A few words on "Deep Throat"

Photo via City Pages.


Much more interesting than W. Mark Felt is this UPI story by Joe Bob Briggs follwing the 2002 death of Linda Boreman -- Linda Lovelace of cinematic Deep Throat fame. From the article --

But Deep Throat, strange as it may seem, changed America's sexual attitudes more than anything since the first Kinsey Report in 1948.

It altered the lives of everyone associated with it. It super-charged the feminist movement. It gave the Mafia its most lucrative business since Prohibition. And it changed the nation's views of obscenity forever....

Nations, like people, have moments when they just need to get drunk and party, and apparently something of the sort was happening in June 1972 when, at almost the same moment, the Watergate burglars broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee and Deep Throat opened at the World Theater in New York City. Deep Throat was not just a dirty movie, it was a cause, and it was so popular that most film critics were afraid to deprecate it for fear of seeming unhip.

Ed McMahon, the sidekick of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, was such a fan of the movie that he showed up with six friends and a case of beer, then stood outside the theater afterward enthusing with the public.

Frank Sinatra was one of the early audience members, along with Vice President Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, Nora Ephron, Bob Woodward, and Sammy Davis Jr., who grew so enamored of Linda Lovelace that within the year he and his wife would be having group sex with her and her husband.

Deep Throat is finally one of those movies that really can't be explained. It was simply there at a certain crazy time, and it brought out every suppressed urge of a public starved for sensation....

Deep Throat was the longest 62 minutes that millions of people would ever sit through. In retrospect, the most inspired decision Damiano made was to rename the movie Deep Throat. Nothing else could possibly explain its success.

Lovelace was interviewed by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, further stoking the interest of socialites, students, swingers, and the curious. Sinema magazine summed up the effusive prose of the day, praising Lovelace's "fresh carnality, the air of thoroughly debauched innocence, the sense of a woman exploring the limits of sexual expression and feeling. Linda Lovelace is the girl next door grown up into a shameless . . . woman...."

Yet she continued to be haunted by the film. Throughout the 1980s she was still in demand as a professional witness for anti-obscenity movements. She appeared on Donahue and testified before the Minneapolis City Council when it was considering a law defining pornography as discrimination against women. And in 1986 she wrote her last autobiography, Out of Bondage, with an introduction by Gloria Steinem. Mostly she used the book to describe her poverty-ridden circumstances and to counter attacks on her credibility that resulted from Ordeal. She portrayed herself as the typical rape victim who gets raped all over again in the court of public opinion when she decides to tell the truth....

But even as the very last smidgen of controversy seemed to have been milked out of Deep Throat, Ron Howard, the Hollywood producer/director, optioned the rights to Ordeal for $3,000.

So given the growing Hollywood fascination with all things sordid, we may see her story told one more time. Until then, she'll mostly be remembered as the "How did she do it?" girl among the people who saw the film, and the "Bad men made me do it" girl among feminists and Christian crusaders. The porn industry has coined its own term, "The Linda Syndrome," to describe porn stars, like Angel Kelly and Samantha Fox, who become stars and then disavow their porn past and embrace feminism.

Lovelace was the longest-surviving member of her original liver-transplant support group, so it's ironic that she died alone, as the result of losing control of her car on April 3 and hitting a concrete post. For almost three weeks she remained on life support. When it was finally turned off on Monday, her parents were at her bedside, along with Marchiano and her two grown children. It was a car accident that led her into porn, and all these years later, it was a car accident that finally released her. In both cases, she never knew what hit her.

Interesting read. (Sorry, no photos.) Cultural questions abound. Parallels to today's moral climate? Three decades after the fact, which "Deep Throat" has had the most impact?