Interview with 'Deep Throat' director Gerard Damiano | Interviews

His "Deep Throat" was made at a time when he sensed that large portions of the general public were curious to see a porno film. He guessed right; both "Deep Throat" and "Miss Jones" made Variety's list of last year's top 12 grossing films. But once the curiosity has been satisfied, he said, audiences do not necessarily come back for more.

Is it, I asked, the you've-seen-one, you've-seen-them-all syndrome?

"Something like that," Damiano said. "I find pornography by itself to be boring on the screen. The only thing that perpetuates it is censorship; people like to feel they're being slightly daring to go to a hard‑core flick. But sexual intercourse does not lend itself to cinematography." He sighed. "I don't care what the 'Kama Sutra' says," he said. "There are not 101 different approaches to the subject. There are only three or four."

To get around such unavoidable limitations, Damiano has turned to techniques of greater artistry and stronger plots. His early films were essentially just hard‑core potboilers. But with "Deep Throat" he added a certain amount of humor. And, of course, he was working with Linda Lovelace.

"I wrote the film for Linda, he said. "If it hadn't been for her, uh, this particular skill she had developed, there wouldn't have been any 'Deep Throat.' At the time, my partners said the title was no good, but I was adamant: I said it would become a household word. And it has. Not only in the Watergate case, but last week we were No. 6 across in the New York Times crossword puzzle."

"The Devil in Miss Jones," his next film, was the first to gather generally upbeat mainstream reviews, particularly for the acting of his star, Georgina Spevlin. "That was a weird accident of casting," he said. "She came to the set originally to run the commissary, be the cook. But there was something about her..."

The movie's opening sequence, in which the lonely Miss Jones wanders around her barren room and finally commits suicide, was praised in some circles for its visually created mood. The scene was edited, Damiano revealed, in time to the Roberta Flack recording of "Bridge Over Troubled Waters." The first time he heard the record, it haunted him: "I played it again and again in the editing room, matching the rhythm of her singing to the rhythm of the cutting. We wanted to use the song on the sound track, but Simon and Garfunkel wouldn't sell it to us."

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmoqakmr%2B3tcSwqmihnqmys8LInq5mr5mptW6wxJ6nZqyYp7yiwIydoKudk6m8s3nGnqmaqpRisaK5yJqlqA%3D%3D