Here is what the critics have said.









TELEVISION REVIEW
'Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone'
By Robert Lloyd, Times Television Critic
August 7, 2008

With former Playboy philosopher Hugh Hefner having retired to be a bit player in a reality show about his girlfriends, Hustler Publisher Larry Flynt has become the de facto spokesman for politically progressive publishers of what may still be called "men's magazines."

As seen in "Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone," a new documentary premiering tonight on the Independent Film Channel, he has a natural eloquence, oddly accentuated by his stroke-slowed speech. And having survived by three decades the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed, and having spent much of that time on the witness stand, in prison or on a soapbox in the service of his beloved 1st Amendment, Flynt has attained a gravitas that a casual flip through his publications would not necessarily suggest. Almost the first words we hear spoken here are, "On behalf of the ACLU and Harvard Law School, I am pleased to present Mr. Larry Flynt."

Even as he has been excoriated as a misogynist, racist and all-around bad egg, Flynt (who actually seems to be none of those things) has become a media figure of standing. His mainstream status is sealed by that of his interlocutors -- Larry King, Tavis Smiley, Ted Koppel all interview him here -- and by his audiences: We see him at an L.A. Times Festival of Books event, addressing a crowd I would not guess reflects the Hustler demographic.

Although it was female genitalia that made Flynt's fortune, it is the magazine's low humor and personal attacks that have just as often landed its proprietor in the papers or in court. Flynt's greatest legal victory ended a suit by the Rev. Jerry Falwell over a parody advertisement that claimed he'd lost his virginity to his mother, in an outhouse. The Supreme Court unanimously sided with Hustler. That the joke might not have been funny was beside the point -- or maybe it was the point, since bad jokes are every bit as protected as good ones. (And Flynt and Falwell subsequently became friends.)

Directed by Joan Brooker-Marks, the film is sketchy as biography, focusing mostly on Flynt's career as free-speech crusader and political gadfly. (For the broader view, we'll have to wait for "American Masters: Larry Flynt" or "Ken Burns' Porn.") And while it provides archival clips of some of his nemeses, including Gloria Steinem and Charles Keating (an anti-porn crusader before his misadventures in the savings and loan business), it is a partisan celebration from first to last. Some of the objectors seem quaint now: "When you attack Santa Claus," says one 1970s prosecutor, referring to a Hustler cartoon, "that's attacking, through sex, everything decent in this country." But others beg to be given a little more time than they get.

"The Right to Be Left Alone" does make Flynt interesting, but it isn't as searching as it might be. The regressive thrust of the magazine's sexual content versus the progressive tone of its politics raises the unasked questions of just for whom Hustler is made and how Flynt sorts out the apparent contradictions. And Brooker-Marks sometimes gives her subject more help than he needs to state his case. But understatement has never been Flynt's modus operandi, either: This is a man who came to court diapered in an American flag, who threw an orange at a judge's head and who, when fined $10,000 a day for refusing to name a source, had it delivered in cash by "porn stars and hookers."

The war against pornography having been won -- by pornography -- Flynt, who sued the Department of Defense to allow reporters on the front line in Afghanistan and dug up dirt on Clinton-bashing Congressman Robert Livingston during the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, now concerns himself with the fates of the nation and the press, which are for him the same thing. "The culture we live in today was born into a society where you could take your individual rights and civil liberties for granted," he says. "So they don't understand what the country would be like without the 1st Amendment." Had no one ever taken him to court, Flynt might not have thought about that much himself. But they did.




Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone
by Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor

View from the Trenches


Hustler's insistent, repetitious return to the imagery of the body out of control, rampantly transgressing social norms and sullying property and proprieties, can't fail to raise political questions.
—Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (1999)

The American people have a right to know how the military is conducting the war. The press has an obligation to report it. It's an important First Amendment issue. This lawsuit should have been filed by the mainstream press, not me. But I think they're too worried about who is going to get the next interview with George and Laura Bush.
—Larry Flynt, "Larry Flynt's War" (Columbia Journalism Review 2002)

Larry Flynt means to offend. He also means to gain attention, make money, and, in his way, tell truth. According to the documentary Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone, he feels a particular odium toward apathy. "I think it's the biggest threat that democracy has," he says, "People don't care or they don't think they can make a difference."

