Making Nice Over the 1st Amendment

It was a lampoon that became an affront, which turned into a court case that gave us a movie to stir up a debate.

So, naturally, naughty Larry Flynt’s escapades wind up next, ahem, the toast of academia.

Who better than Flynt to illustrate that plenty is never enough?

And thanks to “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” others are now being drawn forward to bask in the notoriety of a man who pleads guilty to heinous crimes of bad taste. All because there’s a principle involved.

Everyone who has seen or read about the movie knows what it is. A principle more lasting than money. Although there is plenty of that at stake. And more tangible than celebrity too.

It is the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the “free speech” clause of the Bill of Rights. It protects the writer of this story, and you if you choose to respond, as well as the everyday magazine debaucheries of “a scumbag like me,” as Flynt once described himself.

Because of a case brought against Flynt by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and decided by the Supreme Court in 1987, publishers can continue to parody public officials, even to the point of saying they had incestuous affairs with their mothers--just so long as nobody would think the claims true. In his Hustler magazine, Flynt mocked Falwell in just such terms.

To celebrate the principle, if not exactly the principal libertine himself, the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication on Wednesday night hosted the film’s director, Milos Forman, and Flynt’s real-life lawyer, Alan Isaacman, for a 90-minute conversation with students and faculty.

“Pornography . . . is very little price to pay for freedom of the press,” began Forman.

The director speaks with authority--and now with this film in release, speaks often--on the subject of comparative freedoms, having endured both the Nazis and Communists in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating here.

Forman took his seat in front of the overflow crowd of 300 expecting, and certainly prepared for, a going over. The movie has received significant acclaim, but a lively group of faultfinders argues that Flynt is unworthy of being celebrated in cinema. Such attacks did not come. This was a friendly, admiring audience, and the much-honored director barely received serious questions enough to let him submit that:

* Flynt is a more ambiguous figure than his stereotype, and few traits make for a more interesting story.

* Americans take their freedoms for granted.

* This movie does not airbrush Flynt.

* Explicit pornography is tedious.

“I’m so surprised how nice everybody was,” Forman remarked afterward.

Joining the director at USC was Los Angeles attorney Isaacman, portrayed in the movie (by Edward Norton) as a lone legal crusader, when, in fact, Flynt had many. Nonetheless, Isaacman did win big pornography and libel actions for Flynt, including the climactic Falwell suit before the Supreme Court. (Isaacman was not, as depicted on screen, the attorney wounded in the shooting that left Flynt paralyzed.)

Isaacman pronounced the film “masterful” and delivered an exposition on the necessity for society to protect its center by defending its extremes: Flynt lost to Falwell in a jury trial and lost again before a panel of federal appellate jurists. The evangelist and leader of the Moral Majority had sued for “intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

*

Had Flynt not appealed, and had the early precedents gained hold, Isaacman said it would have “severely chilled” the daring of political cartoonists, editorial writers and television comics like Jay Leno.

“The 1st Amendment is not just for the popular politician or the popular rebel,” he said.

Hollywood always covets approval. And academic recognition particularly so, because mass appeal and intellectualism so seldom meet on the same plane. Forman walked out of USC with everything but a statuette.

“As somebody who for many years has taught 1st Amendment law, I cannot think of a film that in so many ways presents issues of importance for students to understand,” said the dean of the Annenberg School, Geoffrey Cowan. “I think for many, many years this will be something that teachers ask students to see.”

Perhaps the same might be urged for the general public. In a poll commissioned for the state Bar of California in 1991, 53% of respondents could not describe the Bill of Rights. That same year, though, another poll found that 98% of Americans could recognize Magic Johnson.

Forman was awarded Oscars for two earlier portrayals of inspired misfits in “Amadeus” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Tolerance for oddballs, he explained, is a gauge by which society can measure its freedom from tyranny:

“It always starts very innocently. Both the Nazis and the Communists started by cleaning the streets of perverts. And everybody applauds. It opens the door a crack. But the door never stays open just a crack.

“Before you wake up the next morning, you realize that anybody who doesn’t agree or comply with official taste is a pervert.”

*

As for Flynt, Forman said he was intrigued by the extremes of the man whose sexually explicit publications are denounced in every corner of the country even as they continue to sell and make their publisher rich. And by a man and his late wife, Althea, who had “such dirty minds” but a “regal love affair in their hearts.”

“You cannot do a film about the importance of a free press and bore you to death. You have to tell it through a story that is entertaining. And it’s always the extremes, the ambiguity that fascinate. . . . Is he a hero who really consciously, honestly fights for our freedoms? Or is he a smut peddler who is using it to enhance the sale of his magazines? Or is it possible he is both?”

Forman turned to attorney Isaacman, who said, “I don’t think you can separate them. I think his own economic interest and sometimes his personal freedom were inextricably intertwined with the 1st Amendment.”

Pornography, as the film and resulting debate remind once again, is a subject that makes Americans squirm. Those who object to the movie on political grounds argue that Flynt’s X-rated misogyny was softened and therefore sanitized to fit into the R-rated demands of commercial film.

Forman said not, and raised a few laughs. “It is all there. All but the gynecology. But everybody knows that already. From the bathroom at home.”

*

Personally, Forman said he was not bothered by pornography. “What bothers me is that it’s boring as hell. It was exciting maybe the first time when I was 18. And the second time when it was in color.”

The scariest argument against pornography is that it leads to crime.

Forman replied to this with questions of his own. How many crimes are committed with “a knife in one hand and Hustler or Playboy in the other? Compare that to the number of violent crimes, murder and suicide, that come from the pain of love in the heart. Should we not depict love?”

If there are murders in a family, he continued, “do we ban Hamlet?”

For his part, Isaacman said he was not an absolutist for the right to publish pornography. But almost. He would draw the line at exploiting children. But otherwise, “There are no pictures that are so bad they ought to be banned.”

He continued, “We depend on a free flow of ideas. We have a marketplace of ideas, and people can express their ideas. And what remains after the test of time is defined as being what’s true. . . . If people in this country don’t want to read certain things, at some point the person publishing them is going to go out of business.”

For others, business remains just fine. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Flynt said circulation for Hustler is about 900,000 now, counting international sales.