Documentary on Deep Throat: Inside Deep Throat

If you ever watched the 2005 doc “Inside Deep Throat”, you may get a feel for what it was like to live in the ’70s. There are a lot of interviews with people involved in the film, distributed by Universal Studios, and shown on Home Box Office. They recall the controversy the film caused, as well as the “path it paved” for future porn. Everyone saluted Linda Lovelace (Linda Boreman, 1949-2002) posthumously, saying that without her there wouldn’t be an adult film industry. Too much is made of the film, which is at heart a typical chintzy porn film with bad writing and bad acting, until the actors shut up and have sex, which is what the audience is really there to see, anyway. There were cute lines and dialog at times, but that is the way with most porn, especially when the writer has more than a few neurons firing from above his brain stem to come up with them.

Much was made of the fact that it was the highest-grossing porn movie of all time, turning Boreman into a popular, but not very well-paid, culture icon. I didn’t give it a detailed look, I must admit, and will probably not watch it again in any detail (it is a long video), but I didn’t see or hear much mention of her later becoming a feminist and an anti-pornography spokesperson. Nor was anything said about her life in prostitution, her drug addiction, or of her abusive and exploitive marriage to Chuck Traynor who also acted as Linda’s pimp, although they had to mention the Mafia’s involvement in the making of the film. No word about her testimony in 1986 to the Meese Commission about her famously-stated description of the porn industry being a form of legalized rape, or of her own career as a feminist on the lecture circuit. No mention, either of the illegal silicone implants she received, a surgery which hadn’t been safely practised until much later.  This resulted in complications leading to radical mastectomy in 1986.

Boreman died in a car crash in 2002, survived by her parents and her two grown children.

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