Inside Deep Throat Provides Many Laughs But Few Insights

Inside Deep Throat is a fun film. I enjoyed the documentary film footage and the interviews with such players as Gerard Damiano, Ron Wertheim (Deep Throat, production manager), Lenny Camp (Deep Throat location scout adn convicted child pornographer), Andrea True (ex-porn star), Terry Sommer (Miami theater manager), Bill Kelly (anti-porn crusader), Larry Parrish (Memphis Deep Throat prosecutor). The look and sound of the film is gorgeous.

The celebrity soundbytes from Larry Flynt, Norman Mailer, Camille Paglia and company don't add much.

The movie doesn't break any ground. I wish it would've investigated Linda's claims of abuse and where the $600 million the movie supposedly earned went. I wish it would've mentioned the approximately 60-100 people in the porn trade who got murdered in the 1970s and '80s including Joseph Peraino.

The message is resolutely pro-porn, like The People vs Larry Flynt. The pornographers are the good guys and the anti-porn folks are not just the bad guys but are idiots.

Everyone interested in porn or in 1970s American pop culture should enjoy this movie.

Katrina Onstadt writes:

The book The Other Hollywood and the film Inside Deep Throat are different enterprises, of course, but it’s informing to experience them so close together. McNeil and Osborne's porn historians are criminals and egotists; one starlet after another tells a similar life story about being lonely, abused, looking for love. The film tiptoes around these shadows, presenting most of its sources as quirky, funny even. Bailey and Barbato bill one subject, Lenny Camp, as a “location scout” for Deep Throat. This wrinkly bag of a curmudgeon disses everyone involved through a chest of phlegm. In McNeil and Osborne's book, he’s billed as Lenny Camp, “photographer/convicted child pornographer.” The absence of that icky major detail from Inside Deep Throat underscores the filmmakers’ quiet romanticism towards their subject.

Another missing, but notorious factoid: Lovelace, according to witnesses in The Other Hollywood, performed bestiality on film before becoming a star with Deep Throat. She describes being coerced at gunpoint to be mounted from behind by an unidentifiable breed of dog. Afterwards, she says: “I was in the deepest valley I’d ever been in, devastated, wanting only to die.” Of course, another bystander says: “Linda didn’t seem upset. … Linda just seemed to me like a hippie, free-love chick, you know?” Even if the latter were true, and Lovelace was expressing some kind of personal urge the rest of us are too uptight to tap into – call me repressed – such expression seems a wee bit unhealthy.

Anthony Lane Rips Inside Deep Throat 2/25/05

We have to settle for a predictable roster of guest preachers: Camille Paglia, Norman Mailer, Erica Jong, Gore Vidal, Larry Flynt, Alan Dershowitz, and a bundle of simpers and tics with the words “Helen Gurley Brown” written underneath. Far more enjoyable are the crew from the original picture, who are, without exception, on loan from the pages of a Carl Hiaasen novel. Connoisseurs of fruitcake will treasure Ron Wertheim, the production manager, whose vivid gray locks burst outward like solar flares, and who is plainly looking forward to being reunited, in the near future, with his own mind. Moving on, we come to Lenny Camp, the location manager, who cups one ear at the interviewer and describes “Deep Throat” as “a piece-of-s--- film.” Plus, “the actors are all s---.” I would second Lenny in his thoughtful analysis, adding merely that, if you think the actors are s---, you should try the editing. And the lighting. And the sound recording. And the sex.

The sleaziest aspect of “Inside Deep Throat” is its desperation to make a big noise out of a pip-squeak. From the opening credits, in the course of which Camille Paglia recalls “an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality,” to the closing homage, in which our narrator, Dennis Hopper, tells us that “‘Deep Throat’ was less about the joys of oral sex than it was about the freedom to speak out against shame and hypocrisy,” we are dragged through a glossily packaged exercise in cultural aggrandizement, as immovable in its prejudice as the forces of religious reaction which it yearns to provoke. There is even a hilarious attempt, near the end, to argue that the good old days of pornography used to brim with Ambrosian innocence, after which, Erica Jong says, “a very cynical pornographic industry came in on the heels of the First Amendment, and began coining money, hand over fist.” Leaving aside her interesting choice of image, I take it that she is referring to the “bad” money made in our corrupt post-Reagan age, as opposed to the “good” money made by all the Mafia goons thirty years ago or more.