#016 - Hardcore Auteurism: The Films of Gerard Damiano

so Welcome back to the Outskirts Film Podcast after our summer recess.

Due to popular demand, we have decided now to pivot in this first episode of the second season to a subject that everyone has spent the summer months discussing, debating and writing countless numbers of words about.

That is the Odyssey.

That's right, folks.

We've listened to your many calls for a fresh direction and And so to kick off this new season, we're going to speak about 1977's The Odyssey, Ultimate Trip by acclaimed pornographic filmmaker Gerard Deliano.

I'm Christopher Small, and today on the podcast, I'm joined as ever by my co-hosts.

I'm glad someone's laughing at least.

I'm Alonso Guerrero, ready to engage with a bizarre world of fantasy.

So we are interested in outsider artists here at the Outskirts Film Podcast for obvious reasons.

Marginal and often problematic figures and genres that may have once found a fleeting moment in the critical spotlight, but otherwise remain decidedly and comfortably on the outskirts of respectable cinephile tastes.

The filmmaker Gerard Damiano, in that sense, may be a strange pick for our second season opener.

After all, he's the closest a hardcore filmmaker ever came to being a household name across the United States.

And that's obviously because he directed the most famous adult film of all time, Deep Throat.

A Navy veteran and hairdresser from Queens, New York, Gerard Damiano shot that film with mob money over a week in 1972, right inside a narrow legal window when US obscenity law made it briefly possible to shoot and distribute a hardcore film, since prosecutors had to prove that the film had no artistic value.

A year later, the Supreme Court closed that loophole, substituting more localized obscenity laws in its place.

This placed Damiano in a mess of legal battles that he would continue to wrangle with for the long time afterwards.

But in many ways, Deep Throat is the least interesting thing about this amazing filmmaker.

It is something of a rushed, loungy, problematic object that stands in stark contrast with the more ambitious works its maker would make off the back of it.

Over time, Gerard Damiano established a sort of hardcore repertory company – Harry Reams, Georgina Spelvin, Jamie Gillis, Annie Sprinkle, to name a few – and produced a serious and quixotic body of work, the bulk of which was made in the so-called porno-chic boom of the 1970s, but which continued substantially into the 80s as well.

Damiano kept working into the mid-1990s, long after video had transformed the industry and thus longer than most artistically ambitious pornographic filmmakers who came of age in the 70s.

Damiano eventually died in Florida in 2008 after a healthy retirement, a few weeks after a huge birthday celebration and reunion that saw many of his beloved former stars trek down to Florida to celebrate with the master.