SNAPSHOT
The life of one of the most infamous women in early ’70s America gets a dramatization in this offbeat period biopic from co-directors Jeffrey Friedman and Robert Epstein. In the Florida suburbs, circa 1970, Linda Boreman (Amanda Seyfried) is an ordinary and unremarkable young woman who moved back in with her parents (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) a year or so earlier, following an unplanned pregnancy.One night on the town, she crosses paths with Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard) a local bar and restaurant owner who sees Linda as an opportunity; he soon wins her over as a girlfriend, and not long after, the two are married. Within a couple of years, Chuck shoots a private stag film of Linda performing oral sex on a partner, and decides to show it to Gerry Damiano (Hank Azaria), an up-and-coming porn director with ties to the Mafia. Damiano is so impressed by the footage that he immediately decides to cast Linda in his new picture, the hardcore comedy Deep Throat, which becomes the single most lucrative adult film of all time and turns the young woman — renamed Linda Lovelace — into a household name.
The film then flashes forward to six years later, when Linda authors a shocking tell-all book about what really happened when the cameras weren’t rolling; she describes the sadistic abuse that she endured at the hands of Traynor and a series of increasingly futile attempts to escape from his clutches, and claims that she was coerced to appear in the movie. The media then turns Lovelace — who became a Long Island housewife named Linda Marciano — into a feminist icon and a crusader against domestic violence and the enslavement of the porn industry. (source: Nathan Southern, Rovi via fandango.com)
Doing for the 1970s porno scene what Boogie Nights did for that of the 1980s (although the thematic similarities end with their coverage of the porn industry essentially), but with far more shaggy mustaches and flares big enough to build a house on, Lovelace, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, tells the story of Londa Boreman, a good suburban girl who, as Linda Lovelace, was equally celebrated and reviled as the face of sexual liberation.
But behind the facade of the sexually-liberated, giddily-happy ingenue whose ferocious love affair with the world’s media was second only to her onscreen sexual exploits, was a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with an abusive, controlling husband who used her as a means to a lucrative end, a story recounted in 1980 in a book entitled appropriately enough Ordeal.
Lovelace, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2013, tells both sides of the story with a dizzying array of Hollywood’s finest including Amanda Siegfried in the title role, Peter Skarsgaard as Chuck Traynor, and Sharon Stone as her disciplinarian mother, bringing the tortured tale of Linda Boreman to life for a whole new generation.
Lovelace opens in USA in limited release on 9 August 2013 and UK on 23 August. No opening date is set for Australia at this time (although the movie was shown on 10 June this year at the Sydney Film Festival).