Larry Flynt's role in rights depicted
By Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)
Published August 6, 2008 at 4:56 p.m.
REVIEW
People of a certain age (say, over 40), know all too well the legacy of Larry Flynt. He started with a small chain of Ohio strip clubs in the early '70s, then parlayed them into a national erotic magazine called Hustler. Unlike Playboy and Penthouse, it went for hard-core visuals, which immediately got Flynt into trouble with the law.
Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone chronicles Flynt's early and later legal battles, most centering on free speech but many moving beyond simple idealism to principles that continue to govern how the press interacts with celebrities.
Culling material from the Hustler archives and elsewhere, director Joan Brooker-Marks takes us through Flynt's life, from his childhood in rural Kentucky to his face-off against the late Jerry Falwell before the U.S. Supreme Court. Flynt had run a cartoon implying that Falwell's first time having sex was in an outhouse with his mother. Falwell sued. The court unanimously ruled that satire - even distasteful satire - is protected by the First Amendment.
A subsequent movie, The People vs. Larry Flynt, starring Woody Harrelson, was made about the case.
The documentary chronicles other seminal moments in Flynt's life, including the day in 1978 an extremist shot him and left him paralyzed from the waist down. He subsequently became addicted to pain pills, and watched his wife, Althea, spiral into drug use and death.
Flynt also was arrested by the FBI for refusing to divulge the source of audio and videotapes of their sting operation against automaker John DeLorean. It's clear on the tapes that DeLorean was threatened by the government (at least his daughter's health was). Flynt never gave up his sources.
Brooker-Marks' film is highly watchable, yet it lacks the passion you might associate with the man at its center.
It takes a you-are-there approach, punctuated by comments from Flynt and his lawyers about what was going on at various points in his life. Almost totally absent are dissenting comments, unless you count video clips of Falwell or perturbed prosecutors.
Is Larry Flynt a pornographer? Absolutely. But his greatest impact on American life goes well beyond graphic pictorials.
Perhaps more than any other journalist in the last half of the 20th century, he fought ferociously for the right to be heard on his own terms. More often than not, he won.
Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone
* Grade: B-
* When and where: 7 p.m. today, Independent Film Channel (Comcast 503; Direct TV 550; Dish 131)
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