Gerard Damiano, 80, directed ‘Deep Throat’

Published 4:00 am Thursday, October 30, 2008

Gerard Damiano, a hairdresser turned filmmaker whose best-known work, “Deep Throat,” created sensation in every possible meaning of the term when it was released in 1972, died on Saturday in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 80 and had lived in Fort Myers in recent years.

The cause was complications of a stroke he had last month, his son, Gerard Jr., said.

Written and directed by Damiano under the name Jerry Gerard, “Deep Throat” was “pornography’s ‘Gone With the Wind’ in terms of grosses,” The New York Times wrote in 1973. It attained emblematic status as one of the first hard-core films to reach a wide general audience, from self-conscious Middle Americans to self-congratulatory celebrities. “Porno chic,” the news media often called it.

Over 3½ decades, “Deep Throat” has been damned by religious groups, decried by feminists, defended by First Amendment advocates, derided by critics and debated by social scientists.

It dragged for years through local and federal courts around the country in a welter of obscenity trials in which it was variously banned, unbanned and rebanned. All this had the effect, observers agreed, of sustaining acute public interest in the film.

In what was perhaps the movie’s most enduring legacy, its title became the pseudonym of The Washington Post’s clandestine source in its coverage of the Watergate scandal. In 2005, W. Mark Felt, a former second-in-command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, identified himself as Deep Throat.

“Deep Throat” was shot in six days for not much more than $25,000 — money put up, as has been widely reported, by associates of the Colombo crime family. By 2005 it had grossed more than $600 million, Entertainment Weekly reported.