Whatever else you say about him, it's clear that Flynt cares and, despite all kinds of odds, remains determined to make a difference. It's well known that Flynt's profits from the Hustler empire reach past $400 million, that he won a Supreme Court case against Jerry Falwell, and that he was shot through the stomach in 1978, by a man offended by his decision to picture a black man and a white woman together in his magazine. He's never walked again since that day, but he has continued to make trouble as best he can, targeting mainstream politicians and the press, railing against official efforts to curb information, communication, and all manner of speech. "We figure freedom of the press is only important if it's offensive," he says. "If it wasn't offensive, we wouldn't need protection of the First Amendment."

The film returns more than once to an ACLU-sponsored presentation Flynt makes at Harvard Law School. He apologizes at first for his lack of "literary" framing, but submits, "Since I've been dragged through most of the courts, imprisoned, shot, and paralyzed, defending the First Amendment, I figured I could give you a view from the trenches." His audience nods appreciatively, asks him polite questions. He admits he was wrong on the famous "woman in a meat-grinder" cover, though only because it was satire that "fell flat," not because it was odious (because, of course, that was the point). If he's not exactly open to the idea that the determinedly dirty porn he proffered was "wrong"—whether Chester the Molester or racist stereotypes—he is consistent about the need to protect offensive speech above all.

While he offers himself and his publications as examples of same, he is not always so transgressive as he may think. There are essentially two arguments to make against Flynt's sort of porn. It's sensationally degrading and exploitative (as Andrea Dworkin says here in an archival interview, "Hustler has this extra dimension of hatred of women's bodies") or it is only repeating tedious and entrenched attitudes, not transgressive at all (boys find magazines in their father's closets). What has made Flynt's case more salient than porn in either of those senses is his insight—much repeated—that he's exposing hypocrisies.

This became a theme early for Flynt, as the film recounts. A brief sequence shows his first obscenity lawsuit, brought by Charles Keating of Cincinnati's Citizens for Decency Through Law in 1976. Though Flynt was convicted and sentenced to 25 years for "pandering and engaging in organized crime" (the latter being the sort of charge-trumping used to make him an "example"). The verdict was overturned on a technicality, and Keating went on to junk bonds infamy. Flynt's most famous suit, memorialized in Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), was brought by Jerry Falwell in 1983: a series of appeals led to a unanimous verdict by the Supreme Court in 1988, for Flynt and political parodists everywhere.

That it does so somewhat obliquely is all to The Right to Be Left Alone's credit: more impressionistic than biographical, less apologetic than abstract, and decidedly non-chronological, it keeps a focus on the thematic connections among porn, democracy, and freedom—as varying emblems of the "America" Flynt extols. It slips occasionally into self-serving sentimentality (Flynt insists that he loved fourth wife and soulmate Althea's intelligence above all, which may be true, but he also makes no mention of his other four wives, including the present one, Liz) or spends long non-narrative minutes showing how porn images are constructed ("We use the latest equipment," smiles the photographer, his subjects a bare-breasted woman and a slick-shirted cowboy).

But if these orchestrated "bits" are tedious, others make Flynt's political arguments rather scathingly. His lawyer Paul Cambria recalls the publicity surrounding the 25-year sentence in Cincinnati, and Flynt's opportunistic response, producing a "brochure" that argued that the Vietnam War was more obscene than "voluptuous women." The film hammers home this point, showing an awkward archival moment for prosecutor Simon Leis Jr. ("You can't talk about good dirty fun when you're attacking every institution of this country through the magazine," including, by his measure, Santa Claus), unable to come up with an answer to a reporter's query, "Which is the real obscenity?"

Less clunky and more like the broadly comedic approach Hustler took for decades is the film's use of cartoons from the magazine, some animated (Jerry Falwell in bed with Tinky Winky, with post-coital cigarette smoke wafting). Flynt acknowledges his own brief and rather infamous flirtation with "religion," via Ruth Carter Stapleton ("I got over all that," he says now, "Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time"). As it tracks Flynt's search for a means to make consequential protest, the film does not note his diagnosis with bipolar disorder, and neither does it mention his disowned daughter Tonya Flynt-Vega, a Christian anti-pornography activist who has accused him of molesting her as a child.

