Who is willing—or able—to meet the unique demands of performing in pornographic films?  From the actor's point of view, porno is generally not a choice as much as settlement in lieu of legitimate screen and stage roles. While the pseudonymous Harry Reems of “Deep Throat” says he is grateful for the acting opportunities porno has afforded him, he acknowledges he would much rather be performing with his clothes on. Moreover, says Addison Verrill, porno “has never been a good way for actors and actresses to break into legit.”  So producers often have to take actors as they can find them. Leonard Kirtman, a 33‐year‐old film maker whose main field is soft‐core, but who occasionally turns out a hard ‐ core film, relates that several months ago, an unemployed salesman wandered into the office looking for work. “I told him,” Kirtman said, “I didn't have any salesman work but I could offer him a part in a movie.”  “What do I have to do?” the stranger wanted to know.  “Have intercourse,” Kirtman replied (but not in those words).  The man said he was willing, but there was a hitch; he was married. What if his wife recognized him?  “We'll give you a wig,” Kirtman said.  The salesman accepted. However, once on the set with everything focused on him, he found it impossible, despite the best efforts of his leading lady, to achieve an erection. Kirtman disgustedly called the filming off.  The moral of the story seems to be that casts are always available but good professionals, as everywhere, are rare.—R. B.  Terry Levine of Aquarius Film Releasing Inc., the com pany that distributed “Deep Throat” and other leading porno films in the East, says that “sex theaters do better than nonsex.” He estimates that a film generally has to gross at the box office five times its production cost for the producers to begin making a profit. But others in the industry put the multiple at only three. By last estimate, of course, “Deep Throat” had grossed 28 times its production cost in its New York alone.  The $5 price may itself be an important part of the porno‐house image. Early in the run of “Deep Throat,” Bob Sumner, the 26‐year‐old operator of the New Mature World Theater, lowered the admission to $3 and then watched his gate drop because porno fans concluded that hard‐core could not be seen at such a bargain rate.  Perhaps the firmest indication that pornography can be profitable is the assertion of Federal and local officials that the industry is falling increasingly under the domination of the Mafia and has become the mob's fastest growing racket in a decade in the metropolitan area. Lawenforcement officers confirmed recently that they are looking into a number of porno films—including “Deep Throat”—as a part of their ongoing investigations of organized crime in the industry.  No one yet accuses the producers of “Deep Throat” of any wrongdoing, but the film's financial history did take an intriguing turn that remains unexplained. It all began when Gerard Damiano, a droll, stocky film maker with a white‐flecked goatee, rounded up his cast early last year in, Miami. Damiano, who goes under the professional pseudonym of Jerry Gerard, started shooting with a bankroll of $25,000 put up by two partners, Lou Perry and Phil Parisi. The cast included an engaging pornofilm stalwart who goes by the name of Harry Reems and is in particular demand in the industry for his ability to perform virtually tirelessly and on command. Then there was Damiano's particular find, a 21‐year‐old party girl from Bryan, Tex., with Medusa locks and virtuosic talent for fellatio. Damiano gave her the name of Linda Lovelace. With the concurrence of her manager ‐ companion, she was signed to a year's contract at a figure put by Damiano's backers at between $100 and $200 a week. The manager got expenses but no salary.  The film took six days to shoot and another three months to edit and complete. There are different versions of what happened next.  According to Lou Perry, Damiano, the third partner in Film Productions, Inc., asked to sell his share when the film faced legal problems and had not yet begun to make money. “He was compensated what he asked for—$25,000.” Perry said. “He was even asked to stay. This was his decision.”  One of Damiano's acquaintances has a different story, however. According to him, Perry and Parisi, once the film began to draw well at the box office, informed Damiano that the three‐way split was over and they would give him $25,000 for his one–third share of the future profits.  That sounds like a bad deal, I told Damiano as we sat one night with associates in a restaurant on Eighth Avenue.  “I can't talk about it,” Damiano said.  Why?, I wanted to know.  “Look,” he said, “you want me to get both my legs broken?”  When I pressed the question, Damiano just rolled his eyes and said nothing. The chatter around the table had also suddenly stopped.  In any case, some weeks ago, before trial publicity increased the take, Perry would acknowledge that “Deep Throat” had earned the—two —partners well over $500,000 as their share of the gate and, “we figure we might end up with a million.” Not bad for a $25,000 investment.  As intriguing as its financial history, however, is “Deep Throat's” legal history, a saga that serves as a good intro duction to the complexities of the obscenity laws.  