A revisitation of the advent and aftermath of what we might call, with more literal meaning than usual, the seminal work in "adult" films of the modern era, or what Camille Paglia calls, with her characteristic amount of self-restraint, "an epochal moment in the history of human sexuality." It's a chopped salad of a film, assembled from archival footage and talking-head reminiscences, by the documentary team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. A good deal of nonsense, certainly, gets talked by those heads: "Men want to believe that the clitoris is in a woman's throat," affirms Erica Jong, swallowing in toto the silly premise of Deep Throat. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, meanwhile, who have always had a lot to say about a lot of things, come off as intellectual giants in the rotation of commentators that encompasses John Waters, Wes Craven, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Helen Gurley Brown (attesting to the benefits of semen as a facial treatment), Deep Throat's director, Gerard Damiano (a former hairdresser whose roadkill toupee is resignedly gray in the present day and fancifully dark in the past), its male star, Harry Reems, and the Memphis prosecutor, Larry Parrish, who hauled Reems into court to answer for his sins: "Deep Throat attacks the very core of our being." The female star, Linda Lovelace, is unavailable as a talking head, having been killed in a car wreck in 2002. But she talks from the archives, first as a proponent of pornography ("The last person that started censorship was Adolf Hitler, and look what happened there"), then as an opponent of it, before she switches sides again and attempts a pornographic comeback at the age of fifty-one. She is not an inspiring figure, unless maybe inspiring of pity. She is also, to be sure, represented in excerpts from her immortalizing performance, showing off the hard-core skill celebrated in the title, and possibly, with that, inspiring something else as well, something between awe and asphyxiation: Deep Throttle. The documentary tells an interesting story or stories: a cultural story, a character story, a courtroom story, a commerce story, an organized crime story. (The original film, costing $25,000 to manufacture, $1200 of it going to Lovelace and $250 to Reems, is calculated as the most profitable motion picture in history, although the profits didn't go to the people who made it.) All of the interest of it, however, is in the story, not in the telling. The chopped salad is hackwork. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd