The People Vs. Larry Flynt

Reviewed by Lorne Marshall

The debate over the boundaries of free speech is perfectly realized in Czech director Milos Forman's  The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996),  one of the best films of the 90s.

Reared in rural Southern poverty, young Larry Flynt learns to become an independent entrepreneur in ways deemed unacceptable by society at large, selling moonshine as a youth and then later operating strip clubs. Eventually he gets in the smut business by producing a chain of pornographic magazines; but ever the innovator, Flynt decides to take the recent relaxation of sexual prohibition a few levels beyond (or below, depending on your perspective) and poses his models in the most...shall we say, immodest manner.

Thus begins the future mega-publisher's run-ins with the judicial system. Flynt has to defend himself against charges of indecency and obscenity, and he is forced to do the most subjective, Kafkaesque thing imaginable for someone working in the entertainment industry: prove that the material he publishes has some redeeming value. His worst trouble comes when he satirizes the sexual exploits of Jerry Falwell in the pages of Hustler, his most notorious magazine. The ensuing Supreme Court scene is dramatic dynamite (topped only by the earlier moment when he first decides to challenge the lower court ruling against him while watching the preacher on TV haranguing against AIDS).

Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski have taken the real events surrounding a somewhat dubious legend and fashioned a compelling and at times surprisingly tender tragicomedy, the way they did with  Ed Wood.  The frequently-collaborating team recognize that a successful historical film worries less about being resolutely true to the subject than about using the circumstances of a life to unveil a compelling story.

Acting kudos go to Woody Harrelson in the lead role (for which he received an acting nomination by the Academy), as well as Courtney Love as his tormented wife Althea and Edward Norton as Flynt's overworked attorney Alan Isaacman. Amusing cameos are provided by James Carville, Norm MacDonald, James Cromwell as Charles Keating, and Richard Paul as Falwell, a role foretold by a similar character he played years before on the TV show  WKRP in Cincinnati.

A lot of very public heat was generated over  The People vs. Larry Flynt.  However, although the main target of the movie was religious zealots desirous of imposing their own sense of cultural ethics on everyone else; some feminists (specifically those labeled as "gender feminists") raised hell over it. (The philosophies of the two groups don't often overlap; besides pornography, the other exception that comes to mind is the alleged ritual Satanic abuse of children.) Their main contention was that this was a Hollywoodized version of Flynt's life; that if people were just made aware of what he was really about, they would have absolutely no sympathy for him. They missed the point in a couple of ways.

Flynt's story isn't sad because he was harassed for peddling "filth." It's sad because of the effect the judicial persecution had on the people around him that he loved. And it is sad, most significantly, because of the potential damage such persecution could have had on the viability of the Bill of Rights. Also, the film posits this question: if the Constitution exists merely to protect agreeable speech rather than the worst imaginable, what purpose does it serve?

In any event, the satirical dimension of Hustler is completely lost. Putting aside the pictorials of naked women (and this is difficult for some to do, for they believe an adult taking his or her clothes off voluntarily for money can be "exploited"), the more revolting aspects of the magazine are done for humor ad nauseam, not titillation. Sure, the zine is not to everyone's liking; but, to paraphrase Harrelson's words, being guilty of possessing bad taste shouldn't be a criminal act.

That is most puzzling is not that the groups that generated the heat are supposedly sympathetic to free speech, but that Flynt is a known supporter of liberal causes, something that groups like NOW have in the past taken into consideration when choosing not to condemn at least one politician who committed far more heinous indiscretions than publishing a dirty magazine.

Perhaps it is because of the controversy that the picture got snubbed at the Oscars, receiving a mere two nominations while winning several from nearly all other award-presenting organizations. (Hollywood made an even bigger blunder the following year by refusing  L. A. Confidential  its top prize.) And the Academy obviously has a long memory, because the recent achievement of Forman (who won Best Director twice for One Flew Over The Cuckoo s Nest  and Amadeus), the 1999 Andy Kaufman biopic  Man On The Moon (penned by Alexander and Karaszewski) was completely ignored when Oscar nominations were announced.

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