Porn's Pied Piper Deep Throat Director Dies

I went to see Deep Throat cause I'm fond of animal pictures. I thought it was about giraffes.
Bob Hope- When Hope makes a joke about your porno movie, you've arrived.

The movie had no-name stars in fact, fake-name stars: Herb Streicher was going by Harry Reems, and Linda Boreman by Linda Lovelace. The writer-director, a Bronx hairdresser who'd never done a porno feature before, called himself Jerry Gerard. This was early 1972, and the people making hardcore sex movies considered themselves lucky to exhibit their wares legally, let alone have their real names on them. All “Gerard" had was a cute idea for a porno comedy, and a leading lady with a special talent. He also wanted to change the movie's title, from The Sword Swallower. The producer objected that no one would understand the new title. “Don't worry," the director replied. “Deep Throat will become a household word."

Every once in a while, an artist gets an inspiration that changes pop culture. Even if he's a slop artist, and the inspiration is a movie about a woman with a clitoris in her throat. Such a one was Gerard Rocco Damiano, aka Jerry Gerard, who died this weekend in Fort Myers, Fla., at 80, from complications after a stroke. With Deep Throat and his second film, Devil in Miss Jones, Damiano launched the 1970s movie craze of porno chic.

Deep Throat whose $25,000 budget was covered by Louis “Butchie" Peraino, the son of a made man in New York City's Columbo mob family went on to earn tens of millions of dollars. Maybe more: the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat puts the take at an extremely improbable $600 million. Anyway, it was quite a haul. One federal agent quoted a Peraino underling as saying of the Deep Throat take: “We've got so much money ... we don't even count it any more.... We weigh it."