CineMontage

Summer 2016

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20 CINEMONTAGE / Q3 2016 by Edward Landler D irector Miloš Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt premiered 20 years ago, on October 13, 1996, the closing night of the New York Film Festival. From an original screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, it traces the life of the Hustler publisher from selling moonshine in Kentucky at the age of 12 through his creation of one of the raunchiest and most popular American sex magazines to his landmark First Amendment victory at the United States Supreme Court. The film met with both acclaim and disdain. In an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oral History interview, Marcia Nasatir, an industry executive involved with the film, said, "Miloš found the worst person in the world to defend. When I talked to women outside the business, they said, 'I'd never see a movie called The People vs. Larry Flynt.'" Far from celebrating sexual liberation, Hustler's images of women were often demeaning and sometimes violent. Yet, in depicting the unseemly Flynt and his wife, stripper Althea Leasure, the film distills and blends raucous comedy and personal tragedy to draw a sharp satiric bead on the contradictions of the American character. The day after the premiere, the porn tycoon flew THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY In Like Flynt The People vs. Larry Flynt. Columbia Pictures/ Photofest

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