ON December 29th last, Columbia Pictures opened Milos Forman's movie, The People Vs Larry Flynt, on a limited release to US qualify for Oscar nominations. It was regarded as a difficult movie to market, given that its central character, Flynt, is a reviled pornographer, who founded and made millions of dollars from Hustler magazine with its explicit photographs.
However, the actor playing Flynt was Woody Harrelson, fondly remembered by US audiences for his eight years in Cheers as the amiable Woody Boyd. The casting of Courtney Love, the rock singer widow of Kurt Cobain, as Flynt's wife Althea, generated a great deal of interest. The film was directed by the esteemed Czech emigre, Milos Forman, and produced by Oliver Stone, a film-maker who is no stranger to controversy after JFK, Nixon and Natural Born Killers. And get this: the film's spin on Flynt was to depict him as a champion of free speech because of his landmark First Amendment victory in the US Supreme Court in 1988.
Opening on scenes of Flynt's impoverished childhood in Kentucky, the film chronicles his womanising and his rise as a pornographer, his marriage to Althea Leasure, an under-aged stripper he employed, and the assassination attempt on him by a white supremacist appalled by a Hustler photo-spread of a white woman and a black man having sex. That attack paralysed Flynt from the waist down and left him heavily dependent on pain-killing drugs. His wife Althea (played by Courtney Love) became addicted to drugs, contracted AIDS and drowned in the bath at the Flynt mansion.
The film then focuses on the case which led to Flynt's Supreme Court case. It began with a spoof Campari ad in Hustler, in which the high-profile and deeply conservative preacher Jerry Falwell, is purportedly talking about his "first time" and saying that his first sexual experience was with his mother in a backwoods outhouse. Cleared of libel charges but ordered to pay Falwell restitution for emotional distress, Flynt chose to appeal his right to free speech to the Supreme Court.
In their unanimous verdict, the eight judges sitting on the Court decided: "The fact that society may find speech offensive is not sufficient reason for suppressing it. Indeed, if it is the speaker's opinion that gives offence, that consequence is a reason for according it constitutional protection. For it is a central tenet of the First Amendment that the government must remain neutral in the marketplace of ideas."
Meanwhile, Larry Flynt's own version of his life hit the bookstands with the publication of An Unseemly Man, subtitled My Life As Pornographer, Pundit And Social Outcast. In a cross-promotional exercise, Flynt's autobiographical reminiscences were prefaced by introductions written by Oliver Stone, Milos Forman, Woody Harrelson and Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine.
Stone's piece sees Flynt "in the rapscallion tradition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn - the country boy, misunderstood by so many, trying to figure it all out, rafting down the American psyche of a country gone wacko". Stone also points out that Flynt "has had sex with a chicken and with some of the world's most beautiful women".
The Flynt film had gained prestige last October, when it had its world premiere as the closing night presentation at the New York Film Festival, and it attracted more publicity later that month when Flynt flew Harrelson, Love, Forman and Stone by private jet to Prague for a screening and lunch with the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, a longtime friend of Forman. Despite the fact that Hustler had achieved a huge boost in sales when it published surreptitiously-taken nude photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the movie received the endorsement of her son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who put Woody Harrelson on the cover of his magazine, George.
The movie opened in the US to many positive reviews. In the New York Times Frank Rich wrote that it "deserves a huge adult audience because it is the most timely and patriotic movie of the year". Rex Reed, described it as "a powerful, challenging film" in his New York Observer review. Jay Carr weighed in with "raucously entertaining and wickedly provocative" in the Boston Globe. And USA Today gushed that it is "a civics lesson that will still be regaling film enthusiasts four decades hence".
Milos Forman had won the Oscar twice in the past - for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in 1976 and Amadeus in 1984 - so Columbia had good reason to hope that Forman would pull off an Oscars hat-trick with Larry Flynt, with the all the consequent commercial rewards.
January was the crucial month. The movie had been nominated in all the major categories in the Golden Globes, - best picture, director, screenplay, actor and actress - and given the frequency with which the Globes anticipate the Oscars, that was a good omen and invaluable kudos in the month when the Oscars electorate files its nominations.
To benefit from all this publicity and acclaim, Columbia had timed the wide release of Larry Flynt for January 10th, when it would open across the US over 1,000 screens. Everything was in readiness when the feminist writer, Gloria Steinem, dropped a bombshell in the op-ed pages of the New York Times on January 7th.
Headlined "Hollywood Cleans Up Hustler", Steinem's article began: "Larry Flynt the Movie is even more cynical than Larry Flynt the Man." She went on: "(It) claims that the creator of Hustler magazine is a champion of the First Amendment, deserving our, respect. That isn't true ... A pornographer is not a hero, no more than a publisher of Ku Klux Klan books or a Nazi on the Internet, no matter what constitutional protection he secures.
No Hollywood movie would portray a Klansman or a Nazi as a champion of free speech, much less describe him in studio press releases as `the era's last crusader', which is how Columbia pictures describes Mr Flynt
"What's left out (of the film) are the magazine's images of women being beaten, tortured and raped; women subject to degradations from bestiality to sexual slavery. Film-goers don't see such Hustler features as Dirty Pool which in January 1983 depicted a woman being gang-raped on a pool table. Nor do you see such typical Hustler photo stories as a naked woman in handcuffs who is shaved, raped, and apparently killed by guards in a concentration camp-like setting."
Larry Flynt responded with characteristic bluntness: "Gloria Steinem is an ancient, worn-out relic whose only claim to fame is urging some ugly women to march," he told Entertainment Weekly.
"I'm afraid that nothing less than making Larry Flynt 100 per cent evil would satisfy Ms Steinem," Milos Forman commented. "You know, when you make a history lesson, you have to be faithful to the facts. But when you make a drama, all you have to do is be faithful to the spirit of the facts; And that I am convinced we did.
Oliver Stone, a film-maker criticised in the past for playing with facts, said: "I don't know what Steinem is talking about. Larry is not into violence against women. He puts them in a meat grinder as a joke. Doesn't she have a sense of humour? She's making the same mistake Jerry Falwell made. She's taking it seriously when it's supposed to ridiculous." Asked why he himself did not direct the film, Stone replied: "I briefly considered directing it, but people told me to back off that kind of material. I was sort of being pressured not to do scum bags anymore.
AS the publicity campaign for the movie continued, Flint himself became as much a part of the entourage as Norman or Harrelson, turning up at parties, press conferences and the Golden Globes ceremony in his gold-plated wheelchair. In February, a week before the Oscar nominations were announced, Columbia took the unusual step of placing a full-page advertisement in Variety. In bold type it read: "Some people have attacked the film, The People Vs. Larry Flynt. They call it dishonest and guilty of whitewashing the ugly truth about Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine. Columbia Pictures and Phoenix Pictures would like you to read the following excerpts from our country's most distinguished journalists and publications - You Decide."
Illustrated with a photograph of Woody Harrelson with his mouth gagged by an American flag, the page went on to quote seven critics representing the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, New York Observer and Newsweek.
But it was not enough to save the movie's Oscar campaign and when the nominations were announced, it received just two, to Forman for best director and Harrelson for best actor. The box-office returns were even more disappointing, amounting to no more than $20 million after three months on release. Flynt had become an embarrassment to Columbia at this stage and when Oscars night came round last week, they claimed they had no tickets for him to attend the ceremony. Flynt turned up undaunted. He had won again, but the movie won nothing on the night. Neither outcome surprised anyone.