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. How quaint in today's sex-soaked culture, when a porn star is the central attraction of a new teen comedy (20th Century Fox's "The Girl Next Door"), when a three-story billboard of porn queen Jenna Jameson looks down upon family-friendlier Times Square, when ads for Viagra appear superimposed on the backstop during World Series games.
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.' "
Grazer may wind up telling that story on camera because the two documentarians he hired to research and direct "Inside Deep Throat," Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, consider it a charming example of how the film created a furious sexual curiosity in America. "Deep Throat," made for $22,000 and financed by two men regarded in law enforcement circles as organized-crime figures, was the highest-grossing picture in Los Angeles during the 1972-73 seasonThe next year it finished sixth. It played here for more than 10 straight years and is believed to have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.
HBO liked Grazer's search for deeper meaning enough to split the $2-million cost with him and give the documentary a theatrical release before its pay-cable debut next year.
