Larry Flynt recently sat down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, where he talked about the future of free speech. Here are some highlights from his interview:
With the glut of pornography so instantly available to us online in 2017, what could possibly constitute obscenity at this point?
"They go looking for movies involving defecation and urination and stuff like that. The fringe aspects, scatological behavior and stuff like that. But I don't know of anybody in our business that's producing stuff like that. It comes from Europe and other parts of the world. That's probably something they could go after — and probably get an obscenity conviction."
Could it bleed over into mainstream filmmaking? Could the MPAA make it harder to avoid an NC-17?
"All of this has a chilling effect because nobody wants to produce a film they can't get distributed because of the rating. It does have a chilling effect on filmmakers and the First Amendment in general. You can lose free expression and free press as easily as you gained it. A lot of people are intelligent enough to know that. Reagan was kind of bone-headed, but he had [former Attorney General] Ed Meese going after pornography, even after [researcher William H.] Johnson had done a sex study and couldn't find any correlation between exposure to it and [psychological harm]. It created a lot of havoc around the country: Meese presented victims' testimony more than offering any kind of actual trial litigation."
Was Nancy Reagan a factor in the obscenity crackdown during her husband's administration?
"She was outspoken on drug use. I don't know what her position was on pornography. This dates back all the way to [19th century U.S. Postal Inspector] Anthony Comstock, who was the father of the whole antiobscenity movement. He used to prosecute people over sending erotic postcards. This has gone on for 100 years. I thought that the do-gooders had had their say, but apparently they're still at it."
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
No comments:
Post a Comment