Docs Reveal Scope of FBI's Attempt to Close Curtain on 'Deep Throat' Film
FBI documents recently released to the Associated Press following a Freedom of Information Act request reveal a national effort by the law enforcement agency to stop the spread of the 1972 porno Deep Throat.
The effort, clearly, was in vain. But the documents offer a window into the not-so-distant past in which the bureau attempted to take on the spread of indecency.
The AP reports that agents seized copies of the movie, analyzed negatives and conducted extensive interviews with everyone from actors and producers to those who delivered reels to theaters.
“Today, we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government—local, state or federal—being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,” Rutgers Law Professor Mark Weiner, a legal historian who teaches constitutional law professor and legal historian, tells the AP. “The story of Deep Throat is the story of the last gasp of the forces lined up against the cultural and sexual revolution, and it is the advent of the entry of pornography into the mainstream.”
Released were 498 pages from the FBI file on the film’s director, Gerard Damiano, who died in October. The pages, many of which are redacted, are just a portion of Damiano’s 4,800-page file.
According to AP’s report, the file includes memos between L. Patrick Gray, William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, successive FBI heads after J. Edgar Hoover. Even W. Mark Felt, whose Watergate informant nickname came from the movie’s title, was likely aware of the widespread investigation.
Of the alleged crimes being investigated were charges of interstate transportation of obscene material.
University of California-Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh tells the AP that the scope of the FBI’s investigation into Deep Throat was reflective of the times.
“Certainly today, with our broadly socially less restrictive attitude to most pornography and to sex more broadly it may seem odd that the government was spending so much effort on something like this,” he said. “But attitudes back then were much different.”
