The movie cost $25,000 to make. The female and male leads were paid $1,200 and $250, respectively. The movie was ultimately banned in 23 states yet grossed $600 million. More important, it was part of a cultural earthquake.

That movie was Deep Throat and its history and impact are explored in Inside Deep Throat, a documentary now out on DVD. Deep Throat was a porn sensation that not only brought the "adult film" industry into the mainstream but sparked dozens of prosecutions and helped contribute to a debate over pornography that continues to this day.

Although rated NC-17, don't plan on picking up the DVD if your interest is solely seeing the sexual acts that gave rise to the prosecutions or the filming of those acts. Sure, the most notable scene and others are there as they are necessary to tell the story. But the focus here is to put the movie in cultural and historical perspective. Ultimately, Inside Deep Throat does not go quite deep enough, skimming over various aspects of the story and the people involved. It is, though, a fairly satisfying assessment of the disproportionate impact of a porn film of which even the director says, "I don't think it's a good movie."

For those unfamiliar with the premise, Deep Throat was predicated on a woman's unique medical problem — her clitoris was in her throat. As a result, performing oral sex was the only way she could gain sexual satisfaction. Suffice it to say that the film's title reflects the extent of immersion during the act of fellatio.

Star Linda Lovelace was a newcomer to the adult film industry and her husband, Chuck Traynor, arranged a "screen test" with Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano. Damiano says that "what she was doing was so unique that I could build a whole film around it." Male lead Harry Reems originally wasn't hired to "act" in the movie. Instead, he started out as a production assistant. When the movie they starred in together premiered in Times Square in June 1972, it opened a major chapter in the culture wars.

Inside Deep Throat sets the stage for that battle by briefly looking at the state of the adult film industry in the U.S. prior to this movie. It also tells of the the making of the movie, interviewing not only Damiano and Reems but various others involved in the production and filming. It spends most of its time on the impact of the movie on the director and stars and American culture.

Cultural impact? The movie led even the mainstream New York Times to run an article called "Porn Chic." That generated even greater audiences and the movie became a topic of references and jokes on late night talk shows. Repeated seizures of the movie across the country (with a New York judge pronouncing it "a nadir of decadence") generated further buzz. Some of those prosecutions are the subject of separate bonus features on the DVD. The movie so permeated American culture that the name would be given a major newspaper source in the Watergate investigation of the same era, as reporter Carl Bernstein recounts in an interview. The documentary also has such cultural icons as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal opining on the movie and its impact.