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The filmmaking team of Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, who were responsible for the two “Party Monster” movies (the documentary and the docudrama) and “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”–as well as the lesser-known “The Hidden Fuhrer” (about German historian Lothar Machtan’s contention that Hitler was a repressed homosexual)–here turn their attention to Gerard Damiano’s infamous 1972 porno movie, which became a financial and cultural phenomenon while spawning political attacks and prosecutions on grounds of obscenity (though the involvement of organized crime figures in its distribution apparently wasn’t considered significant enough to warrant comparable legal action).

“Inside Deep Throat” combines the equivalent of a “making of” featurette with an account of the movie’s historical impact and a summary of the later careers of its director and stars. In the process it provides excerpts from the original movie, including its most notorious and explicit scene, the one that exhibited Harry Reems’ and Linda Lovelace’s special “talents” in a way that earned the picture both massive public interest and the opprobrium of the custodians of public morality. It gathers observations from a large assembly of participants, associates and commentators, and uses lots of found footage to fill in the historical context and offer a sense of the time. And it bemoans the failure of Damiano’s vision of an ultimate union of sex flicks and mainstream Hollywood fare as the rise of video led to the former’s deterioration into something that abandoned any real narrative component in favor of mere stimulation. (Damiano’s idea isn’t as absurd as it sounds, since at one point in the documentary Peter Bart reveals an association between Paramount Studios and the “adult” film industry, and much later Stanley Kubrick dreamed of making an “artistic” sex film–an idea that was apparently the seed behind his last masterwork, “Eyes Wide Shut.”)

This is an ambitious agenda for a single movie, and Bailey and Barbato pursue it with their characteristic stylistic bravado, going in for jazzy edits, garish colors and splashy montages as well as more sedate interview moments, all accompanied by a bouncy, emphatic score by David Steinberg. The tone is mostly lighthearted, even flippant (as when it focuses on the shrill complaints of Terry Sommer complaining about her husband Arthur’s agreement to be interviewed about the Mafia involvement in the distribution of the movie), although it necessarily touches on some near-tragic elements (like the sad life of Lovelace and the impact of the legal process on Reems). And it’s more than a bit apparent where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie. Even though it would be difficult to paint a positive picture of a moral crusade being led by the likes of Richard Nixon and Charles Keating, Bailey and Barbato go out of their way to make anti-“Throat” representatives like the FBI agent who assembled evidence against the film and the prosecutor who led the team at Reems’ trial (as well as “common people” from newsreel footage) look more than a trifle ridiculous. On the other hand, most of the persons they’ve chosen to include in the interviews tend to celebrate the picture’s impact on the sexual revolution rather than decrying it. And certainly they aren’t anxious to point out something the excerpts from the original movie demonstrate with absolute clarity–the fact that as a film “Deep Throat” was (as a Florida “location manager” recalls in more earthy language, and even Damiano admits in an aside) really lousy–cheap-looking, badly made and brutally unfunny.

Still, though one can question the levity of approach and the obvious lack of balance in “Inside Deep Throat,” you still have to admit that Bailey and Barbato are focusing on a significant, if not especially savory, moment in American cultural history, and they’ve certainly tracked down plenty of witnesses to it and people willing to comment on it. The result is a documentary which, while hardly perfect, is a lot better than the movie it’s about.

One further note: “Inside Deep Throat” represents one of the weirdest Hollywood marriages of recent memory, with Bailey and Barbato joined as producers by the prolific Brian Grazer of Imagine Entertainment, who’s a regular partner on Ron Howard’s movies and is involved, among other things, with the live-action adaptations of the Dr. Seuss books. (It’s also being distributed by Universal with an NC-17 rating.) While it might be argued that the Mike Myers version of “The Cat in the Cat” was, in its peculiar way, more obscene than anything in “Deep Throat,” the assemblage is an unusual one–sort of like a collaboration between Jerry Falwell and Larry Flynt.