We’ve heard little from legendary porn king Larry Flynt lately, but he spilled just about everything in a recent profile. Now 70, the self-described “smut-peddler” opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about his landmark Supreme Court win over Rev. Jerry Falwell 25 years ago, his plans to “out” a Congressman, his sex life and much more.
The People vs. Larry Flynt:
The landmark case over the First Amendment is now taught in law schools (and was the subject of the 1996 Woody Harrelson movie) but who knew that after the heated case, Falwell and Flynt made amends and went on speaking engagements together?
“I was sitting in my office and my secretary called me and said, ‘Reverend Jerry Falwell is in the lobby.’ I said, ‘Send him in.’ So he walked in the door and he held up both hands and said, ‘I surrender!’ He sat down and we talked for about an hour, and then he asked me to go on a couple of speaking engagements with him, where we debated one another.”
Flynt bashes director Quentin Tarantino:
“I don’t care for Quentin Tarantino’s movies. He once said he’d never make a porno movie; I don’t have a problem with that, but he has made some of the most violent movies that ever existed, and all of a sudden he’s against making a porno movie!”
On his sex life
Flynt, who is paralyzed from the waist down on a 1978 shooting, has a penile implant. “Lots of men have them. There’s a little reservoir in the bottom part of your stomach, and you trigger it with a button inside your testicles that doesn’t show. Nothing shows.”
The actress he wants to have in Hustler:
The famed Hustler publisher is now pretty hands off the magazine that put him on the map but he said he would like to give Jennifer Aniston $1 million to $2 million to pose. “You’d sell a ton of magazines with her doing porn,” he said.
His quest to “out” a GOP Congressman
After taking down philandering Republican Speaker-elect Bob Livingston in 1999, Flynt is targeting another prominent member of Congress who he says is in the closet (he declined to name him). “I’ve had an investigation going on for two years,” he said. “We’re having trouble pinning him down, but this is one guy I’d really like to get.”
On his rival Hugh Hefner:
“I like him; he is kind of boring, but he is a gentleman,” Flynt says. “When Hefner started Playboy, he would have much preferred to have started Time magazine. I think he always felt guilty that he had to wrap his pornography within so-called socially redeeming articles. Hefner was a genius in that way. But he never was a troublemaker. He espoused the First Amendment, but I have done more for the First Amendment than the rest of those yokels put together.”