The Golden Age of Porn: Deep Throat, 'Porno Chic' and the 15 Years Adult Film Played in Real Cinemas

In this guide

• What the “Golden Age” actually was
• Blue Movie and Mona: the first steps
• Deep Throat: the film everyone talked about
• Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones
• “Porno chic”: when New York queued for porn
• The law: Miller v. California
• The dark side: Linda Lovelace’s story
• How VHS killed the Golden Age
• What my generation inherited
• My take

People who discover porn today on a phone, in a free clip of a few minutes, find it hard to believe that there was a time when adult films had posters, premieres, critics and queues outside cinemas. That time existed. Historians call it the Golden Age of Porn, roughly 1969 to 1984 (Wikipedia: Golden Age of Porn).

I was born long after it ended. But the industry I work in still carries its fingerprints: the idea of a “porn star”, the awards, the San Fernando Valley, even some of the legal rules. So it is worth understanding, including the parts that are not glamorous at all.

What the “Golden Age” actually was

Before the late 1960s, explicit sex on film in the US lived in the shadows: short silent “loops” for peep-show booths and private “stag” reels. The Golden Age was the brief period when explicit feature-length films, with plots, characters and actual cinema releases, reached mainstream audiences and mainstream attention.

It was not a moral revolution that came from nowhere. It came from changing attitudes after the 1960s, court cases that loosened censorship, and entrepreneurs who saw that ordinary adults, couples included, were curious.

Blue Movie and Mona: the first steps

The era is usually dated from 12 June 1969, when Andy Warhol released Blue Movie, one of the first films with explicit sex to get a wide theatrical release in the United States. In 1970 came Mona (Mona the Virgin Nymph), produced by Bill Osco, another early explicit feature to play in cinemas (Wikipedia).

These films were crude by later standards. Their importance was not artistic. It was that they proved a public audience existed.

Deep Throat: the film everyone talked about

Then came Deep Throat in 1972, written and directed by Gerard Damiano (credited as “Jerry Gerard”) and starring Linda Lovelace, whose real name was Linda Boreman. It was one of the first adult films with a plot, character development and relatively high production values, and it is considered the forefront of the Golden Age (Wikipedia: Deep Throat).

The numbers are part of the legend:

• It was shot over six days in January 1972 for about $22,500, plus $25,000 for music.
• It premiered at the World Theater in New York on 12 June 1972.
• It reportedly grossed around $1 million in its first seven weeks and about $3 million in its first six months.
• Claims that it made $600 million are widely considered unrealistic. The FBI estimate of about $100 million is often cited as closer to reality.

The money behind it was not clean. The film was financed by the Peraino family, linked by investigators to the Colombo crime family, and many theatres that showed it were reportedly mob-connected, which also makes the box-office figures unreliable.

The title even became part of political history: the secret Watergate source in The Washington Post was nicknamed “Deep Throat”.

In 1972, people queued outside a cinema in New York to watch a porn film. Today, the same content is free on a phone and nobody queues for anything.

Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones

Deep Throat was not alone. Behind the Green Door (1972), the feature debut of the Mitchell brothers, starred Marilyn Chambers, who became a mainstream celebrity, partly because she had previously appeared as the smiling mother on Ivory Snow soap boxes (Wikipedia: Behind the Green Door).

In 1973, Damiano followed with The Devil in Miss Jones, and in 1976 Radley Metzger made The Opening of Misty Beethoven, which some writers consider the “crown jewel” of the era.

These films tried to be cinema: scripts, music, locations, dialogue. Whether they succeeded is another debate. But that ambition is why the era still has its name.

“Porno chic”: when New York queued for porn

On 21 January 1973, The New York Times Magazine published a piece by Ralph Blumenthal titled “Porno chic”, describing how hardcore films had become fashionable and very profitable (The New York Times archive). The name stuck.

Celebrities admitted to having seen Deep Throat. Couples went on dates to adult cinemas. Talk-show hosts made jokes about it. Critics such as Roger Ebert reviewed it, often unimpressed, but they reviewed it.

That is the part I find most interesting. For a few years, porn was not completely hidden. It was a public, slightly scandalous part of culture.

The law: Miller v. California

The legal context mattered enormously. In 1973, the US Supreme Court decided Miller v. California, which created the three-part test still used in the US to decide whether material is “obscene” and can be banned (Wikipedia: Miller v. California; Justia).

Miller did not legalise porn. It left the definition partly to “contemporary community standards”, which meant a film could be fine in one city and prosecuted in another. Deep Throat itself faced obscenity trials and was banned in some places.

The legal fight to make filming adult content legal in California came later, and I explained it in Porn Valley and the Freeman case.

The dark side: Linda Lovelace’s story

Any honest article about the Golden Age has to talk about Linda Boreman.

Boreman was reportedly paid only $1,250 for Deep Throat, money that, by her account, her husband and manager at the time, Chuck Traynor, took. In her early books she described the film as a liberating experience. But in her 1980 autobiography Ordeal, she said Traynor had coerced her, beaten her and forced her into pornography, and she later became an anti-pornography campaigner (Wikipedia: Linda Lovelace).

Her story is the opposite of glamour. The most famous porn film in history made a fortune for other people, and the woman whose name sold it described it as abuse.

I cannot judge from the outside what happened on that set. What I can say is that her story is one of the reasons modern professional productions talk so much about consent, paperwork, the right to stop and performer control. I wrote about how that works today in consent on a porn set.

How VHS killed the Golden Age

What ended the era was not a court or a politician. It was a machine.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, home video spread fast. Suddenly, adults could watch porn privately at home instead of in a sticky cinema seat surrounded by strangers. Producers switched from expensive film to cheap shot-on-video features. Volume went up, budgets went down, plots got thinner and adult cinemas started closing. By the mid-1980s, the Golden Age was over.

Then the same thing happened again with the internet, and again with free tube sites. Each technology made porn more private, cheaper and more abundant, and each one pushed down what a single film was worth. I covered the latest chapter in tube sites and piracy.

What my generation inherited

From the Golden Age, my generation inherited:

• The idea of the porn star. Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace were known by name, not just by scene. That model still drives the industry and its awards.
• Porn as entertainment, not only as a product. Plots, brands, directors.
• The fights about obscenity, exploitation and consent that never fully ended.
• The lesson that technology always wins. Cinemas lost to VHS, VHS lost to the internet, and studios are now competing with creators on their own platforms.

My take

I have mixed feelings about the Golden Age. Part of me loves the ambition: people trying to make real films, with posters and premieres, and audiences who were not ashamed to show up. Our industry has rarely been treated with that kind of curiosity since.

But I refuse to romanticise it. It was full of organised crime money, the law was a lottery depending on the city, and the woman at the centre of its most famous film said she was coerced. If the Golden Age teaches anything, it is that success without performer protection is not success. The money was golden for some. Not for everyone.

For the human stories of the women in this industry, read my columns on House of Maximo. Follow my work at maximogarciaworld.com, and for the 18+ side, fuckingpornstars.net.

Sources

1. Wikipedia. Golden Age of Porn.
2. Wikipedia. Deep Throat (film).
3. Wikipedia. Behind the Green Door.
4. Wikipedia. Linda Lovelace.
5. Blumenthal R. Porno chic. The New York Times Magazine, 21 January 1973.
6. Justia. Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973).
7. Wikipedia. Miller v. California.