Who knew that it would ever make the same list as “Citizen Kane,” “Vertigo” and “Pulp Fiction”?
Radio Times magazine, a BBC publication, named “Deep Throat” to a list of 100 landmark films that had a large cultural impact. Other movies on the list include “The Birth of a Nation,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Blade Runner” and “Brokeback Mountain.”
According to Radio Times, “Deep Throat” was the worst movie to make the list, but it took “porn out of the back room and into the cinema.”
Fenton Bailey, co-director of the 2005 documentary “Inside Deep Throat,” wholeheartedly agrees with the blue movie’s inclusion on the list, asserting that it changed the landscape of adult entertainment and sexuality.
“It’s a very important movie,” Bailey told XBIZ. “It captures so many ideas from the sexual revolution, and one of its unintended consequences is that it marked the end of the sexual revolution and the beginning of the commodification of sex and sexuality.”
“Deep Throat” was also the most profitable adult movie of its time, and one of the most profitable adult movies ever. Box office experts dispute its final tally, but even conservative estimates put the total gross at more than $100 million.
“It woke everyone up,” Bailey said. “They said, ‘Oh, my god! There's gold in porn!’”
But, despite the amount of money it made, does it really belong on the same list as “Citizen Kane” and “Vertigo”?
Bailey said yes.
“‘Deep Throat’ is a far more important movie than ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Pulp Fiction,’” Bailey said. “Those movies were great artistic statements, but they had no impact on the culture. We live in the porn age, and it's seeping into every aspect of our lives.”