Paul Interlandi, who has been busy for the past several years transferring Arrow Productions’ classic videos to DVD, not to mention transferring the video master of Deep Throat to film, was excited.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Interlandi said. “Arrow has had this film vault in New York for 35 years, which we haven’t really had access to directly, because it’s a limited access facility. So anyway, people have been digging through this vault, and they found a reel – it was sent to me as a kind of a ‘We don’t know what it is,’ and I took the film and went to a telecine facility, put it up to look at it, and it was the negative to one of the reels of Deep Throat.”
“So I told [Arrow owner] Ray [Pistol], ‘I have a feeling that if they have one reel of negative there, there’s gonna be more in the vault.’ So we had all the stuff shipped from New York to L.A., and I had an opportunity to go through it yesterday. It’s quite a bit of stuff. We found original negatives to Wet Rainbow, to A Touch of Sex, Love Witch – a lot of titles – but more importantly, there was a whole bunch of cans labeled ‘lost treasure.’ So I go, ‘That’s intriguing. What could possibly be in “lost treasure”?’ So I took it over to the telecine facility and put it up, and lo and behold, we now have all the original negatives for Deep Throat, including the optical negative.”
Anyone who knows the history of Deep Throat knows that the film played in theaters, including mainstream, with some venues running it continuously for over 20 years ... with prints getting progressively dirtier and more spliced with each passing week. So to find a pristine negative of the film with even its optical soundtrack negative intact after all these years is akin to the feeling one would have of standing on a beach and seeing an old woman in an aviator suit walking out of the water, calling out, “Hey, I’m Amelia Earhart; anybody looking for me?”
“So even though we’ve paid for a hi-def telecine session,” Interlandi said, with just a bit of weariness in his voice since it was he who spent weeks last spring chasing down a video-to-hi-def-to-film transfer facility, “we’re going to throw that away and start from scratch with the original negative and make a new hi-def transfer. We feel we’ve just got to do it, because this negative is clean, it’s not scratched, the reels were in plastic bags to be kept dust free – it’s been in the film vault the whole time, which is just like in a safe. It looks to be in good shape. In fact, it looks fantastic.”
Interlandi said that once the hi-def master is made, the company will also produce a standard definition version for low-def uses.
Of course, we had to ask if he’d spotted any long-lost or never-seen Deep Throat footage in the uncovered negatives, but Interlandi said he hasn’t had a chance to compare his find to Arrow’s video master. But that prompted him to mention one additional discovery.
“One thing that we haven’t had for as long as I know, which we also found, is the original theatrical trailers for both Deep Throat and Deep Throat 2, so that's going to be telecine’d along with the rest of the stuff, and that will be a new feature of our DVDs in the future.”
Interlandi said he expects to start the process this weekend, in preparation for Deep Throat’s Brazilian premier at the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival, which will begin September 22 and run through October 6.
“Because they’re showing [the documentary] Inside Deep Throat, they thought it was pertinent to show the original movie,” Interlandi said, “so they’re going to all this trouble to get our film down there. They’re worried about being seized by the authorities, so we may have to be very careful how we transport it to the festival.”
Interlandi himself will be attending and lecturing on the history of the film, which is being subtitled in Portuguese especially for the festival showing.
But video retailers should prepare for a wave of hi-def classic product from Arrow. Besides the titles mentioned above, negatives or prints for such historic porn as Babe (with Lisa B. and Samantha Fox), Meatballs (starring Harry Reems, Tina Russell and Andrea True), Lialeh (the first black porn movie) and Sex U.S.A. (directed by Throat's Gerard Damiano, with Russell and Darby Lloyd Rains) have been uncovered, as well as some pieces of a mainstream horror film titled Blood.
“Damiano’s name is written on the boxes, so I assume he directed it,” Interlandi reported. “I hear that he did direct some horror films, so it’s probably one of his.”
Interlandi’s search has also turned up a film marked Teenage Fantasies 2, but he suspects that may simply be a retitled version of the original Teenage Fantasies, which starred Rene Bond.
“We’ve also found something called Vampire Lust, and we don’t have any idea what it is,” Interlandi revealed. “I haven’t had a chance to look at it, but I’ve got everything for it; I’ve got prints, negative, optical negative, I’ve got trailers – I’ve got everything, but I don’t know what it is – we’ve never heard of the film – but if it’s XXX, we’re going to put it out.”
