HOLLYWOOD — A new documentary titled Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone will be shown Tuesday, Aug. 21 at the ArcLight Hollywood theater, as part of the International Documentary Association's DocuWeek.
The film, by first-time director Joan Brooker-Marks, was privately financed and began shooting in Oct. 2005, after Brooker-Marks was introduced to Flynt by her husband, Walter Marks, an old acquaintance of the Hustler founder's. Flynt gave the director free reign with the project, providing her access to his vast personal archives.
"I wanted to touch on the seminal events in his life," Brooker-Marks told The Hollywood Reporter, "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."
Some of the events covered in the film mirror those dramatized in Milos Forman's 1996 biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt, such as his 1977 conviction in Cincinnati for pandering, and his court appearances during the 1980s due to withholding the identities of sources who provided him with tapes revealing the FBI's sting operation against carmaker John DeLorean.
But the doc also touches on much more recent happenings, including Flynt's reaction to the death of Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose libel suit against him in the '80s that ended in a landmark Supreme Court victory for Flynt was one of the main focal points of Forman's film.
The title of Right to Be Left Alone is taken from a cherished opinion in Flynt's eyes given by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that the right to privacy provided by the Fourth Amendment includes "the right to be left alone."
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