Last summer, during the Mayor's campaign to clean up the midtown area, Criminal Court Judge Ernst Rosenberger reviewed “Deep Throat” and, finding it obscene, ordered it seized under a New York Court of Appeals ruling establishing such a procedure as proper. The next day, made aware of a contradictory ruling by the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals that requires an adversary hearing, permitting the exhibitor to defend the film before it can be seized, Judge Rosenberger returned the film. The U.S. Supreme Court will now have to rule on which procedure is proper; meanwhile the run of Throat” continues.  The operator of the New Mature World Theatre, Mature Enterprises, Inc., had meantime been charged with two counts of promoting obscenity, misdemeanors each carrying a $5,000 fine, and the trial began last Dec. 18. The trial was entertaining in itself. It started in a Fifth Avenue screening room where Judge Tyler and court officers viewed the film. Then testimony began, with the defense presenting Arthur Knight, film critic for Saturday Review and professor of film at the University of Southern California. He contended that “Deep Throat” had redeeming social value because it helped people to expand their sexual horizons and particularly emphasized that a woman's sexual gratification was as important as a man's.  Unlike the cruder sexploitation films, Professor Knight testified, “Deep Throat” was not devoted to “deep breathing sex.”  “Didn't you hear the female in the opening scene breathing deeply?” Judge Tyler wanted to know—until the professor explained that he was speaking metaphorically. When the professor used the term “missionary position” to refer to the conventional position for intercourse, Judge Tyler did not understand and the professor had to explain it to him. “It's worthwhile for me, if nothing else happens, to have gotten this education,” the judge commented.  Another witness for the defense, John W. Money, professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University, testified that “Deep Throat,” by showing explicit acts of fellatio, cunnilingus and intercourse, convinced viewers there was nothing shameful about sex and therefore produced saner, healthier attitudes about it. “It puts an eggbeater in people's brains” was the way he expressed it.  Disputing this approach and testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Max Levin, a 71‐year‐old semiretired psychiatrist, said the film was harmful in that it distorted “the true nature of female sexuality.” People with sexual hang‐ups, Dr. Levin testified, might become confused and experience “sexual fantasies of an unhealthy nature.” Dr. Levin, formerly clinical professor of neurology at New York Medical College, ended his crossexamination in a cloud of confusion over whether he was talking about “Deep Throat” or film shorts on the same bill. He entered the theater in the middle of the show, he explained, and couldn't tell where one film ended and the others.  If all of this made for good newspaper copy—and excellent free advertising for the movie—it also seemed to be leading to a judicial precedent.  For it is unusual that the question of “Deep Throat's” obscenity is being debated in a New York City courtroom at all, some legal observers point out. According to the State Penal Law a performance or material is obscene if all of the following three conditions are met: “(a) considered as a whole, its predomminant appeal is to prurient, shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, excretion, sadism or masochism, and (b) it goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in describing or representing such matters, and (c) it is utterly without redeeming social value.”  Needless to say, many of these words—“predominant,” “substantially,” “utterly,” “social value'—have proven hell ishly difficult to apply to given film or book, and city prosecutors have preferred to permit exhibitors of pornography to plead guilty to a charge not having to do with obscenity — disorderly conduct, for example—rather than risk a trial that could result in a ruling that a film of hard‐core pornography is not obscene. In this case they have chosen to charge the corporation, rather than individuals, with promoting obscenity, to allow trial by judge instead of the jury proceeding mandated for charges against individuals. The city apparently fears a sophisticated jury would never rule a film obscene. In fact, a Binghamton, N. Y., jury recently found “Deep Throat” not obscene.  Such legal harassment has not done much, however, to limit the pornographic film business in midtown. Pleading guilty to disorderly conduct doesn't prevent an exhibitor from continuing to show his film, and in any event, his case may not come up until long after the film in question has completed its run and the exhibitor has made his money from it. Having pleaded guilty, the exhibitor has to pay a fine, but he can consider that an acceptable expense, easily absorbed by his profitable operation. In the meantime, Times Square film fare has raunchier.  Conviction on an obscenity charge, however, may result in heavier fines, or even a jail term. So, according to legal observers like Leon Friedman, a lawyer on the staff of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, if Judge Tyler rules that “Deep Throat” is obscene, and if his ruling holds up on appeal, it could in time have a substantial inhibiting effect on midtown exhibitors. In effect, it would establish a legal limit to obscenity at some relatively soft‐core point between your average X‐rated Hollywood film and “Deep Throat,” and the dirty‐movie business would no doubt respect the least for time.  