Newly released FBI files show agents across the US and at the highest level of the agency investigated the 1972 porn movie Deep Throat in a vain attempt to roll back what became a cultural shift toward more permissive entertainment.
The documents show the expanse of probe into the film: seizing copies of the movie, having negatives analyzed in labs and interviewing everyone from actors and to messengers who delivered reels to theaters.
All of it was part of a failed attempt to stop the spread of a movie that some saw as the victory of a cultural and sexual revolution and others saw as simply decadent.
“Today we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government — local, state or federal — being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,” said Mark Weiner, a constitutional law professor and legal historian at Rutgers-Newark School of Law.
Deep Throat achieved fame and become the most widely known adult film to reach a general audience. It was hugely profitable — made for about US$25,000 and amassing hundreds of millions in receipts — and became a cultural buzzword.
The newly released papers are among 498 pages from the FBI file on Gerard Damiano, who directed the movie and died in October.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Released this month after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, they are just a glimpse into Damiano’s roughly 4,800-page file. More than 1,000 additional pages were withheld under FOIA exemptions and because they duplicated other material; the balance of the file has not yet been reviewed and released.
Many parts of the released files are whited out and the FBI’s targets are unclear, but the seriousness with which the agency treated the investigation is unquestionable.
The file includes memos between the FBI’s top men — L. Patrick Gray, William Ruckelshaus and Clarence Kelley, successive heads of the agency after J. Edgar Hoover — and field offices so widespread, it seemed nearly all of the country’s biggest cities were involved.
While much of the probe centered in New York, where many involved in the film lived, and Miami, where it was largely shot, agents from Honolulu to Detroit were involved.
On various entries in the file, a checklist of top FBI brass appears in the top right corner, with initials next to some names.
NICKNAME
One of those listed is W. Mark Felt, the FBI second-in-command whose “Deep Throat” alias as a secret informant during the White House Watergate scandal came from the movie’s title. However, none of the markings indicate he read any of the materials on the movie whose name became synonymous with his role in bringing down Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Felt got the nickname from a Washington Post editor after he anonymously leaked crucial information about Nixon administration corruption.
The FBI notes Damiano had been “somewhat cooperative,” On Aug. 7, 1973, an assistant US attorney general writes to Kelley, saying Damiano is being considered for immunity. The memo doesn’t specify the crime.
Officials at every level of government tried to stop screenings and obscenity trials continued for years. But in the end, experts say, it represents the end of an era in which the government sought to stop the changing cultural tides.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles said the oddity of the scope of the investigation into Deep Throat is a reflection of very different 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.”
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