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Director Gerard Damiano created two of porn's best known names, Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, during the shooting of sex loops in Miami in January 1972 that became Deep Throat. More than a quarter century later, Linda Lovelace remains porn's best known star. A page devoted to her on my web site receives twice as many hits as any other. Linda's third published autobiography, 1980's Ordeal, sold out several print runs.

Director Gerard Damiano discovered Linda in one of her 8mm loops. Damiano owned one-third of the porn production company called Gerard Damiano Film Productions Inc. With money from his father Anthony, Louis "Butchie" Peraino owned two-thirds. Linda starred with Harry Reems in an 8mm cheapie SEX USA, the first movie produced by the Peraino-Damiano partnership.

One day while driving from his apartment to his Manhattan office, Gerard Damiano became inspired. Chuck and Linda sat waiting in his office when he arrived.

"We're going to do a film about a girl who has her clit in her throat," said Gerard. "Linda will be perfect for it. The most amazing thing about Linda is that she still looks sweet and innocent." (Ordeal)

Damiano's partner, Butchie didn't agree. He wanted a big breasted blonde such as Carol Connors who appears in Deep Throat as Harry's nurse.

Afraid of losing Linda's $1200 salary for the film, Chuck talked Peraino into allowing Linda to blow him. She sucked him off in a couple of minutes and repeated the procedure over the following months.

Butchie's dad Tony bankrolled the movie for $22,000. "Old Tony dropped in to see his son once in a while," Linda remembers. "He came with his own small army, all wearing dark suits and trenchcoats, looking like they were trying out for an Edward G. Robinson movie."

In his sixties, Tony drove down to Florida with Linda and Chuck. The cast and crew - soundman named Norman, cameraman Harry Flecks [Joao Fernandez], Harry the gaffer, and a couple of others - for the most profitable movie of all time stayed at the Voyager Inn on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. Though Linda claims Chuck beat her savagely on the first night of the shoot, and that the crew heard her screams, no one else on Deep Throat remembers such an ordeal. Contrary to her claim that they stayed next door, the cast and crew resided several floors away from the Traynors.

Deep Throat begins with Linda arriving home to find her friend Ellen (Sharp) sitting on a table while a man licks her vagina. Linda and Ellen talk to each other while the man keeps licking. Ellen asks him if "he minds if she smokes while he's eating?"

Linda says she doesn't enjoy sex. She's never had a bell-ringing orgasm. Ellen suggests they invite some men over so Linda can experiment and possibly find the excitement she seeks. She doesn't.

Linda visits Dr. Young (Harry Reems). After determining that her problem is not caused by childhood trauma, Dr. Young guesses that her problem is physical. An examination proves him right; Linda's clitoris is in her throat. He tells her that the solution is to relax her muscles and take a penis "all the way down." Linda tries fellatio with Dr. Young, taking the entire length of his penis into her mouth. Grateful, Linda offers to marry him and be his slave. Dr. Young rejects her offer because his blonde nurse, Carol Connors, wouldn't like it, but he offers Linda a job making house calls as a psycho-therapist. Her duties include fellatio, vaginal intercourse and anal intercourse. One home consultation ends with the patient sipping Coke from a glass dildo in Linda's vagina, while the soundtrack plays "I'd Like To Teach the World To Screw," a parody of the famous Coca Cola advertising jingle.

Deep Throat opened to the raincoat crowd in June, 1972, at the New World Theater on 49th Street. Raincoaters are men who, according to the stereotype, arrive at adult theaters wearing raincoats to allow access to their genitals while they fantasize about the women on screen.

Over the next few months, millions of Americans for the first time watched explicit sex. Frank Sinatra, Spiro Agnew, Warren Beatty, Truman Capote, Nora Ephron and Bob Woodward (who used "Deepthroat" as the name for his key Watergate source) took in the film on its first run, and eventually more persons saw Deep Throat in theaters than any other porno.

Deep Throat brought hardcore into popular culture, earning at least twice as much money as any other porno in history. It probably ranks among the top ten grossing films of American film history, along with ET, Star Wars, Rocky, etc... Deep Throat played for eight consecutive years at a theater in Hollywood until replaced by Exhausted. Accurate earnings figures are impossible to come by in porn for it is not in the interest of distributors to release accurate figures of sales and rentals, even if they know them. Most business is conducted in cash, to avoid taxes in particular and the government eye in general. Whatever the exact box office, the flick made for $22,000 over six shooting days in Miami became the most profitable film ever and inspired thousands of imitators.

"The porn film scene of 1973 is strikingly reminiscent of Hollywood during that pioneer era when making any sort of movie was considered disreputable," wrote Playboy movie critic Bruce Williams, "when actors, writers, and directors cranked out primitive two-reelers under assumed names, lest their colleagues in legitimate theater or publishing circles accuse them of prostitution."

"The business was so small in 1971," remembers Edwards. "I didn't think it would go anywhere. It was just private sales to people. Then Deep Throat came out and the business went kaplewee. From that time on they got the bright idea that they could make feature films if they could find people who could act. Few people then could act and perform sexually."

 

Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones ranked among the top ten grossing films of 1973, stimulating the New York Times to coin the phrase "porno chic" to describe the growing fascination with sex on film.

Mainstream critics initially ignored, then panned Deep Throat as both film and eroticism but they failed to see it in relation to its genre. Al Goldstein, editor of Screw magazine, understood the significance of Throat, calling it in 1972 "the best porno ever made." He wrote: "Up and down, up and down, to the very depths of cosmic truth I saw that two-inches-short-of-a-foot-long cock engulfed like some soft vacuum cleaner taking vengeance on man for eons of past suckfulls. Then the climactic moment I was poised and ready for appeared! Hot white cum shot out and Our Lady of the Lips lapped it up. I was never so moved by any theatrical performance since stuttering through my own Bar Mitzvah. "Stupendous" was all I could shout as I stood up and spent my applause on the glory that mine eyes had just seen."

Reviewed by major New York film critics, Deep Throat eventually received unprecedented recognition for a porno movie, attracting "a whole new audience of seemingly regular folks who were willing to pay $5 each to see oral sex performed on a 40 foot screen.

