Reality vs. <I>Larry Flynt</I>
(NOTE: "Life and
Art," a new department, will compare movies, books, etc., with the facts on
which they ostensibly are based.)
"What makes this movie so
effective is that it doesn't sentimentalize or airbrush Larry Flynt," wrote
Frank Rich about The People vs. Larry Flynt in the New York
Times . "What is the point of making a film about the founder of
Hustler that airbrushes both him and his magazine?" wondered Katha
Pollitt in The
Nation .
Who's right, Rich or
Pollitt? How sharply does the film diverge from real life?
Like most biopics, The
People fudges lots of little details. For example, in the film,
Hustler 's staff remains more or less constant--whereas, in reality, the
masthead was constantly changing. But composite characters are a cinematic
device commonly used to reduce audience confusion and maintain narrative
momentum. It's pretty harmless when actor Edward Norton's character, Alan
Isaacman, stands in for the numerous lawyers Flynt hired through his ongoing
court battles (which numbered more than the four the film describes). However,
serving as the all-purpose lawyer required Isaacman to take a bullet that never
actually hit him. In real life, it was Gene Reeves Jr. who was shot, along with
Flynt, during the publisher's 1978 obscenity trial.
Of more
significance is the accusation that Milos Forman's film turns the wholly
unappetizing Larry Flynt into an aw-shucks, lovably pigheaded guy. There the
critics are on firmer ground. Although Woody Harrelson, playing Flynt in the
movie, cheerfully describes himself as a scum bag, the movie clearly wants to
have it both ways on this, and sanitizes Flynt's life in order to do so.
Flynt in the movie is an innocent who wakes up
one day and discovers he is a rich publisher. But the story behind the real
Flynt's fortune may not be so storybook. The Cleveland Press reported in
1978 that Flynt had launched his publishing empire with the financial help of
vending-machine companies that allegedly were linked to organized crime.
Shortly after Hustler made Flynt a millionaire, he decided to distribute
the publication himself. In 1977, Flynt began to distribute a few titles not
owned by his company. He sold his distribution company last July for a reported
$21 million. The Washington Post reported back in 1977 that "the
fraternity of wholesalers and national distributors" viewed Flynt and his
alleged strong-arm tactics (his brother supposedly beat up a wholesaler who
couldn't pay) as "an unwelcome addition to the scene." But that fraternity
might have included some rough players itself. A book by former Penthouse
Forum editor John Heidenry, titled What Wild Ecstasy--The Rise and Fall
of the Sexual Revolution (to be published in April by Simon &
Schuster), claims that Flynt's move angered the Mafia, which controlled the
distribution of many men's magazines. Heidenry also reports that Flynt was in
debt to mob moneylenders.
The film
leaves puzzlingly open the question of who might have shot Flynt in 1978,
paralyzing him, and why. At the end of the film, on-screen typescript announces
that his assailant was never brought to justice. Yet, Flynt's case was
investigated, and most press accounts consider it closed. Joseph Paul Franklin,
a white supremacist currently serving six life sentences for murder (and the
man to whom the right-wing paranoid cult classic, The Turner Diaries , is
dedicated), made a jailhouse confession in Flynt's shooting. A grand jury
indicted Franklin in 1984, but he was never tried. He was considered an escape
risk at trial, according to law officials (and he was in prison indefinitely,
anyway). Franklin does have a history of confessing to crimes all over the
country. He has also confessed to shooting Vernon E. Jordan, then president of
the National Urban League, in 1980, a crime for which he was acquitted in 1982.
Nevertheless, Flynt, at least, believes that Franklin shot him.
After the assassination attempt, the movie's
Flynt holes up in his Bel Air mansion with his wife, Althea, and they both
start taking morphine and pills. So far, so good. But the movie's Flynt stops
his drug use cold turkey after a 1983 operation to cauterize his nerves,
suggesting he had shot up only to alleviate his physical pain. Flynt himself
says in his recent autobiography, An Unseemly Man , that he continued
self-medicating even after his wife overdosed--indeed, until after his most
recent nerve-cauterizing operation, which was in March 1994. He also says he
was taking amphetamines as early as 1964--well before he was paralyzed--and
"spent much of my life hyped-up, doped-up, or drunk."
Flynt's
marriage to Althea was his fourth of five, although from the movie, you'd think
it was his only one. The film's portrayal of Flynt as a quasifeminist
enlightened male depends in large part on its portrait of Althea, played by
Courtney Love. In the New York Review of Books , Louis Menand suggests
the filmmakers "went out of their way to remake Althea Flynt" as a way to award
Hustler a place it doesn't deserve in the sexual revolution. The film
positions Althea and Larry as intellectual and emotional equals. He retains the
right to sleep with other women; so does she. At the magazine, she has
extensive editorial input (which is true). Even after he is paralyzed and their
sex life comes to an end, their love endures.
Their actual relationship was more complicated.
In the movie, Larry hits Althea once; she tells him never to do it again, and
he doesn't. But Heidenry writes that Larry beat Althea more than once, and she
told Hustler that she didn't see anything wrong with a "man striking a
woman." In the film's account of Althea's 1987 bathtub death, Larry propels his
wheelchair into the bathroom and tries to save her. His memoir says he asked a
nurse to check on her. The nurse told People in 1987 that she went into
the bathroom and then "ran to Larry, who was asleep."
And
children. The film gives the impression that Flynt has none, although he has
five--to the best of his knowledge. One of them, Tonya Flynt-Vega, has accused
him of sexually molesting her and, in an interview in the current issue of
Penthouse , Flynt's former brother-in-law accuses him of molesting a
second daughter.
The main point of critics such as Gloria
Steinem (who wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times ) is that the
film sanitizes Hustler 's unsavory sexuality. Even the most cursory look
at back issues of Hustler confirms that the filmmakers seriously
misrepresent its content. The images we see or hear described in the movie are
vaguely countercultural (a Santa-with-an-erection cartoon), not sick
( Hustler 's real-life jokes about Betty Ford's mastectomy); they are
soft-core (centerfold-style nudes), not hard-core (the pictorial of a woman
gagged and bound on the top of a car). The magazine's "humor" often depended on
racist and sexist stereotypes, such as wide-grinned, watermelon-eating blacks.
Flynt says he was parodying these stereotypes, but the film carefully avoids
raising the issue.
The film also exaggerates
Flynt's martyrdom for the cause of free speech. One instance: At his 1977
trial, Flynt was sentenced to seven to 25 years for obscenity and for engaging
in organized crime. The film portrays the sentencing, and then a prison visit
where Althea weeps, "Our bed is so empty." In fact, Flynt spent six days in
jail.
As for Flynt's climactic
Supreme Court victory against evangelist Jerry Falwell, who sued him for
emotional distress, the film sticks fairly closely to the facts. Indeed, the
screenwriters borrowed lines from the court transcript. At an earlier Supreme
Court appearance, though, Flynt shouted, "Fuck this court!" and called the
justices "eight assholes and one token cunt." That transcript didn't make the
movie.
