As we kick off our second season, we're tackling the bizarre and beguiling career of the filmmaker who built one of hardcore cinema's most serious and ambitious bodies of work. A Navy veteran and Queens hairdresser turned director, Gerard Damiano is regrettably best remembered today for the adult film that became a controversial cultural touchstone of the 1970s, Deep Throat (1972).  

But across the so-called "porno chic" boom of that decade and into the '80s, Damiano produced a run of loungey, varied, formally daring films that we talk through in this episode: Devil in Miss Jones (1973), Memories Within Miss Aggie (1974), The Story of Joanna (1975), and Let My Puppets Come (1976), as well as his own... loose "adaptation" of Homer's The Odyssey... 1977's Odyssey: The Ultimate Trip. These films and others feature a recurring troupe of performers — Harry Reems, Georgina Spelvin, Jamie Gillis, Annie Sprinkle — and when seen together suggest the serious-minded aspirations of this remarkable X-rated artist.

In this first episode of the second season, we trace the throughlines of the man’s quixotic oeuvre, still sadly little explored, despite the best efforts of scholars and restorers, outside that one famous, challenging title.

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