"For acts once considered unspeakable, Linda Lovelace became a national celebrity - deemed suitable for the talk show circuit and slavered after by some Hollywood deal makers." (LA Times)

Director Gerard Damiano admits Throat was a joke. As a movie, it's above average. Why then all the hype from mainstream reviewers? Holliday says the critics cheered for explicit sex far superior to the loops they may have seen on the side. "They went ga-ga over routine filmmaking and opened the door for public acceptability."

Bill Rotsler: "One of the things I liked best about the film was Linda's obvious delight in what she was doing. It was infectious and made the entire film more palatable… Right now the language of porno cinema is baby talk - but inevitably some of it will become poetry." A quarter of a century later, many porn mavens believe that such a Messiah has yet to arrive.

In its eighth month in New York, Deep Throat kept drawing in crowds. Variety for January 10, 1973, reported, "Grosses at the World Theater continue in record-breaking proportions as a result of the trial coverage, but the real impact is measured not so much by the spinning turnstiles as by the types of folks being introduced to the theatrical hard-core fare. A visit to the World on Friday revealed the house fully sold out for a mid-afternoon show and a line outside composed of elegant unaccompanied ladies, young couples, middle-aged couples, and at least three silver-haired matrons with shopping bags who looked like refugees from Schrafft's."

Not all critics liked Deep Throat. Ellen Willis wrote in the New York Review of Books that she found the porno "witless, exploitative, and about as erotic as a tonsillectomy. 'Everybody' knows that men divorce sex from emotion because they can't afford to face their real emotions about women... Nevertheless, it baffles and angers women that men can get it off on all those bodies methodically humping away, their faces sweatless and passionless, their consummation so automatic that they never get a chance to experience desire." Nora Ephron wrote in Esquire that the film was "unpleasant, disturbing... not just anti-female but anti-sex... I came out of the theater a quivering fanatic. Give me the goriest Peckinpah any day."

A legally embattled movie, Deep Throat's first major trial ranged over eleven days in New York near Christmas 1972 and attracted worldwide attention. Expert testimony came to more than one thousand pages of trial transcripts.

Film historian Arthur Knight: "I found in Deep Throat an attractiveness about the people.... A real attempt to use humor in depicting sex..."

Sociologist Ernest van den Haag: "The presentation of sex, divorced from emotional relationships....as an act of mutual exploitation...which permits the personalities of the participants to be totally disregarded.... They are...bearers of sexual organs and not human beings who are ends in themselves. I not only regard it as being without redeeming social value; I regard it as highly antisocial."

Professor of Medical Psychology Dr. John Money: "It indicates that women have a right to a sex life of their own, and they are not simply an instrumentality of men's sex life which is the way things used to be... There is a theme in the film which implies that women should get sexual satisfaction and sexual gratification."

Judge Joel E. Tyler decided that the experts had not shown that 51% of the movie had redeeming social value and fined the theater $3 million. He wrote that Deep Throat was "...a feast of carrion and squalor...a Sodom and Gomorrah gone wild before the fire...one throat that deserves to be cut...a nadir of decadence.... It does, in fact, demean and pervert the sexual experience, and insults it, shamelessly, without tenderness and without understanding of its roles as a concomitant of the human condition." Says Tyler, now retired, "If I were to make that decision today, I would be deemed a fool."

Bob Sumner described the ruling on his New World Theater marquee while he booked a new film: JUDGE CUTS THROAT, WORLD MOURNS.

The success of Deep Throat stunned its maker Gerard Damiano. "It keeps knocking me on the head every time I turn around. Being recognized in public places, my phone never stops ringing.... I'm the one who believes it least."

Born in 1929, the hard working high school graduate never collected an unemployment check. In the mid '60s, Damiano was a happily married hairdresser who owned a couple of beauty salons in Queens. His accountant also worked for an independent low-budget filmmaker, and Gerard decided to learn film.

"I've always been impulsive about things. I would see something and fall in love with it and pursue it.

"It was easy. All you had to do was work for nothing and you could do anything in film. I started as a grip, then worked my way up to assistant cameraman and production manager and then finally director. I spent three years paying my dues, working constantly on half-a-dozen features.

"You have to gear your film for the budget; you cannot do it in reverse. All low-budget filmmakers have a formula within which they have to work. And the reason that most people fail is that they try to break out of the particular formula when the budget won't allow that.

"My first three years in this business, I made $300 and went through everything I had - three beauty salons and a wig store.

"Sex films are now to moviemakers what the Borscht circuit was to comedians - the only place you can learn outside the restrictive unions. It's the best schooling." (Sinema)

Damiano too the usual route from from soft to hardcore by making Marriage Manual, Changes and Sex U.S.A. in the bogus documentary style then immune from censorship.

"Six months after I Am Curious (Yellow), we came out with Marriage Manual, the first time we did real sex. But there was always a doctor telling you this could help your marriage. In Sex U.S.A., too, we gave them the old socially redeeming values. By the time of Deep Throat, I had decided to do what I liked. How can you convince people that what you are doing is legit, if you don't believe in it yourself?" (Sinema)

In 1971, Damiano decided that "the industry needed to put humor in sex-exploitation films. Up until then it had been completely taboo, because you were dealing with a limited hard-core sex audience that took their voyeurism seriously. They didn't want humor; they didn't even want development of story or production values. They wanted somebody to come in, take their clothes off, and leave, and then somebody else to come in and take their clothes off. But I realized the public was ready for something else." And the result was Deep Throat.

"I created a monster, because all of a sudden there's a lot of people cranking out sex pictures, making money with crap, making money without ever having paused to learn the craft, to learn what making a film is all about.

"Hardcore would die a natural death in sex months if they let us alone. Deep Throat had just started to peak out in New York when they busted it and made it a household word. People in the film business will do whatever makes money, but they gloss over movies filled with violence. I believe there can be as much appeal in watching two people make love as in watching one person slice another person's head off.

"The moral values of your average sex-film maker are ten times higher than those of people making TV commercials. They are the real pimps and prostitutes. And the girl in a sex film doesn't usually have to ball the producer and director to get a role. She does her balling in the open. If we get rid of censorship, all this is going to take another form. Look at Jane Fonda in Klute; hardcore sex belonged in that picture. Belle de Jour needed harcore to make it real. And Last Tango in Paris had tremendous significance, it's important because it's a fine picture. I'm just sorry that Brando and Bertolucci copped out. In Last Tango, I would have added a few insertions and cum shots." (Sinema)

Unlike most of porn's leading filmmakers, Damiano never made any films released to a general audience. MGM president Jim Aubrey brought Damiano in to talk to studio executives in 1971 but they couldn't agree on a project. In 1973 Damiano made a mainstream film that was never released.

