a love letter to the Supreme Court

The terrible injustice that is being done to Ayaan Hirsi Ali—turned out of Holland, rejected by polite society in America—reminded me of a rousing speech given by the film director Milos Forman at the National Press Club in 1997.

Forman is one of my favorite directors. Even if he weren’t, I would have been touched by his spirited defense of his movie The People vs. Larry Flynt, a troubling but entertaining look at the pornographer and unlikely First Amendment “hero.” The movie had come under sustained attack from Gloria Steinem and other hard-line, hard-core “feminists.” Forman, a political refugee from Communist Czechslovakia, who is intimately familiar with the totalitarian impulse, had a lot to say in response.

I reprint it below in full. I urge you to read it, even if you’re not a Forman fan or a People vs. Larry Flynt fan—particularly if you’re not a fan of the film, or even the idea of the film.

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I recently directed a film called THE PEOPLE VERSUS LARRY FLYNT. It is being called “the most controversial movie of the year”. But this controversy, stimulating though it may be, is based on a false premise. And I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you about this.I know that everything, even the most innocuous and silly joke, can be subject to distorted political interpretation. I will never forget the chill we felt - I was living then in communist-dominated Czechoslovakia with the Soviet Army still on its soil - when we heard about a comedian who told a joke in a pub about a Czech citizen who came to a police station to complain that “three Swiss soldiers stole my Russian watch”. The policeman looked at him quizzically and said: “I think you meant to say that three Russian soldiers stole your Swiss watch”. To which the man replied quickly: “You said it! Not me!”

The comedian was sentenced for this joke to three years in a concentration camp.

I know that pornography is a more sensitive subject than petty theft but still, to accuse my R-rated film, as a few have, for not being sufficiently dirty to deserve the NC-17 rating strikes me as odd. But I forgive them. They are not obliged to be so familiar with my work to have noticed that dirty pictures are not my metier.

I have no argument with those who find some of the contents of Hustler objectionable. I myself find some of its stuff objectionable. I had never bought Hustler in my life. When I was preparing this film and had to go through endless amount of Hustlers, I cringed. Men as well as women are often portrayed on its pages with brutish vulgarity. Sexual and otherwise.

But surely to equate - as one of my film’s critics does - a printed page, however tasteless, with the Nazi slaughter, a slaughter that deprived a sizable portion of the earth’s population of their lives is, to say the least, intemperate. The critics of my film know that it is not possible to legislate taste, therefore they argue that pornography results in acts of violence.

Well, I don’t know whether studies have proved this assertion. I do know, however, that a study of human social history will unarguably disclose that one of our most noble emotions - love - has prompted more damage, more violence, more suicides, even more murders than can ever be ascribed to pornography.

Should we blame ROMEO AND JULIET or WEST SIDE STORY every time an unhappy lover loses control and does something damaging because of the unbearable pain of love in his or her heart? Should we call on Hollywood to stop making these kinds of movies?

I did not want to make pornography the focus of this talk. It is a digression. I did so because the same few critics are trying to convince the public that the goals and themes of my film are identical to those of Hustler.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

My film is not, and never was intended to be, about pornography, pro or con.

Its writers did not conceive it that way nor did I.

That’s why the film’s climax is the case Larry Flynt and his lawyers brought before the Supreme Court. And this case itself is not about pornography.

The case is about our right to satirize, to be irreverent in newspaper columns, in political cartoons, in books and theatres and movies.

There has been a concerted attempt to trivialize this victory for the First Amendment, to sneer at it as insignificant.

I am not a civil rights specialist but I believe that this victory is not only not trivial, it is vital.

I would hate to think of the voices that might be silenced or in jails had the Supreme Court ruled differently.

And I am not ashamed to say that this film for me is a love letter to the Supreme Court of the United States.

As to the objections to Larry Flynt as protagonist: I hardly think the First Amendment would have been put to the test by somebody who, on occasion, used a few profane words. I understand that irony and ambiguity can make some people feel uneasy but I am drawn to both. And for good reason: comfortable certainties in human behavior are rarely worth exploring and, moreover, they are boring. I am a filmmaker, so you do understand that I am not averse to entertaining the audience. Or myself. In truth, I think it essential. Especially when you are trying to get across ideas that I believe are more important than just a car chase.

The ambiguities in Mr. Flynt’s actions certainly engaged my interest.

And still do.

Was he a sincere, tenacious battler for freedom of expression or is he a cynical smut peddler who used his constitutional rights to ensure that he would be able to sell more dirty pages?

Is it possible that he is both?

And if he is, is he more one than the other? Which? Was Oscar Schindler, the German industrialist who aided Jews, a humane saver of lives or a Nazi, an exploiter who used slave labor for notably profitable results? Which? Or both?

These issues, and many others, will, I hope, make us think. But is thinking about such matters - even if we are using the pornographer as a protagonist of our story - so dangerous that it could destroy the moral fiber of our society?

Some insist that it will do just that. If this is the case, we have a serious problem on our hands. Including rethinking the wisdom of our Founding Fathers.

The argument that they would be shocked to see what’s published today on the pages of Hustler doesn’t really persuade me that we should turn the clock back. I don’t buy that.

First: I am convinced that the English and European politicians of the seventeenth century would have been absolutely alarmed by some of the ideas of our Founding Fathers.

Second: I doubt that they were so ignorant as not to be familiar with Boccaccio or Rabelais or the etchings of the period which would make Larry Flynt blush. Which is probably exaggeration.

Not every country has the guts to rise to its best when challenged by its worst. In this century alone, the countries of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Mozart, Freud, when challenged by the Nazis - they buckled.

The countries of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Kafka, Dvorak, when challenged by the communists, they buckled.

Does anybody believe that Hitler or Stalin could have survived if they had not muzzled the free press? If people could have read, heard and discussed the atrocities committed daily by these regimes?

I doubt that.

And it was always the pornography that was their first target.

Understandably. Who would object to cleaning up smut? As a matter of fact, the majority usually welcomes such high moral purpose. But how surprised this same majority was, once they realized that the official definition of smut no longer included only pornographers, prostitutes and homosexuals. The Nazis quickly added Jews, Blacks, Slavs. The Communists expanded the list to include Christians, Moslems, the capitalists and all of western culture. Finally both regimes commonly labeled anybody who didn’t agree with the official regulations and taste as criminal enemies of the state.

To regain their lost freedoms was not cheap for these people. Millions paid for it with their lives.

Maybe I am oversensitive about these issues because of my life experience but I really believe that it is a sign of ignorance or over-security to think that our freedoms are a permanent gift, without daily obligations, that nothing will happen to us if we bend our Constitution a little to satisfy a particular group or ideology.

The problem is that even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is OK.

But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not OK.

If you open the door to censorship just a little, it never stays open just a little and the draft that follows is always more than chilling.

That’s why the real hero of my film is not a person but the Supreme Court of the United States.

Our country is the strongest country in the world not because it is the biggest or the most populous. Our country is the strongest because it is the freest. And if my film disturbs some people because they must digest its points through an uncomfortable character, then, I am sorry, I have to turn to a voice from the seventeenth century: John Milton of PARADISE LOST fame writes in his “Areopagitika about the freedom of the press” something like this: if a stomach is unable to distinguish healthy food from a bad one, then it is the stomach who is sick.