Blow job

Did we get hustled by Larry Flynt?

The most Larry Flynt-like press event I've witnessed in staid Boston had at its center Milos Forman, the filmmaker of the extremely mesmerizing but also problematic The People vs. Larry Flynt. The occasion was the 1979 opening of the film of Hair, which Forman also directed. While Forman held forth about the free-love hippie movie, and journalists scribbled notes, several frisky chorines from the film cast leaned behind the director and gave him a sensual back rub.

He did the talking, they did the rubbing.

It's no jolt that Forman has discovered a kindred sensibility in the founder/publisher/editor of Hustler, the Li'l Abner of the libido. The US of A has been fabulous to both of them, Flynt, the ignoble refugee from moonshiner poverty, and Forman, the patrician escapee from Soviet-invaded Czechoslovakia. Out in LA, Flynt lords it over a conglomerate of 27 sex magazines. Forman, going west from teaching at Columbia University, has negotiated studio backing for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ragtime, Amadeus, and Valmont.

Of late, however, their Butch-and-Sundance adoration has come under siege from feminist scribes, including Gloria Steinem. The common ground of complaint is that Forman's film, however skillful and entertaining, misrepresents Flynt's sordid biography, whitewashes his odious character, and chickens out on showing us what's horrible in the pages of Hustler.

For her much-discussed New York Times attack, Steinem went to the source, and she found Hustler a pig heaven of woman hating, female bashing, and the most excruciating gang-rape fantasies.

Are the objections justified?

Let's start with Flynt's offscreen life. Wrote the Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman in a January column, "The Sanitizing of Larry Flynt": "the average viewer can leave the darkened theater without knowing that Flynt had five wives, two of whom he actually trashed for promiscuity. Without knowing that he had, and neglected, five children . . . "

There's merit to Goodman's position, and it's good to have someone address, in print, Forman's playing loose with the facts. But I believe it can be argued that, for the drama of the movie, one barren spouse is plenty, thank you (especially since Courtney Love's Althea is so intensely, overwhelmingly complicated). Virtually every based-on-life bio picture scissors out important people, does composites, erases children, etc. Forman shouldn't be forced to a different standard.

And if he admires Flynt far more than he should, and shapes Larry Flynt to reflect his admiration? Well, that's a director's prerogative. As Flynt might put it: "Lady, you think I'm the world's biggest woman-hating slob? Then make your own fucking movie about me!"

But what about going soft on Hustler in the film?

First, it's disingenuous for Forman to assert, as he has in discussing his movie, that he's never read the magazine. That's like making a pro-Hitler bio and never checking into Mein Kampf.

It's clear that Hustler was perused carefully before the decision was made to lift for the film only the most softcore shots and the most innocuous ribald cartoons (Dorothy servicing the Tin Man, Santa Claus with a rod). What the movie doesn't show (though Woody Harrelson's Flynt certainly does talk about it enough) is . . . pink . . . pussy.

That's Hustler's post-Playboy XXX legacy: women with their legs splayed, opening up (for Hustler's throbbing male readers) the insides of their vaginas.

Of course Columbia Pictures would never allow the above: even as a raunchy R, Larry Flynt is so sexually challenging that, Entertainment Today reports, business is abysmal in conservative America, especially the Bible Belt South. Still, to have the total courage of its constitutional convictions, Larry Flynt should have been the first porno film from Hollywood. I mean it. Beaver shots of Courtney. Woody's hard, drippy dong. A "Where Are They Now?" identification at the end, with Reverend Jerry saying, "Fartwell's still fornicating with his mother down at the outhouse."

And the film should have pushed in the viewer's face examples of the worst excesses from Hustler's sticky pages.

For instance, Katha Pollitt's discoveries in a recent Hustler when researching her well-tempered, excellent February 3 essay on Larry Flynt in the Nation: "several racist cartoons, a diatribe against Alanis Morisette (`a sick, twisted, man-hating cow . . . '), and a photo feature titled `How to Know if Your Girlfriend is a Dog' which shows a naked woman drinking out of a toilet surrounded by puppies . . . a photo of two gorgeous white women sucking on an enormous black dildo."

Larry Flynt as uncensored and as sexually and morally obnoxious as Flynt himself! Now that would be a First Amendment movie!

AT THE COOLIDGE CORNER for only $100: a lively, eight-Wednesday-night discussion group, "Movie Talk," led by Boston filmmaker/scholar Susan Woll. It kicks off February 26 with Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. Call 630-0834.