Larry Flynt: The Right To Be Left Alone: "Which is the greater obscenity - war or pornography?"
Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone, a 2007 documentary by director Joan Brooks-Marks, is a comprehensive account of the First Amendment Patriot side of the Hustler founder and is, in that way, a compelling look at the person who has arguably done the most to frame pornography (and often reckless humiliation in the guise of satire) as a Constitutionally-protected freedom.
It is impossible to watch this movie and not cheer Flynt as he throws oranges at federal judges, calls them motherfuckers and pussies, picks his nose at depositions, and hammers home his right to publish anything in the name of Free Speech protection. It is impossible not to see him as an heroic ornery smartass who had the courage to risk everything, even after an assailant put him in a wheelchair for life, for the purpose of individual liberties.
"If we're not going to offend anyone," Flynt says, "there's no reason for the First Amendment."
Detailing Hustler crusades to out hypocrisy in government (the magazine's uncovering of House Speaker-apparent Bob Livingston's marital infidelities resulted in his resignation) and coups like obtaining footage of the FBI's sting against car manufacturer/cocaine smuggler John DeLorean, The Right to Be Left Alone repeatedly shows what a big footprint/tire track Flynt has left in the publishing world.
And there is no better physical metaphor for sticking to an ideal than the slowed, measured speech of a man paralyzed in the line of duty juxtaposed with images of a brash, sideburned one-generation-away-from-hillbilly younger Flynt blustering his way through courtrooms and talk shows. Flynt was shot by Joseph Paul Franklin because the latter was sickened to see a black man and white woman together in the pages of Hustler.
(The younger Flynt, in retrospect, looks much more like Vince Vaughn than Woody Harrelson.)
But though the documentary, which debuted on the Independent Film Channel last month after a tour of festivals, takes pains to give time to Flynt detractors like the late Andrea Dworkin and Jerry Falwell, one question I would have liked to see asked was how Flynt would have felt to receive the Hustler Magazine treatment himself.
The closest Flynt comes to self doubt in the documentary is when he discusses the controversial Hustler "meat grinder" cover, in which a woman is fed through a meat grinder next to a caption proclaiming that Hustler (contrary to feminist accusations) doesn't treat women like pieces of meat.
"Even I admitted I was wrong on that one," Falwell says.
"Moral Majority" leader Falwell sued Flynt in the 80's when Hustler published a fake Campari ad that had Falwell recounting his first sexual experience in an outhouse with his own mother. A judge originally awarded Falwell $240,000 ("for hurting his feelings," Flynt says) but the decision was overturned. Later, Flynt and Falwell reconciled.
Flynt points out that today's generation takes Freedom of Speech for granted. In addition, today's porn generation also only knows Flynt as a man wheeled out to receive awards at adult conventions while the back half of the room won't shut up. So it is a pleasure to hear what he has to say up close, even if there is a nagging feeling that "First Amendment Freedoms" was just a convenient umbrella to hide under when someone objected to being depicted as having sex with his mother in a Tennessee outhouse.
In addition to liberal dollops of news footage (featuring the likes of Walter Cronkite, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Tavis Smiley, and John Stewart), The Right to Be Left Alone also examines Flynt's relationship with his late wife, Althea.
"She was my soulmate," Flynt says, lauding her intelligence, especially in someone so young. Althea developed a painkiller habit after Larry's shooting, which evolved into heroin abuse.
"She got the painkillers from me," Flynt says. "I'd drop her off in rehab and she'd beat me home." Althea was diagnosed with AIDS in 1983 but never told her husband how she got it. "I think she was sharing needles," he says.
While the doc provides semi-staged interstitial segments of day-to-day life at Hustler (a photo session with longtime photographer Matti Klatt and Puma Swede, an editorial meeting with Hustler editor Bruce David), these seem one-dimensional next to the substantive snapshot of Flynt, and the Althea sequences never backslide into sentimentality.
Still, we can't help but see whose side the documentary is on. That's not bad, it's just not fair and balanced.
Take the case of Hustler's fight against feminists (which a commenter to the website Manufactured Contempt says achieved the dubious goal of giving more airtime to feminist thought than mainstream media). Should the First Amendment allow, for example, a bounty to be placed on the head of Gloria Steinem even if, as the court said in the Falwell case, that "it was too outrageous to be taken seriously"? Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone comes close to covering everything.
The title comes from a favored soundbite of Flynt's (cribbed from a 19th century opinion by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis) about what the greatest thing is that a nation can do for its people. But the only example of Flynt taking his own advice and leaving alone - sort of - a potential target is his decision to not publish nude photos of pawn/Army Private Jessica Lynch, whose rescue from Iraqi captors was staged for cameras.
"If anyone was a victim," Flynt says, "she was."
And that Flynt himself is a victim, that he took a bullet, jail time, the loss of a beloved spouse, and continued to doggedly, unapologetically (and, by his own admission, classlessly) fight for his right to be left alone, anyway, is the reason to watch this movie.
