‘Deep Throat’ still hard to swallow on 50th anniversary

In the country that devours the most pornography on the planet, “Deep Throat” still got the shaft as it looked to return to theaters for its 50th anniversary this year. 

Banned, protested and subjected to numerous obscenity trials after its 1972 debut, this week’s worldwide premiere for the 4K restoration of “the Golden Age of Porn’s” magnum opus initially had a hard time booking US theaters.

“Europe is much more receptive to us. We couldn’t find a venue that was comfortable showing the film, and we even had a couple cancel on us at the last minute. It was bulls–t,” Gerard Damiano Jr., son of writer and director Gerard Sr., told The Post. 

It was history repeating itself for Robin Leonardi, daughter of porn star and industry activist Gloria Leonard: “Fifty years later, we’re still having this conversation about free speech and censorship — the very same issues that our parents fought for.”

The film stars Linda Lovelace as a sexually unfulfilled woman, who only wants “bombs going off” in bed. She visits an eccentric therapist played by Harry Reems, who discovers that her clitoris is actually in her throat. 

“‘Deep Throat’ is very vanilla, it’s wholesome, almost, and naive compared to the deviant things you can find with two clicks on an iPhone under the covers at night,” said Leonard, who eventually found theaters open to showing it. 

The Roxy Cinema in Tribeca will host a 16mm screening and sneak peek of the restoration on Friday, June 10. The 4K “Deep Throat” will have its world premiere at The Slipper Room on the Lower East Side on Sunday, June 12, with burlesque dancers, a Q&A and three shows, including a midnight screening that “harkens back to the grindhouse days of 42nd Street,” Damiano said. Additional dates in the US and Europe will be held in the fall. 

“For the past 22 years, it has been our intention to grapple with the uptight, puritan nature of the American scene and allow artists a place where they can feel free to express their passions in whatever fashion best suits them,” Slipper Room Artistic Director James Habacker told The Post. “As such, we are proud to play a part in presenting to a new generation ‘Deep Throat,’ a film that did so much to push the boundaries of American taste towards a more open and free expression of our sexual natures.”

An ‘obscene’ hit

Despite “Deep Throat” debuting in the middle of a revolutionary and tumultuous time in US history, the country’s mindset remained very puritanical, especially in entertainment. 

“Although you might have just been at a love-in in San Francisco, when you turned on the TV, Lucy and Ricky are still sleeping in separate beds. You couldn’t even show a couple in the same bed together,” Damiano recalled. But then came “Deep Throat,” and “suddenly media was beginning to catch up with people’s realities. You had hardcore sex in your life, so now you can see it in a movie.”

And see it America did, with celebs like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote and Frank Sinatra joining the “raincoat crowd” lining up to see the “porno chic” sensation made for just $25,000 over six days. 

The Post’s film critic Archer Winsten, who wrote he was “forced” by “public curiosity” to see the film five months after it opened, opined that he was “frankly surprised at the people who watch it with an attention so rapt you’d think they were face to face with hooded cobras about to strike.”

“Deep Throat” was equally difficult for others to swallow, and conservative and feminist protests ensued, as did high-profile local and federal court cases. 

Manhattan Judge Joel Tyler ruled that “Deep Throat” was obscene in 1973 and fined the company that owned the 49th Street theater where it still drew crowds since premiering there seven months earlier. Tyler, however, repeatedly admitted he was “learning something” over the course of the three-month trial, The Post reported in December 1972. 

Lovelace (aka Boreman) later joined the anti-porn movement and renounced her adult roles, saying she was coerced into making them by her violent first husband, Chuck Traynor. In her 1980 memoir, “Ordeal,” she details his alleged abuse, which included beatings, spying, death threats and a gang rape.

“Everyone that watches ‘Deep Throat’ is watching me being raped,” she wrote.

Traynor later admitted to hitting Lovelace and while several costars and crew backed up her claims of his domestic violence and control, many cast doubt on her claims of being coerced into making adult films.

“Yes, she had an abusive husband, but she wasn’t forced into anything. She was really into what she was doing,” two-time costar Reems told The Post in 2005. 

Despite its controversies, “Deep Throat” reportedly earned more than $600 million, making it one of the most profitable movies of all time.

“My father was always very proud to say that Nixon tried to take down ‘Deep Throat,’ but in the end, it was Deep Throat that took down Nixon.”

Gerard Damiano Jr.

Its place in history was further solidified when the Washington Post adopted its title as the nickname for Mark Felt, who decades later would be identified as the Watergate informant whose tips led to the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. 

Ironically, Nixon’s own disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew saw “Deep Throat” in theaters, according to Entertainment Weekly, but that didn’t stop the FBI under the administration — with Felt as the bureau’s second-in-command — from trying to choke the film’s release. 

“My father fought against Nixon as his nemesis. Nixon vowed to bring him down,” Damiano Jr. said. “My father was always very proud to say that Nixon tried to take down ‘Deep Throat,’ but in the end, it was Deep Throat that took down Nixon.”

Growing up with ‘Deep Throat’

Gerard Damiano’s children, Gerard Jr. and Christar, were 7 and 8 when “Deep Throat” debuted, and both fondly recall the time they spent on sets with him, where the cast and crew were “family.”

“He never kept it a secret from us, and certainly, we were never exposed to hardcore pornography or force-fed sex at a young age,” Gerard Jr. said, with Christar adding, “We were taught that sex was a beautiful thing, the human body was a work of art, and it was something you shouldn’t be ashamed of.”

That lesson is front-and-center in “Deep Throat,” where “the woman was the star,” Christar said. “That’s why we think that it became such an overnight success because all of a sudden there’s a new language about the woman and what she desires.”

With their father a fast celebrity and the film making headlines and money, “people thought we were rich — but he got taken advantage of,” Gerard Jr. said. “He found out too late that his business partners in the film were connected to the mafia.” 

The elder Domanio did not see any profits from the film and “was “lucky to get out with his life,” his son said.

Because those mob ties have long put an asterisk on “Deep Throat’s” box office returns, his children aim to set the record straight with a documentary “so people know the real story about what happened,” Christar said.

“There’s so many stories out there that aren’t true. We want to tell our story.”