More intriguing, however, would be a ruling by Judge Tyler that “Deep Throat” is not obscene, given the nature of the recent trial. Expert witnesses called to establish that the film has redeeming social value not only cited its artistic qualities, they went on to argue that in these times of general concern about problems of sexuality, the explicit display of sexual intercourse, fallatio and cunnilingus is socially valuable in itself.  For the court to accept this principle would seem to eliminate the possibility of any obscenity finding for any film, however explicit, that depicts and illuminates virtually any aspect of human sexuality.  As the trial proceeded it began to create a rather serious question about its own relevance and that of the Mayor's effort to make war on sexploitation in midtown, for the newspaper publicity resulting from the trial more than doubled the weekly gate receipts of “Deep Throat.” The Mayor and the legitimate theater owners and other businessmen might like to wipe out the pornography industry, but it nevertheless seems to be meeting a substantial public demand.  William G. Bardel, head of the Mayor's Office of Midtown Planning and Development, who is coordinating the city's drive on Times Square sexploitation, believes, or at least hopes, that the current interest in “Deep Throat” is only superficial. “The repetition of oral sex .... I don't think it will create the mass demand for this sort of thing,” he says, with evident distaste.  And, in fact, if porno chic has thus arrived, some patrons still seem to have satisfied their curiosity with their first and last hard‐core film.  One group of three couples in their late 20's I interviewed one night as they emerged from “Deep Throat” acknowledged having been completely turned off by the film.  “I think it was gross,” said one of the group, named William. “Too graphic. I never watch what I do. I was disappointed. It had such a contrary effect.”  “It was like watching cattle,” said another member of the party, Lynn.  And if critics can applaud the fact that a movie like “Deep Throat” is slightly better in quality than more traditional porno movies, it remains true that pornography is at best a limited form of art. Andrew Sarris, for example, complains that for all its comic moments, good color, bouncy music and vivid action, “Deep Throat” still features disengaged sex organs, the human beings attached to them having been lost somewhere on the way to the orgasm.  Also, porno films characteristically are overwhelmingly male chauvinist, catering to male sexual fantasies and apprehensions. The women are submissive, and the men all but inexhaustible. (Except for gay porno films—a flourishing subcategory—male homosexual contact seems to be taboo in hard‐core and softcore films. Lesbian scenes, on the other hand, are common, but for the titillation of men, not women.)  On the other hand, porno producers and operators believe in a promising future, and are backing their belief with hefty investments. One producer and director who goes by the name of Danny Stone recently made a film called “High Rise,” scheduled to open here in coming months, with the unusually high budget for porno of $75,000. And he dreams of producing a quarter‐milliondollar hard‐core film that, he says, will be “the ‘Ben Hur’ of porno.”  Perry and Parisi are going on to shoot “Deep Throat II” in New York Its completion was recently announced in a large ad in Variety: “We're going to make lightning strike twice,” it said. “If you like ‘Throat,’ you'll love “Throat II.”  The ad portrayed Damiano as the director. However, in another intriguing twist, it turns out that the sequel has not been finished at all—although Parisi insists shooting has begun. Moreover, Damiano has nothing to do with it; it is being made by another porno film maker, Joe Sarno. Asked about the peculiarly misleading ad, Parisi explained, “You know how the motion‐picture business is. Sometimes ads tend to be misleading. But there's a reason for it.” The reason, apparently, is that others had their eye on producing a sequel, and Perry and Parisi wanted to establish their claim on “Deep Throat II” with the name that made “Deep Throat” such a success.  The sequel, according to Perry, is budgeted at $70,000. It also stars Linda Lovelace—“in a kind of ‘Perils of Pauline’ plot,” says Perry. For a week's shooting, she gets $1,000 a day plus expenses for her and her manager, plus a percentage of the future box office receipts.  Meanwhile, Perry says, negotiations are under way with a publisher for a “Deep Throat” film book and, he adds, “We're considering releasing the album.” ■  We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports, and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.  A version of this archives appears in print on January 21, 1973, on page 28 of the New York edition with the headline: “Hard‐core” grows fashionable—and very profitable. 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R Blumenthal article on controversial x-rated film Deep Throat, which has grossed over $3.2-million in more than 70 theaters throughout US, is object of obscenity case in NYC and has engendered a kind of 'porno chic' in NYC social circles; D Vandor, Mayor's Office of Midtown Planning and Development pornography checker, says that compared to x-rated films that were made earlier Deep Throat is 'excellent film'; illus of New World Theater, where film is playing and star of film L Lovelace