If anything at all should be understood from the outset about Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, it is that, for him, nothing is sacred or beyond the bounds of ridicule. Nothing.
A Hustler cover of a naked woman being fed head-first into a meat grinder, adorned with the stamp "Grade A Pink," announcing that the magazine would no longer treat its women like meat. A cartoon of Santa Claus holding a large, erect penis in front of Mrs. Claus with the caption: "I guess this is what I have to Ho Ho Ho about." Another of Dorothy performing fellatio on the Tin Man.
Taste, as Flynt will readily admit, is not his strong suit. "I'm not on any kind of quest for respectability," Flynt explained on "Larry King Live" earlier this month. "I know I'm in the minority-it would frighten me to death if the majority started agreeing with me." Larry Flynt's is the tale of a man who exemplifies the raunchy, the tasteless and always the irreverent-along the way he established a multi-million dollar pornography publishing empire, was prosecuted on obscenity charges, became paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet from a crazed would-be assassin, lost his wife and true love to AIDS and earned a monumental First Amendment victory in the Supreme Court.
It is the tale so artfully chronicled in Academy-Award winning director Milos Forman's (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus) stirring new movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt. The film has drawn praise both for its portrayal of the constitutional battles that marked a significant part of Flynt's life and stinging criticism for what many believe is simply the deification of a misogynistic sleaze merchant. Regardless, it has been the most talked about movie of the season-after all, as Flynt (Woody Harrelson) remarks during one his typically animated and outrageous episodes in court, "Opinions are like assholes-everybody has one."
Indeed, virtually everybody seems to have an opinion of Larry Flynt and, for a large number of people, it is that Flynt is an asshole. And in this country, where justice is supposedly blind, the protection of constitutional rights extends to even the assholes-a concept that, like the contents of Hustler, causes many Americans to cringe. In the case of Larry Flynt, Lady Justice removed her blindfold, looked at Hustler and didn't care for what she saw.
Following his first arrest (on essentially groundless pandering and organized crime charges), Flynt concedes, "The only thing I'm guilty of is bad taste." The People vs. Larry Flynt is, above all else, the story of a man who fought for the right to have bad taste-a fight with significant personal and professional stakes.
As quickly as Flynt achieves success in the pornography industry, he is targeted by, among others, the self-righteously pious Charles Keating, leader of the Citizens for Decency and a member of President Richard Nixon's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. That Keating (James Cromwell) is later indicted as a principal figure in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Scandal, which cost American taxpayers more than $2 billion, provides deliciously ironic fodder for Forman. Keating's anti-porn crusade landed Flynt in court in 1977, facing those trumped-up charges and the overeager prosecution of Simon Leis, woefully overacted by Democratic political strategist James Carville. Flynt was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison-Flynt himself cameos as the judge who hands down the punishment-though the verdict was immediately overturned on appeal.
After his release from prison, Flynt addresses a relatively sparse crowd at an Americans for a Free Press rally. In one of the film's most important exchanges, Jimmy Flynt (Larry's younger brother played by Harrelson's real life brother, Brett Harrelson) remarks to Larry about how great it is that he is there to speak. Replies the elder Flynt, "You idiot, Americans for a Free Press is me-who do you think's paying for all this?!" (Flynt's words gain particular poignancy in the next scene, in which Flynt barks to a reporter, "Why do I have to go to jail to protect your freedom?!") Alternating scenes of sex and war on a screen behind him, Flynt asks which of the two is more obscene: "For those who think the vagina is obscene, don't complain to me-complain to the manufacturer," he declares.
To publish photo spreads of naked women and crude cartoons, as Flynt quickly realizes, carries a very real risk. When he founded Hustler, Flynt did not set out to be the poster boy for free press-exposing breasts and vaginas were far and away his primary concern. Indeed, it was Keating and his ilk, the self-anointed vanguard of suitable morality, whose censorship efforts drove Flynt to forge an unlikely, yet imperative, alliance with the First Amendment.
Both the movie and the actors' performances are compelling because Larry Flynt's saga is compelling. Harrelson, whose Flynt character emanates a perversely magnetic persona, delivers an appropriately flamboyant performance. Courtney Love, in an impressive big screen debut, is particularly appealing as Flynt's wife and soulmate Althea Leasure, while Edward Norton portrays Alan Isaacman, Flynt's attorney, with a youthful modesty. Yet any time history meets Hollywood, something-usually the history-has to give. The People vs. Larry Flynt is no exception. Flynt's brief episode as a born-again Christian-in which his articulated notion of divinely-inspired pornography featured "Adam and Eve getting it on in the Garden of Eden"-should have been probed more thoroughly. (Flynt becomes an avowed atheist following his paralysis, prompting one of the movie's most memorable lines, from Althea, "The reign of Christian terror at this magazine is over-we're smut peddlers again, we're going back to our roots, we are porn again.")
In fact, Hustler targets pointed attacks against organized religion and, in particular, television evangelists, rife with hypocrisy, who prostitute religion for profit and decry pornography as immoral literature of the devil. The inflated pontifications of the Rev. Jerry Falwell (played with a remarkable likeness by Richard Paul) provide ample grist for Flynt's mill-most famously in a Hustler parody of a liquor ad depicting Falwell's "first time" as drunken, incestuous sex with his mother in an outhouse (when an adviser of Falwell is first shown the ad, he remarks smugly that the Reverend would never endorse a liquor product). Falwell sued to recover damages for libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost on the former claim and was awarded $200,000 in damages on the latter. In its portrayal of this legal episode, the movie does well to inject Flynt's hilarious courtroom irreverence toward the Reverend-like deliberately referring to Falwell as "Fartwell," or announcing that he has photos of Falwell engaged in fellatio with a goat-but still maintain an appreciation of the considerable gravity and constitutional implications of the case.
On another level, Forman captures the personal desperation descending on Flynt the human being, a side seemingly void in a man so sacrilegious and perverse. Already robbed of his manhood (in the most literal sense), Flynt suffers tremendously as he witnesses the AIDS-stricken Althea deteriorate before his eyes-as well as a face-the-wrath-of-hellfire-and-damnation sermon from Falwell condemning AIDS as a plague and a violation of moral law. To preserve his livelihood, and more importantly Althea's memory, Flynt appealed the Falwell verdict to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision (Hustler Magazine vs. Falwell, 1988), the nation's highest court ruled in favor of Hustler, holding that the ad parody was clearly satirical and that, as a result, Falwell's status as a public figure precluded him from collecting damages under the emotional distress claim.
Flynt's victory was, more than anything else, a resounding victory for the First Amendment: the right to ridicule public figures without the fear of legal reproach. The movie, contrary to feminist Gloria Steinem's assertions penned in a New York Times column earlier this month, does not lionize Flynt but rather bestows hero status, and quite rightfully, on the sanctity of the First Amendment. Flynt does not metamorphose in any sort of Hollywood-coerced epiphany at movie's end-he is still the same pornographer emeritus and offender of the masses that he has always been. What emerges triumphant, then, is much more than Flynt the crude pornographer-it is the First Amendment, which protects Flynt's right to be a crude pornographer.
"If the First Amendment can protect a scumbag like me," proclaims Flynt at the conclusion of the movie following the climactic Supreme Court victory, "then it will protect all of you-because I'm the worst."
And that, to be sure, is precisely the succinct yet vital message of The People vs. Larry Flynt. For many, this concept is admittedly a bitter pill to swallow, but extol or detest Larry Flynt, the absolute necessity of ensuring the freedoms of the First Amendment for everyone-even the "scumbags"-must, for the very health of our nation, transcend all.
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