If you are looking for a dirty movie, you’re close, but this ain’t it.
Inside Deep Throat is a cleaver, educational and entertaining documentary that looks at the way that the pornographic film industry has changed, by focusing on one film – Deep Throat.
Using a variety of unlikely looking characters, the film makers, 33 years later, now a bunch of weird looking old guys with big glasses and their pants pulled up too high, the film explains that pre-70s, the porn movie was strictly the rain coat brigade, or wild bucks nite deals. Then in the early 70’s the Republican Nixon administration wanted to shut the pron industry, so they picked on the most popular film at the time – Deep Throat. According to this documentary Deep Throat possessed qualities that elevated it above the average Porn movie (humour, acting, camerawork, etc). The controversy of the Government trying to shut the movie down pushed this little skin flic into the mainstream, and from there the story just gets wilder and wilder as the mainstream film industry gets involved and the films success brings out its links to the Pirano family and it’s crime connections..
The characters are wonderfully bizarre, from the Lenny Camp, the swearing
Location scout, the leading man – Harry Reems, and included are a variety of commentators like Hugh Hefner, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, director John Waters and on.
Taking a more light hearted approach to the documentary, like Ron Mann’s 1999 film Grass, Inside Deep Throat could be accused of attributing an awful lot to one film, while hardly acknowledging any others. At the same time, this is one of the better known of the time (even of it hasn’t had a musical adaptation made).
The importance of this period is neatly summed up by Dick Cravette (old television personality) in that this film took a subject (fellatio) that was unthinkable (ask your grandma), through to a time when it is not even considered real sex (ask ex-President Clinton). The repercussions of this fall in decency standards can by illustrated in two words – Britney Spears.