Six Feet Deep Throat

Harry Reems, who in 1972 had the most famous penis in the United States, has died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 65. The prolific and prodigious porn star appeared in more than 100 films, none more famous than Deep Throat, the first porn movie to escape dark sticky theaters and become part of the national conversation. Reems played Dr. Young, who found an anatomical quirk in Linda Lovelace’s character that placed her G-spot in her throat, making oral sex much more pleasurable. No woman since has fallen for that one. Reems’ thick black mustache and shirts open to the navel to reveal a Jamie Farr-like coating of hair became the archetype for what porn stars are supposed to look like. The film grossed more than $600 million for the Colombo crime family. Reems, originally hired as the lighting director and pressed into service when the original leading man didn’t show, got $250 and was hit with a federal lawsuit. After leaving the biz, Reems got his real estate license, but he didn’t consider the career change to be that significant: “I’m still selling dirt,” he said.

 

 

Cora-flat-line

Sexy Cora, 2010’s sexiest German amateur porn star, has gone tits up at the age of 23 after a heart attack during her 6th boob job. Discovered as a cast member of the 10th season of Big Brother Germany, Cora was grateful for the European approach to health care having been hospitalized in 2009 after trying to go down in history by breaking the world record for the number of fellatios performed in one day. She was trying for 200 men but choked, failing to get past 75, much to the disappointment of the man from the Guinness Book of World Records.

I Never Thought This Could Happen to Me…

Bob Guccione, who loved the naked ladies, but lacked Hugh Hefner’s fashion sense and Larry Flynt’s passion for the Constitution, has died of cancer at the age of 79. Once upon a time boys and girls, you needed $2.95 and a cashier willing to look the other way in order to see boobies; now you need Google. In that climate, Guccione founded Penthouse and made a fortune, keeping himself in the finest gold chains and unbuttoned silk shirts. Even if you can’t buy class, you can buy art, and Guccione amassed an art collection replete with Degas, Renoir, Picasso, El Greco, Dalí, Matisse, Van Gogh and Chagall appraised at more than $50 million. Guccione made Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America, a household name with a photo spread that cost her her crown in 1984 and yielded the publication’s best-selling issue. When his ideas ventured outside the sock drawer, he was generally less successful. He sank $200 million into a failed Atlantic City casino, lost another $17 million trying to develop a nuclear reactor, and overestimated the market for a pornographic, blood-soaked history lesson with the John Gielgud rompCaligula. As pro bono porn proliferated on the Internet, Penthouse’s performance plateaued, then plummeted. Bankruptcy, resignation, foreclosure, death.

R.I.P. Dr. Butts

(Kudos for the headline and the heads up to Terry)
Jamie Gillis, one of porn’s most enthusiastic and gifted thespians, has died of cancer at the age of 66. Trained for the stage in New York, Gillis, aka The Hebrew Hammer, aka Buster Hymen, aka Jamie Rugman, found his talents lay elsewhere, and began doing live sex shows while reading poetry and reciting Shakespeare so the shows would be considered socially redeeming and would not be raided by the police. Earning a reputation as “very wild and horny,” or more eloquently “his range [was] elastic, his performances visceral. He effortlessly conveyed gravitas and ease onscreen,” he starred in more than 400 films in the 1970s and 1980s, including Mummy Dearest, Last Rumba in Paris, Terms of Endowment, Cherry-etts for Hire, For Your Thighs Only, Golden Girls: The Movie, On Golden Blonde, Wanda Whips Wall Street (aka Stocks and Blondes), Carnal Encounters of the Barest Kind, Invasion of the Love Drones, and Wine Me, Dine Me, 69 Me. His On the Prowl series of films inspired the On the Lookout scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights.

Behind the Green Grass

(Props to Joe)

Or

99 44/100% Dead

(Further fanfare for Joe)

Marilyn Chambers, the best advertisement ever for Ivory Snow, has died at the age of 56. No cause of death has been identified, but she was known to have survived several thousand strokes. After some time as a model, she got a small part in The Owl and the Pussycat, which gave her an insatiable appetite for acting. She would see a lot more birds and kitties, but there would be no more small parts in her career. She was a pioneer, introducing the era of pube-free porn as one of the first actresses to go hairless, the better to show off her lady bits. She enjoyed widespread fame with her first feature, Behind the Green Door, as a wholesome woman kidnapped into an Eyes Wide Shut-like party, without the midget. She thought this might open the door for mainstream films, a tragic misuse of her lack of a gag reflex, but the only doors that getting passed around on-screen like a doobie in the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert opened were on the backs of vans. She was never able to penetrate Hollywood the same way she got… never mind. In an ironic twist, she was found naked and alone in a mobile home, the same way most of her fans enjoyed her career.

Six Feet Deep Throat

Deep Throat auteur Gerald Damiano will put his experience at filling holes to use one last time after his death at the age of 80. The titillating film will go down as one of the most bankable adult films of all time, grossing more than $600 million to date with more to come, and thrust pornography into the public eye. Deep Throat was widely condemned by religious groups and feminists, a stroke of good fortune that amounted to scads of free publicity helping the film get over the hump of the initial tawdry reputation. In the film, Linda Lovelace plays a woman who, through “an eccentricity of her anatomy finds oral sex more gratifying than conventional intercourse.” Damiano got cocky following the success of Deep Throat, but this film represented the climax of his career, and his later films such as The Devil in Miss Jones and Memories Within Miss Aggie failed to rise to the same stature. He hung around the industry for another two decades, but for a director used to riding on top, directing lesser films like Young Girls in Tight Jeans, was another turn of the screw. A hairdresser before becoming a director, Damiano said this experience enabled him to bone up on how to work with women, a skill that served him well in his later career.