Word: damianos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...interest of reviewers. The opinion of many of them, including me, was that there might be a meeting of pornography, which had quickly established a kind of artistic pedigree, and Hollywood, which was striding toward explicit sexuality. That was also the belief of Deep Throat's writer-director, Gerard Damiano, who said in 1973: "If it's left alone, within a year sex will just blend itself into film. It's inevitable...
...take my word for it. Listen to the Inside Deep Throat testimony of Damiano -now 76 and a Florida retiree, his trousers pulled nearly up to his tits, old-man style. "You had to be there," he says. "You had to be there. I'm thrilled that I was there. And I thank God I had a camera...
...Damiano's camera could be turned on, but if the actors weren't, he'd have no blue movie. (Blue, don't ask me why, was the word to describe a dirty joke, an aching scrotum or a pornographic film. Two stag-film collections that opened in 1970 were called A History of the Blue Movie and Hollywood Blue.) Where was a director to find people who would consent to be photographed having sex? And where would he find sex workers who could convincingly play roles -act -in a feature-length, talking picture...
...step up from anonymity is pseudonymity. Paul Gerber, the writer-director of my own favorite among the early pornos, the 1971 School Girl, was listed as David Reberg on the credits. Damiano put the name Jerry Gerard on Deep Throat. That film's lead players, Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, were really Linda Boreman and Herb Streicher. The star of Damiano's next film, Devil in Miss Jones, called herself Georgina Spelvin -George Spelvin being the all-purpose pseudonym for a stage actor doubling a role (and Georgette for an actress). Jamie Gillis, another star of proto-porn, says that...
...Early porn directors also talked themselves into believing they were committing art. Ron Wertheim, Damiano's assistant director on Deep Throat, may only have been shooting porno loops but, he says in the documentary, "I approached those films as if I was Luc Godard or somebody." Damiano, who went directly from hairdressing to helming hard-core, had a similar sense of vocation. He says that after the success of Deep Throat, "If people wanted to interview me because I was a porno filmmaker, I just was not interested in talking to them. But if anyone wanted to speak...