The marketing for Lovelace is kind of hard to swallow

Serious, harrowing drama it may be, but you can guarantee that the marketing bods behind the promotional campaign for Lovelace went through two dozen blowjob gags before finding one that they thought they could get away with.

Here's the thing: Lovelace is an easy sell. It’s about a porn actress famous for giving blowjobs. You barely need to have much more plot than that to guarantee some degree of success because the titillating marketing materials filled with double entendres and provocative poses practically take care of themselves.

Except, Lovelace is a film that goes beyond the camp, gigglesome veneer of innuendo and explores the genuinely horrific ordeal of an actress abused by her husband-cum-manager (please forgive the phrase) and exploited by a seedy porn industry as a whole.

It is not a date night film.

But we're left with a marketing department that desperately wants to sell the film based on imagination-capturing puns that go against the whole ethos of the film they are trying promote. This culminated in a screening invitation I received last week to view the original 'uncut' release of Deep Throat – complete with champagne reception and after party – "to coincide with the nationwide release of the Linda Lovelace biopic". That is a screening of a porn film that is NOT shown in a favourable light within the very same biopic.

So, knowing the story that the film tells, you have to wonder how it ended up with the tagline "The truth goes deeper than you think". It seems a little – for want of better words – in bad taste, doesn't it?

But then, perhaps that shows some self-restraint? You only have to hover your mouse over the image below to see the kind of poster that the studio wishes they could put out to sell the film:



Promotional flavoured condoms are probably being posted out as we speak.