We were on a lot of the film sets, although we were skirted off when there was the ‘nitty-gritty’ happening. They were six- and seven-year-old children when they accompanied Damiano to Miami, Florida, where he shot Deep Throat in six days for $25,000 (it would gross a reported $600m), and remember interacting with the cast and crew.Ĭhristar, a sound healer and performance artist, says: “We were very privy to what our father did. ”Ĭhristar and her brother, Gerard Damiano Jr, 57, also a former director of adult films, are working on a documentary about their late father. He had a whim when he saw Linda and just took it from there. He never set out to think that he was going to make this phenomenon and start what was known as the sexual revolution. His daughter, Christar Damiano, 56, says via Zoom from New York: “He never thought that it would get the notoriety it did. Photograph: Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images He died in 2008 at the age of 80, as surprised as anyone that Deep Throat would be his legacy. He went into film-making but, lacking access to big studios, settled for the underground scene in New York (with some financial help from the mob). The former hairdresser used to listen to his female clients discuss how difficult it was to express themselves sexually. The film’s director, Gerard Damiano Sr, never set out to change the world but did think he was on the right side of history.
Erica Jong said she was “appalled at how offensive” the concept was. Others, even before the internet and #MeToo movement, viewed the 62-minute film as paving the way for the mass proliferation of pornography, exploitation and objectification.Īndrea Dworkin, for example, a feminist who at one point allied with Lovelace in an attempt to outlaw pornography, argued in a 1993 speech about its dehumanising effects that “when a woman has a penis thrust down to the bottom of her throat, as in the film Deep Throat, that throat is not part of a human being who is involved in discussing ideas”. Half a century on, some regard it as a milestone in America’s cultural and sexual revolution.
Its director was arrested and it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned during obscenity trials that ensured more people were eager to see it (it was not shown at a British cinema until 2005) while its star claimed she was violently coerced into making it. Deep Throat provoked a fierce backlash from an unlikely alliance of feminists and religious groups and drew scrutiny from the FBI.