Garganta Profunda, they call it there. And that might also be an accurate way to describe the splash that Deep Throat - the most famous porn film in history, by general consensus - made at the Festival do Rio last weekend, selling out three screenings to standing-room-only capacity.
Shown partly as a tandem attraction to the run of the Brian Grazer-produced documentary Inside Deep Throat at the festival, and partly in connection with Arrow Productions' soon-to-be-released high-def DVD of the classic, it caused an indisputable frenzy there.
“So many people wanted to get in that they let them sit in the aisles,” said Arrow's Paul Interlandi, who brought the film to the festival. “It would have never made it in the United States, it would have been shut down.
“The second two nights, they moved it to even a bigger theater because of the demand. The first night, we were in [a theater that housed] about 265, 275, and then there was probably another 50 to 100 people sitting in the aisles and standing up in the back. We could have sold more tickets, but there was just no room.”
In fact, the demand was so fierce that Interlandi was almost unable to get his own business affiliates in. “I had to bribe somebody to get our distributor, our Brazilian distributor, in to look at it. Because there was no way of getting tickets.”
Interestingly, the film was a smash despite Inside Deep Throat getting lost in transport, and thus not yet having been screened. “Inside Deep Throat's print got lost because of [Hurricane Stan],” Interlandi said, “so we filled up the theater without even anybody seeing Inside Deep Throat.”
Interlandi was looking to find a theatrical distributor for Deep Throat at the festival, but was unsuccessful. “I did talk to some people that were mainstream theatrical distributors, and of course in Brazil, they consider adult material to be the kiss of death. It's a weird country, they have a dichotomy there - there's a lot of very devoutly religious people, however they have a huge prostitution community.”
Still, he found himself suddenly attaining a celebrity status he'd never before experienced. “It's pretty unusual for an adult director or a male in our industry to have people coming up asking for autographs, but for the next two days, I had all these people wanting my autograph, it was crazy. I had people wanting their pictures taken with me, and it was a strange experience. I now know what it's like to be one of the girls at a convention. I was popular with the people there, and it was a lot of fun.”
To read the festival's promotional literature on the film, click here.
