QUICK TAKES - June 20, 2009

Newly released FBI files show that agents across the country and at the highest level of the agency investigated “Deep Throat” -- the 1972 porn movie, not the shadowy Watergate figure -- in a vain attempt to roll back what became a cultural shift toward more permissive entertainment.

The documents released to the Associated Press show the expanse of agents’ investigation into the film: seizing copies of the movie, having negatives analyzed in labs and interviewing everyone from the actors and producers to the messengers who delivered reels to theaters.

All of it to try to stop the spread of a movie that some saw as the victory of a cultural and sexual revolution and others saw as simply decadent.

“Today we can’t imagine authorities at any level of government -- local, state or federal -- being involved in obscenity prosecutions of this kind,” said Mark Weiner, a constitutional law professor and legal historian at Rutgers-Newark School of Law. “The story of ‘Deep Throat’ is the story of the last gasp of the forces lined up against the cultural and sexual revolution, and it is the advent of the entry of pornography into the mainstream.”

The papers are among 498 pages from the FBI file on Gerard Damiano, who directed the movie and who died in October. Released this month following a Freedom of Information Act request by the Associated Press, they are just a glimpse into Damiano’s roughly 4,800-page file.