It does, however, culminate by making what seem obvious connections between Flynt's own defense of the First Amendment and the current administration's efforts to curtail it and other rights (say, habeas corpus). The film illustrates his characterizations of Donald Rumsfeld ("He oughta be in chains" is followed by the former Secretary of Defense's "Henny Penny, the sky is falling" performance) and George Bush (Flynt's pronouncement, "He screwed up everything he touched, I can't believe in my wildest dreams that we elected such an idiot as our president" cuts to the YouTubed clip of W giving the finger to a news camera.

The emphatic montage that cuts together all manner of tabloid distractions (Chandra Levy, 9/11, Debra Lafave, Timothy McVeigh, Enron, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Larry Craig, John Karr, Bill O'Reilly, Imus, and "Mission Accomplished") certainly makes his case that "The press should be totally ashamed of themselves." Flynt doesn't take any responsibility for the descent of pop culture into sleaze, and he looks back nostalgically on the days when news was separate from entertainment. "Here is your problem with mainstream media," he says, "It's corporate." If his insight is not singular, it is true.




TV Review: Larry Flynt: The Right To Be Left Alone
Bottom Line: Yes, Larry Flynt might publish degrading images of women, but he is first and foremost a patriot.

By Ray Richmond
Aug 6, 2008

Airdate: 10-11:15 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 7 (IFC).


Larry Flynt remains one of those heroic anti-heroes unique to our time, sort of like a First Amendment Jack Kevorkian.

Like Kevorkian, the fact that there is something vaguely oily about him tends to blunt a very cogent and important message that the rest of us would do well to heed. But there is nothing ambiguous about IFC's "Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone," a documentary film from producer-director Joan Brooker-Marks that paints Flynt as nothing less than a free speech icon who has been long wrongly demonized and vilified as a two-bit mob-connected pornographer.

It's a fascinating -- if only semibalanced -- look at the notorious architect of the Hustler magazine empire that really does leave us feeling that Flynt has gone to bat for our freedoms in a way few Americans have before. He just kind of did it his way.

Rich with clips dating to Flynt's rise in the 1970s and his first court case in Cincinnati after his indictment for pandering obscenity and racketeering, the IFC project was obviously done with Flynt's full cooperation -- and it's easy to see why.

Those who oppose him here are painted as oafish and fascist, including heavyweights of the feminist movement like Gloria Steinem. By contrast, Flynt, whose speech and bearing now paint him as something of a mealy-mouthedcq troll, is shown at every turn to be righteous, earnest and singularly patriotic. He makes no bones about the fact that he's a businessman out to earn a buck yet at the same time concerned that the free expression long considered an American right continues to come under increasingly heavy-handed assault. And he seems to care deeply about it beyond the wheelchair he has been chained to since being shot and paralyzed in a 1978 assassination attempt.

As we've seen repeatedly over the course of the past 30 years, Flynt is an endless object of fascination, not to mention contempt and revulsion. There was of course the 1996 Milos Forman film "The People vs. Larry Flynt," which starred Woody Harrelson as Larry and Courtney Love as his colorful wife Althea. But Flynt also happens to be a master media manipulator who more recently drew press for his $1 million offer to anyone who provided information on members of Congress involved in extramarital hanky-panky -- and that resulted in a couple of full-on humiliations and resignations. Love him or despise him, Flynt has long been about honesty and candor, if not quite integrity. He fights for what he believes in even to the point of being imprisoned.

It is this last point that "The Right to Be Left Alone" so adeptly illustrates. Flynt is painted as an indomitable survivor who refuses to back down. In that way, he has not only lived to see his star enjoy an unlikely rise, but indeed the man has become a passionate symbol of righteous disobedience in a civil rights-depleted post-9/11 nation. Booker-Marks might be accused here of glorifying a sleaze-monger and a scoundrel, but it's difficult to argue with her depiction of Larry Flynt as a man who truly loves his country.

Production: Midtown Films and IFC. Executive producers: Christina Lubrano, Debbie DeMontreaux, Evan Shapiro. Producers: Walter Marks, Joan Brooker-Marks. Director: Joan Brooker-Marks. Film editor/sound designer: Kamil Dobrowolski. Creative consultant: Gilbert Girion. Production coordinator: Courtney Vitti.

Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone will be out on DVD on September 30th, 2008. The DVD features the film presented in its native widescreen 16x9 aspect ratio. The DVD also contains a full length commentary track from Director Joan Brooker-Marks, bonus footage of Larry Flynt's deposition, deleted scenes, isolated music track, trailer and a photo gallery.

