The Screengrab

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.

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While we’ve been busy with our spreadsheets and slide rules, trying to figure who the big winners will be come Sunday night, Time’s Richard Corliss is just getting around to giving his picks for the 1998 Oscars. No, Corliss hasn’t slipped through some sort of wormhole in the space-time continuum. Instead he’s presenting Time’s First Annual Re-Oscars.

The premise is that the Academy may have occasionally made a mistake or two over the years, a controversial notion we’re nonetheless prepared to embrace. “What we're offering is a second chance at the Academy Awards handed out on March 23, 1998,” Corliss writes. “To a lot of people, the record 11 Oscars that James Cameron's Titanic lapped up that night were suitable acknowledgment of a much-loved movie that quickly became the top box-office attraction in film history. We're asking how Titanic, which was named the Best Picture of 1997, and the performances that won in the four actor categories have stood the test of time. And we're answering: Eh, not so well.”

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Richard Corliss at Time honors Black History Month by naming "the Twenty-Five Most Important Films on Race". Many of the films aren't by conscious design on race so much as they are touchstones in the hundred-year fight by black artists for their right to be seen onscreen and to use film as an expressive medium, and two movies by Spike Lee might be one too many even if one of them wasn't Bamboozled. (It also seems a bit odd that he says that he included Cooley High because he thought the selection would benefit from the inclusion of "a flat-out comedy." I guess he must think that Richard Pryor Live in Concert is a film noir.) The first half of the feature serves a useful tribute to some of the African-American talents who made a smaller mark on movies than they might have, given the size of their talents: not just Paul Robeson (Body and Soul, 1925), but such performers as Nina Mae McKinney (the "black Garbo" who starred in King Vidor's 1929 musical Hallelujah!), Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, and Lena Horne, whose 1938 debut, The Duke Is Tops, was later rereleased with Horne's name at the top of the credits and with the title changed to The Bronze Venus; and such directors as Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams, Jr., whose The Blood of Jesus (1941) is now included in the National Film Registry, though Williams himself is probably best remembered as one of the stars of the TV version of Amos and Andy.

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