Into the early '70s, Gerard lived with his wife and two children in the downstairs level of the two-family house in Jackson Heights, Queens which he bought as a hairdresser. His mother, a former dancer, knows "her son does sex pictures that the average person couldn't go and see." She lived upstairs.

"I'm a real person. What relaxes me most is cooking. I like to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon with my wife and family. I enjoy them immensely. To go away and lay in the sun by a beach with my family is the most exciting thing in my life.

"A lot of people must feel that my life is one mad sex orgy after another. But if sex films have proven anything to me, it's that there is nothing like a one-on-one relationship with someone you care for, someone you can talk to. To me, that's where it is at.

"But until you see the other side of the coin, you don't realize this. Many people dream that the grass is greener and that all the excitement and the fun of life is somewhere else. And it's not until they get to see it and to know it and to understand it that they find out that happiness is the warmth, the tenderness, the understanding that you can find in the quiet of your own home with your wife and your family. I feel lucky that I've been able to see that." (Sinema)

Gerard, who lived with his mom upstairs until her death in the late 1970s, divorced his long-time wife around 1975 and married a much younger woman (Paula) with whom he still lives.

After Throat, the ex-Catholic produced and directed 1972's The Devil in Miss Jones, the fourth highest grossing porn film ever according to porn historian Jim Holliday.

"Throat is a joke," says Gerard. "Miss Jones is a film."

Talkshow host Larry King says if he were to take three movies to a desert island, Miss Jones would be one.

"Miss Jones is the X-rated industry's first attempt to make an art movie," says Bill Margold, who hates such pretension in pornography. "It's a dismal film, a forerunner of today's punitive movies. Damiano had so much fun with Deep Throat that he wanted to punish the viewer with Miss Jones."

Holliday says DMJ is of lasting significance for being the first porno to deal with a serious subject, for introducing the superb actress Georgina Spelvin and for its structure of sex scenes - oral, straight, anal, lesbian, masturbation, 3-way, kink and double penetration - which set an industry standard.

Ten years later, the 46-year old Georgina Spelvin starred in Henri Pachard's DMJ II. It was her last porno.

The 1974 book Sinema declared the original DMJ the best erotic film ever made and most critics place it on their all-time top ten list.

Miss Jones' sole creator, Gerard Damiano worked as the producer, director, cinematographer, editor, and distributor through his own company MB Productions.

Miss Jones begins with a scene reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit. Georgina Spelvin sits masturbating in a basement. "I'm so close, so close. I want to come." Her companion in this hell is a demented man played by Damiano who waits for God to manifest himself in a fly. The woman seeks sexual release from him, promising him the wildest sex, but he's self-absorbed and indifferent to her needs.

In her New York City apartment, Justine Jones (Spelvin), a virgin spinster, commits suicide from guilt over her lustful thoughts. Before going to hell, she experiences the lustful desires that she never acted out in her pristine life.

Justine, named after the protagonist in the Marquis de Sade novel Justine, is the only fleshed out character in the film. Her male lovers are props.

Five minutes into the film, Miss Jones meets Harry Reems who tells her he is her teacher. Her first lesson is to be cured of her inhibitions. After motioning her to undress, he puts a dildo in her anus and tells her he will punish her if it falls out. She performs fellatio and says, "I love the taste of it. Please, I want to know what it feels like in my cunt."

Excited, she asks her teacher to take out the dildo and put his fingers in her anus. When he does, she sucks on the dildo. "I want to feel your cock, your hard cock spreading me wide apart and tearing me apart. Oh, God, let me have it please. Oh, it hurts so. Hurt me, hurt me, hurt me."

Justine Jones then has oily sex with brunette Judith Hamilton of 3 AM. The two also appear together in Sleepyhead and The Journey of O. Judith is also known as Claire Lumiere, and she lived for years with Georgina in an open lesbian relationship.

Miss Jones squirts water in her vagina and anus, performs fellatio on her teacher, and catches his semen with her face. She rubs an apple on her labia and then licks it; she pushes grapes into her vagina and eats them; she sucks a banana then puts it between her legs before sucking it again. A snake crawls on her body, and Miss Jones puts it head in her mouth several times.

Miss Jones and Judith Hamilton perform fellatio on Marc Stevens, playing with his penis and sharing his ejaculate. In the final sex scene, Levi Richards and Marc Stevens simultaneously penetrate Jones anally and vaginally.

"Can you feel your cocks together?" asks Justine. "Can you put your prick further in my ass, and further in my cunt, oh, f--- me, faster, harder, faster."

Finally, Miss Jones finds herself alone in a room with Gerard Damiano. He's looking for a fly, but Justine wants him to go down on her; she wants to suck him; she wants him to penetrate her with his penis. Gerard ignores her; he talks about the fly. Miss Jones begs him to touch her; she says she can't do it herself. She masturbates. "Just stick your cock in me and then I can get off, damn you. Please help me, damn you, damn you."

Justine's fruitless pursuit of orgasm is the logical extension of sex without personal commitment. The only quality that Justine values in any man is the hardness of his cock. Miss Jones reverses the traditional stereotypes in hardcore films by presenting a woman who uses men solely as a means of sexual gratification. (Sinema)

Gerard believed in Miss Jones. "It's always a shock, even to me, seeing hardcore blown up twenty times bigger than life, so I thought of doing it softcore, then decided hell, no, the time had come for a good pornographic art film. I hoped audiences were ready to take us seriously if we stopped making fun of our sexual problems. Why can't we just look at sex as sex, and not think we've always got to make people laugh to justify it? The movies have been masculine fantasies up to now, exploiting women because you played to the male audience. But the audience today includes women, and I consider Miss Jones a totally feminine film. It's the males who become meat, reduced to objects of her fantasy. And it's the penis she's in love with, not the man."

