there more appealing to him, but him to them. “I literally became infinitely more attractive after that movie.” Some couples repaired to private bedrooms, he said. Mr. Grazer, now 53 and an Academy Award-winning producer of family fare like “Apollo 13” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” said he went home with a brown-eyed Brazilian woman.
It would be the beginning of a 28-year obsession – not just with his after-party sexual escapade (“Of course I remember it clearly,” he said), but with the impact the movie had on the pornography industry, now a profitable big business, and on popular culture. The result of that obsession is “Inside Deep Throat,” a documentary that Mr. Grazer produced with HBO and which will be released in theaters next year.
When it was released in 1972, “Deep Throat” ignited a firestorm of criticism as local and federal authorities tried to prevent theaters from showing it, claiming the movie violated obscenity laws and threatened the moral underpinnings of American society. Despite that – or because of it – “Deep Throat” became the first pornographic film to be embraced by a wide audience, openly attended by the likes of Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Jacqueline Onassis.
The movie, made for under $25,000, became the 11th-highest-grossing domestic film of 1973. With subsequent videocassette and DVD sales and rentals, it’s now made more than $600 million, making it one of the most profitable films in history. As Mr. Grazer and the film’s makers see it, the success of “Deep Throat” was the first real evidence that mainstream America’s sexual curiosity could be turned into a corporate money-making machine.
“The sexual revolution was already happening, but hard-core sex hadn’t crossed over,” said Randy Barbato, who wrote and directed the documentary with his filmmaking partner Fenton Bailey. “It became a flashpoint for the commodification of sex. No one knew hard-core could sell so much.”
Mr. Grazer, who put up $1 million of his own money to make the $2 million documentary, said he met Mr. Bailey and Mr. Barbato two years ago. They were introduced by Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary and Family, who recommended the filmmakers – previously responsible for documentaries about sensational topics like Tammy Faye Bakker and Monica Lewinsky, and “Party Monster,” a fictionalized account of Michael Alig, the New York club kid now serving time for manslaughter – for Mr. Grazer’s project. Originally he had wanted to make a feature film based on the life of Linda Lovelace, the star of “Deep Throat,” who eventually renounced the film and the fame that it brought her. But as he learned more about the movie, he said he became even more fascinated with how it reflected a changing society.
Before “Deep Throat,” pornographic films were limited mostly to 10-minute “loops,” which were viewed privately in the back rooms of adult bookstores or at small clubs. “Deep Throat,” which was nearly an hour long and had a satirical, almost campy, plot about a woman who discovers she has a clitoris at the back of her throat, was different. Couples went to see it; it became chic. And the moviegoers weren’t all young: Mr. Grazer’s own grandmother urged him to see it.
“What was special about `Deep Throat’ was that it required of people to expose themselves, to go into a theater, to be seen walking in or walking out,” said Gay Talese, the best-selling author of “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” a 1981 study of sexual behavior in the United States, in a recent interview. “That was a revolutionary act in the 1970’s.”
Mr. Barbato and Mr. Bailey interviewed more than 60 people, including crew members, actors, First Amendment lawyers, prosecutors and cultural commentators. The almost serendipitous making of the movie is recalled by the cast and crew, many of them now senior citizens. Its director, Gerard Damiano, recounts how the location scout never found a place to shoot the film, so the actors were forced to shoot it at the Miami motel, the former Voyager Inn, where they were staying. Harry Reems, who was paid $250 to play the lead role, recalls that he got the part only after the original star didn’t show up.
The graphic sex in “Deep Throat” offended some feminists – even Erica Jong, whose novel “Fear of Flying,” about a woman’s sexual liberation, had caused its own stir. “I was appalled at how offensive the idea of a woman with a clitoris in her throat was,” she said in a recent interview. “How patriarchal.”
The feminists found otherwise unlikely allies on the right. Using interviews and grainy television news clips, the filmmakers show local and federal authorities (spurred by the Nixon administration’s fight against smut) confiscating prints of the film, closing down movie theaters and suing those involved with the movie using the Supreme Court’s obscenity rulings. Government agencies were concerned, too, that organized crime, which many believed help to finance “Deep Throat,” was reaping most of its profits. The outcry galvanized civil libertarians and celebrities who spoke out in defense of the movie and the First Amendment. Johnny Carson joked about the movie on “The Tonight Show.” The term even entered the language: the Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward gave their secret Watergate source the nickname “deep throat.”
” ‘Deep Throat’ was like a virus,” Mr. Bailey said. “It spread from the dirty raincoat brigade to suburban America.”
The documentary ends by bringing us up to the present. Ms. Lovelace died in a car accident in 2002; Mr. Damiano, the director, became a golf caddy. And pornography became a big business, reflected in many facets of popular culture.
Ms. Jong, who appears in the documentary, sees a disconnect between the freedom of expression that “Deep Throat” promised and what actually transpired. “Now we have total liberation of sexual things but we also have the Patriot Act,” she said. “We never made the connection between sexual speech and political speech. Sex today has nothing to do with revolution anymore. It’s about capitalism and protecting little profit centers.”
Recently federal legislators increased the penalty to broadcasters for so-called indecency. At the same time the Internet has opened vast new markets for pornography. And a wave of porn-star confessionals, including the new best-seller “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale,” by Jenna Jameson, are flooding bookstores.
“I was in Toronto recently, and Toronto is like being in middle America,” Mr. Grazer recalled. “And you’ve got very hot, young, 18-to 20-year-old girls with tongue studs and they are simply, publicly advertising that they are interested in and capable of giving you really good oral sex if you’re interested. And that’s not even designed to be shocking.”
In the meantime, Mr. Barbato suggested, the sort of outward expression of interest spurred by “Deep Throat” in the 70’s has turned inward 30 years later, largely because technology allows those who want to indulge their prurient tastes to do so in the comfort of their homes. “Pornography used to be in the back room,” Mr. Barbato said. “Then it came out for a minute. Now it is again in the back room – the back room of every house with a computer.”
Still, what “Deep Throat” unleashed is unlikely to go away, Mr. Grazer said. “I think we are sexually anesthetized at this point,” he said. “There isn’t anything we don’t consume that doesn’t involve sex to sort of grease the pathways. How do I say it? The marketing of anything today worth marketing involves sex.”