Inside Deep Throat
Universal Home Video
Cast: Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems
Extras: Commentary Track, Featurettes
Rating:
"Inside Deep Throat" is the documentary focusing on the controversial and wildly successful adult film "Deep Throat" that featured 23-year-old Linda Lovelace. It's June 12, 1972 and right in the heart of Times Square Manhattan, a little known adult film debuts that would eventually go on to change the porn industry forever. Due to its skyrocketing success the film managed, not only to titillate, but would go on to become the most profitable film ever! Costing a mere $25,000 to produce and earning over $600 Million to date! Narrated by Dennis Hopper, the documentary delves into the cultural icon status of how "Deep Throat" managed to conjure up both political and social issues during the early 70's. Stopping at nothing to ban its exhibition, desperate lawmakers even attempted to prosecute one of the stars of the film, Harry Reems, to send out a strong message to the producers in the porn industry.
It's quite fascinating, yet sad to see how little the people involved with the production were actually compensated for their efforts. Then later witnessing how the mob seizes control of box-office sales and eventually lining their own pockets with the film's hefty revenues.
Told mostly through stock footage and interviews with Hugh Hefner, Norman Mailer, Dick Cavett and Helen Gurley Brown and featuring additional interviews with creators Randy Barbato, Fenton Bailey, and actors Harry Reems, and the late Linda Lovelace.
Universal Home Entertainment brings the HBO Documentary Films presentation of "Inside Deep Throat" to DVD in a respectable anamorphic transfer, displaying a ratio of 1.85:1. The transfer was quite good for a documentary, displaying rich deep blacks and good saturation of color. Of course, the new interview footage is pristine compared to most of the stock footage used throughout the documentary, but you easily accept the quality of the original source material, which still manages to provide an overall decent presentation.
The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack for "Inside Deep Throat" managed to mix quite well with the given material. Since this is a documentary, the bulk of the soundtrack is vocally driven, which the available sound mix presented naturally overall. The dated sounds from older source materials are, for the most part, sufficient in reproduction and don't exhibit too much distortion.
There is a wealth of value added materials to choose from, including; director's audio commentary, featurettes titled "The Binghamton Trial: Cliterally Speaking", "Beverly Hills: Holly Gets Wood", "Princeton: Throat Deep in Suburbs", "Women Against Pornography", "Linda Does Hollywood", to name just a few.
If you are like myself, and were too young to remember "Deep Throat", or not even born yet, this documentary still manages to provide an entertaining illustration into one of the more controversial moments in American film and is well worth the experience.
