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It was almost called Sword Swallower—that’s the part you didn’t know. Deep Throat, the 1972 porn flick that starred Linda Lovelace as a woman whose clitoris was in her craw, is the most profitable movie ever made. It’s considered a cultural landmark, one of the first hardcore movies to boast a plot and to be widely released; it engendered obscenity charges by the Nixon White House. The uproar that resulted put mainstream audiences in X-rated seats, “blowjob” in the nation’s lexicon, and ideas in directors’ heads. Why, if not for Deep Throat, there’d be no Britney Spears, no girls going wild, and no sex for any reason other than procreation. OK, you didn’t know that, either, but Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato sure do. Their Inside Deep Throat, a documentary on the Little Porno That Could, is part Inside the Actor’s Studio puffery, part Behind the Music sensationalism, and pretty much one long, um, blowjob. The filmmakers (who also helmed 2003’s Party Monster) feature commentary from people such as John Waters, Camille Paglia, Erica Jong, and Norman Mailer, as well as those involved with making the movie, including director Gerard Damiano, now a little old man with pants up to his armpits, and co-star Harry Reems, whose spectacular posthype downfall turned him into not only a drug addict and nonfunctioning alcoholic, but also a panhandler. But the darker aspects of Deep Throat, such as Lovelace’s years-later accusation that boyfriend Chuck Traynor forced her into the industry, are touched on only glancingly. (Some archival footage of Lovelace, who died after a car accident in 2002, is included, but the extent to which Traynor influenced her is alluded to only by her sister Barbara’s comment “Unfortunately, he died before I could kill him.”) Mostly, Bailey and Barbato are concerned with presenting Deep Throat gush (“100% on the Peter Meter!”) and cheerily damning the puritanical mind-set that resulted in the movie’s forced closing (prosecution statements intercut with an echo of “clitoris…clitoris…clitoris”). If that makes the result long on laughs—and how could a documentary on a film with lines like “What if your balls were in your ear?” be anything but?—it also makes it a bit short on serious treatment of the anti-porn persective. In that department, the best the movie can do is Deep Throat prosecutor Larry Parrish’s suggestion that the Justice Department is rarin’ to fight obscenity again—if only, he says, “We can get these terrorists to go away.” —Tricia Olszewski