Gerard Damiano: 1928-2008

For a while there, Gerard Damiano sounded more like a Kennedy at the height of a national crisis than the gatekeeper of porn. “Society seems to be crumbling,” he said in a filmed 1974 address aimed at his fearful detractors. “But a careful, calculated look will prove that some tearing down is always necessary to improve."

For Damiano, who died at 80 over the weekend in the aftermath of a stroke, that “tearing down” meant filming the most famous sex act in history. The man who wrote and directed the wildly campy 1972 porn staple Deep Throat would see his $25,000 skin epic become a national symbol of social resistance and first-amendment rights. And he always knew exactly who he had to thank for it.

“The only thing that’s kept hardcore going this long is the FBI and the Nixon administration,” he told Roger Ebert in 1974, in reference to the obscenity investigation launched after the film opened. “Without censorship to encourage people’s curiosity, the whole thing would have been over six months ago.”

He may well have been right. Deep Throat became the most notorious hardcore movie ever made, and also something of a social event. Audiences swarmed the theater in New York that screened the movie. Jack Nicholson saw it. Barbara Walters saw it. The man who brought the Watergate scandal to international attention was named for it. It was a movement The New York Times famously dubbed “porno chic.”

It wasn’t only politicians trying to win over the family-values set that objected to the movie, of course. Feminist backlash was intense, especially when the film’s star, Linda Lovelace, later denounced it with claims that her porn career was marked by abuse. That sordid history and other questions about the film’s connection to organized crime are chronicled in the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, in which Damiano is an often hilarious co-star.  

But for Damiano, who went on to make The Devil in Miss Jones and dozens of other titles, the turmoil his film created always seemed to have more to do with the way people reacted to it than it did with the film itself. “Sexual intercourse does not lend itself to cinematography,” he said in the Ebert interview of his boredom with the genre, which defined his later career.

Born in the Bronx and variously a Navy man, x-ray technician and hairdresser in his lifetime, Damiano died in southern Florida anonymously this weekend, the silent architect of the most famous—and most important—dirty movie ever made.

Related links:
YouTube: Trailer for Inside Deep Throat
The New York Times: A retrospective on Deep Throat
IMDb.com: Deep Throat

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