It is available now for pre-order from the following sites. Just click on the icons for the links. Also it's available from a number of smaller sites and stores, so spread the word and hopefully leave a positive review if you have the time.

THE HUSTLER PUBLISHER CHALLENGES VITTER:
FORMER NEW ORLEANS ESCORT WENDY CORTEZ, WHO CLAIMED AN AFFAIR WITH VITTER, PASSED A POLYGRAPH TEST. LET'S SEE THE SENATOR DO THE SAME.

In 2002, New Orleans escort Wendy Cortez told local reporters she had an extended affair with U.S. Senator David Vitter in 1999, when he was a Louisiana state representative. The allegations, first reported by political columnist Christopher Tidmore in the Louisiana Weekly, were published anew by the Times-Picayune in the wake of Vitter's admission that he had called D.C. Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey in 2001. Despite being a self-confessed client of the D.C. Madam, Vitter told the entire country that the stories in the New Orleans press were "not true."

Suspecting that Vitter was again lying, Larry Flynt sought out Wendy Cortez, whose real name is Wendy Ellis, and flew her to Los Angeles for a lie-detector test. The polygraph examination was conducted by Edward Gelb, recognized by his peers as the leading polygraphist in the country. Asked if she had a sexual relationship with Vitter through a New Orleans escort service for at least four months, Ellis answered in the affirmative. According to Gelb, the result of both the manual and computerized scoring was "NDI," meaning "no deception indicated, with a probability of deception of less than .01." In other words, Wendy Ellis passed the test with flying colors.

Larry Flynt has now proven that Vitter repeatedly lied to the American people and is unfit to legislate in their name. When he apologized for "a serious sin" in his past, Vitter glossed over the fact that the D.C. Madam's phone records show he "sinned" at least five times. Now, with the vindication of Wendy Ellis's account, we know that Vitter was a frequent patron of "escort" services even before he went to Washington.

SENATORS LARRY CRAIG & DAVID VITTER:

SEXUAL HYPOCRITES OUTTED BY LARRY FLYNT

August 31, 2007

What do Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Louisiana Senator David Vitter have in common? They are both high-ranking Republican sexual hypocrites and liars who have been exposed by Larry Flynt. Last April, the HUSTLER publisher personally selected Senator Craig to be the magazine's "Asshole of the Month" because -- although Craig posed as a heterosexual husband and father of three adopted children, consistently voting against gay rights -- he was actually a practicing homosexual cheating on his wife: "Craig allegedly had liaisons… in bathrooms at Washington, D.C.'s Union Station," we said at the time.

Indeed, on June 11, 2007, the Gem State Senator was arrested in a men's bathroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul nternational Airport -- a known homosexual meeting place -- and charged with disorderly conduct.

According to the incident report of plainclothes officer Sgt. Dave Karsnia "Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig ... moved his foot closer to my foot.…The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area… I could... see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider," Sgt. Karsnia observed.

On Aug. 8, Senator Craig pled guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in a Minnesota District Court. He paid $500-plus in fines and fees and was given a year's probation.

Craig, like Vitter, continues to lie, now claiming that he is innocent despite his guilty plea. In retrospect, Craig says he "should have had the advice of counsel..." Get real, Craig. Everyone knows you are a liar and a homosexual. Come out of the closet, for God's sake.

HUSTLER doesn't care if Craig plays footsies with consenting adult males or if the likewise married Vitter cavorts with escorts and hookers. But HUSTLER is outraged that these liars and sexual hypocrites pretend to be one thing in public, while behaving differently in private. Beating the drum of "Family Values" these men have supported anti-gay legislation such as the Defense of Marriage Act and/or a Federal Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, pushing fundamentalist religious values in order to advance their political careers.

Larry Craig has served as the honorary chairman of the Idaho Safe Kids Coalition, even though he was implicated in a 1982 Congressional page scandal involving charges of homosexuality and narcotics that predated the 2006 Rep. Mark Foley page brouhaha. According to an NBC-TV broadcast, an ex-page told the FBI Craig had illicit sex with teenaged pages.

It's ironic when a pornographer – Larry Flynt – is America's watchdog of morality.

