The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) on Netflix
In 1972 Cincinnati, Larry Flynt and his brother Jimmy run a struggling strip club. Larry turns its newsletter into Hustler, a nude-photo magazine, and falls for dancer Althea Leasure.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.3/10106,838 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes88%
Trailer
Plot summary
Larry Flynt and his brother Jimmy run the Hustler Go-Go, a strip club in Cincinnati that is struggling to draw customers. Larry puts out a newsletter of nude photographs of his dancers, names it Hustler, and watches it grow into a magazine. Sales stay weak until it prints pictures of Jackie Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude, which makes it a national sensation and turns Larry's full attention to publishing. He takes up with Althea Leasure, a young dancer he lets work at the club. Anti-pornography campaigners make him a hated figure, and he argues with them that the law allows the act of sex but jails anyone who photographs it. Prominent court cases follow, with the idealistic young lawyer Alan Isaacman at his side.
Cast
- Burt Neuborneas Roy Grutman
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Woody Harrelson was not the obvious Larry Flynt. Both Bill Murray and Tom Hanks were considered for the role before Harrelson was cast as the Hustler publisher.
- No insurer would cover Courtney Love, so director Milos Forman, producers Janet Yang and Oliver Stone, co-star Woody Harrelson and Love herself split the cost of a $750,000 policy between them. She had to pass repeated supervised urine tests during filming, and did.
- Forman cast Courtney Love only after extracting a promise from her. By her account she went to rehab for the twenty-eight days, never used heroin again and took no drugs on set, and she also dieted off 20 lb at Forman's suggestion.
- Columbia's first poster, a doll-sized Harrelson as Flynt posed over a woman's groin with an American flag round his waist, was censored in the United States by the Motion Picture Association of America and withdrawn; a headshot of Flynt with a flag over his mouth replaced it.
- The banned image ran everywhere else, and in France a group of 31 Catholics and a conservative organization went to court to have the poster suppressed as obscene. A Paris court refused to censor it.
- Gloria Steinem campaigned against the film through awards season, publishing a column on 10 January 1997 urging Academy voters not to nominate it and reprinting it as a Variety advertisement funded under Ralph Nader's Public Citizen foundation. The ACLU bought its own Variety ad in reply.
