Word: flynt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, certainly has not forgotten Keating either. In the 1970s and early '80s, Keating became an antismut crusader, attacking Flynt and winning an appointment from Richard Nixon to an antipornography commission. Flynt told TIME, "The Keatings of this world are the real perverts. You can't dismiss him as someone who just wanted to take people's money; he's one of the most dangerous men in America because he is completely intolerant of others and believes he is always right...
...People vs. Larry Flynt skips over such details, although it is probably no more untruthful than most Hollywood biopics (to give but one example: in real life Eva Peron actually spoke most of her lines). "Dramatizing Larry Flynt was walking a tightrope--include too many contemptible events, and the audience turns off," concede the film's screenwriters, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, in an introduction to the published version of their script. Its climax revolves around the libel suit filed against Flynt by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, which led to the famous 1988 Supreme Court decision saying...
...what kind of free speech is being vindicated here, if not tacitly celebrated? "All I'm guilty of is bad taste," says the movie Larry Flynt, who, as portrayed by Woody Harrelson, is an outrageous but lovable American original. Judging from the film, almost the only thing that distinguishes Flynt's magazine from those of competitors like Guccione and Hugh Hefner is that Hustler's nudes are presented as nature intended, without benefit of airbrush or Vaselined camera lens. "The problem in this country," the movie Flynt proclaims, "is that sex [is considered] bad and ugly and dirty...
...with the supposed largeness of African-American penises and a curious TV spoof in which The Nanny's Fran Drescher "paints her butt with shoe polish. Then she sits on her big, black ass and collects [welfare] checks. Hilarity ensues." Well, maybe. But not in The People vs. Larry Flynt, which turns a blind eye to this recurrent aspect of the Flynt oeuvre...
Like journalists who pore over dirty magazines in order to debunk them, The People vs. Larry Flynt wants to have it both ways. A relevant point of comparison is with A Clockwork Orange, a far riskier and more complicated film that in arguing for the sanctity of free will dared to create a charismatic protagonist whose exercise of that free will was pointedly horrific. Larry Flynt has the nerve to argue for the sanctity of free speech but--for lack of a better word--censors its excesses. Fortunately, moviegoers who feel compelled to test their First Amendment absolutism need...