Synopsis: Both hero and villain, tireless civil rights advocate and purveyor of pornography, the always controversial Larry Flynt is the subject of Joan Brooker-Marks' documentary. Delving beyond Flynt's political career, the film offers an intimate glimpse into the publisher's personal life, including the assassination attempt that left him paralyzed, and his first wife's battle with AIDS. Ultimately, Brooker-Marks delivers the full, unvarnished story of one of America's most unlikely defenders of civil liberties.

IDA: How did you get started in documentary filmmaking?

Joan Brooker-Marks: I have always had a passion for documentaries, and was given the opportunity to follow four elderly women who played mah-jongg every Thursday afternoon. It seemed the perfect "first" film in that it was intimate, in New York, where I live, and thus not too expensive. Fortunately, it was well received and I was given a tremendous amount of encouragement to continue on.

IDA: What inspired you to make Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone?

JBM: I strongly believe that the First Amendment is unequivocal, and as unpleasant as that can be sometimes, I think it is absolutely vital for a healthy democracy. I also felt that Larry had contributed more to the preservation of free speech than any single individual in the last three decades. I was also aware that many people often devalued these contributions because he was (and is) a pornographer. But in fact, none of us is any one thing, and that includes Larry Flynt. He has led a layered and complex life—perhaps outside of the margins that many people consider "normal," but I don't feel that his chosen profession minimizes what he's done for his country, nor does it make him any less a patriot.

IDA: What were some of the challenges and obstacles in making this film, and how did you overcome them?

JBM: The traveling was difficult because I brought my crew and equipment to Los Angeles from New York. I think we made some 20 trips to the West Coast in under a year, and air travel is not particularly easy these days. But the most daunting issue I faced in making the film was dealing with the archival material. I had no idea what I was getting into, and the process of ordering screeners and subsequently licensing footage was completely overwhelming. I think we have almost 250 archival clips, and managing and organizing the material was a Herculean task. I was also fearful about getting licensing approval because the subject matter was Larry Flynt. I wasn't at all sure how the major networks would respond. But we were very fortunate and were helped tremendously by both CBS and NBC, as well as others, who very patiently guided me through the process. The cost was also prohibitive and I wasn't prepared for that, but we managed to muddle through. Never again, however.

IDA: How did your vision for the film change over the course of the pre-production, production and post-production processes?

JBM: Larry often speaks to college audiences, and we thought we would shape the film around one of his trips and his interaction with students. However, the more time I spent with him, the more expansive the possibilities became, and so the film reinvented and redefined itself, combining both the past and present, culminating in what we believe is a more in-depth study—a mosaic of Larry Flynt, the man. This presented tremendous challenges in the editing process because there was no inherent beginning, middle and end. Creating the film's architecture, maintaining its integrity and keeping it interesting was a very difficult and delicate process. I was fortunate to be working with an amazing and very gifted editor.

IDA: As you've screened Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone—whether on the festival circuit, or in screening rooms, or in living rooms—how have audiences reacted to the film? What has been most surprising or unexpected about their reactions?

JBM: The most consistent reaction to the film is that people come away re-informed about Larry Flynt. Many people say they see him in a different light. Most amazing is the response from younger men and women; to them Larry is an icon and a true American hero; that continues to astound me. Of course at every screening we have our detractors, people who despise Larry so much they consider the film anathema and believe that it has no right to be shown, much less made. As a director, it's not a pleasant thing to be confronted with, and as a woman, I've been accused of the worst kind of treachery with respect to women's rights. I don't see it that way, but it comes with the territory...that territory being Larry Flynt.

Joan Brooker-Marks, director of Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone was recently interviewed by Nathan Callahan and Mike Kaspar of KUCI 88.9FM radio in Irvine California. The podcast was recorded right before she flew out for IDA's Docuweek at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood and is a must listen to any fans of Larry Flynt, the first amendment, this film and independent filmmaking in general. Check it out.

LISTEN TO PODCAST

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Larry Flynt is no stranger to the big screen.

Milos Forman's 1996 "The People vs. Larry Flynt," with Woody Harrelson playing the quarrelsome pornographer, chronicled Flynt's colorful run-ins with the law as he challenged establishment moralists. Flynt is no stranger to the small screen, either: Most recently, he has popped up decrying Washington hypocrisy as Sen. David Vitter, R-La., admitted to dealings with a D.C. escort service after receiving a phone call from an editor with Flynt's Hustler magazine.

Now, Flynt also is the subject of a new documentary, "Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone," which screens next Tuesday at the ArcLight Hollywood as part of the International Documentary Assn.'s DocuWeek (August 17-23).

