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Memoirs From a Picture Show is a semi-regular column from the Merry-Go-Round staff chronicling memories, miracles, and anomalies from our time spent in cinemas around the globe. You’ve read about movies; now it’s time to read about seeing those movies in theaters.
“You’re the only asshole!” someone from within the darkened theater loudly proclaimed mid-movie.
For anyone who has ever been to the New Beverly, Quinten Tarantino’s famed repertory theater in Los Angeles, audible audience murmuring during a film would come as a shock—and given the staff’s well-known “no phones, no talking” policy, it would most certainly be followed by some swift justice. But this wasn’t a normal rep screening, and the clarity with which those four words hung in the air was bookended by hushed whispers from the staff who were, for a third time, trying to get a man in the second row to (in the words of those trying to pile on) “shut the fuck up.”
But, again, this wasn’t a normal screening.
All February long, the New Beverly has been paying tribute to its ‘70s roots when it went by the Eros. A porno theater from 1970 to 1977, they’ve been cheekily showcasing a wide range of erotic films from mainstream hits (CALIGULA, ARABIAN NIGHTS) to cult classics (FLESH GORDON, VIXEN!), sexploitation to exotica, and everything in between. Tonight was the final form of the theater’s thesis, fully turning into a proper porno theater for two nights with a controversial 18+ double feature of 1972’s DEEP THROAT and 1975’s HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY.
It was the most evil evening at the movies I’ve ever experienced.
On announcement, the Eros throwback became a divisive diversion from the New Beverly’s normal programming—one that split online film bros. Some (rightly) saw the slate as a rare opportunity to see many films that would never get a proper screening in the year 2026, while others disappointingly wished we could get another annual helping of HEAT, POINT BREAK, and RONIN. And unfortunately for those on the fence, the recently announced March calendar has revealed a continued second round of Eros programming, albeit one with a few more immediately recognizable titles in the mix.
But DEEP THROAT and HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY are tigers of different stripes.
DEEP THROAT’s nearly 60-year history as the most famous porno film next to 1978’s DEBBIE DOES DALLAS is a tragic and sordid one—any quick search of it will inevitably highlight its star, Linda Lovelace, denouncing the film in her 1980 book Ordeal, where she writes of her experience and her ex-husband Chuck Traynor: “If you watch the movie, you are watching me get raped.” And yet that hasn’t stopped it from being a historical footnote now spanning several generations, from its passing inclusion in the Watergate scandal, to its likely tethers to being a money laundering front by the mob, to its central role bringing pornography into the mainstream. Just a few years ago, it was re-released for the 50th anniversary—it was noted before the screening that the 35mm print we were watching was essentially “brand new.”
Lovelace’s denouncement of the movie made its inclusion in the programming an immediate eyebrow-raiser—roughly a week after the New Beverly announced the slate on social media, a Change.org petition launched in an attempt to get the theater to stop it from screening. (It currently sits at just over 2,000 signatures.) And as baffling as its booking was, pairing it with HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY was equally confounding; it’s a film that (to my knowledge) doesn’t have the behind-the-scenes tragedy of DEEP THROAT, but is nonetheless a rape fantasy about a white virgin who is abducted by a group of Black militants eager to make an example of her. It’s a wicked double feature. Conflating alleged on-camera rape with twisted, fetishized fictional rape is morally reprehensible, bordering on indefensible.
And yet, I needed to see some kind of defense. I had too many questions.
How would the New Beverly, who give a precursory introduction to every movie they screen, address this? Would they ignore it? Who spends their Saturday night going to see these movies? Would the theater be empty? Would it be full? Which of those two things would be worse? Would seeing both movies for the first time, on the big screen, prove to be valuable in a way that didn’t immediately scan on paper?
Upon my arrival to the New Beverly, I was greeted to the loud chanting of young women protesting outside, signs and all. Somewhere between eight and 10 voices were yelling, “Justice for Lovelace,” among other pointed call-outs. A woman ahead of me walking to the box office got to the ticket scanner and then immediately walked back the direction she came—waving off the protesters to some applause. And like crossing a moral picket line, I pulled out my phone and slunk into the theater, their loud yelling quieting as the glass door closed behind me.
Seeing DEEP THROAT was never going to feel good—it was a movie I’d avoided watching for my whole life, but the idea of seeing it under this strange context was intriguing. Still, I’d spent most of the 24 hours leading up to the screening convincing myself the anthropological reasons for going (and agreeing to write this piece) were justified, and I clung to the notebook I’d brought as if to try and signal that I had some higher calling for being there (this website, I guess) and that I didn’t agree with what was happening. The song playing in the theater when I walked in was “Miss Jones Comes Home,” from the 1973 porno THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES, which was about as ominous a piece of music as you could imagine under the circumstances.
