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.
