Contemporary box-office reports also put the lie to Universal's PR. The most commonly cited estimates of ticket sales when the movie became the focus of a 1976 obscenity trial in Memphis were $30 million to $50 million, nationwide.
In 1981, Pussycat Theaters, an X-rated franchise in Los Angeles that screened the movie for 10 years straight, placed its L.A. gross over that period at $6 million -- and that included money attributable to pictures with which it shared a double bill. Are there 100 other cities where "Deep Throat" was shown nonstop for a decade? Is there one?
It should surprise no connoisseur of journalistic indolence to know that the press has accepted the $600-million figure as gospel for years. My newspaper database turned up no fewer than 200 references dating back to 1980. The majority have appeared in recent months, thanks to Universal's publicity machine.
Not a single story attributes the figure to an authoritative source. Indeed, it's always accompanied by weasel words such as "by some accounts," "reportedly," "said to be," etc.
When I queried NBC Universal about all this, I was assured that the documentary makers, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, "are pretty careful about this sort of thing."
The Universal people then e-mailed me what they called a list of "sources" for the $600-million figure. This documentation amounted to references to articles from three newspapers (including the Los Angeles Times), one website and one out-of-print guide to X-rated movies. None of the articles gave any prior reference for their estimates.
Even more curious, two don't even support the $600-million figure; one (The Times) merely quoted someone saying that $100 million would be an "understatement," and another cited a possible range of $300 million to $600 million.
I'm reluctant to criticize NBC Universal for inflating the film's box-office take in its publicity materials. Exaggeration is a natural instinct of movie studios; you can't blame them for doing it any more than you can blame a dog for drinking out of the toilet.
But what about the press?
Have our reporters, editors and critics become so mathematically ignorant that a patently inflated figure like this no longer leaps out and demands authentication? Or have they become so accustomed to hearing the unvarnished truth from Hollywood flacks that they no longer bother to vet what they're told before shoveling it into print?
As it happens, I believe I have tracked the inflated estimate for "Deep Throat" to its first known source. It's Linda Lovelace herself -- or rather Linda Boreman, to use the family name she returned to before her accidental death in 2002.
According to Mike McGrady, a former Newsday columnist who co-wrote two autobiographies in which she chronicled a life of abuse by the husband who forced her into the porn business, she gave him the figure and he put it in the books.
But there the well runs dry. "I don't know where she got it," McGrady told me the other day from his home in Washington state. "I think it was something she heard from somebody."
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
