“His hands flying above his spiked hair, Brian Grazer is flinging metaphors, connecting dots across three decades, trying to explain why for years he’s been obsessed with the cultural significance of the 1972 porn classic Deep Throat. On first reckoning this is hard to fathom: One of the most profitable movie producers in history (8 Mile, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Splash) is talking your ear off about a crude, 62-minute, unfunny sex farce that starred a mousy young actress named Linda Lovelace whose sole talent was one endlessly repeated sexual gimmick… But then Grazer, 52, tells you the story about his grandmother and the night in 1973 she came into her 21-year-old grandson’s room. ‘This little 4-foot-10 Jewish grandmother, she lived with her husband, Sy,’ he says. ‘Sy and Sonia Schwartz. She comes in, closes my door and says to me, ‘Sy and I saw it.’ I go, ‘Saw what?’ ‘We saw it, we went.’ ‘You went to what?’ ‘Deep Throat.’ ‘You gotta be kidding.’ ‘No, we stood in line,’ she said. ‘We went.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Hollywood.’ ‘Well, what’d you think?’ And she said, ‘It was quite a film.’ I said, ‘Why did you go see it?’ ‘Well, everyone was talking about it…’ My grandmother,’ Grazer says, delighted both by the absurdity and the point it helps him make, ‘turned me on to Deep Throat.’” — Edmonton Journal (Canada)

What a great story! Apparently Mr. Glazer’s film, Inside Deep Throat, explores the point more, uh, deeply, but really the anecdote says it all: Deep Throat is the film that brought pornography out of the closet, took off the brown wrapper, and paved the way for the mainstreaming of porn that you see today. Forty years ago, little Jewish grandmothers would rather have eaten pig on shabbos than get caught sneaking into a blue movie. Now they — or at least that percentage of Jewish grandmothers that is so inclined — catch it on cable, watch it on DVD, download it from the net. They can watch porn stars repent on tv, they can buy Traci Lords’ memoir from Amazon, they can even make their own videos using camcorders and off-the-shelf editing software.

Porn has become so ubiquitous that you almost wonder if it’s more common than sex — in fact, it probably is — and according to Mr. Glazer, Deep Throat is what we have to thank for opening the floodgates. Maybe Linda Lovelace, who died last year in a car wreck, is up there in heaven now, opening up the pearly gates too. After all, we know that the devil is in Miss Jones, and there’s plenty of porn here on earth, so where else but heaven is there left to expand to? You wouldn’t really want to go if you couldn’t see angels fucking, would you?

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