The Screengrab : deep throat

Marilyn Chambers, 1952 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Marilyn Chambers, who was found dead in her home yesterday at the age of 56, was best known as the star of Jim and Artie Mitchell's Behind the Green Door (1972), one of the three biggest hits of the brief era of "porno chic" in the early 1970s. Where Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, had a winning, giggly anything-goes quality, and Georgina Spelvin, of The Devil in Miss Jones, stood out for her voracious level of on-screen enthusiasm, the youthful Chambers (nee' Marilyn Ann Briggs), who was twenty when Green Door was made, had what porn directors invariably claim to value above all else and seem to find once in a blue moon: a fresh-scrubbed, girl-next-door, all-American cheerleader look and manner that, to the Mitchells and their audience, must have seemed to be screaming out to be defiled. In the movie, Chambers played an innocent miss who is abducted and spirited away to a sinister underground club where she spends the bulk of the film's 72-minute running time being ravished for the delectation of a masked audience; she loves it, of course.

Green Door, which would go on to make millions, was made for $60,000, with the leading lady receiving $25,000 and one percent of the gross--a very good deal for her, because the Mitchells were tough businessmen and Green Door would be one of the few hardcore porn "classics" to make money that actually wound up in the hands of the people who'd made it. The Mitchells were lucky to find Chambers, but their cup really ranneth over when they discovered that their leading lady was the recently anointed face of Ivory Snow; she could be seen, with her hair pulled back and cuddling a baby, on boxes of the detergent from coast to coast. Procter & Gamble wound up giving the movie a shot of free publicity (and taking a bath itself) by recalling all its products and advertising that featured her face, thus demonstrating that it's that 56/100% that's not pure that'll kill ya.

As you might have guessed from the accidental Ivory Snow cross-promotion, Chambers had been pursuing a career in mainstream modeling and acting when she became a porn goddess. She made her film debut with a small role in the 1970 Barbra Streisand-George Segal comedy The Owl and the Pussycat and attracted the Mitchells' attention with her work in Together (1971), a softcore "mock sex documentary" directed by Sean S. Cunnigham, who almost a decade later would cash in as the director of the first Friday the 13th movie. After Green Door, Chambers would reunite with the Mitchells for the The Resurrection of Eve (1973), but she also tried to keep her career in non-pornographic entertainment alive, with mixed success.

In 1977, Chambers became perhaps the only established hardcore star to play the leading role in a "mainstream" film by a major North American director (at least, until Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience opens) when David Cronenberg cast her in his second feature, Rabid; in keeping with the body-horror fixations of Cronenberg's early work, Chambers played a woman who, after experimental skin-graft surgery, develops a vampiric phallus beneath her arm. Years later, recalling her frame of mind in 1972, Chambers said that "I was thinking that something like Behind the Green Door had never been done before and the way our sexual revolution was traveling I really thought it was going to be a stepping stone which would further my acting career." But as the cultural climate turned more conservative, Chambers was was forced to seek out more work in hardcore films such as Insatiable (1980) and Insatiable II (1984). She spent much of the rest of her career bouncing back and forth between hardcore cinema and softcore, sexploitation flicks ranging from 1983's Angel of H.E.A.T (which I remember staring at on Showtime at the end of a long, sunburned Fourth of July) to various Cinemax late night favorites with her name in the title, even taking a writer's credit on Marilyn Chambers's Private Fantasies VI (1986). She also recorded a single, "Benihana," which went to #9 on the R & B charts in 1977.

Chambers had a daughter, McKenna Marie Taylor, born in 1991, with her third husband, Tom Taylor. (The marriage, Chambers's final one, ended in 1994.) In her later years, she took time out from her adult film career to take part in politics, but nobody's perfect. (She ran for Vice President, as the running mate of Charles Jay, in 2004 on the Personal Choice Party ticket, a quasi-libertarian party.) Her last film role was in last year's Solitaire. She received a a lifetime achievement FOXE Award in 2005. The cause of her death has not yet been determined.

Gerard Damiano, 1928-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

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.

New York Magazine Picks the New Yorkiest Movies Since 1968

Phil Nugent — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

Edelstein sort of half-apologizes for having picked so many movies from the 1970s, but how could it be otherwise? It was in the seventies that Hollywood declared studio lots passe and invaded the city with film crews, which were often manned by smart-ass native New Yorkers like Sidney Lumet, Paul Mazursky, and Brian De Palma, whose sensibilities came through so strongly that thet sometimes seemed to be making a "New York movie" even when they weren't. The American movie renaissance of the seventies is inextricably tied up with the breakdown of "the ungovernable city" in the same period; at the same time that the country at large was so attuned to the virtues associated with New York that Woody Allen could emerge as a sex symbol, the city went bankrupt and all but imploded, and the movies were here to record that. Movies as great as Scorsese's early features and as klutzy as Shaft all double as time capsules that tap into the urban chaos and make it look exciting, which is why there are people now who are nostalgic for the "good, old" (pre-Disneyfied) Times Square of hookers, three-card monte, and garbage-strewn streets. Movies don't feel as if they have that kind of combined impact anymore, though one movie that tried hard was Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both Edelstein and Lee credit with helping to drive Ed Koch from office. In an accompanying Q & A, Lee appears to also take credit for hooking up Barack and Michelle Obama, since "Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, 'Thank God I made it.'" Timing is everything. If they'd met a year earlier or a year later, and he'd taken her to School Daze or Mo' Better Blues, she might have gone right home and changed her phone number.