"When Damiano directed that slight farce about the girl with a clit in her throat, he could hardly have foreseen the impact his little throwaway movie would have on the culture. He must still be amused by the irony: a trivial and ordinary exercise in stag film burlesque comedy, starring a plain-Jane non-actress whose only asset was a circus trick she could do with a stiff cock, catches the fancy of a nation that has just given an official ok to erotic entertainment. The novelty factor and the so-called comedy were the reasons given by the new 'straight' suburban audience for seeing Deep Throat, and over a period of years it became the biggest moneymaker of any X-rated film." (AFW 7/87 p. 62-63)

Damiano got nothing beyond a small fee for making the film. But Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones established him forever as an important porn-maker, and he build on that reputation with a score of adult features that far surpass his Big One in artistry and eroticism.

Referred to by some as "the Fellini of porn," Damiano is a filmmaker in love with light and shadow. His chiaroscuro is dramatic and enhances the mood of mystery that characterizes his work. Like the great Italian director, he searches with his camera for the unusual, for people with interesting faces, rather than pretty ones, and for dark corners of life where passions seethes and hiss, where movement is quick, furtive and possibly dangerous. (AFW)

Gerard Damiano's best film is 1974's Memories Within Miss Aggie. Bob Rimmer compares it with Ingmar Bergman films and Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Fromme. The farm location captures the stark New England wintry isolation of the novel. This flick is one of many "art" films that dot Damiano's career.

"While the tale of Aggie's life and love and ultimate woe is as interesting as anything the made-for-television flicks have hit upon, the sex is not erotic. Although the cast is comprised of seasoned legends (Mary Stuart, Darby Lloyd Rains and Harry Reems), the only erotic encounter is the first scene with Eric Edwards and Kim Pope frolicking in the snow." (Holliday)

The author of Thy Neighbor's Wife and numerous other books and articles, Gay Talese, sat in on the week long filming of Miss Aggie. Though it proved less lucrative than Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones, it resembled its more successful forerunners in its contrived plot, its group-sex scenes, its views of ejaculating penises, and the aggressive behavior of its actresses on screen. Talese suspected that it was these scenes of women inviting men into bed, and appearing to be uninhibited about impersonal sex, that catered to the wish-fulfillment fantasies of the majority of middle-aged male customers who frequented most X-rated cinemas. The porno starlets in the films, unlike women in real life, made their bodies quickly available, rejected no man's advances, required a minimum of foreplay, seemed multi-orgasmic, and sought no romantic promises. Such X-rated heroines as Georgina Spelvin, Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace used men for their pleasure, even beckoning a second or third actor after the first had exhausted himself.

While critics of pornography often accused sex films of exploiting women and glorifying violence, such views did not conform to what Talese was watching in person, or what he had seen in the numerous films that he had sat through in Times Square and in shabby theaters elsewhere around the nation.

If it was violence that an audience wanted, then it was more readily available in the R-rated and even the PG-rated films - war movies, the Godfather epics, the psycho-spiritual horror thriller that were shown in endless imitation of The Exorcist. Sex films were passive by comparison. (Thy Neighbor's Wife)

Jody Maxwell gave the performance of her career in Damiano's 1974 film Portrait. The first 15 minutes of the film contain no explicit sex. Maxwell plays a woman with schizophrenic fantasies that she describes to her psychiatrist Jamie Gillis.

Gerard Damiano broke ground on the S-M scene in 1975 with Story of Joanna - a sophisticated movie about love and death. Jim Holliday says it's a visual and sexual masterpeice and the best explicit sex film to deal with human degradation, bondage, sadism and masochism.

Jamie Gillis plays a misogynist who abuses females after first charming them. His cruelty knows no limits. In her finest adult performance, Terri Hall plays Joanna who gradually submits to Jamie's bizarre requests. Most of the sex is nasty but there is occasional tenderness. Terri, a former dancer with the Stuttgart Ballet, performs 'the face of the moon' dance sequence with Zebedy Colt. Colt also goes down on Jamie Gillis for about a minute in a rare male-male sex scene in a straight porno. Both Colt and Gillis are bisexual.

"Forbidden Bodies is a dazzling display of nouveau Damiano, festooned in brassy colors and twitching with vitality. Talented art direction and a great music score enhance the sex, which is as intense as the images are lovely. Although closeups and zoom are over-used, most of the time the camera is where it ought to be to catch the extravagant sexually explicit art." (AFW)

Around this time, Gerard married his second wife Paula Morton (Reisenwitz). "She used money she made from working in porno to pay her way through law school. Then she graduated and found she hated the straight biz. After working at a firm for three months, she quit and worked with Damiano as his editor and producer," says Carter Stevens.

Damiano's son, Gerard Jr.. made a porno in the early '90s called The Crack of Dawn that made fun of the Today show.

Gerard's Consenting Adults of 1982 overflows with kinky sex. It poses as a documentary in places, as is Damiano's bent. "He begins with a ten minute segment photographed at Dick Drost's Ponderosa Sun Club in Roselawn, Indiana. It's a male and female nude beauty contest... Cuts to an inane sequence with Marc Stevens adoring his cock and telling you about the joys of masturbation, or ladies like Veronica Vera sucking his cock. In riposte, Annie Sprinkle tells you how "good it feels going in and out," and Veronica tells about her fantasy of being raped in a dark alley by a loving rapist.

"Then you have ten more minutes with Jim, who is the Master Piercer of Labias in Southern California. You watch him prepare an ecstatic lady and finally pierce her labia in close-up detail, after which he puts on her labia ring. It gently tickles while a woman walks and presumably keeps her ready for action... If Jim pierces the lady's labia, two rings can be joined by a tiny lock and her lover can be given the key to assure her chastity.

"Next you listen to Vera read from a pornographic novel she's writing while she acts out her version of the "joys of sex."

"Damiano discusses cock sucking - the good and the mechanical - while Sharon Mitchell demonstrates the best technique on Ron Jeremy... You are introduced to a new indoor sport - female wrestling. Two women, greased with Mazola, slip back and forth over each other.

"The tape concludes with an evening at the Casino Royalle where, in between the porno movies, two young ladies blow male volunteers from the audience." (Bob Rimmer, X-Rated Guide, p.262-263)

Damiano complains that the biggest difficulty in making adult films is finding sex performers who can also act. Gerard features a particularly lousy thespian - Loni Sanders - in 1982's Never So Deep. The great publisher Hugh Heffer loses the love of his life whose face he can't remember, but, "She's the best cocksucker I ever met."

