Word: porn
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...Fenton-Barbato documentary makes much of the judicial and law-enforcement politics surrounding Deep Throat. The Nixon Administration tried prosecuting the film from every angle -not surprising, since it was a popular porn movie produced by the Mafia. One federal agent quoted a Peraino underling as saying of the Deep Throat take: "We've got so much money ... we don't even count it any more.... We weigh it." The movie reports that "Deep Throat was made for just $25,000. It grossed more than $600 million." (That last stat is a flexible one, like a guy's street-corner...
...question Inside Deep Throat's emphasis on the Nixon Administration's attempt to muzzle pornography. What I do know is that it didn't work. Publicly exhibited porn flourished for the next decade. New York City, certainly, was much more open in the Lindsay-Beame-and-Koch 70s than it would be in the Giuliani 90s. In the early days you could see such perverse eccentricities as Why, a Kronhausen documentary about a Danish farm girl, Bodil Joensen, who has sex with her livestock. That one I skipped...
...most of the "major" porn films (a critic's got to do what a critic's got to do). And I found that the filmmakers were eager to explore all kinds of genres. The Mitchells made a Fanny Hill-style period comedy, Autobiography of a Flea. Low-rent auteur Zebedy Colt pornofied a Crucible-like period drama with The Devil Inside Her.) Peter Locke's It Happened in Hollywood was a Laugh-In-inspired skitcom; one funny turn featured a man-woman trapeze act called the Flying Fucks. These weren't always very good movies, but they were real ones...
...film's money shots is given a slo-mo instant replay of the kind Jackie Chan later used for his best stunts; then the same shot in super slo-mo, then in Pablo Ferro-style psychedelic greens and pinks. The last two minutes are extraordinary for a porn film: one extended closeup of a man's and a woman's faces as they kiss (and have sex) -as if the Mitchells understood Bergman's dictum that "Film begins with the human face...
...last forever, you know?" Though he's referring to the Mitchell brothers, one of whom killed the other in 1991, he could have meant the whole porno chic scene. Professional actors, even of marginal competence, gave way to born-and-bred porn stars like John Holmes in the 70s and Traci Lords in the 80s. "The turning point," says porn director Ed Deroo, "came in 1982, when it finally went all video. I missed film tremendously. Film had soul; video had nothing. Video's just a way of making money. It flows like water, but film had a texture...