Once upon a time, the porn industry wasn’t an industry, and amateurs ruled the blue-movie business. One film featured a plot built around its star’s fellatio skills. Through snowballing publicity and a series of high profile law suits, this film garnered notoriety. Mainstream audiences flocked to see it, and because porn is cheap, the flick became the most profitable movie ever made. That’s the story of “Inside Deep Throat,” a documentary whose topic would have been better served by a magazine article than a 92-minute film.
Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) tell the 1972 hardcore film's history in excruciating detail: the life story of Linda Lovelace, the involvement of the mob, and the travails of Harry Reems, an actor who was made the target of a lawsuit. "Inside Deep Throat" appears as if it has something to say about free speech and sexual politics, and talking heads like Dick Cavett, Norman Mailer, Erica Jong and Camillie Paglia are at hand to expound on its cultural impact.
Some of the characters responsible for the film are good for a chuckle: sleazy real-life templates for Burt Reynold’s pornographer in “Boogie Nights.” There is a brief coda tracing “Deep Throat”’s influence on the history of porn, but Bailey and Barbato don’t reach any particular conclusion. When it’s all said and done, “Inside Deep Throat” amounts to little more than the making-of-featurette to a bad porno.