Gerard wrote, directed and produced 1983's Night Hunger. "This film is perfect for the most discriminating and sophisticated adult film fans. From the murky country road opening to the country bar atmosphere, Damiano has combined poetic imagery with constant eroticism." (Holliday)

Weary traveler Jerry Butler stops in at a bar and listens to the tales told by bartender Jerry Bucklee about 70 years of the Blair family who are afflicted with an unquenchable desire for sex. Night Hunger is a hidden treasure which has only three extended sex scenes but "packs superb eroticism into the mood of mystery surrounding the brooding tale." (Holliday)

VCA released Throat - Twelve Years Later in 1984. Throat refers to 1972's Deep Throat but Linda Lovelace does not appear. Rather, the film tells separate stories revealing Damiano's view of sex in America in 1984. The last story reveals his reason for making the film.

"Joey Silvera and his wife are in an open marriage. They go to the Sewer, a sex club where anything goes and the waiters jerk off in the special rum drink, which is served in mugs shaped like tits. This is followed by 15 minutes of throw-uppy sex put together with Damiano's slick editing and cinematography." (Bob Rimmer, X-Rated Guide p.521-522)

Gerard Damiano made X-rated movies and documentaries into the 1990s. He got flak a few years ago for Just For The Hell Of It, where he plays God.

""Sacrilegious" was the first complaint. Excuse me, but a sacrilegious porn film? You can look at X-rated material in two ways. Either it's sinful and we'll all end up in the hot fiery place. Or else The Big Guy like sex just as much as the rest of us and is pleased with any art form that celebrates it." (HEVG)

Just For The Hell Of It appeared in 1992. "God (Damiano) decides the world needs a "good, clean dirty movie" and calls up Nick (Randy Spears) from down below to put together an epic erotic film using some of the more prominent figures through history. A cute idea, well-executed, with a soon to be classic group sex encounter featuring the whole cast - its flurry of epic cum shots makes the movie take off like a V-2 rocket. Unfortunately, the follow-up scenes never match the intensity of the opening." (AFW 96D p.258)

Manbait appeared in 1991, starring the late Italian porn star Moana Pozzi. "Buck Adams gives an interview from prison about his career as a "fashion pimp," which in his definition...taking advantage of foreign women who can't say no. Just such a person is Moana, whom Adams sends off to experience all manner of intercourse. She bangs Buck in the beginning scene, and Adams heads straight for some [Alexandria] Quinn on his desk. His secretary eagerly puts out for him as does P.J. Sparxx. Leanna gets Mona to dildo her in a heated saphic romp and Marc and Nina put her through the paces too. North and T.T. Boy give her some double penetration that is the hot spot in this Moana-dominated dirty work that suffers from too much Pozzi." (AFW 96D. p.260)

Manbait 2 appeared in 1992 . "Adams tells how he has been wrongly convicted for manipulating an Italian model (Pozzi). Her auditions and assignments...proved to be...prostitution sessions where Adams pandered and profited from her naivete and lack of English language skills. A well-shot hot sequel where the sex dominates." (AFW 96D p.260)

"Why is it that golf and needlepoint and even bungee jumping are all hobbies - but sex and gambling are vices? I say rename them. Then see how ridiculous it sounds to have a whole police division called "The Hobby Squad."

"Why is sodomy in all its various and lovely forms - as well as anything close to bondage or discipline - always called an "aberrant" sexual practice? Maybe they're just interesting practices. You know the old maxim: What I like is erotic and what you like is pornographic.

"The sex business has never tried to fool anybody with fancy names. Clubs with dancers lay it all out for you: "Girls! Girls! Nudes!"

"Labeling our own stuff "adult" was a step in the right direction. But it's really calling a spade a spade. It's for grown-ups, not for kids - and we say so. I like the word "erotica." But that's reserved for expensive photo gallery shows. I've never heard anyone call Screw by that name. It's the difference between a hooker and a callgirl - the price tag.

"Someday I may be directing a scene that's "rectally-challenged" - not just an old-fashioned anal. Long gone are the days when we just yelled across the set, "Which one of you broads takes it up the ass?"

Damiano notes that there's always been sexually explicit art. "Look at any number of drawings. The text may be highlighted but the pictures are dirty. Or check out the Indian Tantric texts that show 101 ways to do the wild thing. Judging from the populations of those countries, the influence has been widely felt." (HEVG)

Gerard Damiano lives in Palm Beach Florida with his wife of the past quarter-century Paula Morton.

"Gerard is the best director," says Nina Hartley. "His sense of humor, his sensibilities... My favorite movies have all been his."

The January 1976 issue of High Society included a lengthy excerpt from what it promised would be Gerard Damiano's autobiography Getting Deeper. He told Peter Bankers:

There were no rules. You only had to keep ahead of the game. A lot of the bookstores were making their own stag films, so they'd send people around to guys who'd film them. It didn't take much. You'd get these people in front of the camera, and they'd do their thing, and when it was over you'd pay them their money and they'd be gone. You wouldn't even remember them. It got that impersonal. First you suck him and then he'll f--- you in the mouth. Here's your $50…and thanks. See you around.

It was late in the afternoon. The snow had kept falling all day. I'd told a few people I was looking to do inserts and if they heard of anybody to send them up to me.

This girl and her guy appeared in my office. Chuck Traynor introduced himself and his wife, Linda. They'd just come from Florida or someplace and they'd heard I was looking for some actors for a loop I was doing.

Chuck Traynor kept talking, but I wasn't listening to him. Next to him stood this beautiful girl, with this incredibly innocent face, covered with snow.

Linda had on this old Army jacket, Army boots, dungarees and a wool hat pulled down over her face. She looked like a mess, but when she lifted the wool hat, she had these bright, innocent eyes. I liked her. She was nervous, but so was I. They were nervous about coming up to audition for a f--- film. I was nervous because I was making the f--- film and trying to be very open and free and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. I guess they were waiting for me to say, "I want you to blow him and lick your tongue up his cock," but I was as uptight about it as they seemed to be.

It didn't seem significant as it was happening. It was just another girl walking in with her old man. But she had this quality of innocence, as if she were asking you to like her because that would make her old man happy. I think she needed that hold Chuck Traynor had on her.

