Word: damianos
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...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...
...slits her wrists in a bathtub. After dying a virgin, she tells a gatekeeper to eternity that she wants to live out her sexual urges, to be "filled, engulfed, consumed by lust." She briefly gets that wish -which includes intimate contact with bananas and grapes, a snake and (Damiano's favorite marital aid) a water tube. (He has a similar scene in Deep Throat and later devoted an entire movie, Water Power, to high colonics.) With plenty of boy/girl, girl/girl and orgy "action," Devil still takes itself solemnly enough to risk being laughable. But heaven knows it's intense...
...Most directors with a left-field mega-hit would instantly crank out another picture in the same genre. Not Damiano. He used his cash, and cachet, from his silly porno comedy to make a super-serioso drama. Reading the script of Devil in Miss Jones, Reems told his friend: "Gerry, it's a steal. This is No Exit in its thinnest disguise." To which Damiano replied: "Well, what do you expect? I wrote it in a weekend." Though Devil was a substantial box-office hit, Spelvin notes that "it was not really a very successful porno film. I mean, guys...
...essence, Deep Throat is part slapstick comedy, part carnal carnival: it's a burlesque routine (Harry Reems' Doctor Schnorrer routine) wrapped around a sideshow freak stunt (Linda's routine). And the movie -maybe all of porno chic -wouldn't exist if Chuck Traynor hadn't shown Damiano a bedroom trick his wife Linda could do. Which, putting it starkly, was to work a penis not only into her mouth but down her throat. Call it glottal fellatio...