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For Oscar®-winning filmmaker Brian Grazer, his initial encounter with Deep Throat was not first-hand. Rather it came courtesy of the observations of a candid and trusted figure in his life: his grandmother Sonia. “It was 1972 when the film had just been released,” Grazer remembers. “My grandmother had come over to our house and announced that she and my grandfather had waited in line and seen ‘that film.’ When I asked her which film, she said, ‘Deep Throat.’ To be quite honest, I didn’t know what the movie was and I certainly didn’t know what the term meant at the time. But within days, maybe hours, I learned that Deep Throat was a pornographic film—perhaps the first one—to really cross over into mainstream society. And the way that I was able to understand this was that my 65-yearold grandmother was telling me, a teenager, that she and her husband, along with hundreds of other people, had been standing in line in the daytime on the west side of Los Angeles to see an enormously popular film. This popularity had come from the many celebrities, including Bob Hope and Johnny Carson, who had talked about it on television and had injected it into the mainstream—which is what made grandma Sonia go see it.” Grazer’s next encounter with the hot-button title came when he was in his early 20s and it was every bit as serendipitous as his first. This time, however, it included an actual viewing of the movie. While working as a law clerk at Warner Bros., he attended an older co-worker’s party in Beverly Hills. With the party in full swing, the hosts turned on the movie projector—and the film Deep Throat began to roll. “And that provoked even more intrigue,” Grazer says. “Ever since then, Deep Throat has really stuck in my mind as a cultural phenomenon.” Years later, Grazer—who had by then become the Academy Award®-winning producer of such blockbusters as Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, 8 Mile, Friday Night Lights and many, many others—was introduced to the idea of making a film of the life of Linda Lovelace, the female lead catapulted to national celebrity by her starring role in Deep Throat. Ultimately, Grazer decided against making the movie. But Lovelace’s connection to the landmark adult film re-lit his curiosity and enthusiasm for investigating “how we got to a place where pornography has proliferated so much in our culture.” As Grazer notes today, “It wasn’t just the widespread popularity of just pornographic films that fascinated me, but how overt sexual content has breached artistic walls constructed long before the sexual revolution, years before Deep Throat...and how the phenomenon of Deep Throat became the igniting factor, in many ways, that led us to where we are today in the popular culture of 2005.” An unabashed pop culture enthusiast, Grazer was particularly intrigued by the shockwaves the film sent through the various worlds of politics, art, fashion, the law— anything and everything having to do with what influences and shapes Americans in their day-to-day lives. Grazer wanted to look at Deep Throat as a cultural phenomenon, “and so, therefore, I dissected or granulated not only the movie itself but its impact on every aspect of popular culture, whether it’s art forms or fashion, politics, even language...of course that phrase, ‘deep throat,’ transitioned very quickly into Watergate.” Summing up, Grazer says, “Deep Throat became an explosive atomic chain reaction, for as much as people wanted to see it and the great popular reaction it caused, there was an equally strong reaction among the legal and political authorities, who wanted to suppress it. This resulting First Amendment case study was, for me, one of the greatest reasons to make INSIDE Deep Throat.” Next: Participants
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