I spoke with them. Chuck did all the talking - they'd never been in a film before, they'd just arrived from New York, they would do anything, they dug everything. It was obvious that Chuck was in control. Linda needed him to dominate her.

I figured I would get to know Linda better with Chuck out of the room, since she hadn't said anything with him around. I asked Chuck to leave the room. He did, and Linda immediately began to climb up a wall. She couldn't think of anything to say. She became totally paranoid. I don't know what she expected. I suppose with Chuck out of the room she expected me to ask her to take her clothes off and go down on me. She didn't know I was as uptight as she was.

So, I asked Chuck to come back into the room. When he did, Linda relaxed. I don't think the idea of making an X-rated film was her idea - it was his, but he was in control of her.

I'd already learned that you never get a straight answer from auditioners by asking, "What do you like to do sexually?" They always tell you, "I like to do everything," which is never true. Nobody likes to do everything.

We all have our particular hang-ups. It's not important for me to get someone to do something that they don't want to do. Why try to get an actor or an actress into a sexual bag that turns them off?

If there's a scene that's about anal balling, it's almost impossible to get them into that if they're turned off by it, but in an interview they'll tell you, "Sure, I dig anal balling. I dig everything."

I learned I'd get a better film if I asked applicants what they didn't like to do. Most of them were agreeable to telling me what turned them off. They got to understand that I would never put them into a situation that would them uncomfortable. That's how I approached Linda and Chuck, but it didn't work.

"She'll do anything," Chuck kept assuring me.

No one likes to do everything, I kept saying to myself. "Is there anything you don't like to do?" I asked Linda.

"She likes to do everything," Chuck assured me again. She nodded in agreement. She always nodded in agreement to everything Chuck said.

I liked them. Linda had this innocent face, as if she were a virgin. Chuck's ability to control her fascinated me. It was every man's dream - mine too, I guess - to have a girl who would do whatever you wanted her to do.

"She can take an entire cock," Chuck said in passing. "No matter how big it is."

I'd heard that before. She can swallow a broomstick. She can take an eel all the way up her cunt. She can take his fist and clamp down on it so hard he can't get it out. She's so tight she can take your finger and make it feel like it's in a vise.

"Ok," I finally said to Chuck and Linda. "Come around tomorrow morning at 11:00 and I can use you in the loop."

The next day, Thursday, Chuck and Linda arrived on time. I was a little late getting in because it was snowing. We had coffee together and talked about the loop they were going to do with another couple, Rob Everett and his old lady, who were also late because of the snow.

We'd rented somebody's apartment for the afternoon, and we all went there: my cameraman and me, Chuck, Linda, Rob and his old lady. Rob and his old lady had worked for me before, so I knew they could get it on. After the camera was set up, I asked them to take their clothes off. Nobody was uptight except Linda. She hesitated so much Chuck finally had to take her clothes off for her.

When Linda finally undressed I almost fell to the floor. She had this abdominal scar than ran about 20 inches across the front of her body. She was uptight about it, but I didn't want her to know that. She's a beautiful girl, and I wanted her to know that.

I didn't want to show her scar on film. She didn't want to show it. I suggested a shot where she sucks Chuck's cock, so you'd see her face, this wonderful open face. Chuck turns out to be Mr. Rubberband. He can't get it up for the camera, no matter how hard Linda tries to get him a hard-on. He's nervous, but a lot of guys who aren't exhibitionists can't keep it hard when you're filming it. That's why you hire professional actors who've done it before. You can gamble on a girl who hasn't done it before on film because she can fake it, but a guy has to have that hard-on.

I made them switch partners, Rob with Linda and Chuck with Rob's old lady. Rob was really hung, and he had no trouble getting it right up to eleven inches when Linda started sucking him. In two seconds she had swallowed the whole thing.

I dropped my script, my cameraman's eyes bugged, and we stared at each other. "What was that?" I asked. It was the most fantastic thing I'd ever seen. Right down her throat.

"Do that again!" I say to Linda, and she slurps it right down her throat again. I filmed for a few minutes, then made the actors stop. I pulled Linda aside. "Hey," I said to her, "let's forget this. I want to do a film with you, not this s---."

Chuck walked over to us. I handed him the money I'd promised - $50 for the guys and $75 for the girls.

"We've got something here," I said. I told them to come to my office the next day, Friday, and we'd discuss a full-length film. I'd have a film for them. A film! This was going to be a whole new adventure, not a f---ing-sucking loop, but a film that was honest and was funny and made you feel free about sex.

"Can you act?" was the first thing I asked Linda that Friday.

She shook her head.

"Were you ever in a high school play or something?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "I just like to f--- and suck."

Chuck smiled.

"Do you think you could say some lines?" I pressed.

"I don't know," Linda said blushing. "I don't think so."

I knew she could. She just had to get over her shyness. "Would you like to try?" I questioned.

Linda nodded. Chuck smiled. "She can do anything," he said, putting his arm around her. Linda smiled, but she didn't say anything. "I don't know if I can say words," she would tell me later.

But before that conversation, Linda called me. 'Yes,' she said, as if Chuck had written it down for her to say, 'I want to learn how to walk and talk and act.' I reconfirmed the appointment to discuss the film. "I'll have a script for you," I assured her.

I worked all that weekend on a script. This girl had floored me. She wasn't just giving head. She wasn't just taking that cum like raw goat's milk down her throat. She was giving deep throat. As I was driving home on the 59th Street Bridge, it all began to shape itself in my mind. This girl who's not getting off getting f---ed goes to this doctor who finally figures out that somehow her clitoris has ended up in her throat. That's why she's able to take it all the way down. I wrote the gag lines and dialogue and I knew it was funny, because I busted out laughing as I was writing it. I sensed that something important was happening.

It all seemed to fall into place when some guys I knew came back from Florida after making a film there. It was freezing in New York, and they kept talking about palm trees and wide stretches of beach and sunlight. They said Florida was a perfect place to film, and if I wanted to go down there they'd put me in touch with people who could help me. I hadn't taken a vacation in four years. I was freezing my balls off in New York. I decided to film Deep Throat in Florida.

I needed three weeks to coordinate everything. Linda came to my office every day, and I coached her for the film. I'd get her to recite lines. We talked about acting: we went over dialogue. She could take a cock, any cock, and swallow it. But when I gave her a line of dialogue, she'd freeze up. Sucking cock, taking cum, that was natural to her. To talk, to walk from one point to another made her uptight. I had to teach her how to project herself, how to get over her personal hang-ups so that she'd seem relaxed in front of a camera.

