Tuesday, January 14, 2003 Posted: 12:19 PM EST (1719 GMT)


NEW YORK (Variety) -- Oscar-winning filmmakers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment will make a feature documentary on the cultural impact of the 1972 porn film "Deep Throat."

The $25,000 "Deep Throat" is still considered the most profitable film ever, having grossed around $600 million. The picture also fueled a sexual revolution. The directors of the documentary will be Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who filmed the HBO expose "Monica Lewinsky in Black and White."

Grazer once tried to make a feature about the life of "Deep Throat" star Linda Lovelace, who later became an anti-porn crusader and claimed she'd been forced to make smut by her Svengali husband. But Grazer found her story too relentlessly depressing and sad. (Lovelace died in April 2002 after being injured in a car crash.)

"I find the actual movie and Linda's story less interesting than I do that moment in society where something ignites enough curiosity that it is like splitting an atom," Grazer said. "That single movie popularized pornography. It became the catchphrase in the Watergate scandal, it broke down all kinds of walls."

Co-director Bailey said the film touched a nerve with a repressed crowd looking for a reason to let loose. He and partner Barbato just made their feature directing debut on the Macaulay Culkin starrer "Party Monster," based on their documentary about club kid murderer Michael Alig. The film is competing in Sundance.

Bailey and Barbato began filming over the weekend because Lovelace was posthumously voted into the hall of fame during the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Grazer said he chose the duo partly because of their six-hour documentary "Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization" for the U.K.'s Channel 4.

"You might say that 'Deep Throat' was the film that started the independent film movement," Bailey said. "It sparked a brief period when porn looked like it would be going from the backstreet raincoat brigade to mainstream."

Producer Grazer and director Howard won Oscars last year for their work on "A Beautiful Mind."

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