The Other Hollywood (7 page)

NEW YORK CITY
1971–1972

JOHN WATERS
:
To me, the day porn films became legal was in 1969 when they showed
Pornography in Denmark
in a commercial movie theater in New York City, and it didn’t get busted.
Variety
will back me up on this.

I hitchhiked from Provincetown, Massachusetts, all the way to New York to see it because I knew it was historic.
Pornography in Denmark
got around the law because it was “a serious documentary,” right? It was supposedly “socially redeeming,” but it showed penetration. That opened the doors to other movies, like
SEX U.S.A.
and eventually
Deep Throat
.

It was a big deal because after that there was no turning back.

That’s the day exploitation films ended—the way Andy Warhol ended Abstract Expressionism in one night by that soup can, the way the Beatles ended rhythm and blues in one night on the
Ed Sullivan Show
.

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
I invested money in a company that went bankrupt. We then made two pictures. One was a documentary called
SEX U.S.A.
and the other was called
This Film Is All About.
…That’s right—blank.

New York papers won’t even use the word “sex” on movies like this. To give you a for instance,
SEX U.S.A.
in the
Daily News
was printed
XEX U.S.A.

FRED LINCOLN
:
I went to work for Gerry Damiano and Butchie on a film called
SEX U.S.A.
Linda Boreman was in it before she was Linda Lovelace. Paul Matthews was in it, Tina Russell was in it, and Harry Reems was there—everybody that was around. Again, we just did it and walked away. It wasn’t a loop; it was a feature. Gerard Damiano did features. This was before
Throat
.

HARRY REEMS
:
SEX U.S.A.
was the first interview-type thirty-five-millimeter film. It was shot in a West Side studio. We all watched one another take our clothes off. Then we went—two by two—into six or seven cubicles and there we stayed with our sexual partners while the narrator explained very pedagogically what we were doing.

FRED LINCOLN
:
You see, what Butchie really wanted was to make features. That’s what he always wanted—to make motion pictures. It’s kind of a sad story—here’s this mobster’s son who wants to be an auteur, you know?

That’s why Butchie picked Gerry Damiano—because I don’t think Gerry ever did loops. Butchie put up the money because he knew Gerry could make a feature.

HARRY REEMS
:
Gerard Damiano was a grown-up Wizard of Oz, a short, jolly, jelly bean. He had a gray goatee and a funny little toupee. He was sort of the stereotype of the second-string Hollywood director. But Gerard Damiano has been called the Mike Nichols and Ingmar Bergman of porno films.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Gerry was a decent guy, but he did try to rip me off for twenty-five dollars on
SEX U.S.A.
The budget was really tight; there wasn’t any money, so he tried to pay me seventy-five bucks a day. I said, “No way.”

I said, “Listen. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll break your fuckin’ legs.”

Then Butchie asked, “What’s goin’ on’?”

I said, “Gerry told me he was bringin’ me a hundred bucks a day. Now he wants to give me seventy-five.”

Butchie just said, “Pay him.”

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
SEX U.S.A.
cost about twelve to fifteen thousand dollars to make. So far it’s grossed six hundred thousand.

So we decided to do another film, but we didn’t want to do a documentary. There was this film,
Mona,
that we had seen. It was different. It had a story. It was what you would call “improvisational.” We thought of doing the same exact thing.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Andrea True was the one that mentioned to Chuck Traynor that she knew this guy, Gerard Damiano, who was going to make a thirty-five-millimeter, big-screen pornographic movie.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
I would see Gerard Damiano coming in and outta the Perainos’ office. Yeah, I was friendly with him, but it’s like two guys that are pushin’ wheelbarrows. If one guy has been there a long time, he thinks he’s a superior wheelbarrow-pusher to the other guy. Plus he was making
sixteen-millimeter films, so he’s big-time. I’m a little guy because I’m making eight-millimeter loops. Plus I swept the office, fixed the lights, went on locations, drove cars, stuff like that.

RAY PISTOL (PORN PRODUCER)
:
Chuck and Linda came in to see Butch, and Chuck had loops underneath his arm. Chuck put one on—and it was Linda’s doggie flick. And Butch said, “We don’t do that shit here.”

Butchie threw them out of the office. This is from Butch directly. And in the anteroom, outside, Gerard Damiano was coming up the elevator as Chuck and Linda were leaving, and they started a conversation.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
I’d like to say something poetic, like
Linda came in beauty like the night,
but it’s not true. She came in wearing army boots, an old army jacket, and a wool hat pulled over her head.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Yeah, that army jacket. Chuck made me look like a hippie chick. It’s not something I ever would have been caught dead in.

But compared to men like Bob Wolfe, Gerard Damiano was like Cecil B. DeMille.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Gerard Damiano was a pretty easygoing guy. I mean, he had a little bit of an air, like I say, because he was the director of feature films. And back in the early porno days, a feature film was a “FEATURE FILM.” Gerry was working with the Perainos—he was their director. And he was a good director; he knew about shooting sixteen-millimeter, you know, reversals and two shots and one shots and all that shit.

RAY PISTOL
:
Chuck and Linda and Damiano hit it off and decided to go to a swingers’ club that night. And that was the night that Damiano saw Linda’s talent. He came back the next day and hit Butchie up to completely change everything around.

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
To be honest about it, we couldn’t come up with anything too good. We were just going to do another
Mona
. Then somehow Gerry Damiano seen this girl at a party. I assume he got fixed up with her.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
Fortunately for Linda—and for me—I was casting for a sex insert, a short segment for a full-length movie. So I asked her if she would do it, and she said yes.

HARRY REEMS
:
I was doing some loops for Gerry that summer and working behind the camera with him a little. One morning he called me and asked me if I’d be able to show up that day to do some shorts.

When I got there, he said, “You’re going to do an anal scene with Linda.”

This was my introduction to Linda Lovelace.

But that morning she was very nervous. She acted like a complete beginner. Gerry soon guessed that her nervousness had more to do with the presence of her husband/manager, than any feelings of inadequacy about her assignment. When he made that discovery, he sent the husband on errands. With Chuck temporarily out of the picture, Linda relaxed and turned in a performance, to say the least.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
I met Linda on Wednesday and did the insert on Thursday. And it was when she did the insert that I realized the talent that she had.

HARRY REEMS
:
Gerry convinced Linda that she should do her best because this would be a cut or two above the run-of-the-mill loop. In the loop, Linda played a nurse, and I was the patient. I’m shown in bed wearing some crazy underwear with hearts and flowers. My cock is wrapped up in bandages with a bow at the tip. My nurse pats my bandaged member, which is in an enlarged and inflamed state.

“No,” I protest. “It hurts.”

My nurse won’t be dissuaded. Off comes the bandage, and nursie is soon applying oral therapy to the ailing organ.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
It’s impossible to perform the act unless there’s a straight line from mouth to throat—like a sword swallower. So how could we arrange it? We tried every conceivable way until we at last found the proper position for the camera to catch it all. It amounted to a kind of 69 position, with my body kind of flat against Harry’s chest. I struggled at first—but it began to work and work well. When I felt him straining, I had to put his throbbing cock all the way down.

HARRY REEMS
:
I knew the anal scene was coming up so I asked Linda, “Would you like some K-Y Jelly or something?”

“No, no,” Linda panted, “Just let me give you some more head.”

Giving more head she became frantic—her tongue and lips were everywhere. Then I felt the muscles in the back of her throat opening up. Her head lowered over me. Suddenly I could feel my cock go right into her throat.
I couldn’t believe she ate the whole thing!
My cock and balls and half my pubic bush were all engulfed in that cavernous, deep throat.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
Linda knocked me out the minute she started going down on Harry, doing her
Deep Throat
thing. Harry was very heavily endowed. I had never seen anybody take a cock that deep before.

HARRY REEMS
:
It was a frightening sensation. My first thought was, “Will she bring me back alive?”

But she kept going up and down all the way. The muscle in her throat was relaxed. Her breathing got noisier and noisier. She started to drip from her nose and over her chin. She let out animal shrieks.

“Okay, I’m ready,” she finally gasped.

Her cunt and anal passage were both sopping wet. Gerry’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets and the cameraman’s jaw brushed his shoes. I think all of us there knew we were present at a significant moment in sexual history.

I fell instantly—though briefly—in love with Linda. We balled our brains out and fucked every which way.

That loop was eventually inserted in
Deep Throat
.

CHUCK TRAYNOR
:
Gerry Damiano wasn’t the first person to see Linda give deep throat, no. She did deep throat people in the early loops. But obviously nobody realized that this was a really unusual talent. Gerry was the first one to take it seriously. I mean, I didn’t realize the power of it because I had lived with it all my life.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
In selling her attributes, Chuck probably mentioned she could take a large amount of cock. But, again, it was very hard then to describe it. I’m sure he wasn’t aware of what he had there; if he was, Chuck has proven himself to be enough of a businessman over the years that he would have handled things a lot differently.

BUTCHIE PERAINO
:
Gerry came in the next day and said that as he was driving over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, he was thinking of Linda. What she had done was fantastic. He’d never seen anybody do like she did. So he thought, let’s make a picture about this girl.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
I was so knocked out over what Linda did that I went home and wrote
Deep Throat
over the weekend. Linda was doing something that defied description. You have to understand, at the time there was no such expression as “deep throat.” I invented it. Now it’s sort of a byword; you think, “Wow, I wonder if that girl can give deep throat?”

And Linda looked like the girl next door—though she actually wasn’t—so I wanted to develop for her a caricature of what every man wanted the girl next door to be. And the name “Linda Lovelace” I created for her—after I wrote the script.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Butchie Peraino did not like me. He didn’t want that sweet, innocent look that Mr. Damiano was going for. He wanted a bubble-gum chewing, bleach blond with large breasts. He thought his twenty-five thousand was just gonna go to waste.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
One of the most difficult things was to convince my partners that Linda was worth starring in the film because of the way she looked. Outwardly, she wasn’t particularly sexy or exciting. All they could see was her army boots and stocking hat.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
I will say this about Butchie Peraino, he never talked behind my back. Anything he had to say about me, he said right to my face and generally at the top of his voice. Butchie and Damiano were in nearby offices, and they constantly shouted their opinions from one room to the next.

Butchie would point out that this was their first feature film and that their entire futures were riding on it.

Damiano would say that he understood that perfectly and that’s why they should use me. Butchie would shout back that he had never heard of a female star of a pornographic movie without big tits.

“BIG TITS SELL TICKETS!” Butchie yelled.

“LINDA STAYS!” Damiano shouted back.

And I did. Chuck was to be paid a flat hundred a day for my role in the movie, a total of twelve hundred dollars.

GERARD DAMIANO
:
I said I would make Linda a star if she would volunteer to work and rehearse. I’m not talking about giving blow jobs. I’m talking about delivering lines and getting her to act.

LINDA LOVELACE
:
Butchie Peraino said, “We’ve never even seen this broad talk!”