Heather Veitch is a former stripper and fetish model who found Jesus a few years ago and started an outreach ministry for sex workers called JC's Girls. She and accomplices from her fledgling megachurch in Riverside would go to strip clubs and attend the AVN and Erotica LA conventions and invite sinful women to church.
It was soon after I began writing this website that I met Veitch and her two cohorts in the studio of photographer/raconteur James "Jimmy D" DiGiorgio, as the JC's Girls ministry was just beginning to get attention.
At the time I doubted that the end result of Veitch's ministry was to simply convince strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars that Jesus loved them, but instead to convince them to give up their professions altogether. In my mind one doesn't necessarily follow the other, and I succumbed to a prejudice I have about the vanity and disingenuousness of evangelists.
Maybe because there's an Indiana Jones movie out now that I was reminded of a line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: "Dr. Jones, do you seek the Grail for God's glory - or your own?"
JC's Girls hooked up with Jimmy D. so that he would photograph them like he would porn stars (albeit with clothes), so that the church ladies might seem familiar to the strippers they approached. Also on hand was documentarian Bill Day, whose The Pussycat Preacher, a film about Veitch and the genesis of JC's Girls, was released this year.
It is an excellent movie. We watch as Veitch is cautiously accepted into the fold of Sandals, an evangelical church in Riverside housed in a college gymnasium and shepherded by Matt Brown, a reverend who looks - to the alarm of his cohorts in the Southern Baptist Convention - like a surfer dude.
Preacher details Veitch's and Brown's struggles for acceptance. First, on a personal level, Veitch must wade through the stares of decent churchgoing folk even as she looks less like them than she does the women she's trying to save. Then Pastor Brown must fight for JC's Girls to be accepted by the congregation and its larger church affiliations. Viewers will root for Veitch and Brown against the closed-minded Goliaths who don't feel that a church should minister to sinners.
But the film does expose vanity on all levels. When a group of strippers is finally lured to the church, Veitch is angered by the tough sell laid on them by another church elder. She doesn't want him getting credit for saving them. And only Veitch has experience with the sex industry; her cohorts are attractive ringers, along for Veitch's ride. When I asked them in 2005 if JC's Girls would accept unattractive women as ministers, they said there was always room behind the scenes.
JC's Girls were not represented at Erotica L.A. this year, though precursor XXXChurch (covered by Bill Day in his previous documentary, Missionary Positions) was, as was newcomer The Pink Cross. I found it odd that the three porn ministries pointedly had nothing to do with each other, even if they all shared the same boss.
At the end of Preacher, Veitch moves to Las Vegas to start a new ministry. She has since been divorced from her disabled husband and has suffered more Christian slings and arrows because of that.
Her move seems abrupt, though, given that she and Brown have spent the movie fighting for her right to stay at Sandals (Brown admits early in the movie that every week Veitch would come to him with something "she always wanted to do"), but Veitch would not stick out like a sore thumb in Las Vegas, and being an Everystripper is advantageous to a preacher in Sin City.
(Disregard the awful voiceover and soundtrack music - they do not appear in the movie)
I and Barely Legal director Erica Mclean were interviewed for the independent documentary American Virgin for our take on how the adult industry handles the notions of virginity and innocence.
Viewers will thrill to see Gram Ponante Towers' Clean Room in which its Porn is kept and preserved with the same techniques as used by the Peabody Museums of Harvard and Yale as well as the Smithsonian. I can assure you that porn off-gasing is far more toxic than any ancient artifact from Mesoamerica.
"Try not to hate the world as it goes about its business; remember: it's you who is the freak."
When I first moved to Los Angeles from Bogue Chitto and got a job (five years ago next month) at AVN, I remember sitting in my Hollywood apartment watching one of the 60 or so porn movies it was my job to review each month before going out with a friend visiting from back home.
There were some gunshots outside and soon police converged on the area and helicopters descended. It didn't faze me, but my friend said, "If I told anyone from back home that I sat on a couch watching porn with another guy while helicopters buzzed around the window, they wouldn't believe me."
This is the feeling I got from watching Paul Sapiano's jokey, observant, and sometimes poignant snapshot of millennial hipster Hollywood, The Boys And Girls Guide to Getting Down.
Read more after the gap.
A humorous etiquette guide to being 21 to (at most) 34 in Hollywood (and nowhere else), The Boys And Girls Guide follows a talented ensemble cast through hookups, drug deals, party and club crashing, and the bleary morning after, from which the quote at the top of the article is taken.
Not a porn movie, though there is a smattering of boobs, each in oddly non-sexual situations, the Guide nevertheless presents scenarios familiar to Porn's own parallel party circuit, in which a little cocaine opens many doors, Costco vodka in a Grey Goose bottle is never discovered (because all vodka is the same), Mr. Belding shows up, "fauxmosexuals" fool few, bouncers are judged by their accumulation of hot dogs, and people have enough money for bottle service but not for cab fare.
