Movie Log: Inside Deep Throat

I won't lie to you: one of the main reasons I wanted to see this documentary (about the famous porn movie) was raw, unadulterated prurient interest. I grew up during the VCR boom, and my generation was the first to have porn available pretty much at will. (Though, in my day, we had to go out and rent movies, and then find times to see them where someone's parents weren't home -- not like these whippersnappers and their always-on Internet!) So the history of porn is interesting to me, besides the obvious fact that porn itself has a certain interest.

I've never seen the movie Deep Throat (though I've seen my share of porn over the years), and I don't expect I ever will: grainy '70s porn is not really my thing. However, I did read the novel, or at least parts of it: my father had it hidden, not well enough, sometime in the early '80s. That's me all over, though: when given a choice, I nearly always choose reading the book.

So I Netflix'd Inside Deep Throat, and I watched it on Sunday night. For those of you who need to know: yes, it's got some dirty bits, though they're mostly in the background or otherwise obscured. The most famous filmed blowjob does make an appearance, about halfway through the movie. But, though this is rated NC-17, you'd have to be awfully odd to find it particularly arousing; it's mostly talking heads, and those heads are pretty gray and wrinkled by now.

The opening credits, which run on and off for nearly ten minutes, make the claim that this documentary will be about The Director (Gerard Damiano), The Actress (Linda Lovelace), and The Actor (Harry Reems). But that's one of the main problems with the movie: it loses track of what it wants to be about for reels at a time, and ends up mostly being about a representative sampling of the legal cases that grew out of Deep Throat. Though bits and pieces of the other possible movie do show up now and then, there's no real continuity with those elements.

Inside Deep Throat is also horrible with its timeline, and uses real dates as sparingly as a porno movie uses condoms. For example, there's one section that talks about Nixon's re-election (in November of 1972, which the movie does not say), and all of the nasty repressive Republican stuff that followed...then segues into talking about the opening of Deep Throat in New York City on June 12, 1972 -- which of course happened five months before Nixon's re-election. When a movie is that sloppy with matters of basic knowledge, I stop trusting it.

I would have liked to have seen how Gerard Damiano went from being a hairdresser to a porn-movie-maker, and how the Mob was mixed up in the business, but this movie glosses over that entirely. (Much later in the movie, it's mentioned that Damiano was a swinger, which is, I assume, part of the answer.) I would have liked any context about Damiano's previous work in porn; Inside Deep Throat mentions a movie he made afterward, but nothing specific about any movies he made before Deep Throat. Somehow he got funding, from persons unspecified, to fly a bunch of people down to Florida to film a feature-length movie -- yes, it was done on the cheap, but that's still serious money, and Inside Deep Throat makes no attempt to explain how Damiano got to that point.

I would have also liked the movie to have made any attempt to cover Linda Lovelace's relationship with her Svengali, Chuck Traynor, but he's almost completely absent from this movie. (Is he alive? Is he dead? It's mentioned that he took up with Marilyn Chambers after Lovelace left him, but that's about all we know.) We get more of the arc of Lovelace's life than we do of Reems's or Damiano's -- since a childhood friend makes some innocuous comments, and her sister breathes fire at anyone related to Lovelace's porn career -- but they can't speak to the alleged point of this movie, which is about the making and promoting of Deep Throat.

Reems gets the short end of the stick; we don't find out anything about his life before or during shooting. We get some mildly amusing movie clips (he's not unfunny, for a porn actor), and then see him convicted of vague porn tendencies and about to be sent up the river for five years when suddenly Hollywood descends from the heavens like Zeus and somehow gets him off. (This was not particularly clear.) Then we get the condensed version of his E! Hollywood Story (homeless, alcoholic, drugs) and he disappears until the end credits, where we find out he's sober, Christian and selling real estate in Utah.

So the bulk of the movie becomes The Story of How The Man Tries To Keep Porn Down. A little of this would go a long way; a lot of it goes much too far. (If the movie had much of a point of view, other than "I like Deep Throat, therefore persecuting it is the work of a meanie," it would be easier to take.) Again, the lack of time references makes it all confusing, and seemingly was done to smush Nixon's re-election with Bush's in the mind of the viewer.

Parts of it are very good; I wish they'd let some of the people talk longer, and focused on the stories they have to tell rather than speeding on to the next legal kerfuffle. There's an FBI agent I'd love to see more of -- again, I think the movie I'd most want to see would be how the Mob lost control of porn. And there's a older Florida couple -- the husband ran a movie theater, or something -- who are just wonderful. I'd watch them for an hour.

All in all, it's interesting, but too focused on its message (which is, I guess, understandable after the success of the agitprop documentaries of the last couple of years). I'm as in favor of free expression as anyone, but Inside Deep Throat just got boring. And that's a very sad thing to happen to a movie about the most famous porn movie ever made.