`Deep Throat` as a cultural milestone

His hands flying above his spiked hair, Brian Grazer is flinging metaphors, connecting dots across three decades, trying to explain why for years he has been obsessed with the cultural significance of the 1972 porn classic "Deep Throat." On first reckoning this is hard to fathom: One of the most profitable movie producers in history ("8 Mile," "A Beautiful Mind," "Apollo 13," "Splash") is talking your ear off about a crude, 62-minute, unfunny sex farce that starred a mousy young actress named Linda Lovelace whose sole talent was one endlessly repeated sexual gimmick. How quaint in today`s sex-soaked culture, when a porn star is the central attraction of a new teen comedy (20th Century Fox`s "The Girl Next Door"), when a three-story billboard of porn queen Jenna Jameson looks down upon family-friendlier Times Square, when ads for Viagra appear superimposed on the backstop during World Series games. But then Grazer, 52, tells you the story about his grandmother and the night in 1973 she came into her 21-year-old grandson`s room. "This little, 4-foot-10 Jewish grandmother, she lived with her husband, Sy," he says. "Sy and Sonia Schwartz. She comes in, closes my door and says to me, `Sy and I saw it.` I go, `Saw what?` `We saw it; we went.` `You went to what?` `Deep Throat.` `You gotta be kidding.` `No, we stood in line,` she said. `We went.` `Where?` `Hollywood.` `Well, what`d you think?` And she said, `It was quite a film.` I said, `Why did you go see it?` `Well, everyone was talking about it. ...` "My grandmother," Grazer says, delighted both by the absurdity and the point it helps him make, "turned me on to `Deep Throat.`" Creating a sexual curiosity Grazer may wind up telling that story on camera because the two documentarians he hired to research and direct "Inside Deep Throat," Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, consider it a charming example of how the film created a furious sexual curiosity in America. "Deep Throat," made for $22,000 and financed by two men regarded in law enforcement circles as organized-crime figures, was the highest-grossing picture in Los Angeles during the 1972-73 season. The next year it finished sixth. It played here for more than 10 straight years and is believed to have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. HBO liked Grazer`s search for deeper meaning enough to split the $2 million cost with him and give the documentary a theatrical release before its pay-cable debut next year. That one of the kings of mainstream moviemaking is betting he can make you contemplate an oral-sex film speaks volumes about the way pornography has insinuated itself into pop culture. Porn has gradually morphed from taboo to a ubiquitousness that can make the women of the Vivid Video porn empire seem hardly more threatening than the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders used to be. There are two ways to think about "Deep Throat`s" role in this. One is to dismiss the film as an aberration, a death rattle of the libertine `60s. It was the first porn film to draw mass audiences, including many married couples, titillated by the kooky theme, the obscenity prosecutions that nagged the film in city after city, and the film`s relentless celebration of an act unmentionable in polite company. By 1976, Sony introduced the VCR, making private porn convenient and soon destroying more mass communal experiences in adult theaters. Within another decade the AIDS epidemic made the casual-sex ethos of "Deep Throat" a distant memory. Today many Americans get their porn on a computer, spending $1 billion a year on 100,000 sites. Changing way we look at sex The other way to look at the legacy of the film -- the way Grazer, Bailey and Barbato look at it -- is to marvel at the way it shattered sexual mores and to ruminate about the connection between that revolution and today`s porn chic. When you see a porn actress running for governor, when you find hard-core porn routinely offered on TV in middle-brow chain hotel rooms, when a sports talk-radio host invites a different female porn star to make NFL picks every Friday -- when porn is that common, the filmmakers suggest, thank "Deep Throat" for helping to set the tone. "So many things weren`t the same after `Deep Throat,`" says Barbato, who has collaborated with Bailey for more than a decade on eclectic, provocative documentaries on subjects ranging from Tammy Faye Bakker to Monica Lewinsky to a New York City "club kids`" murder to the history of pornography. "There was almost like a genuine, innocent curiosity about pornography, about sex and sexuality.

It`s almost like `Deep Throat` and its commercial success was the beginning of pornography being co-opted by big business" -- the "commodification of sex," as the directors are fond of putting it. During the past year, Barbato and Bailey have filmed interviews of scores of people -- porn actors, directors, prosecutors, cultural commentators -- who lived through "Deep Throat." "There`re endless tales of the sexual revolution, and every one makes you want to make a left-hand turn and go into someone`s personal story," Barbato says. One of the stories is of Linda Lovelace, whose celebrity first drew Grazer`s interest in "Deep Throat." Half a dozen years ago he decided to make a biopic about the actress, who was reportedly coerced into porn by her husband, was paid $1,200 for her work and spent much of her life after "Deep Throat" impoverished or ill, variously condemning porn and basking in its notoriety. Lovelace (nee Boreman) died in a Denver traffic accident at 53 in April 2002. Soon after, Grazer -- who said he had already commissioned a script and interviewed several well-known actresses to play Lovelace -- decided he had been moving in the wrong direction. Part of zeitgeist "The more I learned, the less interested I got in Linda Lovelace and the more interested I got in the profound effect the movie had on the culture," he says. It crossed every barrier; it entered the zeitgeist." (In 1973, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post would code-name a key Watergate source "Deep Throat.") "It wasn`t shocking anymore. Then you say to yourself, `How does that affect all the other art forms that think they`re going to shock you by saying something sexy or showing those images that don`t have the same impact anymore?`" Grazer`s fascination with the subject takes him through a whoosh of leaping notions fueled by an engaging intellectual restlessness. He talks about "Girls Gone Wild" and female reporters who look like actresses and Snoop Doggy Dogg`s new porn career and how he wants the documentary to contain " `Ice Storm` stories," anecdotes of couples who went to see "Deep Throat" out of boredom, only to have one suddenly inspired partner stray. "I`m just so interested in it, I can`t tell you," he says. "I`m obsessed with it. I`m obsessed with granulating the culture in relation to `Deep Throat.`" Whoosh -- he transposes "Deep Throat" to today`s Big Thing: "I said to these guys [Barbato and Bailey], it`s like the ultimate reality television experience. Linda Lovelace was very normal-looking. She wasn`t the girl next door like a discovery of Hugh Hefner. She wasn`t hot and sexy like any girls in porno. She was this modest, just beige girl, this modest-looking sort of grocery-store-clerk-kind-of beige character that could do this miraculous thing. She became enormously famous for that. If you look at any successful reality show, they`re all based on the same drug: `This can happen to you.`"