in the late 1960s, Gerard Damiano He was a respected family man. Then I ran a beauty salon In the borough of Queens, New York. And although the business was going well for him, he soon noticed one thing in common among his loyal female clients: many of them, taking advantage of their time at the hair salon, openly expressed how dissatisfied they were with their intimacy. their husbands.
With that in mind, he didn’t hesitate to park the dryers near the cameras. Its purpose was clear. Considering the ignorance and lack of sexual education prevailing at that time, it was recommended to educate the society through cinema. ANDHe debuted in 1969 with “We All Go Down”.‘ is a low-budget movie with some suggestive scenes. Although three years later the former hairdresser went one step further.
explosive premiere
after meeting a mMysterious agent named Chuck Traynor who showed him homemade tape of wife Linda Boreman doing oral sex, the former hairdresser was encouraged to record her first porn movie. Impressed by the comfort of this woman, he immediately signed her as his hero. who was he actually she changed her name to Linda Lovelace.
In a single weekend, Damiano wrote a bespoke script for his new muse that was as absurd as it was deceptive: Unable to reach orgasm, a young woman discovers that her clitoris is deep down her throat.. Originally the project was going to be called ‘Doctor Searches Home’ (‘Doctor searches home’). Not content with that, the director thought of a title with a bigger hook. Simply, ‘Deep Throat’.
Its premiere at the World Theater in New York on the night of June 12, 1972 was a big deal. In the following weeks, it was exhibited both X and commercially in other cinemas in the same city. Player-like personalities Jack Nicholson or ‘socialite’ jackie kennedy, as well as a heterogeneous population of all social classes participated massively. In January 1973, ‘The New York Times’ even devoted an article to this phenomenon. The headline was: ‘Stylish porn: it’s getting vulgar, trendy and very profitable’.
‘Deep Throat’ cost $25,000 –some of that figure came directly from the mafia– and over 600 million. Now, the salary the cast receives can only be described as ridiculous: Linda Lovelace received $1,200; your partner on the screen, Harry Reems, only 250.
Tracked by the FBI
Predictably, conservative Richard Nixon was not pleased with such a success. Just now, in 1970, the Republican president sponsored the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The game did not go well. The resulting report was clear: “There is insufficient evidence that exposure to sexually explicit material plays a significant role in the occurrence of criminal behavior.”
However, he turned around in June 1973 when the United States Supreme Court – with a Republican majority – toughened its moral fight against the distribution and exposure of pornography. Without going any further, the police confiscated all possible copies of the film, and in July of the following year, even actor Harry Reems was arrested by the FBI, charged with conspiracy to transport obscene materials across state lines.
To the surprise of many, he was sentenced to five years in prison in April 1976. But in the end, he never went behind bars. A group of civil liberties activists, along with Hollywood figures like Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty, ran a successful campaign to have the sentence overturned.
Lovelace Complaints
Special mention deserves Linda Lovelace’s story. The first major adult female movie star described it this way in her 1980 autobiography ‘The Ordeal’: Traynor forced her into prostitution. Also in the movie threatened with death –”he said he’d shoot me if I didn’t make a scene”– and this was gang raped. Under the umbrella of feminist activist Gloria Steinem, Lovelace has harshly attacked the porn industry in several television interviews.
That same year he married a humble worker, Larry Marchiano, and they had two children. no one dared to give him a second chance. No matter how much Lovelace tried to reinvent herself, her shadow was too long. She was seen signing ‘Deep Throat’ posters at various erotic salons after her divorce from her second husband in 1996. On April 22, 2002, He died as a result of a traffic accident at the age of 53. that he suffered earlier that month. The checking account was low.