The film marks the feature directorial debut of Joan Brooker-Marks, a former TV writer who moved on to teach film at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Even though Flynt has gotten plenty of media attention, she was convinced that most of the previous accounts of his life "were more biographical. I wanted to touch on the seminal events in his life but also wanted to really, really concentrate on his court battles on behalf of the First Amendment. Personally, I think the First Amendment is unequivocal, and Larry's efforts have been significant -- particularly for writers and satirists, even though they have been minimized because he is a pornographer."

Her husband Walter Marks, who happened to be an old acquaintance of Flynt's, introduced her to her subject, who gave her carte blanche, opening up his own extensive archives.

While the film, which was privately financed at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars, began shooting in October 2005, Brooker-Marks has been adding bits of footage right up until locking it for its DocuWeek premiere -- for example, adding Flynt's reaction to the recent death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose libel suit against Flynt led to a Supreme Court victory for the publisher in the 1980s.

As a piece of advocacy filmmaking, "Left Alone" could almost have jumped from the pages of Hustler itself. It includes interspersed footage of a Hustler photo shoot -- albeit a relatively discreet one -- as well as political-minded cartoons from the magazine. It jumps from topic to topic: Flynt's first court case in Cincinnati, where he was convicted of pandering in 1977; his refusal to surrender sources for the tapes revealing the FBI sting operation against carmaker John DeLorean in the '80s; and his exposes of prominent Republicans during the Clinton impeachment trail in the '90s.

The documentary does tend to lionize Flynt at points. It reports, for example, how Flynt filed suit against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so that his reporters could accompany troops into battle in Afghanistan. Although a U.S. district judge denied Flynt's request for a preliminary injunction and the Supreme Court subsequently refused to hear the case on appeal, the docu argues that the Defense Department allowed embedded journalists to accompany the military into Iraq as a result of Flynt's legal efforts.

The film takes its title from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' contention that the Fourth Amendment's right to privacy includes "the right to be left alone" -- a sentiment that Flynt echoes. In the buttoned-down world of constitutional law, Flynt emerges as a most unlikely champion of free speech because, as Brooker-Marks says, "In the beginning, he just wanted to be around pretty girls and publish a magazine."


Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

We have received the official theatrical summer schedule for Larry Flynt: The Right to be Left Alone.  It will be playing for a week straight at the Arclight Cinemas Theatre in Hollywood California from August 17th-23rd.  The film will be playing twice a day for a total of 14 screenings. On Tuesday August 21st, Larry Flynt will join director Joan Brooker-Marks in a Q&A session immediately following the 7:25PM screening.

The full list of screen times can be found on our main page.  Or by clicking here

Please let us know if you are planning on attending any of the screenings.

From the upcoming July 23, 2007 issue of Newsweek

Newsweek Link

The "D.C. Madam" scandal isn't going away. Reporters, bloggers and investigators for Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt are all scrambling to match recently released phone records from Deborah Jeane Palfrey's escort service to Beltway pols who might have been clients. "It's going to be one revelation after the other for the next 20 weeks or so," says Palfrey, who is fighting federal prostitution charges and who hopes "outed" clients will testify that her employees weren't prostitutes. She says anywhere between a few dozen to a hundred high-level officials will be discovered on her list.

The latest catch: Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, Rudy Giuliani's top Southern conservative ally. Vitter quickly confessed to a "very serious sin" and went into hiding. The Vitter revelation is just the latest scandal to touch Giuliani, whose former police commissioner has pleaded guilty to corruption charges and whose South Carolina campaign chairman was forced to step down last month after he was indicted on federal cocaine charges. A Giuliani aide called the scandals "a string of bad luck." Palfrey says if Vitter did have sex with one of her escorts he should be indicted as she has been—but she's still not sure he did. "All those right-wing politicians do just that—they fall on their swords. Isn't there some script out there for this very event?"

The question is who will be next, now that the numbers are so accessible. Vitter's number was unearthed by Dan Moldea, a D.C. reporter who is helping Palfrey write her memoirs and who also moonlights for Flynt. Palfrey's list of almost 200,000 numbers is a gold mine for Flynt, who already has a team of investigators trying to dig up dirt on the sexual indiscretions of lawmakers and has placed ads in The Washington Post offering rewards for info. "But the bloggers and the techies are really doing the greatest job," says Moldea. "And they are all obsessed with numbers starting with 202-224 ... numbers coming from the Hill." A new Web site, dcphonelist.com, allows anyone to punch in a number and it will cross-reference it to "madam's" list. The site urges users to "be responsible"—but any pols who made use of Palfrey's services probably shouldn't count on that.