I had to teach Linda that she was a beautiful person. I don't think she believed that. She was incredibly shy. I thought she was basically an unhappy girl. I think she was never accepted as a human being, and that was important to her. She didn't talk much about her early life. One day she'd tell me she was from Texas, the next that she was from upstate New York. She was strongly dominated by Chuck Traynor. He had an incredible hold over her, manipulating her as a puppeteer would. But Linda needed that. She needed someone strong to dictate to her.

I had to create psychological games for Linda to play, to get her to open up this beautiful person that was crouching inside of her, struggling to get out. I started by having her read the dialogue from Deep Throat out loud. She kept freezing up. "I'm not an actress," she kept telling me.

"Just be you," I told her.

For a week, nothing seemed to work. I was close to getting my production crew ready for Florida, but I knew Deep Throat could only work if I could get Linda over this mental hurdle. She was like a frightened child when she had to talk to people. I couldn't have her like that on film. Sure, she could give the deepest throat I'd ever seen, but the sex became incidental. There was humor in the film. The sex was joyous. I couldn't have Linda looking uptight when she was reading dialogue I it would ruin the exuberant spirit of the film.

It was time for a different strategy. "Do you know any poems?" I asked her one day. "Any verses?"

She shook her head.

"Oh come on, everybody knows a Mother Goose rhyme," I prodded her. "You must know something like that."

Well, it turned out, Linda knew "Mary Had A Little Lamb," so I had her recite it to me, over and over again. I had her recite it for five hours, and this incredible change began to come over her. She started saying it in different ways, like an actress would practice a line in different ways to get it right.

I finally had her walk out into the next room, where a whole crowd of people were working, and recite "Mary Had A Little Lamb." She froze first, but then she got the words out. When a girl walks into a room and starts reciting "Mary Had A Little Lamb," people do a double-take or two. Linda was embarrassed, but the people in the room thought this beautiful girl was goofing on them, putting them on to make them laugh.

A few minutes later I had her go back in the room, and this time I told her to yell out "Mary Had A Little Lamb," as loudly as she could. This time she wasn't as embarrassed, and when the people in the office laughed, she began laughing with them. She was beginning to realize that she could do anything, that people would dig her, that she didn't have to be afraid to open herself up.

I didn't know Linda's background, but it was pretty easy to see somewhere along the line people had scared her, so she started shutting herself tighter and tighter inside herself. With sex, she could do anything, but if somebody convinces you all you can really do is give a helluva blow job, where does that leave you as a whole person?

I've had the same problem with performers before and after Linda. "I don't mind f---ing," they would tell me, "but I can't do the dialogue." One time I had this actress pretend she was a pussycat. She started purring. Then I told her to rub against the chair while she was purring. I had her get down on her hands and knees and start meowing as she crawled around. She must have thought I was into something kinky, but she did it.

Later, at a restaurant, I had her go through this whole pussycat routine again. After a few drinks, I told her to go down on her hands and knees and walk around this crowded restaurant meowing and purring against somebody's foot. "You can do it," I urged her.

She did and everybody in the restaurant loved it. They must have thought she was on Candid Camera. At that moment all her inhibitions were totally destroyed. What in life could be as embarrassing as crawling through a crowded restaurant going meow, meow, meow?

Linda was never promiscuous. People expect that if you've done things on screen, you do them in your private life too. They think Linda goes around to men's bathrooms, and waits by the urinal to suck them off one after the other. They think the X-rated actresses goes to kennels and gets it on with every Great Dane in the place. They don't think of asking for autographs. They want her to give them a blow job.

Linda wanted to be totally free, and yet if Chuck Traynor had told her to take a man's balls in her mouth, massage them with her tongue, then slide her tongue up and down his tool, she'd do it. She wasn't supposed to enjoy it, she'd just do it because Chuck said so. If Chuck had told her to lick out someone's asshole, she'd do it. She'd do anything he told her to do. He had a Svengali hold on her.

No one could really satisfy Linda just sexually. There had to be a mental relationship. She had to be controlled, dominated, maybe even degraded.

By the end of the three weeks' rehearsal, a new, more confident Linda had emerged. She was doing the dialogue perfectly. She was still scared, though, about the scar that ran across the front of her body. I assured her I'd shoot her at such angles that nobody would see it. She felt assured. This frightened girl was no longer hiding behind this impenetrable wall of silence. She started telling me about this horrible automobile accident where she'd gotten this scar, which marred her face and ran across her lip, too. It scared her to come that close to death, but to come out of it with these scars was impossible for her to face.

She was this incredibly lonely girl who'd always felt she couldn't communicate with anyone. She'd met and married Chuck Traynor. She needed him because he could manipulate the chains she'd tied around herself. They needed money, so they'd headed to New York, where Chuck figured they could get some by making f--- films. I don't think ever Linda ever had the strength to object. Chuck was her old man: she belonged to him.

I flew down to Florida to look things over. The palm trees freaked me out. They were f---ing everywhere. There was a blizzard in New York and this incredible sunshine was beating down. I sat by the pool at my motel and felt relaxed for the first time in years. My friends had assured me everything would be perfect in Florida. There was a lot of fresh talent, they had a great apartment for me to shoot in, everything was all set up.

I had a budget of $23,000 which was the most I ever had to make a film with. My production crew drove down in a van. Chuck and Linda flew down. I flew in Dolly Sharp, but she'd only come if she could bring her old man. I wrote in the Wilber Wang part for him. He has this incredible schwantz with a left hook.

I'd been given the keys to an apartment my friend said he owned. We all went on location there the first day. The apartment had everything - a swimming pool, this huge living room, steps leading out to a balcony. There was an enormous golf course adjoining the building.

We unloaded the cameras and the other equipment and set up by the pool. While I was doing that, I had some production people working on converting one of the rooms into a doctor's office.

We had all the equipment set up when a hyper little man, who kept running a few steps ahead of his cane, ran out screaming into the pool area. "Whatta you doing?" he screamed.

I told him we were shooting a commercial, and that my friend who owned the apartment told us we could use all the facilites. "Whatta you, crazy?" the man screamed, clicking his cane against the side of the pool. "They haven't paid their rent in months. I'm the owner of this place. Get out."