There was plenty of chatter about the protesters leading up to the movie—it frankly would’ve been strange if there hadn’t been. But of course, this chatter was dismissive. A man in his mid-50s in the concessions line remarked that he “grew up Catholic” and “has guilt doing about anything” when discussing it with the female cashiers. Others in the theater were quick to shut down whatever failed guilt the protests were meant to have—”They tried to claim we were on the level of Jeffrey Epstein” one person contemptuously spewed.
But the protesters cleared up one question I had going in: Everyone here knew what they were about to watch. There would be no way to view DEEP THROAT and not know, beyond its carefree ‘70s porno music and seemingly detached depiction of sex, what was happening on the other side of the camera. If you didn’t know before, you damn well knew now.
And then it started.
A New Beverly staff member came up to introduce the movie and there was zero mention of any production details, any post-script or asterisks surrounding its release, or even Lovelace’s name. What was a unique framing opportunity by the theater to justify the seemingly unjustifiable was simply ignored, full-on sending us into a pre-show package that included Guido Manuli’s 1981 cartoon short ERECTION and trailers for other pornos including 1978’s THE CHINA CAT and 1983’s UP ‘N’ COMING.
As the film played, I couldn’t help but be in awe of what was happening. Ironically, I live a 60-second drive away from Los Angeles’s last remaining porno theater, but I myself have never been to one. To see that much graphic sex on that big a screen, surrounded by a 2/3rds-filled theater of strangers, was as surreal as I could’ve imagined—the last time I watched porn with other people was the first time I’d ever seen porn, and it was certainly under much more innocent, adolescent circumstances.
And DEEP THROAT, like plenty of pornography from that time, is filled with off-handed jokes and an over-the-top tone that is doing its damndest to make you forget about Lovelace, her experience in the industry, and the protesters outside. Through it all I could only grimace, trying to sort out what the experience even was. This is a film whose loose “plot” is about a woman who is turned off from sex. Surely the wicked irony of that wasn’t lost on people, right?
Throughout DEEP THROAT there was the occasional “Woo!” from the audience, and plenty of laughs. The theater gave it a round of applause when it ended.
The same could not be said for HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY, where the fictionalized framing and depiction of rape was met with an eerie silence for those of us that stayed for the second showing. Beyond its retrospectively remarkable soundtrack and the fact it was a rare ‘70s porno directed by a woman, the rape fantasy played coldly and clinically—while DEEP THROAT’s tone allowed it to be a crowd-pleaser despite the behind-the-scenes assault, HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY is bleak through and through. At one point, one of the actresses gets hit, and the woman a few seats down from me yelped; the uneasiness felt palpable throughout the whole hour.
My skin was crawling by the final moments of the double feature. HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY ends with a big pop—as Shirley White’s jealous lover character Jody gets blasted with a shotgun after threatening to cut off Debby’s (Lisa Baker) tit with a knife. After 40 straight minutes mixing surreal sexual violence and some of the silliest slow-motion cum shots you’ve ever seen, the audience was ready to laugh and applaud at anything.
Throughout HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY, be it as a way to try and ignore what was playing out on screen or just a genuine processing of the evening, I kept returning to the person who had yelled, “You’re the only asshole!” to the man talking through DEEP THROAT.
At the intermission break between the two movies, the New Beverly staff had finally succeeded in kicking him out. A skinhead’y Orange County guy if I’ve ever seen one, he and his wife, both in their mid-to-late-40s, made a scene about being escorted out of the theater.
“We were having fun, isn’t that why we’re all here,” the woman said, trying to gain some kind of support from an unwavering audience of cinephiles as she exited the row.
“It’s not a serious porno film,” the man adds.
I was curious if they would’ve stayed for HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY if their chatty, fun time would’ve continued. But I was equally curious and disheartened at how they’d reckoned with the evening. Certainly we were all culpable in showing up and taking a seat, but I have to think I wasn’t the only person doing so out of some kind of fucked-up curiosity. These two were clearly here for fun—to get their kicks watching a seminal piece of adult filmmaking, context be damned.
I don’t know why the New Beverly programmed that. I don’t know why I went. To say I did, I guess.
But I’m not sure the talking man was the only asshole. I think we all were.
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