A slick and and well-produced movie with some excellent performances (I'll single out Dominique Purdy with his bit on Dionne Warwick's cell-phone), The Boys And Girls Guide is solidly a movie euphemistically described as a "love letter", meaning you won't get it unless you've lived it. In that way the movie is also like a documentary, except with tips on how to do "titty bumps" rather than Alan Alda talking about the Serengeti.
Shot in and around Hollywood, particularly the Cahuenga club corridor, this movie could be pitched like Swingers with Dirty Vegas standing in for Big Bad Voodoo Daddy meets Slackers with better clothes and L.A. standing in for Austin, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (The BBC version).
Unlike its decades-old predecessors, however, this Guide's hipness and narcissism leaves just a little room for sadness, as if the whole process of getting down leaves those attempting it a little empty.
Director Jim Powers is hell-bent on stripping away the glamour and romance of the porn industry, the shining jewel in the San Fernando Valley's crown (next to aviation and West Nile Virus).
His second installment of bloopers from his years at JM Productions includes on-set fights, breakdowns, and Ashley Blue's all-in-a-day's-work take on wiping up after a drunk lesbian bukkake participant. In between, Powers explains the sordid goings on until there is absolutely no magic left.
This movie will make you fall in love with Kiki D'aire all over again.
Read the review of Porn's Most Outrageous Outtakes 2here.
You can think about the woman, or the peeler you knew in 2005
Not, as I'd originally thought, a Bob Seger travelogue dealing with the trials and tribulations of life on the road, the just-available NightMoves documentary is instead a backstage look at Tampa's annual stripper-heavy convention, shot during the 2005 show.
Characterized by a homier and clubbier feel than the AVN convention and show, the 2005 NightMoves event brought together Keli Anderson, Regan Anthony, Aria, Belladonna, Jezebel Bond, Tim Case, Darla Crane, Kiki D'aire, Felicia Fox, Victoria Givens, Montana Gunn, Dennis Hof, Layla-Jade, Jesse Jane, Ron Jeremy, Christi Lake, Jacklyn Lick, Carmen Luvana, Gina Lynn, Sean Michaels, Mike South, Lisa Sparxxx, Sunset Thomas, and Vandalia for several days of inside jokes, fan interactions, the inevitable crossovers with the swinging community, and peeler drama.
Even at the feature dancing level, the noble stripper is a blue collar worker. She works hard for the money (even if she hates you), so this behind the scenes peak might as well be about railroad workers, except with boobies and pole wax.
I asked one stripper of my acquaintance how it felt to pick up a measly three dollars off the stage after an extended workout to "Old Time Rock And Roll" or "My Humps":
"You pretend it doesn't bother you," she said, "but you just want to explode."
Perhaps the adult industry's most passionate advocate is Larry Flynt. Alone he seems to have the credibility to persuasively argue that viewing dirtpipe milkshakes is our right.
Each of the porn world's established or ascendent organizations has tripped over itself to bring Flynt out to deliver his winning stump speech, the money shot being "The greatest thing a government can do for its citizens is recognize their right to be left alone."
Flynt has his good and bad days, and it is hard to watch him struggle with his speech. It is also difficult to separate the crises within Hustler, the shakeups among its underbosses, and the fact that employees have to pay to park in the the building that bears his name with the simple fact that thousands of people previously or currently allowed to make their living off this odd business owe the privilege to him.
Flynt past (looking a little like Vince Vaughn) and present stars in the new documentary Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone, from New York's Midtown Films.
Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone
, a 2007 documentary by director Joan Brooks-Marks, is a comprehensive account of the First Amendment Patriot side of the Hustler founder and is, in that way, a compelling look at the person who has arguably done the most to frame pornography (and often reckless humiliation in the guise of satire) as a Constitutionally-protected freedom.
And there is no better physical metaphor for sticking to an ideal than the slowed, measured speech of a man paralyzed in the line of duty juxtaposed with images of a brash, sideburned one-generation-away-from-hillbilly younger Flynt blustering his way through courtrooms and talk shows. Flynt was shot by Joseph Paul Franklin because the latter was sickened to see a black man and white woman together in the pages of Hustler.
The closest Flynt comes to self doubt in the documentary is when he discusses the controversial Hustler "meat grinder" cover, in which a woman is fed through a meat grinder next to a caption proclaiming that Hustler (contrary to feminist accusations) doesn't treat women like pieces of meat.
While the doc provides semi-staged interstitial segments of day-to-day life at Hustler (a photo session with longtime photographer Matti Klatt and Puma Swede, an editorial meeting with Hustler editor Bruce David), these seem one-dimensional next to the substantive snapshot of Flynt, and the Althea sequences never backslide into sentimentality.
And that Flynt himself is a victim, that he took a bullet, jail time, the loss of a beloved spouse, and continued to doggedly, unapologetically (and, by his own admission, classlessly) fight for his right to be left alone, anyway, is the reason to watch this movie.
