Gerard Damiano

The hard-core film director who made Deep Throat

Gerard Damiano

1928–2008

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In 1972, while shooting one of the 40 or so hard-core pornographic movies he directed, Gerard Damiano discovered a young actress named Linda Boreman. “I thought, Stop the presses!” he recalled. Damiano went home and, over the weekend, wrote a whole script around Boreman. Rechristening her Linda Lovelace, he called his project Deep Throat. Made in six days for $25,000—reportedly put up by associates of the Colombo crime family—the X-rated film would gross more than $600 million and revolutionize adult entertainment.

A Navy veteran, Damiano spent 12 years as an X-ray technician, said the London Independent. Switching to hairdressing, he opened three shops in Queens, N.Y. “He always claimed that eavesdropping on the conversations of his sexually frustrated clientele set him to thinking that X-rated films could have crossover appeal.” An avid photographer, Damiano shot weddings and baby pictures. At his accountant’s urging, he branched into film loops for peep shows and full-length erotica.

“Deep Throat’s premise was medical in nature,” said The New York Times. Lovelace played a woman whose clitoris was in her throat and who could achieve orgasm only by performing oral sex. The unlikely plot, combined with the movie’s humor and the chemistry of Lovelace and co-star Harry Reems, made Deep Throat an underground cultural hit, with celebrities and ordinary folks alike openly lining up to see it; critics called the phenomenon “porno chic.” That the movie “was variously banned, unbanned, and rebanned” only yielded more publicity. Deep Throat even became the nickname for Mark Felt, the clandestine FBI source for Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward during the Watergate scandal.

Damiano, who died last week following a stroke, had a complicated relationship with his work, said the Chicago Sun-Times. He sold his rights to Deep Throat for $25,000 to the mobsters who bankrolled it, explaining, “Look, you want me to get my legs broken?” And although Damiano’s other major X-rated works, notably The Devil in Miss Jones (1973) and Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974), made him synonymous with the genre, he wore that mantle reluctantly. “I find pornography by itself to be boring on the screen,” he once said. “Sexual intercourse does not lend itself to cinematography.”