The poster for Deep Throat, the controversial film that ushered in the era of so-called “porno chic” in 1972, memorably asked this question: “How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle?” Sometimes, she has to go all the way down to Florida, specifically Miami and Fort Lauderdale. That’s where the groundbreaking feature was shot, namely because director Gerard Damiano wanted to get the heck out of New York one frigid January, and he’d heard that Florida was the perfect place to film. The Rialto Report, those tireless chroniclers of the vintage porn scene, recently dispatched investigator April Hall to the Sunshine State to see how the locations for the film have held up over the course of 43 years. (NSFW, obviously.)
As the article points out, finding agreeable locations in Florida proved to be a struggle for the Deep Throat crew, and Damiano often had to improvise when filming sites fell through on him. Luckily, the owner of the motel where the cast and crew were staying proved to be amenable, so part of the movie was shot there. That particular institution, Miami’s Voyager Congress Inn, is no longer there; the site is now occupied by a campus of (no kidding) Johnson & Wales University. But the motel pool used by star Linda Lovelace in the movie? Still there and still in use. A bridge prominently in the film has also not changed much since the Nixon years. And the Fort Lauderdale house that served as the setting for an orgy scene has been greatly remodeled but is, according to April Hall, “still recognizable.” The current owners have even put up a sign declaring the driveway to be “2616 Lovelace Place.”
Perhaps most interesting of all is the sad fate of a beautiful mansion once owned by an eccentric Hungarian playboy named Baron Joseph “Sepy” De Bicske Dobronyi, who agreed to let his Coconut Grove estate serve as the filming location for several key Deep Throat sequences, including the famous “doctor’s office” scene between Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. The place went on the market a few years ago and has since fallen into shameful disrepair. As The Rialto Report snapped some pictures of the place, it was just about to be torn down. A landmark in adult entertainment is about to be lost forever, but at least it was documented here.