Gerard Damiano has died, at 80, of complications following a stroke. His major, not-inconsiderable achievement was the creation of what trendspotters in the 1970s called "porno chic," by directing (under the name "Jerry Gerard") the 1972 Deep Throat. That film had modest, mostly unrealized, aspirations, to break the mold in skin flick entertainment value: it had a novel premise--young woman finds that her clitoris is in her throat-- that was inspired by Damiano's discovery of a young leading lady-- Linda Boreman, who he rechristianed "Linda Lovelace"--who, in the words of Nora Ephron, had "no gag reflex whatsoever", and an actor ("Harry Reems", known to his mama as Herbert Streicher) who cavorted like the guy who was voted the funniest member of his high school class doing a bad Groucho impression. Through some combination of a quirk of timing and lucky accidents--as Richard Corliss notes, Lovelace's "inexperience on screen played like freshness, innocence"--Deep Throat caught on big, becoming a cultural phenomenon. At a time when advocates of greater cultural freedom were arguing about nudity and simulated sex on screen, with the 500-pound gorilla (so to speak) of Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris just around the corner, a lot of people began thinking that it might be their duty to pencil in at least one hardcore movie on their schedules, and Deep Throat was the porn movie to see. Another explanation was offered by Norman Mailer in the 2003 documentary Inside Deep Throat: "It was a giggle," Mailer says, "and the worst thing that can be said about Americans as a people is that we'll sell our souls for a giggle." In terms of the ratio of costs (next to nil) to box-office take, there's a pretty good chance that it's the most profitable movie ever made, though hard figures are hard to come by, for the same reason that Damiano would never see any of it: he had gotten his funding from organized crime figures, and it turned out that Mafia bookkeeping made Hollywood bookkeeping look like Scrooge on Christmas morning.
Deep Throat gave Damiano a name, though, and a moment, and he did his best to cash in on them. Actually, "cash in" has more mercenary connotations than Damiano's brief career as a self-styled porn master deserves. It turned out that he had artistic ambitions-- pretentions, even. When Reems saw the script for Damiano's follow-up project, which became The Devil in Miss Jones (1973), he called Damiano out on having ripped off Sartre's No Exit, and in how many conversations between two guys making a porno movie do you suppose that both of them had read No Exit? That film actually holds up much better than Deep Throat, in no small part to the star performance of Georgina Spelvin, a former chorus girl with some soft-core sex films on her resume who had waited until her mid-thirties to make her hardcore starring debut; the lusty enthusiasm with which she went at her role, combined with the fact that she was not still in the full freshness of her youthful beauty, made her a much more effective symbol of pushing past the boundaries of sexual conformity than all of Deep Throat's goofy comedy numbers. Damiano would have another good year in 1976, with the release of the Story of O-flavored Story of Joanna and Let My Puppets Come which--no, seriously, dude, it's got puppets in it. But though he would continue to grind out films into the mid-90s, his dream of a creative, critically respected field of independent porno filmmaking came crashing down as the culture tightened up and the industry became geared to the video market. (For more details, see Boogie Nights.) He leaves behind a wife, former porn actress Paula Mortin, and two kids, Christar and Gerard, Jr.