HOW IT FELT : Barbato & Bailey's 'Inside Deep Throat' [7/10]

Wednesday, 08 June 2005

More than three decades after its release, the aftershocks of Gerard Damiano's hour-long, shoestring-budget, fellatio-packed porn classic Deep Throat continue to resonate. Indeed, here in the UK in June 2005 it seems there's no getting away from what's been described as 'the most profitable film ever made'. Only last week the Watergate informer code-named after the movie was finally unmasked as fomer FBI bigwig Mark Felt. And now audiences can feast their eyes on Inside Deep Throat, a riotously entertaining* - but also starkly sobering - account of the whole remarkable phenomenon by shameless self-proclaimed muckrakers Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato.

Previously best known for the racuously camp feature Party Monster and a string of OTT, behind-the-headlines made-for-TV biographical documentaries (including The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Barbato & Bailey seem to be on something akin to 'best behaviour' this time around. Presumably because Inside Deep Throat is - in stark contrast to Deep Throat itself - quite a prestige project, funded by HBO and produced by Oscar-winning Brian Grazer (also responsible for A Beautiful Mind and 8 Mile.)

Heavyweight testimony is provided by the likes of Gore Vidal, Carl Bernstein, Norman Mailer, Camille Paglia, Susan Brownmiller and Alan Dershowitz, interspersed with comments from (among many others) Dr Ruth Westheimer, that reliable pop-culture rent-a-gob John Waters, Wes Craven, Peter Bart and a very dry, top-value Dick Cavett. We also hear from porn-industry legends Harry Reems (whose starring-role in the original picture led, astonishingly, to his being successfuly prosecuted for obscenity), Georgina Spelvin, Andrea True, Larry Flynt, Hugh Hefner and - poignantly - Deep Throat's leading-lady Linda Lovelace.

"Poignantly" because the story of Deep Throat is essentially a tragic one - Lovelace later alleged that she'd been effectively coerced into taking part by her Svengali-like husband Chuck, and it would be putting things very mildly indeed to state that for Lovelace there was to be no happy ending before her car-crash death in 2002. On a wider canvas, Deep Throat paints a scary, sometimes depressing picture of how America's reactionary elements - including the police, judiciary and governments - behave when, as during the early days of President Nixon's second (Watergate-truncated) term, they have the electoral upper hand.

The astonishing success of Deep Throat - famously, the first porn picture to attract 'normal' audiences - seemed set to usher in a new, boundary-busting era of sexual frankness and taboo-tackling movie-making. Nixon was gone, the Democrats were back in power, and the post-Easy Rider 'Golden Age' of American auteur cinema was in full swing. As we now know, within a few short years the pendulum swung sharply back to the right: Reagan in the White House, safe escapist fare from Lucas and Spielberg atop the box office. And as for the porn industry - well, see Boogie Nights for full details on that front.

And now here we are in 2005: George W Bush's red/blue-divided America indicates that the cultural and social battles typified by the Deep Throat furore have certainly not gone away - one of the reasons why Inside Deep Throat deserves wide distribution.Barbato and Bailey are, however, sensibly keen to point out that Deep Throat itself isn't perhaps the finest vehicle in which to go to war against the forces of repression and reaction: we hear messy tales of its how its distribution was effectively hi-jacked by organised crime, and from the clips we're shown Damiano's limitations as writer-director (and those of his performers) are glaringly apparent.

But while Inside Deep Throat is unlikely to send a new generation of thrill-seekers rummaging through their parent's video-collections in search of the original, it's invaluable as an introduction to one of the most remarkable episodes in recent American cultural history, one which seemed to leave no level of national life untouched.

If anything, there's a little too much material here to cram into a single feature-length film - there's a distinct "quart into pint pot" feel at times. Editors William Grayburn and Jeremy Simmons, whose energetic assemblage of disparate source-material is top-notch, could perhaps have been a little less enthusiastic with their shears. Presumably a future DVD release (and/or book) will have the space to explore the countless fascinating avenues which Barbato and Bailey can, by the nature of this project, only very briefly examine. But perhaps, given the nature of their subject-matter, it's only too appropriate that they leave us wanting more (...more! more!!).

Neil Young
8th June, 2005

INSIDE DEEP THROAT : [7/10] : USA 2005 : Fenton BAILEY & Randy BARBATO : 110 mins
seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 8th June 2005 - press show

* Among many laugh-out-loud moments, pride of place must go to the 'Adolf Hitler pussy shot.' Honest, you'll know what I mean when you see it...

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