Larry's interview with Dan Abrams



Larry on CNN



Larry on Larry King Live

Why Habeas Corpus Matters

Larry Flynt.com

The ultimate measure of just how dangerous the reign of George Bush has been to our basic freedoms was ..ed in January at a packed hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Provoking the shock and anger of the committee's deputy chair, Republican Senator Arlen Specter, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had the temerity to insist that the right of habeas corpus—that basic principle of English common law enshrined in the Magna Carta guaranteeing prisoners the right to appear in a court of law to have their case reviewed—is NOT one of the rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, which Gonzalez took an oath to enforce.
"There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution," Gonzalez insisted, while lamely conceding that, in that sacred .., "There's a prohibition against taking it away…." To which a flabbergasted Spector responded, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The Constitution says you can't take it away except in cases of rebellion or invasion. Doesn't that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there is an invasion or rebellion?"

Gonzales did not appear any more perturbed at being caught in an egregious violation of America's tradition of liberty than he had been at previous Congressional hearings during which he defended torture and illegal wiretapping. This time, however, his rationale was more sweeping and therefore more ominous in its implication. What our nation's top law enforcement officer argued—and bear with me because his logic is quite bizarre—is that because the Constitution refers to habeas corpus as a right that can be suspended in the midst of a rebellion or invasion, that it is not a basic right at all.

"I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas," said Gonzalez. "Doesn't say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except—" At which point he was cut off by an exasperated Spector, who accused him of "violating common sense."

Worse, Gonzales espoused a philosophy that would strip away most of the guarantees of our Bill of Rights, for they too are affirmed only by the negative prohibition restricting Congress from interfering with what was assumed by the Founders to be obvious basic human rights established by the Enlightenment.

As Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee, put it pointedly to Gonzales: "Many of our most cherished rights are guaranteed by the Constitution in much the same way. For example, the First Amendment is also a negative construction. It prohibits Congress from making laws infringing on religious freedom and our freedom of speech, but you wouldn't say that it doesn't guarantee free speech and religion."

In fact, the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution clearly establishes that rights are assumed unless clearly taken away: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

But why is Gonzalez not only confused but indeed desperate in asserting an obviously invalid legal doctrine? How could someone presumably well-versed in the country's legal traditions—and officially pledged to uphold them—be so oblivious as to their essence? Commenting on this mystery, John Dean, former White House counsel in the Nixon Administration, wrote on FindLaw.com of Gonzalez's sorry performance: "I must confess that watching his testimony makes me deeply uncomfortable. Gonzalez does not seem to know when he is making a fool of himself, and I can't tell if he is suffering from empty-suit syndrome or an unhealthy case of hubris."

Unfortunately, there is a lot more at stake here than one man's reputation for intelligence. Not content to just obnoxiously insult the basis of our civil democracy, the Bush Administration has acted as if there are no restraints on its behavior, as when it decided to illegally wiretap Americans even when a secret judicial review process was already in place, hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely as "an enemy combatant," and give no due process to hundreds held in Guantanamo Bay without charge or prisoner of war status.

As with torture, the denial of habeas corpus—basically, the threat that you will never have your day in court and be imprisoned for the rest of your life—is clearly counterproductive to getting at the truth concerning the dangers we face as a nation. It is a proven axiom of law enforcement that witnesses who testify under terrible duress tell their inquisitors what they want to hear rather than the truth. But if the purpose of the interrogation is to exploit the crime—in this case, the tragedy of 9/11—for political advantage, then the truth is not what the prosecutor is after.

We know from even the limited information made available through the 9/11 Commission that none of the key prisoners interrogated have confirmed the Administration's portrayal of the roots of the attack. Most importantly, they deny any connection between Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and therefore their testimony in an open court in accordance with habeas corpus requirements would embarrass the administration and possibly our allies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

In other words, these witnesses have been kept out of sight precisely because their day in court, while not in any way exonerating any crimes they may have committed, would nonetheless expose the lies of the administration as well.