Coming on the heels of the death last month of '70s Golden Age director Henri Pachard is today's news about Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano, who died over the weekend of complications of a stroke.

Damiano was an old-school filmmaker, a hairdresser who wanted to make movies and got the luckiest break of his life when he met Linda Lovelace. He went home, wrote Deep Throat to take full advantage of her at-the-time unique talent, shot the movie in six days in Miami and made history.

Deep Throat is still a fun movie to watch, clocking in at a tidy 62 minutes, with a clever joke-filled script, original music and the still-impressive sight of Linda Lovelace's groundbreaking demonstration of her sexual technique.

I remember a screening of Deep Throat a few years ago at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in West Hollywood. Arrow Productions had rented the theater and ran the movie for a mostly-industry audience. I was surprised to find that all the performers who had come that night had never seen a porn movie on a big screen before; they were accustomed to all-sex videos watched at home. The acting, jokes, music and location shooting were all things they were not used to seeing in porn.

Times change, and one would be a fool to stand in front of the future and say "Stop!" But one would also be a fool to not look back and appreciate what went before. The premiere of Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge at a downtown movie palace a few months ago was a great example of what porn movies used to be like, and mainstream filmgoing still is: a shared experience in a big room full of strangers.

Directors like Pachard and Damiano were veterans of those days, when people made films, with plots, acting — and, yes, sex — in them. There's a reason that veteran performers like Herschel Savage, Ron Jeremy and Mike Horner can act: They had to.