Having come of age in the '70s, I am certainly familiar with "Deep Throat" as a cultural phenomenon: its status as the epitome of "porno chic," the way it made Linda Lovelace a household name, Bob Woodward's appropriation of the title as the code name for his secret Watergate source.
With "Deep Throat" the prodigious profit-making machine, however, I was unfamiliar until recently.
That is, until the publicity pitch for "Inside Deep Throat," a new documentary about the movie, made a pair of remarkable claims: that it is the most profitable picture ever made, and that it has grossed $600 million.
The information came from the distributor of "Inside," General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, certainly an upstanding company. After a moment's contemplation, though, I knew
what to think of these claims: Baloney.
Leaving aside that "Deep Throat" was financed by mobsters and that therefore any figures are suspect, logic and arithmetic alone are enough to tell you that its box-office gross could not remotely have approached $600 million.
We're talking about a movie that was released in 1972, banned in half the country and generally exhibited in one theater at a time even in the biggest cities, such as New York and Los Angeles.
The average U.S. ticket price in 1972, according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, was $2.05. By 1980, when the "Deep Throat" phenomenon was way played out, the average was still only $2.69.
For the movie to have made $600 million at the box office, in other words, it would have had to sell tickets to enough customers to populate the entire United States one and a half times over.
The No. 1 mainstream movie of the 1970s, by the way, was "Star Wars." To date, its domestic theatrical gross is $461 million. You want to tell me that "Deep Throat" has sold more tickets than "Star Wars"?
One credulous report in the New York Times recently attributed the lofty gross enjoyed by "Deep Throat" to "videocassette and DVD sales and rentals." Unfortunately, home video players didn't even appear on the market until two years after the movie's release, and didn't become a mass-market device until after 1990. (In 1985, the average price of a home VCR still exceeded $600.)
I've seen references to a videocassette of "Deep Throat" being the "bestselling sex videotape of all time," but hype is hype. Oddly enough, this miraculous product seems to have vanished from the face of the Earth without leaving a trace; you can't even find it on EBay.
