HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017194.jpg

4.2.12 WC: 191694 In order to get out of the conspiracy, according to the government, Reems was obliged “to take up affirmative actions to defeat and destroy the conspiracy.” But what could Reems have done? He could not have “exposed” the crime, as one might expose a secret conspiracy, since everyone knew that Deep Throat was being distributed throughout the world. He could not have prevented the distribution and exhibition of the film, since he retained no legal rights to it. The prosecutor apparently expected him to physically destroy the thousands of prints of Deep Throat that were then in theaters and on video. The jury, selected from residents of Memphis, a city proud of being called “the buckle of the Bible Belt,” convicted Reems and his co-conspirators and Harry went off in search of an appellate lawyer. Because of my involvement in the I Am Curious Yellow case, he called me. When we first met, Reems described himself to me as “a nice Jewish boy earning his livelihood by doing what lots of people would pay to do.” He was born in Scarsdale, New York, with the name Herbert Streicker, attended the University of Pittsburgh, dropped out, joined the Marines, and later set out to become a stage actor. He had performed with the La Mama troupe, the New York Theater Ensemble, and the National Shakespeare Company in New York City. He had even done a Wheaties commercial. During Christmas of 1969, “when things got rough and there was no work around...,a fellow said he knew where I could make $75 doing a stag film.” He nervously accepted and reported for work. His two female costars, both doctoral students in sociology at NYU, put him at ease, and he completed several “loops.” Streicher was successful, not so much because of his looks or size, but rather because of his extraordinary ability to perform repeatedly on cue. In a business where time is money and the major cause of delay is male incapacity, a porno actor capable of filming several sequences in one day’s shooting is in demand. Streicker told me how he ended up as the male star of Deep Throat. He had been hired—at $150 per day—as a sound and lighting technician for a sex film being shot near Miami, Florida, in January 1972. When the original male lead failed to appear, the director, Gerard Damiano, asked Streicker to fill in—at a $50 cut in salary. Since it took only one day to shoot the film’s sex shots, he earned only $100 for his performance. His contract did not call for royalties. When the filming was completed, Streicker’s role in the enterprise was over: he did not participate in the editing or distribution of the film—not to mention its enormous profits. Even his stage name “Harry Reems’—with some vague sexual allusion in mind—was picked by the director, without even consulting Streicker. He was pleased, of course, that the film was well-received and widely shown. He retained “Harry Reems” as his professional name, and performed in several other sex films. But his role in Deep Throat was over, or so he thought, until he was arrested two years later in his Greenwich Village apartment. An FBI agent handed him a warrant requiring his presence in Memphis, Tennessee, a city that Streicker had never even visited. The prosecuting attorney was a young Bible Belt fundamentalist named Larry Parrish. (The names of all the participants sounded like puns: Reems, Streicker, Lovelace, Parrish.) Parrish was dubbed by the press as “Mr. Clean,” “The Memphis Heat,” and “the Memphis Smut Raker.” A born-again Christian, and an elder in the First Evangelical Church, Parrish believed that pornography was the bane of modern America. He once told a reporter, “I’d rather see dope on the streets than these movies,” explaining that drugs could be cleansed from the body, but pornography’s damage was “permanent.” When asked why be became a prosecutor, Parrish cited 107 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017194