Imagine Entertainment's new documentary, Inside Deep Throat, opens nationwide on Feb. 11 with an NC-17 rating.
"Inside Deep Throat did their thing at Sundance," said Arrow Productions owner Raymond Pistol, who own's the copyright to the original, AVN Best Classic DVD Winner for 2005, Deep Throat. "We're seeing an increase of sales for our Special Edition DVD of Deep Throat, but it goes beyond that: I guess we're going to be running Deep Throat as a double feature (with Inside Deep Throat) across the country as well; either the MPAA-rated R version or the X-rated version of our movie, depending on each city's rules."
Pistol noted that there's quite a bit of interest in the documentary. "Even WorldNetDaily did a review," he said. "They excoriated the picture, of course, but it was a long excoriation. I figure if WorldNetDaily is writing about it, it's really getting big buzz. ABC just called me; they're wanting footage because they've got [Harry] Reems and some other people coming on there, and they're going to do a thing on it."
In fact, Joseph Farah, publisher of WorldNetDaily, concluded his article on the documentary with, "But the nightmare didn't end for Linda Susan Boreman [Linda Lovelace]. She's being victimized all over again – this time by so-called 'mainstream' Hollywood filmmakers still determined to cash in and persuade Americans it was all a big laugh."
Farah made reference to Boreman's book Ordeal, allegedly a recounting of her bad experiences in porn, which Boreman wrote at the urging of anti-porn feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon. However, as noted in Inside Deep Throat, director Gerard Damiano and several others in the Deep Throat crew attested that “Linda enjoyed working on the film, and at no time was forced to perform any sex acts.”
Pistol won't talk about his negotiations with Inside Deep Throat producer Brian Grazer for the Deep Throat footage that appears in the documentary, but he made it clear that the double bills aren't something that Imagine Entertainment has anything to do with.
"Actually, I'm not working in conjunction with them," Pistol assured. "Theater owners have called me up and said, 'Will you give us a print?' So this is the theater owners that are putting this together, not Imagine and not me. I got a call out of the blue. I mean, over the years, I've always had calls saying, 'Can you send us a print?' But it was never worthwhile to strike one for just one theater. But they're now talking about going from city to city with it, so now it's worthwhile."
Pistol said he could not give AVN.com a list of the cities where the double bill will play.
Arrow will be providing both R and XXX versions of the film, and apparently very little actually had to be cut out to get the less-restrictive MPAA rating. "If you think back," Pistol explained, "there wasn't all that much sex back in the '70s in movies, and so it winds up running 59 minutes. The X-rated version is 61 to 65, depending on which version you get, and we added footage to our Special Edition so it winds up being 90."
Reports are that in the 33 years since its release, Deep Throat has earned over $600 million.
