"Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..."
-- The First Amendment to the US Constitution
"All I wanted to do was make some money and have some fun"
-- Larry Flynt
It was the early 1970s, the twilight of the sexual revolution in America, when a sex industry entrepreneur named Larry Flynt leveraged a small string of Ohio strip-clubs into the beginnings of a publishing empire. Hustler was a raw and raunchy magazine that pushed the limits of American tolerance. Its publisher, a grade-school dropout and Kentucky redneck, was nobody's hero, but circumstance would cast him as the era's last crusader. It was a role that brought Larry Flynt both ruin and glory.
Woody Harrelson stars as publishing maverick Larry Flynt, who becomes the unlikely champion of the First Amendment when he takes his fight against the Rev. Jerry Falwell all the way to the Supreme Court. Though his life, both public and private, was a tale told to America in soundbites and headlines, behind the scenes raged a story less familiar but no less striking: a story encompassing love and loss, redemption and despair, madness and healing.
Larry Flynt (Woody Harrelson) and his Hustler Clubs were the bane of Ohio's local authorities. Bringing the sex industry to America's heartland was a thankless yet lucrative task, and Flynt and his brother Jimmy (Brett Harrelson) were brazen enough to pursue it. For Larry especially, the clubs were an opportunity to combine business and pleasure -- no less so after forming a deep relationship with an underaged but streetwise dancer named Althea Leasure (Courtney Love).
It was Flynt's home-made "Hustler Newsletter," a publicity handout for the clubs, that launched the clubowner's new career as a publisher. Here was a view of female sexuality presented free of the high-brow conceits and airbrushed glory of Plavbov. Recognizing a potential gold mine when he saw it, Flynt gambled all that he owned on transforming his newsprint-and-staples newsletter into a slick national magazine. The first issue was a financial disaster; but when a subsequent issue featured photos of Jacqueline Onassis sunbathing nude in the Greek Mediterranean, Hustler's sales went through the roof.
Outrageous sex and sensation became Hustler magazine's formula for success. Flynt and Leasure entered into a loving, but unconventional, marriage, to settle into a 24-room mansion, of a style befitting Hugh Hefner's blue-collar counterpart. Flynt was at the top of his world.
Then came the maelstrom.
As the nation's mood took a radical shift, Flynt's decision to make his corporate headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio was taken as a personal affront by two local anti-porn crusaders, Simon Leis (James Carville), the Hamilton County Prosecutor, and Charles Keating, Jr. (James Cromwell), a financier obsessed with smut. Effectively shut out of the American mainstream with his 1976 arrest on obscenity charges, and shunned by both sides of the political spectrum, Flynt began an arduous fight against the rising tide of censorship and the emerging radical religious rightwing movement.
Complicating matters was his unlikely alliance with evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton (who also happened to be the sister of then-President Jimmy Carter), portrayed by morning news anchor Donna Hanover. Flynt's spiritual connection with Stapleton would lead this porn king to become a born-again Christian, both alienating Althea and slowing Hustler's seemingly unstoppable momentum.
Through subsequent arrests, and fighting trial after trial, the unlikely rebel used his millions in a one-man campaign against a new American order -- releasing the infamous John DeLorean/FBI cocaine-sting videotape, then refusing to reveal its source to a court, and offering a million-dollar reward for the killers of President Kennedy. When Flynt was paralyzed by a sniper's bullet on the steps of a Georgia courthouse, his fight only gathered steam.
Flynt faced his greatest public challenge when Jerry Falwell (Richard Paul), the leader of America's self-proclaimed "Moral Majority," sued over a scandalous Hustler parody presenting a satirical account of Falwell's first sexual experience -- with his mother in a backwoods outhouse. At the same time, his soul mate Althea succumbed to AIDS.
Though cleared of libel charges but told to pay restitution for emotional distress, Flynt chose to appeal his right to free speech to the Supreme Court, which led to a unanimous, precedent-setting decision in Flynt's favor.
As Flynt's permanent contribution to American jurisprudence, it was his greatest victory.
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