Portrait“50 Years of ‘Deep Throat’ Porn” (3/6). Dreaming of playing Shakespeare, but a poor actor, Harry Reems became a pillar of New York porn cinema after his role as a doctor in “Deep Throat” in 1972. However, he was not scheduled for the casting of a film that will take him to court.
“I looked through the peephole and saw armed men at my door. » On July 7, 1974, an FBI raid woke up Herbert Streicher, better known to the public under the pseudonym of Harry Reems, at his New York home. Strange name. It was coined two years earlier by filmmaker Gerard Damiano while working on the credits for his film Deep Throator Deep Throat in French. A “Porn name”, as the Anglo-Saxons say, for its male star. Either “Harry females” or “women’s zone”.
It’s all the more nerd to pass to posterity under this nickname since he was originally recruited in this film not to play, but as a production assistant or lighting assistant. Being a porn actor is much better paid, he knows this for having participated in hundreds of clandestine film shoots in New York, but, somewhat jaded and lonely, he begins at 25 a reconversion that he wants discreet – behind the camera so.
“I dreamed of a period of abstinence and a love story”, he will say. In this blue flower climate, Harry Reems traveled from New York to Miami in January 1972 at the wheel of a blue Cadillac, also belonging to Gerard Damiano (whom he considered a friend) and whose trunk was loaded with cinema equipment. The same car lead actress Linda Lovelace drives for the first (quite long) minutes of the film. On site, the actors, supposedly selected in Florida, do not show up. Damiano is desperate. Helpful, Harry agrees to resume at short notice the main role, that of the good doctor Young. The acting talent of Harry Reems has not left an indelible mark in the collective memory. Some evoke his borrowings from Groucho Marx, starting with a sapper mustache which became his trademark; others point to certain limits in his dramatic art, closer to Benny Hill than to Peter Sellers.
$500 daily fee
It is all the drama of his life, because he believes he has a vocation for the theater. After an ordinary schooling and an adolescence darkened by the illness of his father, he leads the bohemian life common to hundreds of other aspiring actors in New York. He pulls the devil by the tail to perform Shakespeare in smoky cafe back rooms. A few television commercials make him live for a while. Burlesque shows too. But his mother disapproves of his infatuation. It is because he would not have dared to admit to her that he is being sued for bad checks that he is taking part in a first porn shoot. His debt amounts to 1,800 dollars. A good friend tells him that he can earn 75 a day if he manages to have sex in front of a camera. The calculation is quickly done. As Linda Lovelace’s ex-husband Chuck Traynor will sum it up with his outspokenness, “It’s still better than shoveling cement”.
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