Dirs/scrs: Fenton Bailey,Randy Barbato. US. 2004. 90mins

It has been thirty-threeyears since Deep Throat first went down on one of Time Square's triple-Xfleapits in Manhattan and came up a pop-cultural landmark that reverberates tothis day. The lasting impact, both personal and societal, of this seminal pornflick is now chronicled in a breezy documentary that dwells mostly on the widerpolitical legacy still being played out today in the morality schisms ofAmerica and elsewhere. However, it is the aching human stories left behind in DeepThroat's destructive wake that stay with you and help elevate what wouldhave been a routine cinematic history lesson, albeit one so handsomelyproduced, into a theatrical experience.

Produced by ImagineEntertainment's Brian Grazer for a generous $2m, Inside Deep Throat costmore than eighty times that of its source material. The expense would seem morethan justified given the evident commercial pay-offs of a documentary that willcommand acres of TV and print coverage, and spit out every double entendre punin the media lexicon.

The same curiosity that madeDeep Throat such a hit with the 70s in-crowd, celebrities and all, willsurely come into play again on the specialised circuit. Only this time, thetitillation will have long since gone. The sight, momentarily glimpsed here, ofLinda Lovelace's full-on acts of sword-swallowing fellatio has lost much of itsprurient potency thanks to the ubiquitous VCR, disc-players, pay-per-view smutand the numbing onslaught of spammed erotica. Which is precisely the point: DeepThroat was the film that first alerted the underworld to porn's mainstreampotential and in so doing help make hardcore flesh-peddling a legit enterprisethat penetrates every corner of contemporary life.

Quite how Deep Throatbecame so chic, even to the point of becoming a by-word for adult pleasure andthe nickname for Nixon's Watergate whistleblower, has never been entirelyexplained. And it is the reason why a curious new generation of literate theatre-goersmight want to revisit one the many watershed moments in the sexual revolutionto find out what the fuss back then was all about.

Certainly, the original DeepThroat has got to be the most shoddily assembled, poorly-lit movie ever tohave a full-length documentary devoted to it. Filmed over the course of sixdays in sleazy Miami motels with $22,500 of crime money, the 62-minute creationwas a laughably amateurish effort that revolved around a single conceit:Sexually unsatisfied, Lovelace's character consults a physician and learns thather clitoris is located in the part of the anatomy usually reserved for one'stonsils. No prizes for guessing how her predicament gets resolved. Still, thatintentional comic absurdity was more plot than all the 8mm looped stag filmsthat had been circulating until then. A global phenomenon burst into flame,stoked by a $3m injunction from a New York judged that declared Deep Throattoo obscene for public consumption and fuelled by a popular desire in the early70s to defy convention.

From the onset of Bailey andBarbato's documentary essay, Deep Throat is declared to be the mostsuccessful independently produced movie ever made. With a worldwide grossestimated by the FBI at some $600m, this box office aberration theoreticallyeclipses all other word-of-mouth sensations such as The Blair Witch Project.Theoretically, because none of that stash can be adequately accounted for todaysince everybody involved along its supply line was on the take. Distributed bythe mob, the prints were dropped off at theatres that would later be shakendown for an extortionate slice of the gross receipts. Some of those that didn'tcomply saw their movie-houses burned down.

While fascinating to themovie industry as a distribution case study, this side-story is only touchedupon by the filmmakers. And, judging by the press notes for their documentary,so are many other tales that have accumulated around Deep Throat in theensuing three decades. Having gathered 800 hours of material, the filmmakershad tough editing choices to make, one of which was to skew the focus away fromits desperate star into a wider treatise. Before she was Linda Lovelace, pimpedby her sexual svengali into becoming a worldwide brand for uninhibited lust,she was Linda Borman, the fresh-faced daughter of a New York cop. Years later,she briefly trying to make amends, or perhaps just her rent, as an anti-porncrusader. A car crash ended her penniless life in April 2002, before this filmwas started.

When she was alive, producerGrazer himself flirted with the idea of doing a Hollywood biopic of Lovelacebut abandoned the project in favour of a non-fiction film that assessed theinsinuating cultural impact of her defining performance. The resulting filmcertainly offers plenty of contextual grist as the likes of John Waters, NormanMailer, Alan Dershowitz, Hugh Heffner, Erica Jong, Gore Vidal and CamillePaglia all weigh on the zeitgeist effects and its First Amendment implications.

Having previously curated anentire documentary series on the history of erotica (Pornography: The SecretHistory Of Civilization), not to mention a British reality series on theCalifornian porn industry, Bailey and Barbato are well-placed to provide anover-arching survey of the sexual landscape as narrated by Dennis Hopper. But,as with their Sundance hit The Eyes Of Tammy Faye, the small personalhistories are more revealing than the wide-angle perspective.

Audiences at Sundance, whereInside Deep Throat received a high-profile premiere last night, will beamused to learn that Lovelace's male co-star, a mustachioed lothario who wentby the stage name of Harry Reems, is now living in their midst as Park Cityreal estate agent. Not only that, but this reformed alcoholic has since foundGod - another detail only momentarily alluded to.

The most indelible portraitis that of Deep Throat's indefatigable director Gerard Damiano (alsoknown as Jerry Gerard). Now living ignominiously with his grown-up children, heis real-life equivalent to the Burt Reynold's character in Boogie Nights,a filmmaker who rued the day that big business moved in porn and made it dirty.A former hairdresser, Damiano was of the old school that tried at least to makea picture, including cut-aways of rockets launching into space to suggest thefemale orgasm, rather than just a mindless succession of grind acts. And it isDamiano that surely holds one of the keys to Deep Throat's success byinsisting on changing the film's original title from The Doctor Makes AHousecall. Nothing like a catchy movie name to capture the globalimagination. Not that he saw much more than a dime from those hard-earnedlabours.

Prod co: Imagine Entertainment, HBO Documentary Films,World Of Wonder productions
Int'l sales: Summit Entertainment
US dist: Universal Pictures
Prods: Brian Grazer, Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato
Exec Prod: Kim Roth
Co-prod: Mona Card
Cine: David Kempner, Teodoro Maniaci
Eds: William Grayburn, Jeremy Simmons