I tried to talk to him but he kept swinging his cane back and forth. He said he was going to call the cops. He said he was going to take our cameras for the back rent. He was going to have us all thrown in jail for trespassing on his property.

I didn't what the f--- to do. All the pre-production, all the planning, everything was wasted. I had fifteen people down in Florida, I was footing all the bills, and now we didn't have any place to shoot the movie.

I watched all the equipment we'd rented being put back on the truck - the sound equipment, the dollies, the cameras. There was no way to scout new locations this far into the planning of the film. I had the whole crew psyched up with visions of palm trees, I was paying everybody by the day, plus per diem and we had no place to shoot. This little old man completely destroyed me.

But I have a gift for jumping out of disaster.

The first thought that came to my mind, after I'd calmed down a bit, was that I had a scene in Deep Throat using the exterior of a pool. I called the manager of the Cozy Rest Motel, where I had the whole cast and crew staying. The Cozy Rest was a motel so off the beaten track it made you think of Janet Leigh in Psycho. If the owner had six people a year staying there, it was a good year for him. And here I am with fifteen people in my party. It was like a convention to him. I explained my problem to him, and in two seconds flat he told me to come back to the hotel and use his pool. We were going to make our film!

"We began the pool sequence with Linda and Dolly Sharp where Linda Lovelace (I'd made up the name for her a day or two before) confesses she's never felt firecrackers exploding when she made love. It was terrific.

Then it started to rain. It never rains in Florida, but it's raining now. I had another scene where I have Linda driving into Florida. The wipers are going in the car. It turned out to be a great opening sequence, even when the the sun came out and I had to keep the wipers going to maintain continuity in the film.

From there on we worked with incredible energy. While I'd be shooting at one location, I'd have another assistant off somewhere scouting another location. It was non-stop.

One day we happened to meet a real-life Prince who was excited about the film we were making, so he suggested that we could use his house for some interior shots we needed. "I've got this great place," he told us, "and some good dope, so we'll party and we'll smoke and we'll have a great time."

His house was incredible. It was filled with larger-than-life statues of all these naked women. They were everywhere - in the foyer, by the pool, in the kitchen, in the bathroom. It wasn't hard to know where his head was at.

We spent two days filming at his house, and the whole time he was still waiting to party and smoke some good dope, but all we're doing is working, working, working on the film. After two days he realized no one was looking to get laid, no one was looking to party, and his face was down to the floor after we loaded up all the equipment and left him. All these crazy X-rated people had been running around his house and he was never even laid.

I had brought Harry Reems down with me to Florida as a production assistant. I thought Harry had already been overexposed in X-rated films. He'd been in everything, and he was looking to break out of performing and learn the technical end of the business. I really dug Harry. He's a professional, he's a romantic and he's an exhibitionist. You have to be one if you're going to look good in an X-rated film. Harry knew where his own particular head was, and he could get it up any time you wanted. I hadn't written a part for him in Deep Throat.

I couldn't find anybody in Florida to play the doctor in Deep Throat, and so I finally asked Harry. He loved it. He was completely turned on to Linda. He couldn't wait to ball her. I wrote the part pretty close to his own personality - he's zany, he's crazy, he gets excited and jumps up and down. Harry's always turned on, and he's got talent.

The only problem I had was the hold Chuck Traynor had over Linda. She became very uptight when he was around and she had to do a scene. You could sense she got nervous. She had to do whatever he wanted her to do, but she wasn't supposed to get off on it. To get Linda to enjoy it, I had to keep sending Chuck on errands. He was my gaffer on the film, so whenever Linda had a number to do, I'd send Chuck off for a Coke, for a ham sandwich, for a toothpick, whatever I could think of so she could relax and do her number and enjoy it.

I've read since then that the way Linda learned to suck cock like that was by practicing for years. I've also read where she's supposed to walk around cleaning the house with a non-turned-on vibrator stuck up her vagina so that she learns to control her muscles. That's bulls---. Any woman can do what Linda did. It's not a gift only certain women are born with. It's something that anyone can learn tod o if they want to learn.

First, you have to want to do it, because basically taking a cock that deep is uncomfortable. You have to be turned on to it, then it's just a matter of positioning because the curvature of the cock goes up, and you've got to get your mouth where it conforms to that curvature. The 69 position is best because then the bend of the cock conforms to the bend of the throat and then it goes way, way down.

You've got to overcome the tendency to gag when it gets that deep in your throat. The only way to do it is to relax by wanting to do it. If you don't dig it, you'll never be able to do it. It's the same with anal balling. You've got to dig it. It helps if you stimulate the clitoris because that relaxes the anal muscle. From there on, you're on your own.

But there's another problem, which is that Linda can make a man feel inadequate. Al Goldstein did an interview with Linda for Screw where she sucked his cock his cock while he ate her pussy. He was turned off to it completely. He felt he was inadequate because Linda's got this incredible mouth where she absorbs your entire cock. You can get lost in there; it's like a man being attacked by a woman. A man loses that feeling of dominance. It happened to Al.

We filmed for a week, and it was beautiful. It had been funny, it was exciting, and it was bright. I even wrote in a part for myself as the gay who says, "What's a nice joint like you doing in a girl like that?" It was my cameo.

But it was more than a cameo. It was me saying to the world, "Hey, look at me. I'm a person. I want to stand in front of you, because I am a person. Look at me. I'm a person. Accept me."

That's exactly what Linda was doing, too, and I think she sensed it during the filming. I wanted her to sense what she was doing, because it was what she wanted to do, and it was beautiful. She was saying, look at me, I'm a person, accept me, too.

Children are the same way. They are always looking to please. They please their parents by doing things that are creative and different - they sing, they dance, they play the piano for you even when all the chords are wrong, they draw pictures of Mommy and Daddy that make you look like giants. That was that innocent childish quality in Linda. Whatever I have to do to please you, she was saying, I want you to notice me and accept me and see me and be pleased with me. Linda could suck cock better than anybody in the world, but that was the beauty of it. She held on to her innocence. Throughout Deep Throat I wanted to make her emerge sexually free, not sexually perverse. She's still the girl-next-door in the film.

And why shouldn't the girl-next-door know how to suck cock?