So in just 1 day we go from Futurama to a porn documentary. This is certainly an interesting change of pace Netflix, let's see what you have in store for me.
[Yo. Spoilers. Duh. But it's a freakin documentary anyway]
As the title implies, this movie is a documentary about the making of and fallout from Deep Throat, the most successful porn movie of all time. Dennis Hopper narrates the tale, and it's full of interviews, both newly taped and using old stock footage, with just about everyone involved in the movie from the director, stars, distributors, people whose houses they used for filming, etc. The first and most prominent person they talk to is Gerard Damiano, the director of Deep Throat. I REALLY wish I could find a good picture of him to put up here, cause he's in classic old man pants-around-the-nipples garb. Seriously his pants might have been the highlight of the entire documentary for me.
The movie starts out talking about the sexual revolution in the 70s, and how that made it even possible for a movie like Deep Throat to become mainstream, with sex and sexuality being more acceptable to be talked about publicly. It opened in Times Square, back when Times Square was Times fuckin Square, and not this overly neutered version that it's become. Obviously New York and federal legislators had a huge fit over a porno movie being shown in an actual theater, and theaters that showed it kept getting raided, but all that it did was cause the movie to get more and more exposure, really causing it to become the phenomenon it was.
After seeing how big it was becoming, theater owners in other states wanted to show it as well, and according to the documentary, that's when troubles really started to happen for the movie. The adult theaters all had mob ties, and people went mysteriously missing after not making payments, or theaters started burning down. But the real problem was that they had now started to distribute pornography across state lines, giving federal judges a legitimate case against them. For reasons that were undisclosed in the documentary, Gerard Damiano and Linda Lovelace, the lead female star of the movie, had immunity, so they went after Harry Reems, the male lead of the movie in order to make an example out of him. After just a few hours, the jury found him guilty of all charges. However after less than a year, he was cleared of the charges, seeing as how the laws they were using to persecute him weren't in place when the movie was made.
Eventually it gets to the point where Linda Lovelace joins the feminist movement in the late 70s and turns on the movie as well, claiming she was being held captive on set and basically raped in the movie. The documentary, however, has a huge pro-Deep Throat bias and makes her come off like a crazy bitch. So I don't know how true her claims are, but I'd be willing to bet there's more to them than the doc wants you to think.
The movie then goes into a ridiculous sequence, complete with shots of the American flag in the background, talking about how Deep Throat revolutionized America and essentially says that NONE of pop culture today would be possible without it. It then ends with a hilarious crazy old man rant talking about how porn today isn't what it used to be. There's no art! It's only about the money and the sex! .....shut the fuck up. It's PORN. That's all it was EVER about, there was never any fucking art in it. I was actually willing to give this 3/5 stars, but that last stupid rant knocked it down to 2/5
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