If you look at the Top 10 grossing films of 1972, one picture stands out. Alongside Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and The Getaway, with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, is Deep Throat, the watershed blue movie about a woman’s uniquely positioned clitoris. Some sources have estimated Deep Throat to have generated as much as $600,000,000, against a budget of roughly $25,000. It was “pornography’s Gone With the Wind in terms of grosses,” wrote The New York Times in 1973, and it ushered in the brief era of “porno chic.”
“Our father—I like to say he did everything but suck dick in that movie,” says Gerard Damiano Jr. of Gerard Damiano Sr.’s work on Deep Throat, which he wrote, directed, and edited. A New York City kid born during the Depression and raised Catholic, Damiano Sr. worked as a shoeshine boy and busboy before serving in the navy for four years. When he returned to civilian life, he became a hairdresser and ran three successful beauty shops—a fulfilling career which, he’d say, lent him a deeper understanding of the opposite sex.
By the late 60s, the sexual revolution was paving the way for a burgeoning adult-movie-making scene on the East Coast, and while hairdressing remained his bread and butter, Damiano Sr. began making stag films (short, silent pornos) and “nudie cuties” (films with abundant female nudity). (Francis Ford Coppola had also been making “nudie cuties” in the early 60s.) Damiano Sr. was trying to finance a full-length pornographic feature when he met Linda Boreman and wrote a screenplay specifically with her in mind. Linda Boreman became “Linda Lovelace,” and Deep Throat was born.
Funded by the Peraino crime family, it was one of the earliest sex films with a fully realized plot, self-aware humor, and an original soundtrack (for which Damiano Sr. contributed lyrics). Deep Throat was the first triple-X film to transcend the raincoat crowd and become fashionably mainstream. “On the day that Deep Throat came out, which was June 12, 1972, there was a line around the block,” says Damiano Jr.
However, it wasn’t until Deep Throat became the vice squad’s prime target that it turned into a full-on phenomenon. Prints were seized, it was banned, un-banned, re-banned, and litigated in both local and federal courts for obscenity. When President Nixon launched a war on pornography, it was Deep Throat that was cast as decency’s chief villain.
“Our father—I like to say he did everything but suck dick in that movie.”
Deep Throat became a free-speech cause célèbre, and it was a hip rite of passage to be seen attending a screening. Truman Capote, Jack Nicholson, and Frank Sinatra all went to see it. Sammy Davis Jr. was even rumored to have his own personal print. And Linda Lovelace became a household name and the first porn star. (Lovelace would later become an anti-porn campaigner and claimed she was forced to participate in the film’s production at gunpoint by her abusive husband, Chuck Traynor.)
Despite Deep Throat’s cultural significance, Damiano Sr. wasn’t particularly proud of it as a piece of filmmaking. (He was also denied a cut of the film’s huge profits, forced by the Perainos to accept a lump sum of $25,000.) He had seen how, a couple of years earlier, Midnight Cowboy had been the first X-rated movie to win the Oscar for best picture. And Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was about to become a box-office smash and the critical darling of international art-house erotica. “This merging of adult film and Hollywood, that’s what our father was actively working towards,” says Damiano Jr. “The idea that porn films wouldn’t be a genre—they would just be an aspect of films. Sometimes you’d pan away to the fireplace, and sometimes you [would] stay with the couple all the way through.”
For his follow-up, The Devil in Miss Jones, Damiano Sr. channeled Ingmar Bergman with inspiration from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit in a story about a good, lonely spinster who commits suicide and, barred from heaven for her act, bargains to become the embodiment of lust on Earth so she can deserve her ensuing damnation. It was the seventh-most-popular film of 1973 and a legitimate hit with critics, The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill writing, “It makes the usual materials of hard-core porn serve a dramatic purpose every bit as valid as the country-house garden parties of Henry James.”
Encouraged, Damiano Sr. pushed his art-porn instincts even further, with 1974’s Memories Within Miss Aggie. This unrelentingly bleak film, about a middle-aged woman who lives with her wheelchair-bound companion and struggles to remember how they met, had an ending with a Hitchcockian twist and was the first porno to be submitted for Oscar consideration with a full-page Variety ad. While it gained no nominations, it tickled Damiano Sr. to know that Academy members would have been required to watch it before voting.
“Then video came along, and the bottom dropped out,” says Damiano Jr. Adult entertainment increasingly catered to private consumption, and Damiano Sr.’s dream of porn becoming a vital part of Hollywood disappeared.
Damiano Sr. died in 2008 at the age of 80. In recent years, his children—Gerard and his daughter, Christar—have been restoring and preserving their father’s films as seedy yet essential pieces of film history. “People aren’t jerking off to Deep Throat so much anymore,” says Damiano Jr. “When they look at it, it’s kind of a snapshot into the 1970s and the sexual revolution.”
Beginning with the 50th anniversary of Deep Throat, in 2022, they’ve been touring the world hosting screenings, and in 2025 they hope to show a new restoration of The Story of Joanna, a sadomasochistic fantasy, which Damiano Sr. considered his magnum opus.
Half a century ago, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s All the President’s Men was published, chronicling the Watergate scandal. It revealed that the reporters’ clandestine informant had been nicknamed “Deep Throat.” “Our father was proud to say, ‘Nixon tried to take down Deep Throat,’” says Damiano Jr., “but in the end it was Deep Throat who took down Nixon.’”
Spike Carter is a writer and filmmaker
